It's amazing that western civilization managed to get through a bunch of other publishing hoaxes, Janet Cooke, Rich Cohn, Stephen Glass, Michael Finkel and the Epstein kid (Jason, Jacob?) without the internet putting red ants in the doer's underpants. (Yes, I wish the internet had been there for the Vince Foster death in '93, but) the internet has no goddamn sense of proportion.

When are you going to let up on Kaavya? The girl's 19. When has the chick paid enough for her crimes? When does the story, unh, lose its interest? When is your Gotcha gland fully palped? O.K., I agree: maybe Kaavya should make a full confession. Maybe, as a comment-er said to me below, She should give back the money. But is that our business? I'm not sure. Little, Brown has behaved like mensches. Isn't it up to them and Kaavya whether they get the money back?

What's enough? Should we pillory her in Harvard yard? Should we give her a big red P to stitch on her shirt?

Secretly now I'm pulling for Kaavya. Go write a book about what happened, hon. But please—lose the Range Rover, you're destroying the glaciers.

Still, I have borne the slings and arrows of skeptical editors and fact-checkers as well as I could, though my sins against the goddess of journalistic probity and objectivity have been more venial than mortal. Besides, I chose almost a half-century ago to enter a field in which a privileged subjectivity is a professional necessity. This is not to say that I sympathize or identify with such well-publicized fakes of our time as Janet Cooke, Charles Van Doren, Clifford Irving, Jayson Blair and our current subject, Stephen Glass. Nonetheless, I can't help feeling a little awed by the enormous amount of psychic energy expended by these notorious hoaxers. It's a measure of Hayden Christensen's fruitful intensity in his performance as Stephen Glass that we become privy to every last twitch of his vaulting ambition-all the way down to the final desperation of his shattered self. Mr. Ray has wisely chosen to tell the story from the point of view of a manipulative antihero, using a deceptive flashback structure that's ultimately demystified as just another one of the pseudo-narrator's fraudulent inventions.

What I find particularly interesting in the Glass story is the unyielding journalistic distinction between fact and fiction-or rather between nonfiction and fiction, a division that bedevils the cinema as much as it does journalism. After all, the stories that Stephen Glass is said to have "fabricated" in the prestigious pages of The New Republic could be said, in another context, to have been "created" by Mr. Glass. And since when has "creativity" not been an enviable talent?

The plot thickens when we realize that Mr. Glass has been pilloried for manufacturing "quotes." But isn't this one of the less edifying "gotcha" games of contemporary journalism? (What about getting people to stick their foot in their mouth for the public's amusement?) Indeed, the so-called human-interest story could be debunked as one of journalism's most potent opiates for the masses, part of the delusion that ours is the best of all possible worlds while we're systematically manipulated by plutocratic puppeteers.

As the movie shrewdly observes, Mr. Glass got away with his bogus writings for as long as he did by selecting "fun" subjects-people who couldn't be checked with the standard references, but could only be verified and refuted in cyberspace. Mr. Glass skillfully utilized the Internet to cover his tracks with comparatively computer-illiterate, print-freak-type editors such as the late Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria) and his successor, Charles Lane (Peter Sarsgaard), and similarly afflicted fact-checkers (played by Chloë Sevigny and Melanie Lynskey), who also double as Stephen's bewitched cheerleading chorus.

In the end, Stephen is undone by Adam Penenberg (Steve Zahn), an equally ambitious young media maven working at an Internet publication. This serves as the great irony of the story, and the key element in an amusingly cascading melodrama of exposed fakery. Adam and his own indispensably cyber-hip fact-checker, played by Rosario Dawson, develop into a comedy team whose antics reach a crescendo when the fact-checker asks for a shared byline, and Adam brusquely refuses. In an instant, the demons of lacerating journalistic ambition are revealed in all their naked fury.

I was frankly surprised by the unflattering portrait of The New Republic 's publisher, Martin Peretz, presented in the movie, as well as the revelation that the magazine's circulation was only 81,000 or thereabouts. There's also a funny inside joke about the deliberate omission of pictures in The New Republic : As one of the older employees notes, Stephen's fake stories would never have seen the light of day if he'd had to supply pictures with his copy.

But the feeling of devastating loss that Stephen feels when shown the exit is caused by something deeply American: the notion of the workplace as more of a home than home itself. The enormous popularity of the "work family" in the old Mary Tyler Moore show on television was an early manifestation of this sociological phenomenon. Shattered Glass is about as well executed as any movie I've seen this year. The performances of Mr. Azaria, Mr. Sarsgaard, Mr. Zahn, Ms. Sevigny, Ms. Dawson and Ms. Lynskey do more than complement Mr. Christensen's central characterization; they provide a sane backdrop for Stephen's pathological deceptions to steadily unravel against. All in all, this is turning out to be one hell of a year for movies. In fact, there have been so many revelatory surprises each week that I don't really have the time, the space or the inclination to worry about all the expensive stinkers. Tant pis .

Sex and Death

Jane Campion's In the Cut , from a screenplay by Ms. Campion and Susanna Moore, based on the novel by Ms. Moore, pushes the envelope, raises the bar and ups the ante on explicit screen sexuality. This involves considerable and prolonged nudity on the part of Meg Ryan as Frannie, a creative-writing instructor embedded in the grungier sections of the Lower East Side of Manhattan. From the outset, Frannie seems to be searching recklessly for her carnal identity, until she is plunged into a consuming relationship with Mark Ruffalo's sexually aggressive Detective Malloy. Ms. Campion stays insinuatingly close to the two lovers as they test each other's most perverse predilections. A mysterious murderer of women lurks around them, providing both the starting point and the ultimate climax for their deadly serious fun and games.

New York has never looked more darkly sinister than it does here, and frankly I just couldn't believe much of it. A pimp and his charges are conspicuously camped in the doorway to the apartment of Frannie's half-sister, Pauline, played in characteristic beaten-down-by-life fashion by the terminally passive-aggressive Jennifer Jason Leigh. Not that half-sister Frannie is exactly bubbling with high spirits in Ms. Ryan's career-switching role: Her patented perky romanticism of the past is replaced by suspiciousness and purely libidinous restlessness here.

Still, I found the movie reasonably absorbing from moment to moment, albeit the murder "mystery" is strewn with red herrings and the book's nihilistic ending had to be scrapped in the happy-happy manner of vintage Hollywood adaptations of dark novels. (This practice was immortalized by the old New Yorker cartoon showing a man and woman kissing onscreen, while in the audience, a woman confides to her husband: "In the book, she shoots him.")

It seems not to matter that In the Cut dispenses with any real suspense about the identity of the murderer in order to plumb the lower depths for a Dantean vision of hell. Still, Ms. Campion here runs the risk of committing the expressive fallacy of depressing the audience along with her tormented characters. After all, the sun shines once in a while, even on the Lower East Side, and not every passer-by is a potential mugger or rapist.

Mark Ruffalo alone escapes the movie's slough of despond with his resourceful portrayal of a tough detective endowed with the instincts to know which buttons to push in Frannie's psyche to make her helpless to resist him. Still, I didn't believe the scene in which Detective Malloy and his partner, Detective Rodriguez (Nick Damici), talk dirty needlessly in Frannie's presence as if they regarded her as a cheap whore in some pimp's stable. From what little I know about cops on the prowl, they'd be a lot smoother than that.

Kevin Bacon is quite interesting in an unbilled role as a figure of suspicion, the degree of which depends entirely on whether he is on or off his medication, and the actor seems to relish the chameleonlike possibilities in the part. What In the Cut confirms above all is that the current rating system-i.e., box-office returns-is defunct as far as an influential sector of the moviegoing public is concerned when it comes to seeing provocative films like this one.

A Day of Rest

Rolf Schübel's Gloomy Sunday (Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod) , from a screenplay by Ruth Toma and Mr. Schübel, based on the novel Gloomy Sunday by Nick Barkow, combines its anti-Nazi theme with a fictional embellishment of an actual song. "Gloomy Sunday" was written in 1933 by two Hungarians, Rezso Seress (who composed the music) and László Javor (who wrote the lyrics). It swept through Europe and even crossed the Atlantic in a hugely popular American version recorded by Billie Holiday-one of the dozens of artists who have recorded the song over the years, a list that also includes Artie Shaw, Björk, Elvis Costello, Marianne Faithfull, Paul Whiteman, Sarah Brightman, Serge Gainsbourg and Sinéad O'Connor.

The point is that I became aware of the song's notoriety as an alleged incitement to suicide sometime in the 40's, when my musicologist friends were debating the comparative morbidities of "Gloomy Sunday" and Schoenberg's Kammer Symphony, as best I can remember. Yet I have yet to find anyone-even among my peers-who's heard of "Gloomy Sunday."

Both the novel and the film inspired by this song have invented a romantic scenario of one woman loved by three men at the same time in 1940's Budapest, with Hungary under a Fascist regime sympathetic to Hitler. The main locus of the plot is a Budapest restaurant owned by a Jewish businessman, László Szabo (Joachim Król), who is passionately in love with his manager, Ilona (Erika Marozsán). László brings a piano into the restaurant and auditions musicians to play it. András Aradi (Stefano Dionisi) is a pianist who arrives late for the audition, but Ilona, taken with his feverish manner, insists that he be allowed to compete. László immediately senses in András a rival for Ilona's affection, and he proves to be prescient.

Eventually, László, András and Ilona form a volatile ménage à trois typical of the mood of sexual experimentation in 1920's and 30's Europe.

András composes "Gloomy Sunday" while he's working in the restaurant, and László becomes his business manager to promote the song on recordings across Europe; soon it becomes known as the "suicide song." Plagued with guilt over what he has caused with his music, András himself commits suicide. Ilona is also clumsily courted by a German visitor to Budapest, a rising industrialist named Hans Wieck (Ben Becker), who later returns to Budapest in the uniform of a Nazi high commander in the SS. For a time, Hans protects László in gratitude for the restaurateur's having saved his life after Hans jumps into the Danube in despair over Ilana's rejection.

The film comes full circle with an ironic flashback structure that serves as an allegorical revenge mechanism to reveal one last cynical betrayal, which is made to stand for all the evils of the Holocaust, and particularly those of cynicism and opportunism. Of course, there is no mystery in much of the suicidal despair during the Hitler years in Germany; no doubt "Gloomy Sunday" was just one of the many triggers.

He didn't.

Mr. Glass' novel, The Fabulist , a light fictionalization of his heavy fictionalizing tendencies at the self-proclaimed "inflight magazine of Air Force One," has hardly been a chart-topper. And he certainly didn't endear himself to his audiences via his Hayden Christensen alter ego in the film-we are mad at you, Steve!

But The New Republic has fallen into the public's warm, fuzzy embrace. And the money's good, too.

The New Republic 's five-year-old sin-in the movie's version of the events, TNR editor Chuck Lane calls the magazine's publication of Stephen Glass' dozens of fabricated stories "indefensible"-has given them this week's cover star, as well as a ton of advertising for the movie.

Print editions of the Nov. 10 issue of TNR feature the mug of the real Mr. Glass with the header "Bad Press: What the Media Can Learn From Stephen Glass and What It Can't."

