"We have a new president and a new administration and we have to give them leeway to do the things that they think they need to do," said Engel, reaffirming a position that marked something of a sea change in the way Jewish Democratic politicians approached criticism of Israeli policy. But when asked when that leeway would expire, he said, "Frankly, I think we are rapidly approaching that point."

The concern of Engel and other Democratic Israel hawks has always been that demands not be made on Israel alone, but that renewed American pressure on the freezing of settlement growth be matched with significant demands on Israel's Arab neighbors.

Engel, and other Democratic leaders, heard that balance in Obama's Cairo speech, and as a result, mitigated their usually staunch, blanket support of Israel—which Benjamin Netanyahu has counted on in Washington to apply pressure on the White House—to allow for a harder U.S. line against settlement growth. Influential columnists like Tom Friedman have reinforced Obama's argument.  

But in recent weeks, the complaints from within Israel for Obama to offer direct reassurance to the Israeli people about American support have intensified, applying more pressure on the Democratic supporters of Israel who have provided cover to Obama's new policy.

Engel, for one, wants a pressure-relieving meeting to happen.

"I'm hoping that the two of them will be able to sit down and talk," said Engel, referring to Obama and Netanyahu. "Netanyahu can only move if public opinion in Israel allows him to move. Right now, public opinion is very unhappy with the things the administration is saying to them on settlements and natural growth. The image of the United States is getting worse in Israel."

The Obama administration may be willing to endure an erosion of popularity in Israel, where the president has been less exuberantly received than in most other places, if it wins him a perception across the region that the U.S. is an honest broker. Israel supporters like Engel understand that calibration, and the fact that they have been willing to go along with it until now is testament to Obama's changing the terms of the Israel debate here.

But there is also consternation among some Israel supporters, including Engel, that if Obama is criticizing that bad Israel policy because he believes it will win him reciprocal concessions from Arab states, he is being, to borrow the term Hillary Clinton once used, naïve.

"I think there has been intransigence among the Arabs," he said, adding, "The Arabs need to be pushed more and if they were pushed more, then Israel wouldn't feel like it was being singled out. If the U.S. and Israel are arguing, the Arabs are just going to sit back and enjoy the show. When the Israel and the U.S. are working in tandem, that's when the Arab countries make concessions."

Engel added that he thought "Obama is a very, very smart guy and he thinks he can achieve his goals," but he reiterated his caution that his breaking point was "rapidly approaching."

In an editorial last week, even The Times, which has largely supported the new Obama policy, argued, "Now he needs to explain to Israelis why freezing settlements and reviving peace talks is clearly in their interest."

Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World is one of those peculiar volumes public thinkers of a certain disposition, upon reaching a certain popular standing, seem compelled to write: an omnibus summation of the recent trajectory of their thinking—and, by extension, the state of the world.

"This is a book," the first sentence explains, "not about the decline of America but rather about the rise of everyone else."

That expansive mission statement is not quite achieved—or achievable—and it’s one that also happens to motivate a glut of other recent titles (e.g., Parag Khanna’s The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New World Order, Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East) newly stocked in the current-affairs aisle. In this saturated market, The Post-American World—refreshingly unsubtitled—distinguishes itself on at least one other count: No book in recent memory better explains the rise of Fareed Zakaria.

That’s wide of the target, of course, but only just. In fact, a persuasive treatment of the decade leading to our current hand-wringing over American decline—the decade of Putin and Dubai, the euro and the renminbi—might very appropriately start with the person of Fareed Zakaria. I say this not because Mr. Zakaria’s biography—"In the fall of 1982, I arrived here as an eighteen-year-old student from India. … [America] seemed to offer unlimited generosity and promise"—slots so nicely (if facilely) into generations-long narratives of globalization and identity, but because the style and substance of his commentary are so acutely calibrated to the local anxieties of the moment. Or, as you might ask if you went to bed the night Al Gore won the presidency and just woke up this morning: Who is this guy?

