Mr. Cuomo's recent behavior suggests that he regards New York voters as rubes, naïfs and just plain dopes. On the eve of the party's state convention, he announced with well-practiced seriousness that he would not compete for the delegates' affections because, he said, their approval amounts to a "kiss of death." Nice words for his party's rank-and-file workers, eh? No wonder Mr. Cuomo is so unpopular with many of the party's front-line troops. They remember how he treated them when he was his father's chief political operative, and they now realize that time and experience have equipped him with neither finesse nor humility. He still is the same old Andrew, relentlessly focused on himself and his obsession with power. Those who stand in his way must be ridiculed or crushed.

Mr. Cuomo pulled out of the state convention because he knew he would lose to Mr. McCall. Does he really expect us to believe that he would have disdained the process if he were the front-runner? Apparently he does.

Had he taken his fight to the floor, Mr. Cuomo probably would have won the support of at least 25 percent of the delegates-meaning that he would have an automatic place on the primary ballot. Instead, he made a great show of remaining outside the process, preferring to earn his spot on the ballot by gathering petition signatures. Through this tiresome process, he will prove to us that he truly is a man of the people, a lonely outsider with no connections to those awful political insiders-except, of course, for those awful political insiders who worked with him when his father was Governor and who are now helping to manage his campaign.

How stupid does he think we are?

As for Mr. McCall, it's hard to know exactly what, if anything, is driving him to challenge Governor George Pataki. At least it can be said of Mr. Cuomo that he desperately wants the job. Mr. McCall, it seems, would be content to win a place in history as the state's first major-party African-American gubernatorial candidate, lose graciously to Mr. Pataki, and then fade from the scene. There is a sense, too, that Mr. McCall feels he shouldn't have to fight for the nomination, that his years of service to the party and to New York entitle him to the nomination.

New York shouldn't have to suffer through another go-through-the-motions gubernatorial campaign. But that's what Mr. McCall appears to be offering.

These two flawed candidates have yet to demonstrate why New York should turn Mr. Pataki out of office in November. Mr. Cuomo offers only his ferocious personal ambition, and Mr. McCall thinks it's his turn to be Governor. What a dismal state of affairs.

Another Term For Harold Levy

Mayor Bloomberg says he isn't sure whether Schools Chancellor Harold Levy is the right leader to, in the Mayor's words, "go forward." Members of the Board of Education seem similarly skeptical.

They ought to think a little harder. They ought to consider what yet another change in the chancellor's office will mean to a school system that hasn't had stable leadership in years. They ought to reflect on the advances the school system has made since Mr. Levy was hired in 2000. And they ought to extend Mr. Levy's contract, which expires on June 30.

The incumbent chancellor gave up a career in the private sector to take on the thankless chore of rebuilding the city's public schools. He brought with him a fresh approach, a business-like method of problem-solving and a passionate belief in public education. He has had only a couple of years to change one of the nation's most cumbersome bureaucracies, and he should be given a chance to see his reforms through.

The board will meet on May 30 to decide Mr. Levy's fate. Some members are waiting for cues from Mr. Bloomberg, who has made the schools his first priority. The Mayor, another refugee from the private sector, should signal his support for Mr. Levy, and the board should act accordingly.

The job of schools chancellor is too important and too enormous to be filled by a series of one-term, interchangeable bureaucrats. Mr. Levy needs more time to get the job done, and he should be given the chance.

New York's Stephen Jay Gould

The obituaries for Stephen Jay Gould placed him at Harvard University, his place of employment and research since he earned his doctorate in paleontology in 1967. But Gould, who died of cancer on May 20, would have been quick to point out that his Cambridge environs did not taint him. This son of Queens and graduate of Jamaica High School remained passionate about his Yankees and, in fact, never permanently settled up in Red Sox land. He lived in a loft in Soho and was the Astor Visiting Research Professor of Biology at New York University-a campus with remarkably convenient access to stadium-bound No. 4 and D trains.

Gould not only was one of the foremost evolutionary biologists of his time, he was a prolific public intellectual who delighted in ideas and debate. And he had a personality and writing style that made science accessible to interested lay people.

It is a tribute to him and to New York that he finally returned to the city of his birth.

The result is usually predictable and unsatisfying-often a treacly piece of nostalgia whose purpose seems to have been securing the author a field pass at spring training and a few player autographs. Expertise in one field is mistaken for knowledge in another as the author wallows in the reflected glow of being in the same place, at the same time, with his or her heroes. They are, to use baseball parlance, "green flies."