As recently as Monday, Nov. 3on the TNR Web site, images of the real Stephen Glass and advertisements for the movie featuring the prettified Hayden Christensen version of him winked at each other from opposite ends of the screen, like Norm Macdonald retiring his Bob Dole character on Saturday Night Live while the real Bob Dole, standing beside him, beamed with an odd mixture of relief and self-importance.

There's been a class field trip, recorded by David Carr in The New York Times , in which magazine staffers went out to watch the film before coming back to spend "some hours around the water cooler debating the finer points." There's been a New Republic –sponsored screening of the film, complete with Q&A. And some lucky staffers who were there when the drama unfolded got paid consulting gigs on the film.

New Republic editor Peter Beinart said his use of Stephen Glass as the TNR cover boy was a pre-emptive measure of sorts.

"We knew that because of the movie, there would be a lot of attention to the media and a lot of questions directed at us," Mr. Beinart said. "It seemed to us that if there were all these questions about the media with us at the center of it anyway, rather than talk to a lot of reporters, why not write an article? That's what we do. And if we were going to do an article, why not put Steve's photo on the cover, given it's him conjuring up this debate anyhow?

"Of course it's a terrible moment in the magazine's history," Mr. Beinart said. "It was one of the absolute low points. But it was also a terrible thing that the leadership of the magazine-not me, but Chuck Lane-handled very well. The movie's pretty good in keeping true to events, and that's what led us to be associated with it."

Writing in The New York Times on the day of the movie's release, film reviewer A.O. Scott offered a rave for the movie, with a caveat.

"The only false note comes near the end," Mr. Scott wrote, "when the magazine's moment of shame is rather too eagerly transformed into an occasion for self-congratulation."

That note is ringing truer at The New Republic in the days since the film's release.

"When was the last time a story like this happened?" said TNR editor in chief Martin Peretz, who doesn't come out of the film smelling like roses but seemed willing to take one for the team. "Are we going to get 15,000 subscribers from it? No. Will some people hear about the magazine who hadn't before? Yes. Will it rekindle some people's interest in it? Hundreds. Small thousands? The magazine comes out looking pretty good."

And, he said, they deserve it.

"When we realized what happened [with Mr. Glass' fabricated stories], we didn't delay," Mr. Peretz said. "We didn't equivocate. We fired him when we found out what he did and then detailed everything he had done. The magazine, given what happened, came out looking very good. What's wrong with that?"

If you've seen the movie, you know just how much help they had "finding out" about Stephen Glass. Because it was at Forbes -in the editorial offices of the company's Web venture, then called Forbes Digital Tool -that a few Yahoo searches raised questions about the veracity of Mr. Glass' piece, "Hack Heaven," about a pubescent hacker who landed a million-dollar consulting gig with "software giant" Jukt Micronics after hacking into the company's Web site.

Forbes comes out looking pretty good, too-and to Adam Penenberg, the Forbes reporter who broke the story, Shattered Glass has been a missed opportunity for his alma mater.

"You have to ask why Forbes is missing this really great opportunity to promote their role in breaking this story," Mr. Penenberg said when contacted by Off the Record. "It's really kind of bad. Here we had done something that was part of Internet history, and the magazine can't capitalize on that. And that's absurd."

To date, the company's only dealings with Shattered Glass , according to Forbes spokeswoman Monie Begley, was to correct a minor error in the press materials.

"As far as promoting it," Ms. Begley said, "we've nothing to do with it. But I hear it's a good movie."

If TNR 's break with Stephen Glass was apocalyptic, Forbes ' split with Mr. Penenberg was not without acrimony, either. A freelance writer for most of his life, Mr. Penenberg came to Forbes at the age of 36 in May 1997, where he covered the murky world of cyber crime. Following what he has claimed was a barrage of job offers from other publications after his role in the Glass saga, Mr. Penenberg accepted an offer from legendary Forbes editor Jim Michaels, who brought him to the print side with the words: "Write the kind of stories you get. We need to sell magazines."

One such story-a 1998 piece that detailed how two cyberhackers were able to hack into The New York Times ' Web site and keep it down for eight hours-drew the attention of federal prosecutors, who threatened him with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury in 2000. After legal counsel for Forbes made an arrangement for Mr. Penenberg to appear and verify the accuracy of his story, though without giving up his protected sources, Mr. Penenberg refused on the advice of his own attorney. The attorney and others told Mr. Penenberg that once he took the stand, he'd open himself to other kinds of questions. Mr. Penenberg, citing the magazine's refusal to support him, loudly stormed off his post in July 2000.

Since then, he's written Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America and the forthcoming Tragic Indifference: One Man's Battle with the Auto Industry Over the Dangers of SUVs -the latter of which, he said, includes only on-the-record sources.

Asked whether the circumstances of Mr. Penenberg's bolt had anything to do with Forbes' lack of interest in Shattered Glass , Ms. Begley said, "Oh God, no." Michael Noer, Forbes.com's executive editor for news, called it a "totally separate issue." If, he said, either Mr. Penenberg or Kambiz Faroohar-the editor who worked on the piece with him-were still on staff, "I'd ask them to write something. But they're not."

Failing that, the movie's second-string heroes-because the real hero in the movie is The New Republic -didn't have much to work with.

"We don't do movie reviews," Mr. Noer said. "This is a business-news site; we're a daily business-news publication. The integrity of the Forbes brand is portrayed well in the story. You can still find the original stories on it on our site, and that's frankly about all we're going to do. I think people reviewing the movie have been honest about it and are giving Forbes proper credit.

"People read about this, and they associate Forbes . We'd rather come across as a hard-hitting online publication than run a headline on a daily-news site highlighting a story from five years ago. The New Republic doesn't have much else to say for itself."

Of course, getting buzz out of the movie is only one potential benefit. TNR found in the producers of Shattered Glass a ready source of advertising dollars. It's not just a matter of the two publications' differing approaches. Asked whether anyone had tried to place ads for the movie in Forbes , Ms. Begley said they hadn't; they'd bought their ads in TNR .

"As publisher of a magazine, I didn't see a conflict of interest. Obviously, they thought we were a good target, and I was happy to have their business," said TNR president and publisher Stephanie Sandberg. "It's natural that many of the people who see the Web site are the same people who will see the movie. It makes sense to accept that business. We're in the business of being economically viable as well."

Now a special report from Observer cultural correspondent Rachel Donadio:

Hell hath no fury like a scientist denied the Nobel Prize. Dr. Raymond Damadian, the Long Island–based M.R.I. pioneer, is charging ahead with his war against the Swedes-the one he launched through full-page advertisements in The New York Times and elsewhere.

In "A personal letter to my fellow medical doctors about this shameful wrong," which ran on Page A9 of Monday's Times , Dr. Damadian argued that it was "outrageously unjust" for the "clubhouse of Nobel insiders" to award this year's prize in medicine to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield, academic scientists whose work, he said, builds on his original discovery: that magnetic resonance imagery could have medical applications.

While history shows that the Nobel Committee has passed over other deserving scientists-think of Albert Schatz, who as a graduate student discovered the antibiotic streptomycin, only to see the director of his lab, Selman Waksman, win the Nobel Prize for its discovery-Dr. Damadian seems to be the first to have resorted to an all-out media battle.

Monday's ad was the latest stage in what is adding up to be a very expensive campaign. The full-page ad-Dr. Damadian's third in The Times in the past month-cost $139,608, calculated at the weekday rate of $1,108 per column inch for what the paper defines as a "cause and appeal/political" ad. That's more than double the weekday rate for national retail ads, at $482 per column inch.

Are these rates based on the paper's desire to set the bar high in order to fend off angry scientists with lesser means from taking out ads? Not according to The Times ' spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis. She said the rates were based on "market factors." In other words, the paper knows it can get big bucks from people with axes to grind and the means to grind them in public. Ms. Mathis said that Dr. Damadian's ads met the guidelines of the paper's advertising acceptability manual. "We accept opinion ads regardless of our own editorial positions on any given subject," she said.

Last month, Dr. Damadian also took out full-page ads in The Washington Post , the Los Angeles Times and the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter . So just how much has he spent? Dr. Damadian wouldn't say. "That's not the point," he said, speaking by phone from the Long Island office of the Fonar Corporation, the publicly traded M.R.I. manufacturer he founded in 1978. The point, he said, is to fight for "more truth and honor in the sciences."

Dr. Damadian, who has been a Nobel candidate in the past and who patented the first M.R.I., said he paid for the ads with his own money and with funds from Friends of Raymond Damadian, a committee set up to further his cause. "Shareholders just want to be sure the company's not paying for them," he said. The company has had better luck in the courts: Dr. Damadian said he collected $128.7 million from General Electric in the 1990's following court rulings in favor of his M.R.I. patent.

(For the record, Dr. Damadian also said that he had become a creationist in recent years, after finding scant evidence "that mankind originated from a slime mold that, give or take a million years, stood up out of the ocean and began to give lectures.")

His crusade has also won him actual coverage in The Wall Street Journal , The Baltimore Sun and Newsday.

So what comes next in the Nobel crusade? "It's kind of a day-to-day," Dr. Damadian said. "We don' t know."

For all his efforts, Dr. Damadian doesn't seem to have gotten a rise out of the Swedes. "We thought it was a very drastic reaction," said Bo Angelin, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. But was it worth the expense? "It's a lot of money," Mr. Angelin said. "It would be difficult to feel he would get very much effect out of it."

Except, of course, for a voice in the conversation-and a much higher Nexis profile.

An 18-year-old named LeBron James has everyone a little dreamy these days, including The New York Times .

On Oct. 31, following the second straight stellar performance by the high-school hoopster turned N.B.A. superlad and Cleveland Cavalier, The New York Times -in a break from all that is holy-transformed the front of its sports section into a giant movie poster with laudatory shout-outs in different colors and sizes of type from the likes of Larry Bird ("He's the best talent I've seen come out in years") scattered across the top of the page.

While such a display would hardly gain notice in the pages of, say, Esquire , seeing it in the post-Howell Times was a little like watching Murder She Wrote 's Angela Lansbury do a turn as the angst-ridden sophomore on The O.C.

"We dared to have fun," Times sports editor Tom Jolly explained. "We approached the story with a degree of skepticism and expected after his performance on Thursday to find quite a bit of skeptical voices with cautionary tales, and instead found quite the opposite-as you saw from Larry Bird."

Mr. Jolly said the resulting design was the result of a brainstorm between himself and the art director, when the latter viewed some of the comments and thought they were akin to the hyperventilating pull-quotes in movie ads.

Asked whether he took into consideration The Time 's newly enforced font code-which standardized all headline fonts while eliminating the myriad different typefaces that used to come before Times stories-before making such a dramatic decision, Mr. Jolly said, "No, I didn't. But I know we used virtually every one of them that was available."

He didn't.

Mr. Glass' novel, The Fabulist , a light fictionalization of his heavy fictionalizing tendencies at the self-proclaimed "inflight magazine of Air Force One," has hardly been a chart-topper. And he certainly didn't endear himself to his audiences via his Hayden Christensen alter ego in the film-we are mad at you, Steve!

But The New Republic has fallen into the public's warm, fuzzy embrace. And the money's good, too.

The New Republic 's five-year-old sin-in the movie's version of the events, TNR editor Chuck Lane calls the magazine's publication of Stephen Glass' dozens of fabricated stories "indefensible"-has given them this week's cover star, as well as a ton of advertising for the movie.