On paper (and through cable and copper wire and over the airwaves), there’s a lot to dislike. Not long ago an obscure academic and Foreign Affairs editor, Fareed Zakaria has since become something like a multimedia simulacrum of an intellectual. Here he is, with his angular aristocrat’s mug, delivering conventional wisdom like hard truths on ABC’s This Week. Here he is, at once deadpanning or hamming it up with his fawning "buddy" Bill Maher. Since 2000, he’s edited the international edition of Newsweek, a publication whose unshakable middlebrow irrelevance is often publicly lamented by Jon Meacham, editor of the U.S. edition. Before migrating this year to a similar (and presumably better paid) weekly gig on CNN, Mr. Zakaria’s ubiquity extended to the nonprofit sector; the name of PBS’s Foreign Exchange With Fareed Zakaria is the kind of pun an eager investment banking trainee thinks his bosses make. He once reviewed wine for Slate.

The Post-American World does little to suppress Mr. Zakaria’s penchant for snappy platitudes and catchphrases. I hesitate to call these tics populist; it shows no love for the populace to write as if "folks" without Harvard Ph.D.’s like his own can’t be spoken to like adults. In Mr. Zakaria’s telling, China and India can never just have relations with the United States: It has to be "The Dragon and the Eagle," or, rather less poetically, "The Cow and the Eagle." (What of the majestic Bengal tiger?) "Great Powers," we’re told elsewhere, "are like divas: they enter and exit the international stage with great tumult." And, "Unipolarity + 9/11 + Afghanistan = Unilateralism + Iraq"—whatever that means. Treated here with smug indifference, language, as it so often does, enjoys the last laugh. "Polarity is not a binary condition," Mr. Zakaria aphorizes late in the book, and it’s pretty clear he doesn’t get the joke.

Yet it’s hard to stay mad at Fareed Zakaria. For all its obnoxious faux-erudition—we’re treated to an extensive footnote early on about the relative strengths and weaknesses of G.D.P. and purchasing power parity as comparative metrics—The Post-American World is ultimately a decidedly unscholarly work of secular theodicy. Lighten up, a genial voice tells us—things in China and India and Europe are as they are because that’s the best they can be. "The arrow may be moving slowly, but it moves in the right direction. … In any event, there is no other way. Democracy is India’s destiny." Right.

Confined to the final 30 pages, Mr. Zakaria’s prescriptions for American foreign policy recall those institutional posters that insist "All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." In other words, don’t be a jerk and don’t break your own rules just because you can. The balance of the book is a meandering consideration of why the West has dominated the globe for the last 500 years, and why that dominance is coming to an end. Here, the great timely appeal of the author comes into focus: He’s like that friend you have who reads unusually widely, but never deeply enough to make you uncomfortable.

Thus we get Jared Diamond-lite geographical determinism—Europe’s "topography produced many natural borders and encouraged political communities of varying sizes"; and Max Weber-lite religious determinism—"Hindus, like Confucians, don’t believe in God. They believe in hundreds of thousands of gods." Perhaps national destiny is a matter of political structures—"Indians understand America. It is a noisy, open society with a democratic system, like theirs"; or perhaps linguistic ones—"India’s diversity is 4,000 years old. … It is a county with seventeen languages and 22,000 dialects." Mr. Zakaria is self-critical enough to make plain that one can’t really believe in all these determinisms at once; he’s self-satisfied enough not to try to synthesize a more convincing school or approach.

And so leaden economic facts dance and miscegenate with helium factoids—did you know that Abdul Nasser’s favorite movie was It’s a Wonderful Life? Innovative historians Niall Ferguson and Paul Kennedy are quoted abundantly, but so are McKinsey white papers and Thomas Friedman. Indeed, the specter of the loathsome Mr. Friedman, the catchphrase junkie behind The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1999) and Longitudes and Attitudes (2002), hangs over much of The Post-American World; though their politics and target audience are basically identical, Mr. Zakaria, with his caveats and interpretative lacunae (i.e., arguments), is an improvement on his Op-Ed-page precursor.

Which is to say, for all its inanities, as a tertiary source on the way nation-states live now, you could do far worse than The Post-American World. You won’t learn much you couldn’t have figured out for yourself, but you won’t be lied to, either. These days, with explanations easily outnumbering reassurances, that’s about enough.