The exceptions are few. Stephen Jay Gould, who died on Monday, May 20, in New York City, was one of them.

Mr. Gould had the good fortune to have been born in 1941, the season in which Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox hit .406 and Joe DiMaggio, of Mr. Gould's beloved Yankees, hit in 56 consecutive games. Indeed, Mr. Gould once traced his affection for the game to a day at Yankee Stadium where he witnessed both men ply their trade.

But despite the temptation, when Mr. Gould wrote about baseball he never succumbed to nostalgia-except to get our attention. Neither did he ever fancy himself a "sportswriter." Apart from the occasional review in The New York Review of Books , much of his baseball writing appeared in serials like The American Statistician , The Journal of Sport Behavior , Phi Delta Kappan and his beloved Natural History . Not quite The Sporting News.

The game was simply a tool Mr. Gould used deftly and with restraint. A tool that he loved, to be sure-this was a Yankee fan who held season tickets at Boston's Fenway Park-but a tool nevertheless. Mr. Gould's last "baseball" essay-"Baseball's Reliquary," in the March edition of Natural History -begins by dismissing the sticky notion that baseball "'imitates life' or stands as a symbol for larger truths and trends of human existence." Baseball was not a metaphor to Mr. Gould, but a real event. He once explained that he wrote of baseball because "Few systems offer better data for a scientific problem that evokes as much interest, and sparks as much debate … of trends in history as expressed by measurable differences between past and present." He used baseball to test larger ideas, knowing that baseball would bring the reader along as he explored a bigger topic. So an essay about Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak was also an excursion into statistical probability and the effect of that on the evolutionary history of a species.

That's quite a trick, one that he was able to accomplish over and over again, using Ted Williams' .406 batting average, Chuck Knoblauch's throwing woes, Bill Buckner's infamous error and other baseball events to guide us through yet another test of that system. Had he stopped there, that would have been plenty to separate him from the "baseball imitates life" school of sportswriting dilettantes.

But Mr. Gould could always bring it. Just when he was out there by himself with the bases loaded, no one out and the reader's attention starting to flag, just when it appeared there was no way for him to deliver us from the bewildering complexities of science, he always brought it back, elegantly retiring the side. Baseball was a tool for Mr. Gould the evolutionary biologist, geologist and paleontologist to teach us about science. So too, I think, was science a way for Mr. Gould the humanist writer to teach us about ourselves.

Mr. Gould battled cancer for many years. Reading him now, it is perhaps easier than ever to see what he was up to. In his 1988 essay "The Streak of Streaks"-his examination of Joe DiMaggio's remarkable 56 games-he shows us the difficulty of DiMaggio's achievement, along the way touching upon Caruso, Middlemarch , The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám, statistical probability, logic and evolution. He then brings it back, concluding: "DiMaggio's hitting streak is the finest of legitimate legends because it embodies the essence of the battle that truly defines our lives. DiMaggio activated the greatest and most unattainable dream of all humanity, the hope and chimera of all sages and shamans: he cheated death, at least for a while."

-Glenn Stout

George Gurley's Confessions

On my first day of kindergarten, the teacher asked everyone to sit down and put our hands in our laps. "Now don't we all know what our lap is?" she asked. "I don't know what my lap is," I said, "but I know what my penis is!"

In first grade, a classmate told me he had never cried, so I took his head in my hands and hit it against the floor a few times. Sure enough, he cried.

In second grade, I told a teacher to "Go to hell, bitch!"

Around the same time, I paid a pretty girl named Shannon four silver dollars to say "I love you," then tossed the silver dollars on the ground and walked away.

I teased my grandmother's blind cocker spaniel, Sam.

I persuaded a pal in seventh grade to ask a woman on the street for a blowjob.

I told my parents I was seeing Victory with Pelé and Michael Caine, but I really went to see Tarzan, the Ape Man with Bo Derek.

One winter I played the song "Let's Hear It for the Boy" a dozen times on the jukebox at Pizza Hut, ruining a good dozen lunches.

At boarding school I went AWOL a lot, smoked during chapel, and was busted for urinating out a second-floor window. I wouldn't rat out the other guy who did it, but his name was Fred and he had zero idea there was a teacher's barbecue going on below.

