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Now that the deal is considered one of worst mergers in history, and following the murder of his son, Mr. Levin sounds very much like the man who runs the Moonview Sanctuary, a holistic treatment facility in Santa Monica, California. Yesterday, clad in a loose-fitting sweater and sporting a gray beard, Mr. Levin went on MSNBC's Squawk Box to talk about the ten-year anniversary of the deal.

"If you'll give me a few minutes, because I have been obviously reflecting on it. The first thing I would say is that the concept that was underneath it was probably some kind of transcendent concept," Mr. Levin said in a soft, measured tone.

"I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently," he said. "I guess it's time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say, 'You know what I'm solely responsible for it.' I was the C.E.O. I was in charge. I'm really very sorry about the pain and suffering and loss that was caused. I take responsibility. It wasn't the board. It wasn't my colleagues at Time Warner."

It's not simply a surfeit of contrition. An Observer profile from 2001 detailed exactly how Mr. Levin had eclipsed AOL head Steve Case, and emerged as the man behind the big merger, which ultimately destroyed billions of dollars in shareholder value.

"Even though the stock was up at the time, there was a lot of tension, and I didn’t deal with the psychology with enough compassion," Mr. Levin said yesterday. "It’s a little hard to exercise compassion, connection, and love when the market is very unforgiving as it was at that time.”

The sit-down is timed to coincide with CNBC's look back at the deal, aggressively titled “Marriage from Hell: The Breakup of AOL Time Warner.”

Fools Rush In: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Unmaking of AOL Time Warner, by Nina Munk. HarperBusiness, 352 pages, $26.95.

Writing a satisfying book about the AOL–Time Warner merger and its aftermath is like getting a laugh from a joke when everybody knows the punch line-and yet the challenge of making this familiar territory seem worth going over again is taken up with gusto in two new books by talented journalists. Though neither author makes a serious effort to tell the broader story about the state of the media industry, the Internet boom and bust, or even why seemingly sensible mergers go horribly wrong, they provide such compelling detail about the train wreck that was AOL Time Warner that you can't turn away.

The title of Kara Swisher's book, There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere , actually is the punch line of an old joke: It's what the enthusiastic youth answers when asked why he's digging in an enormous pile of manure. As Ms. Swisher demonstrates, the sentiment became an unofficial corporate mantra at AOL.

Ms. Swisher's extraordinary knowledge of AOL (she previously published a well-received history of the company, AOL.com ), accounts for her new book's strengths and its weakness. Her story about the T-shirts AOL's business-development team made up is alone worth the price of admission: After the Time Warner team complained during the rushed due diligence that the AOLers were "making it sound as if you're buying us," AOL produced shirts emblazoned with the concise reply, "Putz, we are."

But the AOL-centric nature of both the specific anecdotes and the overall perspective lead Ms. Swisher to miss several key aspects of the transaction's dynamics. She ends her book awkwardly with a discussion of 13 steps she believes would "fix" the AOL service itself-as if this were the most significant issue raised by the failed deal.

In Fools Rush In , Nina Munk provides more balance and even more juicy detail. Both books do a remarkable job of documenting the fact that the people at the top of AOL knew the jig was up: Their stock price had gotten way ahead of the growth the business had left to deliver. Steve Case and his bankers then undertook a systematic review of how to get out while the going was good. Mr. Case settled on Time Warner as the perfect asset.

Fools Rush In really delivers in its vivid portrait of Jerry Levin, the perfect mark for the con of the century. Brilliant, isolated, arrogant and emotionally fragile after the death of his son, Mr. Levin had become increasingly frustrated with his inability to bring Time Warner into the digital age. Mr. Case drew Mr. Levin in first by feigning a lack of interest in running the combined company himself and then by convincing him (over lots of wine) that "[b]y using the new technology to give people access to news and information, and to one another, Time Warner could reduce ignorance, intolerance, and injustice." So confident was Mr. Case of Mr. Levin's commitment to this messianic vision that he felt free to pull the ultimate bait-and-switch minutes before the hastily convened Time Warner board meeting to approve the deal. Not only was he not willing to be a non-executive chairman, Mr. Case told Mr. Levin, but he also wanted a number of the company's top executives to report directly to him. Mr. Levin relented. During the intervening year before the transaction closed, Mr. Levin pointedly refused to engage with his Time Warner colleagues, who had taken note of the obvious warning signs-the weakness of AOL's business, the aggressiveness of its accounting-andwere seeking ways to get out of the deal.