Print editions of the Nov. 10 issue of TNR feature the mug of the real Mr. Glass with the header "Bad Press: What the Media Can Learn From Stephen Glass and What It Can't."

As recently as Monday, Nov. 3on the TNR Web site, images of the real Stephen Glass and advertisements for the movie featuring the prettified Hayden Christensen version of him winked at each other from opposite ends of the screen, like Norm Macdonald retiring his Bob Dole character on Saturday Night Live while the real Bob Dole, standing beside him, beamed with an odd mixture of relief and self-importance.

There's been a class field trip, recorded by David Carr in The New York Times , in which magazine staffers went out to watch the film before coming back to spend "some hours around the water cooler debating the finer points." There's been a New Republic –sponsored screening of the film, complete with Q&A. And some lucky staffers who were there when the drama unfolded got paid consulting gigs on the film.

New Republic editor Peter Beinart said his use of Stephen Glass as the TNR cover boy was a pre-emptive measure of sorts.

"We knew that because of the movie, there would be a lot of attention to the media and a lot of questions directed at us," Mr. Beinart said. "It seemed to us that if there were all these questions about the media with us at the center of it anyway, rather than talk to a lot of reporters, why not write an article? That's what we do. And if we were going to do an article, why not put Steve's photo on the cover, given it's him conjuring up this debate anyhow?

"Of course it's a terrible moment in the magazine's history," Mr. Beinart said. "It was one of the absolute low points. But it was also a terrible thing that the leadership of the magazine-not me, but Chuck Lane-handled very well. The movie's pretty good in keeping true to events, and that's what led us to be associated with it."

Writing in The New York Times on the day of the movie's release, film reviewer A.O. Scott offered a rave for the movie, with a caveat.

"The only false note comes near the end," Mr. Scott wrote, "when the magazine's moment of shame is rather too eagerly transformed into an occasion for self-congratulation."

That note is ringing truer at The New Republic in the days since the film's release.

"When was the last time a story like this happened?" said TNR editor in chief Martin Peretz, who doesn't come out of the film smelling like roses but seemed willing to take one for the team. "Are we going to get 15,000 subscribers from it? No. Will some people hear about the magazine who hadn't before? Yes. Will it rekindle some people's interest in it? Hundreds. Small thousands? The magazine comes out looking pretty good."

And, he said, they deserve it.

"When we realized what happened [with Mr. Glass' fabricated stories], we didn't delay," Mr. Peretz said. "We didn't equivocate. We fired him when we found out what he did and then detailed everything he had done. The magazine, given what happened, came out looking very good. What's wrong with that?"

If you've seen the movie, you know just how much help they had "finding out" about Stephen Glass. Because it was at Forbes -in the editorial offices of the company's Web venture, then called Forbes Digital Tool -that a few Yahoo searches raised questions about the veracity of Mr. Glass' piece, "Hack Heaven," about a pubescent hacker who landed a million-dollar consulting gig with "software giant" Jukt Micronics after hacking into the company's Web site.

Forbes comes out looking pretty good, too-and to Adam Penenberg, the Forbes reporter who broke the story, Shattered Glass has been a missed opportunity for his alma mater.

"You have to ask why Forbes is missing this really great opportunity to promote their role in breaking this story," Mr. Penenberg said when contacted by Off the Record. "It's really kind of bad. Here we had done something that was part of Internet history, and the magazine can't capitalize on that. And that's absurd."

To date, the company's only dealings with Shattered Glass , according to Forbes spokeswoman Monie Begley, was to correct a minor error in the press materials.

"As far as promoting it," Ms. Begley said, "we've nothing to do with it. But I hear it's a good movie."

If TNR 's break with Stephen Glass was apocalyptic, Forbes ' split with Mr. Penenberg was not without acrimony, either. A freelance writer for most of his life, Mr. Penenberg came to Forbes at the age of 36 in May 1997, where he covered the murky world of cyber crime. Following what he has claimed was a barrage of job offers from other publications after his role in the Glass saga, Mr. Penenberg accepted an offer from legendary Forbes editor Jim Michaels, who brought him to the print side with the words: "Write the kind of stories you get. We need to sell magazines."

One such story-a 1998 piece that detailed how two cyberhackers were able to hack into The New York Times ' Web site and keep it down for eight hours-drew the attention of federal prosecutors, who threatened him with a subpoena to testify before a grand jury in 2000. After legal counsel for Forbes made an arrangement for Mr. Penenberg to appear and verify the accuracy of his story, though without giving up his protected sources, Mr. Penenberg refused on the advice of his own attorney. The attorney and others told Mr. Penenberg that once he took the stand, he'd open himself to other kinds of questions. Mr. Penenberg, citing the magazine's refusal to support him, loudly stormed off his post in July 2000.

Since then, he's written Spooked: Espionage in Corporate America and the forthcoming Tragic Indifference: One Man's Battle with the Auto Industry Over the Dangers of SUVs -the latter of which, he said, includes only on-the-record sources.

Asked whether the circumstances of Mr. Penenberg's bolt had anything to do with Forbes' lack of interest in Shattered Glass , Ms. Begley said, "Oh God, no." Michael Noer, Forbes.com's executive editor for news, called it a "totally separate issue." If, he said, either Mr. Penenberg or Kambiz Faroohar-the editor who worked on the piece with him-were still on staff, "I'd ask them to write something. But they're not."

Failing that, the movie's second-string heroes-because the real hero in the movie is The New Republic -didn't have much to work with.

"We don't do movie reviews," Mr. Noer said. "This is a business-news site; we're a daily business-news publication. The integrity of the Forbes brand is portrayed well in the story. You can still find the original stories on it on our site, and that's frankly about all we're going to do. I think people reviewing the movie have been honest about it and are giving Forbes proper credit.

"People read about this, and they associate Forbes . We'd rather come across as a hard-hitting online publication than run a headline on a daily-news site highlighting a story from five years ago. The New Republic doesn't have much else to say for itself."

Of course, getting buzz out of the movie is only one potential benefit. TNR found in the producers of Shattered Glass a ready source of advertising dollars. It's not just a matter of the two publications' differing approaches. Asked whether anyone had tried to place ads for the movie in Forbes , Ms. Begley said they hadn't; they'd bought their ads in TNR .

"As publisher of a magazine, I didn't see a conflict of interest. Obviously, they thought we were a good target, and I was happy to have their business," said TNR president and publisher Stephanie Sandberg. "It's natural that many of the people who see the Web site are the same people who will see the movie. It makes sense to accept that business. We're in the business of being economically viable as well."

Now a special report from Observer cultural correspondent Rachel Donadio:

Hell hath no fury like a scientist denied the Nobel Prize. Dr. Raymond Damadian, the Long Island–based M.R.I. pioneer, is charging ahead with his war against the Swedes-the one he launched through full-page advertisements in The New York Times and elsewhere.

In "A personal letter to my fellow medical doctors about this shameful wrong," which ran on Page A9 of Monday's Times , Dr. Damadian argued that it was "outrageously unjust" for the "clubhouse of Nobel insiders" to award this year's prize in medicine to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield, academic scientists whose work, he said, builds on his original discovery: that magnetic resonance imagery could have medical applications.

While history shows that the Nobel Committee has passed over other deserving scientists-think of Albert Schatz, who as a graduate student discovered the antibiotic streptomycin, only to see the director of his lab, Selman Waksman, win the Nobel Prize for its discovery-Dr. Damadian seems to be the first to have resorted to an all-out media battle.

Monday's ad was the latest stage in what is adding up to be a very expensive campaign. The full-page ad-Dr. Damadian's third in The Times in the past month-cost $139,608, calculated at the weekday rate of $1,108 per column inch for what the paper defines as a "cause and appeal/political" ad. That's more than double the weekday rate for national retail ads, at $482 per column inch.

Are these rates based on the paper's desire to set the bar high in order to fend off angry scientists with lesser means from taking out ads? Not according to The Times ' spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis. She said the rates were based on "market factors." In other words, the paper knows it can get big bucks from people with axes to grind and the means to grind them in public. Ms. Mathis said that Dr. Damadian's ads met the guidelines of the paper's advertising acceptability manual. "We accept opinion ads regardless of our own editorial positions on any given subject," she said.

Last month, Dr. Damadian also took out full-page ads in The Washington Post , the Los Angeles Times and the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter . So just how much has he spent? Dr. Damadian wouldn't say. "That's not the point," he said, speaking by phone from the Long Island office of the Fonar Corporation, the publicly traded M.R.I. manufacturer he founded in 1978. The point, he said, is to fight for "more truth and honor in the sciences."

Dr. Damadian, who has been a Nobel candidate in the past and who patented the first M.R.I., said he paid for the ads with his own money and with funds from Friends of Raymond Damadian, a committee set up to further his cause. "Shareholders just want to be sure the company's not paying for them," he said. The company has had better luck in the courts: Dr. Damadian said he collected $128.7 million from General Electric in the 1990's following court rulings in favor of his M.R.I. patent.

(For the record, Dr. Damadian also said that he had become a creationist in recent years, after finding scant evidence "that mankind originated from a slime mold that, give or take a million years, stood up out of the ocean and began to give lectures.")

His crusade has also won him actual coverage in The Wall Street Journal , The Baltimore Sun and Newsday.

So what comes next in the Nobel crusade? "It's kind of a day-to-day," Dr. Damadian said. "We don' t know."

For all his efforts, Dr. Damadian doesn't seem to have gotten a rise out of the Swedes. "We thought it was a very drastic reaction," said Bo Angelin, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine. But was it worth the expense? "It's a lot of money," Mr. Angelin said. "It would be difficult to feel he would get very much effect out of it."

Except, of course, for a voice in the conversation-and a much higher Nexis profile.

An 18-year-old named LeBron James has everyone a little dreamy these days, including The New York Times .

On Oct. 31, following the second straight stellar performance by the high-school hoopster turned N.B.A. superlad and Cleveland Cavalier, The New York Times -in a break from all that is holy-transformed the front of its sports section into a giant movie poster with laudatory shout-outs in different colors and sizes of type from the likes of Larry Bird ("He's the best talent I've seen come out in years") scattered across the top of the page.

While such a display would hardly gain notice in the pages of, say, Esquire , seeing it in the post-Howell Times was a little like watching Murder She Wrote 's Angela Lansbury do a turn as the angst-ridden sophomore on The O.C.

"We dared to have fun," Times sports editor Tom Jolly explained. "We approached the story with a degree of skepticism and expected after his performance on Thursday to find quite a bit of skeptical voices with cautionary tales, and instead found quite the opposite-as you saw from Larry Bird."

Mr. Jolly said the resulting design was the result of a brainstorm between himself and the art director, when the latter viewed some of the comments and thought they were akin to the hyperventilating pull-quotes in movie ads.

Asked whether he took into consideration The Time 's newly enforced font code-which standardized all headline fonts while eliminating the myriad different typefaces that used to come before Times stories-before making such a dramatic decision, Mr. Jolly said, "No, I didn't. But I know we used virtually every one of them that was available."