Jonathan Liu, a writer living in Queens, reviews books regularly for The Observer. He can be reached at jliu@observer.com.

Tom Scocca catches up with Tom Friedman in China, and sees him tell a crowd of Chinese readers that the 2008 election will be about... China. (See, also, Tom Friedman's column today on China.)

Rebecca Dana writes about that weird Election Night exit poll quarantine room.

Joe Conason thinks Nancy Pelosi is too close to John Murtha.

Steve Kornacki thinks Pelosi's opponents underestimate her in-fighting ability at their peril.

And Sara Vilomerson and John Koblin write about the surprising direction in which Jim Dolan has taken the Knicks.

-- Josh Benson

If Mr. Friedman falls, I won’t be unhappy. To be frank, these days I find myself increasingly in agreement with my fellow golf nut, Mr. Flat Earth, as he backtracks and backtracks to conclusions on Bush, globalization, energy conservation, Iraq and Iran, corporate America, etc., long obvious to commonsensical grownups with a shred of conscience, concern and experience.

As Mr. Friedman recently put it, very nicely, we have wandered, fat, dumb and happy, into the jaws of what might prove a lethal paradox: The billions we spend on imported oil (a number that might well be extrapolated to include the billions that China, India et al. spend on oil to run factories producing export goods destined for the U.S. market) go in most instances to people who basically don’t like us and in some cases are trying to kill us.

Imagine if F.D.R. had allowed Germany and Japan to sell tax-exempt war bonds on Wall Street in 1942 to fund research on the V-2 rocket or a more efficient kamikaze navigation system (the Street would have gone along if the price was right). That’s sort of what’s happening now. If Iran goes nuclear, it will have been on our dime, directly and indirectly, and I can’t say that I’m likely to give three cheers for globalized capitalism if I end up as a speck of radioactive dust wafting over the East River.

Obviously, it’s easy to overstate the threat: It cannot be lost on Tehran that if they’re connected to any event that results in the death of any sizeable number of Americans on home ground, retribution may result in zero Iranians left alive. Or that if the American consumer, pushed to the wall, picks up his marbles, there goes the price of oil. Still, on balance, the outlook here in Brooklyn is decidedly blue: e.g., what to do, what to do, what to do?

Unlike David Brooks, I don’t feel (see his column of 5/11) that the answer lies in more talk, more symposia, more chin-scratching. The people he sees bringing about innovative centrist solutions are the same people who’ve sat at the top for the past 20 years. I don’t trust 99 percent of the politicians out there whose name recognition exceeds 10 percent. This voter agrees with what Mr. Friedman recently wrote: The only way out is a third party.

Let’s call it “The Equity Party.” While it respects the aspirations of those at the top and those at the bottom, it will mainly speak—in a language that can be understood—to and for those who dwell in the gray and desolate zone wedged between East Hampton and affirmative action, people who feel their backs are to the wall, that Washington doesn’t give a shit about them and neither does Harvard. These are the folks who represent a rich vein of resentment that can be captured by imaginative, honest policy proposals. Folks like this don’t want class war; they do want a fair deal.

It helps to tie the new to history, if only as an earnest of character, if you will, an indication of the sort of thinking—the kind of people—the Equity Party wants to speak for and appeal to. Why not set as broad objectives the goals set forth in F.D.R.’s 1944 “Economic Bill of Rights”? But we must emphasize that we can only come as close to these as conviction, courage and realism will take us, which may be no more than halfway to the further limits of the possible.

In a politics of polarities, a party defines itself as much by whom and what it opposes as by the values it embraces. What and whom shall we stand against? I’d proclaim a crusade against corruption, the monetized cynicism that has led to the pervasive degradation of our politics and our markets and the public and private institutions that embody them and feed off them. Corruption is the ultimate killer: It truly is political and economic cancer. If you don’t believe me, read the hair-raising piece on Berlusconi’s Italy by Alexander Stille in the current New York Review of Books. It can happen here. To a considerable but hopefully not irreversible degree, it already has.