The guilty pleasure of watching so many powerful, intelligent people make fools of themselves during the era of Internet euphoria more than compensates for any weakness in either book. Still, it would have been nice if the authors had tried to address directly the basic question of whether this transaction ever made any sense at any price. To be sure, both authors point out that the promised $1 billion in cost synergies was a fantasy figure. But Ms. Swisher, for one, seems to suggest that the merger might have worked if it hadn't been for certain Time Warner executives-lacking the necessary Internet "DNA or … passion"-who were trying to sabotage the deal. If she really believes this, Ms. Swisher has missed one of the most important lessons of the AOL–Time Warner transaction.

Treating the AOL–Time Warner deal as an anachronism of the boom minimizes the strong similarities between it and bad media deals struck before and since. Ms. Munk correctly highlights the close parallels between this transaction and the earlier merger of Time and Warner. One of the most important similarities is that both destroyed shareholder value: She reminds us that it took Time Warner shares the better part of a decade to achieve the level of the rejected 1989 cash offer of $200 per share made by Gulf and Western (now called Paramount). But there's a parallel that Ms. Munk neglects to mention: The strategic justifications for both deals were largely spurious.

In addition to the supposed cost synergies, the AOL–Time Warner combination was meant to accelerate AOL's transition to broadband, to secure significant new cross-media advertising deals and to magically monetize "an awesome 130 million 'subscription relationships' in total." None of this was credible. Time Warner already had a thriving broadband service called Road Runner. If this service had been "blow[n] up," as Mr. Case wanted, that would have represented a dis- synergy of the deal. SBC Communications very successfully uses Yahoo to market its broadband service-but it doesn't need to merge with Yahoo to do so. Ms. Munk and Ms. Swisher both effectively highlight how the much-vaunted cross-media deals were few or fraudulent. And given that Time Warner never found much incremental benefit from having both magazine subscribers and cable subscribers, it was always unclear how adding I.S.P. subscribers to its revenue stream would jump-start the business.

Strangely, although the AOL–Time Warner deal has been repudiated, these kinds of "strategic" justifications for media deals in general have not. The recent investor presentation outlining the rationale for the NBC-Universal combination-entitled "Imagine the Possibilities"-was eerily familiar in this regard. Complete with up to $500 million in promised synergies (at least $100 million of which would be "revenue-related") and the promise that "Content Origination Drives Platforms," one slide showed a mosaic of the various brands of the combined entity and summed up the strategic rationale in a single word: "Wow!"

One media mogul was recently asked at the "off-the-record" Foursquare Conference why media companies have such a seemingly insatiable desire to make acquisitions. "Bigness sucks less than being small," he replied.

Media moguls are not alone in making foolish acquisitions or overpaying for sensible ones-but the fact that the media industry has consistently underperformed the market as a whole suggests an unhealthy propensity in this regard. It's not altogether surprising that businesses predicated on the notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity rarely see an acquisition that doesn't seem like a good idea. If AOL Time Warner doesn't teach media moguls to be more selective in defining the scope of potential "strategic acquisitions," media investors will continue to hear that giant sucking sound: It comes from their shrinking portfolios.

Jonathan A. Knee is a senior managing director at Evercore Partners and an adjunct professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School.

See, there I go again! Anything one says is likely to be held as proof of irredeemable, incurable curmudgeonliness. For example, just because I think the films of Anthony Minghella are doltish and crude doesn't mean I don't like movies. I love movies! But when I told a bright young friend how much I liked The Cider House Rules , the snicker that came across the phone line curdled my Ovaltine. "But it's so sentimental," I was told. And of course it is, but in the best, non-Pavlovian, non-chain-jerking way: I was immensely touched and moved, and such tears as I shed were circumspect, because the director and cast weren't going for my tear ducts the way Apaches went after scalps (cf. Love Story ). The picture glories in great performances by Tobey Maguire, Michael Caine, Delroy Lindo, Charlize Theron and a full dozen others, but its crowning strength is the script by John Irving, who understands his characters and their situations from within. It's a beautiful movie. And what kind of era are we living in, anyway, when "sentimental" is de facto grounds for dismissal.