In the mid-90's, only seven years out of high school, 25-year-old Stephen Glass, the youngest of 15 staff writers on the respected left-wing Washington-based news magazine The New Republic , was promoted to associate editor. He was a solid game player-effusive, smiling, flattering, popular, idealistic about all of the values held sacred by the serious press. His hard-hitting pieces, not only for The New Republic but for Harper's , George and Rolling Stone , were praised and envied. He worked exhausting hours for low pay, but he was read by all the right power players and his career was soaring. There was only one thing wrong: He was making it all up. An outrageously colorful and detailed exposé about computer hackers called "Hack Heaven" aroused the suspicions of investigative reporters for an online publication of Forbes , who decided to do some fact-checking of their own. The catalog of lies they uncovered was staggering. As much as his editors believed in him and tried to support him in defending against the charges, they discovered to their horror that Mr. Glass had made up all or most of the facts behind 27 of the 41 articles he bylined for The New Republic . It's called "cooking a story." Agonizingly, a brilliant but flawed kid with a tremendous future watched his career obliterated in the flames of scandal. Shattered Glass doesn't apologize or exonerate, but it does explain what brought a distraught, deeply troubled young man in a high-powered job to crack under pressure.

As sad as this story is, it works on other fascinating levels. Director Billy Ray, who also wrote the seamless screenplay, shows the working habits in a pressure cooker that drive so many young writers to burn out before the age of 30. Rushing to deadline, exposing drugs, hookers and binge partying at the Conservative Political Action Conference, it was just easier to fabricate. Plus it made more colorful copy. The movie also catalogs the internecine dramas among the staff-the jockeying for position among the competitive writers on payroll (Chloë Sevigny is especially good as one of Glass' chief admirers); the firing of a popular, compassionate editor, Michael Kelly (Hank Azaria), by the magazine's hard, dictatorial publisher, Marty Peretz (director Ted Kotcheff in a rare acting assignment, and very forceful, too), and his replacement by a new editor the staff does not respect or admire, Chuck Lane (Peter Sarsgaard). In this atmosphere of tyranny and interoffice subterfuge, the stress doubled in Mr. Glass' desperation to live up to the expectations of so many people. His need for constant approval, the panic and lack of sleep, the work avoidance and the crippling emotional pressure of never-ending deadlines are subjects with which all journalists sympathize. But Mr. Glass devoted more time to elaborate superficialities-covering his tracks, inventing sources, printing fake business cards, planting phony voice-mail messages and bogus e-mail addresses, even creating nonexistent Web sites-than he spent on the actual work itself. No wonder he was turning into butter.

The acting is uniformly excellent. Mr. Azaria, as the late Mike Kelly, and Mr. Sarsgaard, as the conflicted Chuck Lane, are perfect editors. Steve Zahn is the irritating but believable rival reporter who orchestrates Mr. Glass' fall from grace. The claustrophobic elements in the cramped magazine office all come together in sharp focus-from Mr. Glass' most worshipful co-worker, a smart, factual reporter whose compassion for her friend clouds her own objectivity, to the switchboard operator who comes up with the one way the entire debacle could have been prevented: If The New Republic did not refuse to run photos. I mean, how can you make up fictional sources if you need illustrations to back them up? The pieces all fall into place, but the mesmerizing centerpiece is the amazing Mr. Christensen. Who knew he could act? With his finely sculpted features and owlish Harry Potter glasses, he is the living embodiment of another Glass-one of the awkward, heartbreaking, dysfunctional Glass family members in the short stories by J.D. Salinger. Watching him get miserably consumed and inextricably trapped by his own lies, squirming on the sharp needles of his own word processor, is a very disheartening thing to watch. And yet at the same time, Shattered Glass is so skillfully and carefully made that it seizes the imagination and keeps you spellbound. At the same time, you learn volumes about how journalism works. In the tradition of Richard Brooks' Deadline U.S.A. and Alan Pakula's All the President's Men , it's both a manual on the finer elements of journalism and a fine detective story with elements of overwhelming suspense.

And stop the presses: The end to the egregious flummery of these ink-stained wretches has yet to be written. While Jayson Blair socks away the publishing money for an autobiographical book about his escapades at The Times , Stephen Glass was hired by Rolling Stone to write a feature covering the Canadian pot laws. The beat goes on.

Loving Hugh Jackman

The new theater season has exploded, and here I am again, out on a limb with a saw in my hand. If nothing else happens for the rest of the year, after The Boy from Oz I think I have already overdosed on the dazzle factor. Yes, it's about the brief kilowatt glow radiated by the life, career and untimely death of Australian Wunderkind Peter Allen. But that's just a peg on which to hang a star. Bottom line: The Boy from Oz is a sensational one-man show-business phenomenon called Hugh Jackman, and all those headlines asking the question "Can he save it from the bad reviews?" are a waste of newsprint. The answers are all the same: You bet your ass he can. He is doing it nightly. Frankly, I have never seen any male performer do it with so much passion, talent, energy, charisma and panache in all the years I've been attending Broadway musicals. Women have knocked my argyles off many times. Lots of them. But never a real live guy-type person with a hairy chest and a smile as wide as Shubert Alley. Especially one who sings like a mixture of John Raitt and Billy Joel, dances like Gene Kelly, acts with smashing conviction, looks like a camera-ready eight-by-10 and brings an entire theater to its feet, screaming and stomping, just by unbuttoning his pants. Men, women, boys of every persuasion, grannyboppers, prom queens, skateboarders, probably cocker spaniels-to love Hugh Jackman, you have to get in line.

Already a full-fledged movie star who has stolen entire films from Halle Berry, John Travolta, Meg Ryan and a screen filled with buff aliens, he was the greatest Curly I have ever seen in the London production of Oklahoma! Jaded cynics are still raving about his New York singing debut at Carnegie Hall opposite Audra McDonald in the one-night concert version of Carousel . Now, what he has done to, with and for The Boy from Oz is something of a miracle. He has nothing to prove to me. Yet here he is, making his Broadway stage debut for a thimble of what he gets paid in the movies, prancing and sailing and soaring and stopping the show better than Peter Allen ever dreamed of. Here is a star with the power to render the critics impotent.

The show? I was afraid you'd ask. At gunpoint, I can't pretend it's one for the archives. Let's just say it is doubtful that in 20 years it will revived by "Encores!" But at least it moves.

Allen grew up bisexual in the outback, the child of an abusive father and an adoring mom, formed a bogus brother act with a pal, changed their names to Chris and Peter Allen, got discovered by Judy Garland, married and divorced Liza Minnelli, and hit the career skids-all before the intermission. In Act II, he goes solo, writes hit songs, wins an Oscar, makes a comeback at Radio City Music Hall, loses his boyfriend to AIDS and finally dies of the disease himself at 48. The book by Martin Sherman catalogs the facts without nuance or detail, and Philip William McKinley's direction reduces a supporting army of characters to tertiary traffic. The chief casualties in the sequined gridlock are Isabel Keating, who has the nervous mannerisms and biting wit of Judy but none of the heart ("You're green," she says to Peter on their first meeting, "I'll bet you haven't even had your stomach pumped yet") and Stephanie J. Block, who never resembles anything physically, vocally or remotely like Liza. The structure is annoyingly formulaic, like a first-day class in Music Workshop 101. Peter trades insults with Judy, then Judy gets a song. Peter tries to make a go of his marriage to Liza until she finds him in the arms of a man, then Liza gets a song. The story isn't unique or special enough to build a show around, and the style is raunchily Vegas.

None of this matters, of course, because when the show threatens to lull, Mr. Jackman slides across the top of the waxed grand piano or leads the Rockettes through a high-kicking hall of revolving mirrors on a palpitating "Everything Old Is New Again" in top hats, white ties and tails by William Ivey Long, out-tapping Tommy Tune. With a waist like a doughnut hole, he struts his way through "I Go to Rio" like a Jack Cole dancer from the 1950's in enough ruffles and feathers to make Carmen Miranda drool. He makes love to the music, the lyrics, the keyboard, the butt-shaking dance steps by Joey McKneely. It may not be My Fair Lady , but it's a colossal entertainment as long as Mr. Jackman shows up every night and continues to give it 150 percent. God forbid he should ever catch a cold or break a toe. If he is out of this show for one day, the curtain cannot rise. He is the whole frigging show. The lines are long, the standing ovations are longer, but he's only committed himself to Broadway for one year. So get there fast. A talent as overwhelming as Hugh Jackman only passes this way once in a big fat blue moon. Even in a campy extravaganza like The Boy from Oz , he's lusty, brawny and brilliant.

"They have different kinds of ambition," said Mr. Christensen about Anakin Skywalker (who about now should be one rattling voicebox away from turning into Darth Vader), and Stephen Glass, the disgraced former New Republic writer, whom the actor portrays in the upcoming Lion's Gate film Shattered Glass .

"Annakin's ambition is an all-dominating, rule-the-galaxy type of ambition," continued Mr. Christensen. "But yeah, they are both people who allow their sort of moral integrity to become questionable so that they can get what they want."

The comparison will flatter journalists who picture themselves as great protagonists in the epic sweep of history. But not since the pit-stained drama of All the President's Men -and the Watergate reporting that was its basis-has that picture been transposed to the silver screen with the dramatic effort of Shattered Glass . The film, which will be released by Lion's Gate on Oct. 31-but had its world premiere on Aug. 30, at the Telluride Film Festival-is set in the heart of journalism's roiling schism of self-love and self-doubt, and arrives in time to put a starry exclamation point at the end of a year in which that schism has taken up more self-referential column inches than ever before.

Whether anyone out there is watching-whether the last year's soft revolution in the fourth estate really matters to the public-remains to be seen.

Journalism: The Treatment

What a year it's been for journalism. First was the process of embedding reporters with coalition troops during the United States' invasion of Iraq, which produced almost as much reporting on the war as it did reporting on the reporting on the war. Then came the sad deaths of several journalists in the Middle East, including Atlantic and former New Republic editor Michael Kelly, who played a major role in the Stephen Glass story and is portrayed in Shattered Glass by Hank Azaria. But the self-flagellating climax of the media's year came in the form of Jayson Blair. The ambitious New York Times reporter's errors and lies led to the June resignation of top editors Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, and shot Mr. Blair to the tippy-top of journalism's 10 most wanted list, above plagiarist Ruth Shalit, Pulitzer Prize–winning fabricator Janet Cooke and, of course, former New Republic scribe and con artist Stephen Glass.

His story, and therefore ours, begins long ago (1998) in a galaxy far, far away (Washington, D.C.), when a sparky young journalist wrote a series of too-good-to-be-true stories for The New Republic . Envied by his colleagues and competitors, Mr. Glass was a much-sought-after hotshot, juggling freelance gigs from Harper's , George and Rolling Stone . But Mr. Glass was making up his stories, and the fabrications made it past the magazine's fact-checking department and by Mr. Glass' mentor and New Republic editor, Mr. Kelly. Forbes "Digital Tools" reporter Adam Penenberg, whose investigation of Mr. Glass' story about a nonexistent hacker convention and an imaginary company called Jukt Micronics precipitated his downfall, comes into the story after he is chastised for not having gotten the piece himself. Expecting to find the story he had missed, he found the story of his career: a reporter for the vaunted New Republic making up every word of his stories. Mr. Lane, who took over TNR when Mr. Kelly was fired by publisher Marty Peretz, pressed Mr. Glass for explanations to satisfy Mr. Penenberg, and the two men wound up in a narratively satisfying dénouement in a Maryland hotel lobby, where a nervous Mr. Glass' elaborate stories crumbled.