I stole a Judas Priest Screaming for Vengeance tape from the Galleria, some candy from the corner store by St. Bernard's, and a tremendous mess of bacon, burger patties and eggs from that fraternity.

Since age 7, I haven't been able to get through a prayer without cursing the Lord.

Soon after moving to Manhattan, I began throwing wet toilet paper-"soggies"-at people and cabs from the roof of my building. I threw a snowball into a bus once, I believe at the driver. And I was there when an umbrella accidentally fell out of 640 Park Avenue and pieces of bologna were thrown off a bridge in Lawrence, Kan. (They stick to the windshield.)

I didn't go to a best friend's wedding, then gave him a bottle of booze for a present a year later.

I promised a girl we'd go to Central Park if she came over right then, but I reneged: It was all to have sex with her.

I went to Privilege and gave a stripper my roly-poly phone number.

I set bugs on fire with lighter fluid.

I shot an antelope in the head.

When I worked at Allure magazine, I got Isabella Rossellini's home number and called her one too many times.

Still, I have done many nice things, too. Someone called me a saint once for helping a friend in need. I've always been kind to animals, besides that antelope. I say "please" and "thank you." I drink green tea. I'm not loud in restaurants. Unlike vile, uncivilized human scum, I say "I can't talk right now" into my cell phone when I'm on the Jitney or at Sushisay or in Duane Reade. I think about the environment and worry about the polar bears in the Arctic. For six months I walked around quietly in my loafers, often removing them, so that I wouldn't disturb 1A, even though 1A was unoccupied.

I've been praised for including people in social gatherings, talking to the ones no one's talking to. You know, considerate. A kind, compassionate guy. Mischievous, irrepressible, but not a complete misanthrope. Had I been born 20 years earlier, I would have appreciated what Joan Baez was up to in the 60's-up to a point. I would have hated Nixon a little. I cried during The Killing Fields and an episode of The Love Boat .

No, I'm not saying which one.

-George Gurley

Ever since the late 1950's, when C.P. Snow lamented that the sciences and the humanities, once inseparable, had drifted apart, a number of people in both camps have tried to bridge the cultural chasm with their pens. Writers such as Walter Sullivan, John Noble Wilford and John McPhee have brought science and scientists to life for the rest of us; but there have been a number of scientists, too, who have explained their activities and their fields just as lucidly, with the advantage that as practitioners their essays are also memoirs. They write largely in the first person. Lewis Thomas in biology, Stephen Jay Gould in paleontology and Carl Sagan in astronomy come to mind. Many are, to one degree or another, New Yorkers.

The latest addition to this list of literary scientists is another New Yorker, Neil de Grasse Tyson, the director of the spectacular new Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, known before its $210 million reconstruction as the Hayden Planetarium. Although Mr. Tyson is not yet as well known for his research as some of his literary-scientist colleagues, he is every bit as much a writer. His essays appear back-to-back with Mr. Gould's in Natural History magazine. Mr. Tyson's new book, The Sky Is Not the Limit , is an easygoing blend of autobiography and commentary about astronomy and astrophysics.

The book is redolent both of the city and the skies. As with many New Yorkers, his awakening to the stars occurred at the Hayden Planetarium: During his first visit when he was 9, he thought the stars were a hoax because there were many more of them than he could see from his Bronx apartment building, the Skyview. When, in his early teens, he was at an astronomy camp in the Mojave Desert where the air was clear and the stars plentiful, the best comparison he could make was to the urban skies of the Hayden. Back in the city, he earned money by walking dogs–money to buy a Newtonian reflecting telescope with a six-inch mirror. Neighbors seeing him lug the telescope, with its gunlike barrel, across the Skyview's roof, called the police. "I have yet to meet [a policeman] who was not impressed by the sight of the Moon, planets, or stars through a telescope," Mr. Tyson writes. "Saturn alone bailed me out a half-dozen times."

Clearly Mr. Tyson, like many young scientists, found his vocation early. And like many of them, he was what is called "gifted"–a term he doesn't like. He credits his parents with sustaining his passion for astronomy. His father, a sociologist, was one of the first blacks to be a city commissioner (under Mayor John V. Lindsay), and his mother is a gerontologist. He attended the Bronx High School of Science and went on, in rocketlike ascent, to Harvard College for his B.A., to the University of Texas at Austin for his M.A., to Columbia University for his Ph.D. and to Princeton University as a postdoctoral research scientist. In 1996, at 37, he was named director of the Rose Center.