I love Topsy-Turvy , the Gilbert & Sullivan picture. I wish it had been an hour longer. And Jim Broadbent, who plays Gilbert, is such a ringer for the incomparable Pierpont Morgan that the likeness alone is grounds for some studio chief to greenlight a film based on Jean Strouse's splendid biography of the rarest of all Wall Street spirits. I am surprised that the success of Topsy-Turvy hasn't prompted the re-release of The Story of Gilbert & Sullivan , a wonderful 1953 bio starring Robert Morley as W.S. Gilbert and Maurice Evans as his collaborator, and D'Oyly Carte Opera Company immortal Martyn Green as Grossmith, on which Topsy-Turvy director Mike Leigh has obviously drawn to some extent.

Scratch a curmudgeon and like as not you'll find a disappointed optimist. As I once wrote somewhere else, in an age of euphemism, a realist is likely to be derided as a cynic. These are puzzling times, hard to figure out.

I'm not sure what I make of the America Online-Time Warner deal. Apart from my esteemed colleague Chris Byron, the only people worth a damn when it comes to Big Finance and Big Media-Net are Michael Wolff in New York , John Cassidy in The New Yorker and John Ellis in New York Press and I've read them all carefully. A lot of what they have to say seems cogent and realistic. To which I must add my own hunch, based on 40 years on, in and around the Street. There's a point in the life of tycoons-very like "the time in the affairs of men" adumbrated by Brutus in Julius Caesar -which "must be taken at the flood" almost as a form of self-validation in the form of making a rrrreally big deal. I think Steve Case had reached that point, and my guess is that we should look at ego as much as broadband as the driving motif in the merger.

Never forget that when one sets a fox to watch the chickens, the likelihood of losing a few pullets is presumably offset by the added safety factor that accrues from what your new employee knows about other foxes. Apply this to AOL T.W., and the question ceases to be "What does Steve Case see in T.W.?" and becomes "What does Steve Case know about AOL?" For example, if you keep an ear to tech buzz on the Net and elsewhere, you're aware that AOL 5.0, when downloaded, substantively changes the inner workings of a computer. Stuff that worked smoothly before no longer does. Some 230 files are tampered with-and without warning. My Ethernet driver disappeared, replaced in Device Manager by an AOL driver that didn't work and that I never asked for. Suddenly I could no longer get to Yahoo.

Is this kind of stuff important? I think it is. For one thing, it smacks of private-sector Big Brothering. For another, it sounds awfully like what Uncle Sam got on Microsoft's case about.

Then there's Ecuador, which is about to make the U.S. dollar its official currency. I suppose they can do what they want in Quito, but what does this say about the Federal Reserve, which now becomes Ecuador's de facto currency board? I'm not saying the Fed will henceforth manage the nation's money with one eye on the price of llamas, but one does have to wonder. Suppose I ran through my credit at my club and the powers-that-be decided it would be O.K. for me to start signing another member's name. How would that go down with the other guy-and isn't that what we're talking about here?

We give the Great Greenspan a lot of huzzahs for the boom we've been in for two decades now, but my view is the real credit should be given to the trillions in unregulated overseas dollar creation over which the Fed has been powerless to control. My horseback estimate is that these unregulated greenbacks have leaked back into the market to the tune of perhaps 5,000 points on the Dow. By the end of the 1970's, no one knew within $350 billion (in those days, real money) how many Eurodollars etc. were out there. What that number might be today, God knows! And God help us! But I do ask myself: Isn't one's currency integral to one's sovereignty? What happens if the First National of Lake Titicaca starts making dollar loans over which the Fed has no reserve control? What if there has to be an Ecuadoran Rescue à la Mexico? Whom will we then be rescuing from whom?

Money, money, money. It fairly makes the head spin. The passing of Hedy Lamarr reminds me of an incident that yielded the most valuable insight into money I have ever heard. It came from an old wildcatter, a bit off his rocker in his dotage thanks to too many dry holes, and it came at the end of a long, rambling disquisition in which the late Ms. Lamarr's name briefly figured. "Love," the old boy told us, "is wonderful. But if it costs over $100, it's expensive!"

The foregoing is printed as a public service to anyone contemplating a relationship with Patricia Duff.