A 1998 Vanity Fair article by Buzz Bissinger made it clear that Mr. Glass' downward spiral had itself become the story too good to be true. (The story is the basis for this movie.)

Mr. Glass went into hiding and completed his law degree. He resurfaced this year with his novel The Fabulist , about an ambitious journalist who makes up his stories. He also granted a clammy mea culpa – cum –book-tour appearance to 60 Minutes , and was rewarded for his time on the circuit with an assignment from Rolling Stone , one of the magazines in which his fabricated stories once appeared. (The same week, Mr. Blair received assignments at Jane and Esquire , a double-play that inspired struggling freelancers with its boldness.)

The Hollywood Reporter

Screenwriter Billy Ray, who had done a semester's tour of duty at Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism before returning to his native Hollywood, was commissioned to adapt Mr. Bissinger's piece into a screenplay for HBO-completing the story's journey from The New Republic 's scrappy D.C. offices to the Death Star of the New York magazine world to the Great White Way.

A regime change at the cable network left the project dormant for several years. When Mr. Ray wrested it back from HBO, he teamed with Mr. Christensen and his brother Tove, who had also been entranced by the Vanity Fair piece. They took the project to Tom Cruise's production company, Cruise/Wagner, and got funding from Lion's Gate.

What they created was a quietly ambitious movie that takes journalism very, very seriously. At one point, a full two minutes is spent on an explanation of The New Republic 's editorial process. The Glass character describes to a classroom full of high-school students how a story goes through two editors and back to the writer, then through a fact-check, a copyeditor, lawyers, the publisher, production, and finally back through all of these steps again. He also explains how a dry policy story about ethanol subsidies can be checked for discrepancies against "the Congressional Record , trade publications, LexisNexis or footage from C-Span."

It's not often that an independent film could double as a J-school seminar.

Mr. Ray was also spot-on when it comes to the youthful strivers who populate the media. In a scene set during a party at Mr. Glass's apartment, one beer-swilling man observes to another, "If they stoop any lower, pretty soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Time and People !"

Har!

Jealous glances between co-workers as Mr. Glass gets phone calls from other magazines help to flesh out the needy insecurities of the film's characters.

One of the most poignant moments in the film-at least on the journo-narcissism meter-comes after just such an episode, when one of Mr. Glass's fictionalized female colleagues abandons her dry business-writing style and aims for Mr. Glass's breezy, beer-keg bardic rhetoric.

"Is that what you want, Amy?" asks the reporter's colleague, Caitlin (played by Chloë Sevigny), when she's read Amy's freshman effort to remake herself as a journalist with more flair. "To get a bunch of smoke blown up your ass by a bunch of editors?"

"Yes," Amy replies without hesitation.

Mr. Ray said that his efforts to capture the spirit of journalism were so strenuous in part because he wanted to "apply the standards of journalism to the writing of the movie." He flew to Washington to meet with Kelly and Mr. Lane and everyone from TNR who was willing to speak to him, some of whom did so "off the record."

"Billy would make a really good journalist," said Mr. Penenberg. "Even information you couldn't get as a journalist, Billy either managed to get or deduce" from talking to as many of the saga's players as he could.

What he came up with was a portrait of Mr. Glass that-as played by Mr. Christensen-is sweaty, anxiety-stricken, self-impressed and self-doubting.

"Are you mad at me?" asks the unctuous Mr. Glass of his friends and superiors over and over again, until an audience-of journalists or regular humans-will want to choke him with his necktie.

No doubt those same people will warm to the compelling characterization of Mr. Kelly, who cooperated with Mr. Ray on the project before his death.

"There are good editors and there are bad editors," Mr. Glass' character tells his rapt audience of high-school students. "My hope for you is that once-at least once-you get a truly great one. A great editor defends his writers against anyone. He stands up and fights for you. Michael Kelly was that kind of editor. He had that kind of courage."

Mr. Azaria plays Kelly with a muzzy warmth and solidity that seems to serve as a tribute to the late, great editor-and makes it hard to believe that the film was entirely written and shot before Kelly's death.

"Kelly is the most principled man I have ever met in my life," said Mr. Ray. "It's sickening that he's dead." Mr. Ray also claimed that the late Kelly "would never have seen the completed film" and was "desperate to see it derailed," since it told the story of how he missed the signs of Mr. Glass' fabrications.

Kelly's TNR replacement, Mr. Lane, is portrayed by the soft-maned Peter Sarsgaard as a humorless pill who is reviled by his young staff of Kelly loyalists. Ultimately lionized for catching and firing Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane served as a paid consultant on the film, visiting the Montreal set on the day they were shooting a scene in which the young TNR reporters rip him to shreds.

"I was two feet from Chuck, and I said, 'Do you want to stop watching this?'" said Mr. Ray. "He said, 'No, it's probably a pretty accurate description of what they were saying about me.'"

"I was worried that I was coming off as this stiff, humorless guy who nobody at the magazine liked," said Mr. Lane about his characterization in the film. But then he thought: "First of all, you are a little bit stiff and a little bit humorless, so just get used to it. Secondly, the movie reaches a conclusion that if it wasn't for this stiff and humorless guy, the magazine would have been much worse off."

The characterization of the prim Mr. Lane as the ultimate savior translates very well into Hollywoodese. We feel sorry for the obviously unpopular but attractive Mr. Sarsgaard, having to take over a viper's nest of overachieving children after Kelly's firing by a particularly Mephistophelian Marty Peretz, as portrayed by Ted Kotcheff.

"I'm not gonna sit around and be a bullshitter. If I come off well, I'm not going to complain about it," said Mr. Lane. "For me, personally, this isn't the bad episode. I can see that for some people-not just Mike or somebody like Marty, who obviously comes off very badly-it's not such a great thing."

As could be expected of fusty journalists unused to seeing their names in type larger than 10 points, let alone their Hollywood simulacra on a real movie screen, most of them are just psyched to be in the movie.

"My wife says Steve Zahn does me better than I do me," said an obviously impressed Mr. Penenberg, who spoke to the actor by phone during production.

"I just wanted to know how he reacted when he figured it out," said Mr. Zahn of his interactions with Mr. Penenberg. "I asked, 'Did you go "Oh my God!", or is it something you expect every once in a while?' And he said, 'No, man'-and he was talking in layman's terms for me-'this was a very big deal!'"

Anonymous sources

Mr. Glass' closest female colleague, Hanna Rosin, preferred not to have her name used. The result is that while the movie features 20-foot versions of Mr. Glass, Mr. Lane, Mr. Kelly, Mr. Peretz, Mr. Penenberg and even Forbes editor Kambiz Foroohar, the only actual woman played in the film is Mr. Lane's wife Katrina, who appears in approximately one and a half scenes.

The female characters played by Chloë Sevigny, Melanie Lynskey and Rosario Dawson are fictionalized amalgams of any number of peripheral characters.

"There weren't very many women at The New Republic , just as a plain fact," said Mr. Lane after thinking for a minute about this point.

Mr. Ray has another explanation: "There were a couple of sources that wanted to remain anonymous," he said. "Some of them were male, and the best way to protect their anonymity was to make their characters female. It also added to the notion subtextually that people mothered Glass."

Mr. Glass himself did not speak to anyone involved in the film, though an Aug. 21 Daily News item reported that Lion's Gate was so eager to have Mr. Glass' input that they offered him a job.

"I can confirm that the script was sent to Stephen Glass as a courtesy," said Tom Ortenberg, the head of Lion's Gate, "in case he wanted to make any comment. We sent it only as a courtesy. We never followed up; he never responded."

Mr. Ortenberg insisted that even if Mr. Glass had responded to the script, "we would have listened respectfully and acted appropriately in addressing any thoughts he might have had, but we never, ever would have allowed him to profit from this."

But why shouldn't he have profited? He was certainly allowed to publish his novel and promote it on national television. The kind of concern that Mr. Ortenberg and the rest of the team behind Shattered Glass are showing for journalism's rules-much as Mr. Ray had promised early in the project-comes off as sort of sweet. It's usually journalists and their readers who are obsessed with the scandals and mores of Hollywood players.

But if the lesson of Stephen Glass is that solid journalism, not popular success, is the high road, it's a lesson the filmmakers hope they don't come to exemplify. After all, popular success is what movies are all about. Will anyone other than J-geek Romenesko readers be able to appreciate the implications of Mr. Glass's ethical transgressions? Will they care about the delicately balanced relationship between Mike Kelly, Chuck Lane and Marty Peretz?

The filmmakers sure hope so. They're opening the movie in a mixture of art houses and multiplexes, and planning Oscar campaigns for Mr. Ray, Mr. Sarsgaard and Mr. Christensen.

"The story makes for a very good film, like a Brontë novel where the woman harbors a tragic secret," said Mr. Sarsgaard.

But it doesn't need to be Brontë. It just needs to be compelling. And it is.

No matter how freighted with inside-baseball LexisNexis talk, the movie traces the rise and fall of one hell of a needy kid. Journalism is a good place for those kinds of stories; the power of the recent Jayson Blair scandal should testify to that.

Even the players in the film, like Mr. Sarsgaard, realize that much.

"I wish it had come out three months ago," he said.

There's nothing subtle about the borrowing. Have a look.

Dr. Saga writes: "My mother … was the daughter of a wealthy farmer … [she] died when I was eleven … I heard that my father was a traveling salesman who called at the house regularly, but I never met him. [My uncle] was a nice man, I won't forget him."

In "Po' Boy," Mr. Dylan sings:

"My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer / My father was a traveling salesman, I never met him / When my mother died, my uncle took me in-he ran a funeral parlor / He did a lot of nice things for me and I won't forget him."

The question on the minds of Dylan fans is: "So what?" Not only has our boy Zimmy made a cottage industry of spinning obscure ditties into folk classics, he's dropped plenty of clues about what he's been up to. Dig these Six Curses:

1. "No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke …. ("All Along the Watchtower," 1967)

Translation: Simmer down, WSJ . If Our Bobness didn't get nabbed for lifting "Blowin' in the Wind" (in 1978 he said: "'Blowin' in the Wind' has always been a spiritual. I took it off a song, I don't know if you ever heard, called 'No More Auction Block'"), then you missed your window; he's damn near unimpeachable now.

2. Tears of rage, tears of grief / Must I always be the thief? ("Tears of Rage," co-written with Richard Manuel, 1968)

Translation: As The New Republic 's Leon Wieseltier described Stephen Glass' mea culpa on 60 Minute s, this is "contrition as a career move"-except that our blue-eyed Rapunzel from Hibbing is not a bespectacled twerp like Mr. Glass, and his tears are acidic. (See: "Positively 4th Street.")

3. It takes a thief to catch a thief …. ("Moonlight," 2001)

Translation: Nobody's perfect. Take note, Mr. Eig and Mr. Moffett.

4. Steal a little and they throw you in jail, / Steal a lot and they make you king. ("Sweetheart Like You," 1983)

Translation: Let's see: Doris Kearns Goodwin is a media darling and a member of the Board of Overseers at Harvard University; Stephen Ambrose has sold millions of books; the aforementioned Mr. Glass has a new book and movie about himself on the way.