In The Sky Is Not the Limit , astrophysics and autobiography fortify each other. In a chapter called "Dark Matters," he starts off with the fact that 90 percent of the gravity in the universe is caused by invisible matter. "Ordinary matter and dark matter feel each other's gravity but otherwise do not respond to each other's presence," he writes. "Occasionally, I cannot help but personalize, even personify, dark matter's place in the universe. Especially the part about matter and dark matter feeling each other's gravity but not otherwise interacting."

His ascent has not been easy. When he got his doctorate in 1991, his sheepskin brought the total number of black astrophysicists from six to seven, out of a national total of over 4,000. Like his father, he is a trailblazer. Given his own experiences, he is surprised that even a half-dozen black astrophysicists have made it. Part of the problem is stereotyping. Over and over again, society pushed him toward athletics–and not altogether unreasonably: Well over 6 feet and 190 pounds, he was captain of the wrestling team in high school and wrestled on the Harvard varsity team as well as in graduate school. When he arrived at Columbia for his Ph.D., he was instantly asked to join the department basketball team. "At no time was I perceived as a future colleague," he writes. To this day, Mr. Tyson is still in good physical shape, which anyone can see by glancing at the photograph on the cover of his book (he's wearing a flamboyant black vest imprinted with golden suns and moons). He has been asked to appear in a calendar of "Studmuffins of Science," an invitation he turned down.

Even blacks have tried to stereotype him. When Mr. Tyson was a sophomore at Harvard, a senior on the wrestling team–a black man who had just won a Rhodes Scholarship and was headed toward economics with a special interest in inner-city problems–told him scathingly, "Blacks in America do not have the luxury of your intellectual talents being spent on astrophysics." No wrestling move, Mr. Tyson tells us, could be as crushing as those words.

He didn't fully overcome his own doubts until nine years later, toward the end of his research at Columbia, when his department received a call from Fox News. There were explosions on the sun–did the department have anyone who could talk about sunspots? It did. Mr. Tyson gave a videotaped interview. When he saw it later on the air, it struck him forcefully that the sunspot expert on the television was black. With the exception of entertainers or athletes, Mr. Tyson could not recall ever seeing on television a black person who was an expert on anything not having to do with being black. His guilt at being an astrophysicist fell away. He writes: "I realized as clear as the crystalline spheres of antiquity that one of the major barriers to successful relations between blacks and whites is the latent supposition that blacks as a group are just not as smart as whites." He had found a mission. He has since given over 60 television interviews; with the death of Sagan, he has become perhaps the most visible spokesman for the stars. In particular, he wants to make astrophysics, or any scientific career, a viable alternative for black kids.

Anyone suffering from latent Shockleyitis–the stereotyping of blacks as having low intelligence–can recover by dipping anywhere into The Sky Is Not the Limit . The essays are written with an elegance, restraint and humor that set off occasional wry sound bites. (One forgives Mr. Tyson a certain immodesty, a trait which may help account for his rise against overwhelming odds.) Writing about the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, chunks of which a few years ago slammed into Jupiter, many with life-extinguishing force, he notes, "Whatever damage Jupiter sustained, one thing is for sure: It's got no dinosaurs left." He describes the hit as "A shot across spaceship Earth's bow."

Toward the end of his book, Mr. Tyson stakes out for himself a rather bold position, an extension of his Natural History co-columnist Mr. Gould's advocacy of evolution over creationism. "Let there be no doubt that as they are currently practiced, science and religion enjoy no common ground," Mr. Tyson writes, arguing–much as Mr. Gould has done–that "the claims of science rely on experimental verification, while the claims of religions rely on faith. These are irreconcilable approaches to knowing," he declares. But he goes beyond even Mr. Gould in advocating science as providing unquestionably the best explanation for the natural world and its origins.

Astrophysicists have a more primordial view of creation than paleontologists; they take our roots back before tidal pools on the early Earth to the big bang at the beginning of the universe. Science, says Mr. Tyson, has a "greatest story ever told" of its own. He then presents as clear and literate an account as I have read of the origins of the universe and its history up to the molecular origins of life on earth.

In the course of this enticing journey through life on earth and in space, the eloquent chapter "Dark Matters" notwithstanding, the reader forgets that the author is black. And the reader might even forget that he or she is not a scientist. For the book succeeds not only in bringing whites closer to blacks but also scientists closer to humanists.