5. "Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief / Looks up at his hero the Commander-in-Chief / Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please make it brief / Is there a hole for me to get sick in?" ("Tombstone Blues," 1965)

Translation: More contrition. In the shadow of a saint, you think Mr. Dylan can't handle a couple of journalists? Bob's been to hell and back-which you'd know if you're one of the three schlubs who saw Hearts of Fire .

6. Don't steal, don't lift / Twenty years of schoolin' / And they put you on the day shift ("Subterranean Homesick Blues," 1965)

Translation: This is the ultimate rebuke to those would-be Pinkertons. If Mr. Dylan hadn't helped himself to Dr. Saga's lines, he'd be flipping burgers.

To sum up, consider these lines from "Absolutely Sweet Marie" (1966):

To live outside the law, you must be honest / I know you always say that you agree ….

-Elon Rafael Green

Suburban Slumming

On a bustling block off Sixth Avenue sits one of Manhattan's hottest restaurants. The place doesn't take reservations; on weekends, you'll wait two hours for a table. We're talking, of course, about the Olive Garden on Sixth Avenue and 22nd Street. The wood-paneled walls. The imitation marble columns. The glossy, laminated menus. How is it that an Italian-themed chain restaurant-418 in the U.S. and counting!-that serves up lots of pasta and no attitude is thriving in this carbo-phobic town? By trafficking-unintentionally and unself-consciously-in suburban nostalgia.

At 9 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the dining room was packed. At the bar, a group of four friends were enjoying the remnants of bread sticks, salad and cold beer as a crowd of at least 20 waited at the door for a table.

"We live in the East Village, so normally I would never see these people," said Mark Arroyo, a 34-year-old with short black hair and matching black-framed glasses who works for a Soho advertising firm. "It's like they imported everything from Jersey. The wait staff, décor, the people eating here-it's like being in a time warp."

His friend and fellow East Village resident Alix Ford admitted that after leaving her midtown office (hedge funds) to go out to dinner, the Olive Garden didn't jump to the top of the list. "We're slumming," said the blond Ms. Ford. "We call it the 'Suburban Happy Hour . ' We've done TGIF's, Applebees. Last month we were at Hooters. We usually order the signature cocktail, but tonight it's just beer."

Two tables over, Hillary Buyea, a 29-year-old real-estate lawyer, was finishing up a plate of chicken alfredo with her friend Emily Kindlon, a 22-year-old database administrator. "We're from upstate New York originally, so there's familiarity involved," she said. "We're both big fans of the Olive Garden."

At another table sat Gary Sav, a 29-year-old Wall Street analyst who lives on the Upper East Side and who'd had lunch at Nobu that day. He was looking sorrowfully at his eggplant parmigiana.

"It looks like a frozen veggie patty," he said. "I have this nagging suspicion that they stuck it in the microwave about five minutes ago."

Adam Gorlyn, a fellow investment banker, said that the Olive Garden experience wasn't as he remembered it from his college days at Rutgers. "Back in school, they used to serve the dipping sauce with the breadsticks. And the salads were bigger. What happened to all the tomatoes?" he said.

Mr. Sav looked around. "There are no hot girls here," he said. "But that's part of the catch. This isn't your typical high-intensity New York restaurant scene. It's not like Sushi Samba or something. It's more like riding on the subway." Steff Perl, a schoolteacher, sat across the table and poked quietly at her ravioli portobello.

On another warm summer night, Sidra Castor, a 23-year-old event planner, had snagged a table for herself and a friend. "I've been here three times since March," she said. Originally from Ohio, Ms. Castor reminisced about the Olive Gardens back home. "When you go to authentic Italian restaurants in New York, you can't find alfredo like this," she said. "That's what I like about Olive Garden: It's more American.

"I get made fun of by all my friends," she added. "They think it's pathetic that I eat here. I think it's kind of pathetic too, but I like it."

-Gabriel Sherman

The End of Barbie?

Meet Toe Jam Jimmy. Jimmy is a three-inch-tall rubber toy decked out with purple hair, a wife-beater T-shirt and green goo between his toes.

Take him out of his package, and a whiff of that green goo may knock you over. You may never eat Roquefort again.

Jimmy is a "Stink Blaster," part of a toy line to be released in the U.S. later this year. It's been the No. 1–selling toy in Italy, where the bambinos are wild for the noxious knickknacks. Other scents include vomit, dog breath, "porta potty" and halitosis.

Stink Blasters were just one of the products being hawked by toy manufacturers to retail buyers in late June at the International Toy Center at 200 Fifth Avenue. In previous years, retail buyers would take the grueling 24-hour flight to Hong Kong showrooms to check out the next plastic cash cow. But this year, worries about SARS had U.S. retailers clamoring for a domestic show to keep them out of East Asia.

Some of the new stuff at the show included a George Bush action figure that spouts 17 canned phrases ("I come from Texas!"), a motorized watergun and increasingly tiny radio-controlled cars that are already popular as an after-work distraction for Japanese bar patrons. Hulk and Spider-Man toys were all over the place, not to mention the Chihuahua from Legally Blonde 2. But the fact was, Stink Blasters and talking Presidents notwithstanding, a lot of these new toys really seemed to suck.

Indeed, SARS was the least of the problems facing the toymakers gathered at the I.T.C. (unless you happened to be Asian-exhibitor Len Soyka complained that one of his manufacturers, an Asian-American woman, was stopped and asked to present a passport). Kids are getting older faster, and the toy industry is starting to sweat about it.

According to Carol Rehtmeyer, president of Rehtmeyer Design and Licensing, the industry targets children based not on their real ages, but on their "aspirational age"-the age they wish they could be. So a doll being peddled to 8-year-olds will have a TV commercial showing pubescent 13-year-olds emoting about the toy's awesomeness.

"At one time, Barbie was aimed at a 12-year-old girl," Ms. Rehtmeyer said. "Today, by the time they're 6, they're done."

She also bemoaned the "programming" of today's children, whose lives are a constant shuttling from one supervised activity to another.

"Kids are complacent," she said. "They're always with authority figures and always being guided: 'Now we're doing soccer practice; now we're doing tae kwon do.' The kids are learning to listen to what's going to happen rather than think on their own."

(She would seem to know what she's talking about: On her Web site, the toy executive describes herself as an "author, ballerina, 1st degree Tae Kwon Do black belt holder, award-winning competitive dog trainer, one-time professional ice-skater, and a wife and mother of a five year old daughter.")

But back to the Stink Blasters. Will they be a hit in New York? Jeffrey Haber, owner of the toy boutique A Bear's Place on Lexington Avenue, said he didn't think so-he wrinkled his nose at the mere sight of one. Would the three-inch rubber nuisances sell (at $4.99 each)?

"In the lower-end stores … maybe," he said.

-Michael Mohammed

"We'll probably do something in Hollywood first and hone the book proposal over the next few days," explained Mr. Vigliano. The book proposal will consist of the same five pages he's showing to movie executives, along with a sample chapter that will "showcase Jayson's writing talents at more length," Mr. Vigliano said. Book publishers will be hearing from him shortly, he said: "I think we will be getting the proposal out in a week or 10 days and expect to make a deal within a week after that."

The proposal, portions of which were obtained by The Observer , focuses almost exclusively on Mr. Blair's experience of and views on the spiky complexities of race, both in the Times newsroom and in the professional world in general. "Why is not simple," Mr. Blair begins. "I want the chance to articulate the reasons for my downfall, not to excuse myself or to cast myself as a victim, but as a cautionary tale."

If Mr. Blair's instincts as a journalist are shaky, his skills as a self-promoter appear to be solid: On Monday, he issued a statement to CNN that said, "I hope to have the opportunity to write and share my story so that it can help others to heal."

Mr. Vigliano, meanwhile, is working hard-and fast-to turn the 27-year-old into Jayson Blair Inc. It's a story that he believes could be worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in film and book royalties.

But unlike Mr. Blair's career-suicide doppelgänger, Stephen Glass-who has said he spent five years in therapy before publishing a work of fiction about his fabrications in The New Republic -the former Times reporter isn't waiting around to get his head straight. He's diving right in, not slowed down at all by the gummy ethical issues involved in exploiting his own bad behavior for personal profit. The memoir that Mr. Blair wants to write will either justify his actions or further damn them. Above all, the proposal claims, the book will have something to teach others: "I want to offer my experience as a lesson," Mr. Blair writes, "for the precipice from which I plunged is one on which many young, ambitious, well-educated and accomplished African Americans and other 'minorities' teeter, though most, of course, do manage to pull back from the brink. That precipice overhangs America's racial divide; and the winds sucking us down into the chasm (cultural isolation, professional mistrust, and the external and internal imperatives to succeed, at all costs, to name a few) can be too strong for the troubled and unprepared-as I was-to withstand.

"Today," ends that section of the proposal, "even at the most liberal, well-intentioned of institutions, race is still terra incognita, where the young and conflicted, like me, can all too easily lose compass."

Just a few days after Mr. Blair's compass sent him out the front door of The Times , which was on May 1, he returned a call from Mr. Vigliano-whom he'd met while shopping a book on the Washington, D.C., sniper case last fall-to talk about a book deal. "At some point, after I heard what had happened at The Times, " said Mr. Vigliano, "I called him and said I was thinking of him and if he wanted to talk or needed help with anything, to give me a call. Then he called me." Mr. Vigliano said he couldn't recall the exact date, but "a few days" after Mr. Blair's dismissal, the former reporter paid a visit to Mr. Vigliano's office on Broadway in Soho. He declined to describe Mr. Blair's emotional state at the time-that would be material for the book, he explained-but he did say that "I obviously wouldn't be dealing with somebody who was unstable."

Some time after that, Mr. Blair wrote the proposal, to which the agent made "minor edits," according to Mr. Vigliano.

Mr. Vigliano said he had plans for Mr. Blair's book to be much bigger than a tell-all about journalistic sins, or even an inside look at the dysfunctional world of Howell Raines' Times .

"Clearly, there are issues of race here that transcend The New York Times ," said Mr. Vigliano. The paper of record, he said, "is just one institution that's really a surrogate for many, many other institutions in America. It will also deal with issues of substance abuse. Clearly, he had psychological issues that he's going to talk about."

One possibility is that Mr. Blair will write something similar to James Frey's self-eviscerating addiction confessional, A Million Little Pieces -which, The Observer has learned, Mr. Blair is currently reading. But his agent suggested that Mr. Blair's memoir might resemble Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America , by Washington Post reporter Nathan McCall, who bootstrapped his way from prison to a position as a journalist.

"It probably has some elements of the Jill Nelson book, too," said Mr. Vigliano, referring to Volunteer Slavery: My Authentic Negro Experience , another memoir by a black Post reporter, because it will make "elements of the stiff, snobby book-publishing community uncomfortable." But, he added, "it's a huge, huge story, and it's far, far bigger, in my mind, than any of those books, because it's the cover of Newsweek , it's the cover of New York -and maybe, paradoxically, you've got an enormously gifted writer."

Mr. Blair gives a taste of his own authentic experience in his proposal. At one point, he recalls the racism he confronted on a daily basis as the "only black reporter on any of the New York newspapers covering crime":

"I was tired of listening to the other reporters joke about victims like the five children who were raped by a man in the Bronx," he writes, "or how black-on-black violence was just making the city safer for everyone."

Already, speculation in the New York Post has suggested the possibility of a six- or seven-figure advance for a book by Mr. Blair. Those figures, Mr. Vigliano said, "don't seem unreasonable to me. It's a huge, huge story. I've talked to Jayson and I've seen the richness of this story. It's a very deep and very textured and layered story, and he's a gifted writer-and no, those figures don't seem unreasonable at all, by any means."

While Mr. Blair's story will be defined largely in the context of race, that doesn't mean the former reporter won't be trying to put forth his version of what went down at The Times . In particular, Mr. Blair comments frankly in the proposal on Jonathan Landman, the editor who oversaw the metropolitan desk where Mr. Blair was assigned. Of the now-famous e-mail that Mr. Landman sent to colleagues saying that Mr. Blair had to be stopped from reporting for The Times , Mr. Blair writes in his proposal that "it was actually in the context of whether I should be writing during a two-week break I took for drug and alcohol rehabilitation. Months later he would send me an e-mail offering his unqualified support for my improvements."

Mr. Blair goes on to write that while Mr. Landman "is no hero in this story," he calls him "an honorable and honest man." However, he asserts that Mr. Landman's "neo-conservative views have been some of the most difficult things for any minority reporter at the Times to handle."

Reached for comment, Mr. Landman told The Observer , "I sent a lot of e-mails. There was never unqualified support. Never, ever. But there was progress." As for Mr. Blair's characterization of him as "honest," Mr. Landman responded, "To be called 'honest' by Jayson Blair-there's something to treasure."

That Mr. Blair should try to profit from telling his story is not really a surprise, of course. Nowadays, public indignation is practically a cash crop in American culture. And in journalism alone, the examples of post-fuckup money-making are plenty: from The Washington Post 's Janet Cooke, whose faked 1981 Pulitzer Prize–winning story about a young drug addict eventually netted her $380,000 with Columbia TriStar Pictures, to Michael Finkel, the Times Magazine reporter whose profile of an African teenager named Youssouf Male turned out to be a composite of a number of subjects, who sold his tell-all memoir to HarperCollins for a reported $300,000.

Mr. Glass' novelization of his fictional nonfiction exploits, The Fabulist , which went for a sum in the low six figures, has attracted equal parts awe and disgust. His publisher, Simon & Schuster, has been criticized for rewarding Mr. Glass' wrongdoing (although few have leveled similar charges at Mr. Glass' agent, Lynn Nesbitt of Janklow & Nesbitt). In any case, Mr. Vigliano shrugged off the ethical issues of making money off journalistic transgressions.

"As far as ethical choices," said Mr. Vigliano, "I don't have a problem repping a guy who made up a few stories and embarrassed The New York Times . He lost his job, and he's been the object of intense scrutiny. He did wrong, he obviously admitted it and paid the price, and I don't feel like it's any huge … he's not eating babies, you know?"

Whether Mr. Blair's future output is the stuff of best-sellers and blockbuster films remains to be seen. But already, editors at major publishing houses are skeptical.

"I am wholly uninterested," said Jonathan Karp, the vice president and editorial director at Random House, echoing the sentiment of a number of editors contacted by The Observer . "It's a boring story that everybody already knows. I think the public will be completely satiated by the coverage in other newspapers, and to revisit it in the form of a book is unlikely."

Still, he conceded: "Far more boring stories by less interesting people have probably sold over the years."

Mr. Vigliano, who has been an agent since 1986, said he specializes in highly commercial works. Known for his aggressive hustling of clients, he's not averse to representing controversial material that other agents wouldn't touch, according to publishing executives. Last year he represented the estate of Kurt Cobain, selling Journals , his personal diaries, for $4 million to Riverhead Books. Among his other clients are Britney Spears and Jerry B. Jenkins of the Left Behind series. He said he even repped the Pope on a book, The Rosary Hour: The Private Prayers of Pope John Paul II .

Mr. Vigliano originally made contact with Mr. Blair while the reporter covered the Washington, D.C., sniper murders in the fall of 2002. At the time, Mr. Blair was hoping to sell a book that explored his complex emotions while following Lee Malvo, the black 18-year-old sniper, with whom he said that he felt a racial affinity.

At the time, however, Mr. Vigliano had a conflict of interest and couldn't cement a partnership.

"I couldn't represent him because I was repping Chief Moose," said Mr. Vigliano, referring to Charles A. Moose, the Montgomery County police chief who is currently suing the county for the right to profit from a book deal based on the case.

But the reporter and the agent stayed in contact. "I continued to stay in touch with him because I liked him," said Mr. Vigliano, who said that Mr. Blair's coverage of the sniper case would still play into the current proposals, although only "peripherally."

But Mr. Vigliano will have to contend with a number of hurdles to get Mr. Blair's story sold. For one, Mr. Blair's believability as a nonfiction writer is undoubtedly a hard sell.

"One of the main reasons I wouldn't be interested in this book is that the author has a major credibility problem," said Will Schwalbe, the editor in chief of Hyperion. "This author has forfeited the right, for the time being, to claim any kind of credibility in a nonfiction work."

"His nonfiction is so untrustworthy, you'd have a hard time believing his fiction," said David Hirshey, the vice president and executive editor at HarperCollins who acquired Mr. Finkel's book. "You'd have to suspend disbelief past any known human level."

Mr. Hirshey said the difference between his author and Mr. Blair was that "Finkel admits he made a colossal mistake, but it is only one mistake and not a pattern of deception and betrayal."

Even Mr. Blair's racial angle, which appears to lend him an air of intrinsic credibility, smells foul to some people. "This guy was more of a con man than he was a Negro," observed Stanley Crouch, the author and Daily News columnist. "His ethnicity is being more emphasized-but he's a high-level con man. The first thing the con man has to do is figure out the mark. Howell Raines and The New York Times constitute the mark."

Still, said Mr. Crouch, "This guy might have a story that might be very interesting, for people who are interested in that kind of story. He might do very well."

Mr. Vigliano, for his part, defended his client's right to write a memoir. "He's not going out and reporting on a story," he argued. "If he was going out and reporting on something that needed to be fact-checked, that had reporting at its core, then there would be issues of credibility."

Mr. Vigliano also said that suggestions that proceeds from a Blair book would be garnished under the Son of Sam laws-which stipulate that the perpetrator of a crime can't profit from it, and that any proceeds must go to the victim-were ludicrous because, he said, "Who is the victim that would have to recoup money in Jayson Blair's case? The New York Times ?"

Stephen Glass' publisher, Simon & Schuster, sought to distance itself from Mr. Blair's proposed project. David Rosenthal, the publisher, said the speed with which Mr. Blair was grabbing for a book deal was troubling to him.

"It does appear a bit complicated and unseemly," said Mr. Rosenthal. He defended Mr. Glass' novel, saying it wasn't "somebody trying to do something off the headlines. It was never intended that way. I think the Blair situation has colored people's feelings about Glass, there's no question. Although I do think the similarities are extremely superficial at best."

Mr. Rosenthal said he wouldn't even consider Mr. Blair's book. And he questioned Mr. Blair's ability to write with gravity about race. "I know of no great track record of [Mr. Blair] writing on race," he said. "It seems more convenient than thoughtful, perhaps."

Not everyone was unsympathetic to Mr. Blair. Eamon Dolan, editor in chief of Houghton Mifflin, said he figured that Mr. Blair had few other recourses. After all, the man needs an income, he said.

"It seems to me that publishing is almost the last refuge for this type of scoundrel," he said. "What else is he going to do? He's not going to be able to get a job in periodical publishing, he's not going to J-school. He can write a book! He could conceivably have this long afterlife as a book writer. Look at Mark Fuhrman. He writes true crime; he has two or three best-selling books."

Even so, Mr. Dolan made his own feelings about a Blair memoir clear. "I have a strong, visceral reaction," he said. "I have a strong, visceral disinterest."

Have you ever seen on the cover of a book the words "A NOVEL" in type exactly as large as both the title and the author's name? That's the billing Simon & Schuster has given Stephen Glass' The Fabulist -and it's false advertising. The book, about a young journalist named Stephen Glass who is caught fabricating news stories, is pure self-exculpation, a stage-managed, 342-page apology that will cost the reader $24.

Mr. Glass should sign over a portion of any profits to Jayson Blair, whose similar troubles at The New York Times were apparently exacerbated by maxed-out credit cards (just try reporting on events in rural Texas when you can't buy a plane ticket). And maybe a chunk of Mr. Glass' change should be kicked back to 60 Minutes , which last Sunday bestowed on him the kind of (re-)exposure every first-time novelist dreams of. He ought to make some sort of gesture, if only in acknowledgment of the obvious, which is that he's cashing in. To borrow Leon Wieseltier's concise phrase, it's "contrition as a career move."

Here's what we learn from the dust jacket of The Fabulist : "Formerly a journalist, Stephen Glass is currently at work on his second novel." Of course: He's launching his new career. After entertaining subscribers to The New Republic with dozens of fictitious articles passed off as fact, he's now capitalizing on his "true" talent ("I am compulsively imaginative, and by that, I mean I am always speculating, wondering, considering, and writing the world around me into a story"). The irony-we must have irony in a tale this tawdry-is that Mr. Glass is abundantly talented. He's funny and fluent and daring. In a parallel universe, I could imagine him becoming a perfectly respectable novelist-a prize-winner, perhaps, with a bit of luck. But in our universe, Mr. Glass will always be tainted, even despised, and he knows it.

Stephen Glass, hero of his own novel, suffers. He loses his job, his girlfriend, his self-esteem. He confesses all to his parents, braving their disappointment, their disgust (but in fact they stand by him). How much should he suffer? A rabbi explains to him that the Mark of Cain is not merely a sign of shame but also a form of protection, and this is how Stephen understands it: God "wanted Cain to bear only the punishment that God thought he should have to bear." But the almighty media, which grinds away with a pit bull's tenacity, won't let him off so easily. He's harassed, he's reviled. One critic accuses him of committing "journalism genocide"; another calls him the "Milosevic of magazines." "You'll never be sorry enough for the journalists," he's warned, and it's true: If he pops into view, the blitz will begin again. "If there were a special hell designed personally for me, it would probably have been this very hell." Actually, it's more like purgatory: He works in a video store, cultivates anonymity. Yes, he submits to both tragic and comic degradation, but his torments aren't exactly up to the standards of the Inferno .

Suspense, in The Fabulist , consists of wondering whether Stephen will ever attain absolution.

Fiction is famous for its cathartic properties: A good yarn will wring all the emotion out of the poor dish towel of a reader. This is why Mr. Glass waits until Stephen has hit bottom (though there's a chance he may bounce back, thanks to a good-hearted woman) before treating us to this naked appeal for forgiveness, a whiny, artless soliloquy: "I was, and I am, so sorry …. I apologize now: an insufficient apology, I know, to substitute for the one that should have come long ago, and never did. I want to offer it even though I understand it will afford little comfort to the people I wrote about (especially since few will believe it). But I do mean my apology …. "

He also means his novel, the arc of which suggests that the fault lies not with Stephen Glass but with journalism itself-because the profession turns people into monsters who will do anything for good copy. To further illustrate this point, Mr. Glass invents for Stephen a former friend and fellow reporter named Cliff. Intent on an exclusive interview, Cliff mercilessly stalks our disgraced hero. He's even willing to hold an ailing pet hostage in exchange for a 30-minute Q&A. Here's Cliff, ranting, desperate, damning himself and, by extension, his entire profession: "I have tracked [Stephen] down for weeks. I have searched high and low so he could tell his side of the story. A side that will probably just be another lie …. I have … worked my ass off, for him to be fairly represented in my article." But we already know that Cliff thinks Stephen is a pathological liar. And we must of course agree with Stephen when he tells Cliff, "You think that if I talk to you and you report it word for word, you'll have the story right, because it'll be accurate. But accuracy's not all you're looking for. Journalists always say it is, but it's almost never true. You're looking for a good story; accuracy's only half of it. You'll get the facts right and then you'll beat me over the head with them." Janet Malcolm for dummies.

If Stephen Glass were a great novelist, the question of forgiveness would answer itself. We would be too caught up in the narrative, too dazzled by the writing, to quibble about fraud and journalistic ethics and appropriate penance. Readers cherish Ezra Pound because some of his poems are indispensable; we "forget" the stupid and harmful things he did and said during his sad life. The Fabulist , however, we can easily do without; and unless Mr. Glass' talent grows tenfold, novel No. 2 will be more of the same. Which means, I'd say, that both apology and forgiveness should remain a private matter between Mr. Glass and those he's wronged. Writing novels only succeeds as atonement in novels, as Ian McEwan would surely agree. In real life, it won't wash.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer .

Tonight, May 7, well-known television innovator ( Pop-Up Video ) and nut case Tad Low will host something he's calling a Private Panty Portrait Party, which sounds like one of those voyeuristic hootenannies you used to read a lot about three or four years ago, when everyone under 35 was still drunk on dot-com money, reading Brill's Content and devoting much horny after-work energy to postmodern, public sexual fulfillment.

Guests at Mr. Low's PPPP bash will be plied with booze (beer, tequila) and asked to strip down to their skivvies in order to be photographed. Why photographed? Because-of course!-Mr. Low and his Tad-poles at Spin the Bottle productions are making a TV series for which they need a lot of pictures of people running around in their underwear (can't they just use B-roll from a bunch of Benny Hill s?).

The photos will be used in a segment of 4-Play , a music video program Mr. Low is making for the digital cable channel Fuse (formerly Much Music). 4-Play 's gimmick is that the screen is divided into four blocks, with one block playing an actual music video, and the other blocks showing related, silly material. For example, for a recent video by Queens of the Stone Age-in which the real video depicts the band getting into a car crash with a deer- 4-Play 's other blocks will include someone making venison Wellington, as well as faces of celebrities who look like deer. (Mr. Low said this list includes Mary Tyler Moore, Chris Kattan, Michael Richards, Johnny Depp and Martha Plimpton. Johnny Depp ?)

Mr. Low's underwear photos, then, will be used to accompany a recent Jimmy Eat World video in which the actual band plays at a high-school underwear party. The idea is to contrast the hired hardbodies in the real video against the squishy vérité ones you get when you send out a mass e-mail invite. Capiche ?

"Face inclusion is optional," Mr. Low said.

Tonight on Much Music, Fuse or whatever it is, Behind the Music That Sucks . We're fine with the idea behind this show, but the gratuitous "sucks" is just lame-ass, 13-year-old–ish shock-mongering. Whoever suggested it-10 push-ups in a thong, at Mr. Low's soirée! [MM, 132, 9 p.m.]

Thursday, May 8

When we saw him a few months back, documentary filmmaker R.J. Cutler could barely contain his excitement about his upcoming reality show, American Candidate , in which viewers would select a person they felt was well-positioned to mount an actual campaign for President of the United States. (Not you , John Kerry!)

Now American Candidate is on ice, after its network, FX, decided the video democracy program was going to be too expensive to produce. But Mr. Cutler's still excited, and optimistic his show is going to get picked up by another network.

"We have reason to be extremely confident that continuing production on the show is a wise idea," Mr. Cutler said.

So preproduction on American Candidate wages on. Though the show has moved the launch of its Web-based candidate search from this spring to September, Mr. Cutler said the program was "completely on schedule."

Why not get Mr. Cutler's other documentary subject, Roseanne, to fund the show herself? Mr. Cutler said his experience with the sometimes-combustible comedienne has been going "really, really well." He's been following her around for an ABC reality series that is scheduled to launch sometime in August, he said.

On FX's big daddy Fox tonight, the Miss Dog Beauty Pageant . News Corp doesn't have the moola for American Candidate , but they do have the moola for this. It's co-hosted by that J. Peterman guy from Seinfeld . Roof ! [WNYW, 5, 8 p.m.]

Friday, May 9

Stephen Glass-the scandalized ex– New Republic ex- Wunderkind who hasn't piped up publicly since he was given the heave-ho for making stuff up-will break his silence Sunday May 11 in an interview on 60 Minutes.

Mr. Glass recently sat for an interview with 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft. Other individuals interviewed for the piece include Charles Lane, Mr. Glass's former editor at TNR -now at The Washington Post -and Leon Wieseltier, TNR' s literary editor.

Mr. Glass, who'd written for other magazines besides TNR , was at the center of a mighty media hoo-hah in 1998 after he was busted for fabricating parts of many of his pieces. Canned from TNR by Mr. Lane, the then-25-year-old pretty much went underground, though along the way he did get a diploma from Georgetown Law.

Now there appears to be at Stephen Glass revival at hand. Mr. Glass's story is the subject of a forthcoming film entitled Shattered Glass , in which the reporter is played by Hayden Christensen, the Star Wars: Attack of the Clones kid. Mr. Lane is played by Peter Sarsgaard; late TNR editor Michael Kelly is played by Hank Azaria. The film is scheduled for release in October.

And Mr. Glass has written a novel. It's a fictionalized account-your joke here-of his own story.

Efforts to locate Mr. Glass yesterday were unsuccessful. A spokesperson for 60 Minutes said the show had no comment on this Sunday's episode. Mr. Lane declined comment, and Mr. Wieseltier did not return calls.

One person who will be watching Sunday's 60 Minutes with interest is Adam Penenberg, a journalist whose Forbes.com investigation of one of Mr. Glass's stories ultimately led to the reporter's ouster. Mr. Penenberg and his Forbes.com editor, Kambiz Foroohar, are also characters in Shattered Glass (Mr. Penenberg, now an accomplished book author himself, is played by Steve Zahn)

"I'd love to hear what he has to say," Mr. Penenberg said. "I guess the question I have is, 'Why should we believe anything he has to say?'"

On CBS tonight, Star Search . [WCBS, 2, 9 p.m.]

Saturday, May 10

We all know that Martin Scorsese's a pretty good actor. He was swell in Quiz Show , and surely Mr. Scorsese deserved an Academy Award for acting like it was a breeze to collaborate with Harvey Weinstein on Gangs of New York.

He's also really good in that new American Express commercial that's running in recognition of the current Tribeca Film Festival. In the spot, Mr. Scorsese, a famous perfectionist, tears through a stack of snapshots at a drugstore, trying to find the ideal one from his nephew's 5th birthday party. Unsatisfied, he phones his nephew and asks him how he'd like to "turn five again."

It's a snazzy commercial, but can you imagine directing Mr. Scorsese around? That assignment fell to 40-year-old, Jim Jenkins, an experienced commercial director.

"He asked me for my resume, which is kind of frightening" Mr. Jenkins said.

But Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Scorsese got along quite well, and Mr. Jenkins got the job. "He is very easy going," Mr. Jenkins said.

Mr. Jenkins said the making of the commercial was equally blissful. The spot was made in one day; Mr. Scorsese was on set for about five hours, the director said. Some familiar faces from Mr. Scorsese's past films were to be part of his crew, just to make sure the star was comfortable, but Mr. Jenkins said everything went smoothly.

Mr. Jenkins also said Mr. Scorsese, who's known for being his own toughest critic, had fun playing with his perfectionist image. "He's so humble," Mr. Jenkins said. "He never speaks highly of himself or his work, he only credits other people. I think that sort of self-deprecating thing is not only what made him game for the spot, but what made the spot work overall."

Since the commercial began airing, Mr. Jenkins said he'd heard that Mr. Scorsese was a fan of it. And Mr. Jenkins, who'd already directed plenty of celebrities, has received a lot of additional notice, including a big May 4 story in Advertising Age . Not a bad day's work for someone who can still recall seeing his first Scorsese film, Taxi Driver.

"I have never shot anybody like him," Mr. Jenkins said.

Tonight, Mr. Scorsese curls up at home and weeps uncontrollably to The Green Mile. [WABC, 7, 8 p.m.]

Sunday, May 11

Buffy the Vampire Slayer goes bye-bye on May 20. No fans are more cuckoo about their show than Buffy fans, of course, so to mark the occasion, we did a little email interview with Janine Mischor, who runs a Buffy fan web site called Slayer's Empire (http://www.web-glitter.com/~tempting) and is currently residing in Germany:

When did you launch your site?

"Slayer's Empire" went online on March 3rd 2000 after the site idea had been brewing in my mind for around one month.

Why'd you do it?

In the year 2000 my whole life consisted of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I practically lived for this show, so I thought, how many other like-minded Buffy obsessed freaks are out there in the world?

Why were Buffy fans so nuts about the show?

I think the show is down to earth and captures every day problems-not just teen problems. The show really gets to you and is so moving, because you can identify yourself with or relate to any of the characters. It also has a bright and open-minded female superhero, a lot of humor and tons of action and, of course, scary demons. There's a bit of everything in it for anyone who watches it.

Do you think Buffy is Sarah Michelle Gellar's finest work?

Yes, definitely, she showed us for seven years that she is an amazing and talented young inspiring actress. As for movies, her acting in Cruel Intentions was unbelievably good and wicked, but her other role choices just didn't bring out her real potential.

What did you think of Scooby-Doo ?

I saw it in the cinema, of course, but, well, it definitely doesn't count as one of my favorite movies. It's fun to watch once or twice but then you kind of have seen enough. But if Sarah wants to take her career in that way, I mean, starring in comedies, then I really appreciate that and support her, of course.

Are you going to go out of business when Buffy goes off the air?

No way, the show helped me grow up and inspired me so much, I could never close this site, I want to show how much Buffy means to me. My first website ever was about Buffy- that's how I got a weblife-so once you are addicted there's no way you can get out of the Buffy verse.

Do true Buffy fans watch stuff like Friends ?

In fact I looove Friends . I love tons of TV shows but I only got interested in them because I started watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so here's another good thing the show did for me.

What are you going to do the night of the final episode?

I won't be able to view the episode since I'm still stuck in Germany, but I will probably light a few candles in my room, put my favorite Buffy episodes in my VCR and watch them and think of all those times when the show has been my inspiration and helped me overcome my teenage problems and my constant pain.

Thanks Janine! Tonight on the UPN, the lowbrow network goes suddenly highbrow with Coppola-mentary Apocalypse Now Redux . [WWOR, 9, 7 p.m.]

Monday, May 12

On NBC tonight, Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of "Three's Company ." We'll hold out for the authorized one. [WNBC, 4, 9 p.m.]

Tuesday, May 13

Watching Ellie . There she is-and there she goes! [WNBC, 4, 9:30 p.m.]