The new party must otherwise stand for fresh thinking on deficits, income and wealth disparity, taxation, immigration, Iraq, Iran, medical care, jobs and opportunity, energy, government, man and nature. Ideas that depart from the Op-Ed wisdom that all that’s needed to set this nation straight is an adjustment of this or that process or a percentage-point shift here or there in existing economic or political modules. The thinking should be on the largest, furthest-reaching scale practicable, innovative where it makes sense, but above all realistic. The overriding analytical and prescriptive imperative will be: no cure that’s worse than the disease, considered in all its aspects.

There are some big things that can be done if properly thought through, presented and articulated; there are others that simply can’t be. Here’s an example: make corporate dividends fully deductible at the point of payout but tax the bejesus out of retained profits, which can all too readily be absconded via management stock options. Let management go back to the stockholders for big-project capital dollars. The cycle should be: pay out, put back in—if the stockholders have faith. This is the way these big “private equity” buyouts (essentially no more than tax-efficient recapitalizations) work. Keep the money moving; that’s the key to a vibrant long-term economy.

Who should spearhead the Equity Party? My nominee is less than a mile away across the river from where this is written. He’s no man’s fool, no man’s political chattel. If you look seriously at how Michael Bloomberg has accomplished what he has, and the way he’s done it, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he is, in fact, a one-man third party. He’s beyond price; he knows who the other smart people out there are, and who are the B.S. artists.

Who better, then, to do what Lars Porsena did in Macaulay’s great poem: to bid “his messengers ride forth, east and west and south and north, to summon his array”? Yeah, yeah, I know: Porsena’s grand design was thwarted by Horatius at the bridge. But Hillary and Pataki and Kerry and Frist and the rest of those self-serving, doublespeaking clowns who offer nothing but ambition? Horatius they sure as hell ain’t.

Onward, I say! Up and at ’em! Excelsior! Equity!

Downtown bomb-thrower, Gen-X John Reed, better read than Red: Pissed-off prodigal son returns to targets Wesley Clark, Tom Friedman.

The author of the New York Press ' "Cage Match" column, a weekly rant against the media, politics and everyone else who stands in his way, doesn't try to rile people. "The columns are supposed to be funny," said 33-year-old Matt Taibbi. "I don't enter into it with the idea of attacking people. Honest. Tom Friedman is funny. My writing on him may be withering and vicious, but it's a byproduct of how lame he is."

Mr. Friedman, take heart: You're not alone here. Other Taibbi-branded "lame byproducts" have included the White House press corps-which Mr. Taibbi suggested be "herded into a cargo plane, flown to an altitude of 30,000 feet, and pushed out, kicking and screaming, over the North Atlantic"-and Wesley Clark.

In a cover story for The Nation on the general who aspires to be President, Mr. Taibbi wrote that it troubled him that anyone in the anti-war crowd could support the general, because "it seemed to me that no person who found the Iraq war morally repugnant could have gone on television and talked sunnily about how this or that weapon was ravaging Iraqi defenses.

"I remember watching Clark on CNN," Mr. Taibbi continued, "and at one point he was actually playing with a model of an A-10 tank-killer airplane, whooshing it back and forth over a map of Iraq, like a child playing with a new toy on Christmas morning. A person who was genuinely opposed to the war as wrongful killing would be sick even thinking about such a thing."

New York Press may not be the in-flight magazine of Air Force One, but Mr. Taibbi picks his targets wisely, and he's getting notice for it. In his nine months as Alexander Cockburn's replacement, Mr. Taibbi's become the kind of flame-throwing upstart his predecessor once was. But he has no alliances, no political fellowships to rein in his voluble personality.

That's made him the signature writer of the paper revamped by editor in chief Jeff Koyen and Alexander Zaitchik-their steady, dead-shot performer. "He's aggressive and intelligent," said Mr. Koyen when asked why he took on the columnist. "But he backs up his stuff. There's a very subtle argument under a pretty aggressive tone."

Mr. Taibbi splits time between Buffalo and an apartment in Hell's Kitchen. He grew up in Boston, Mass., and went to Bard College. Now he's back in town, a pissed-off prodigal son, having spent 10 years overseas after college, building up his ammunition abroad, coming back fully armed and angry.

Over there, he wrote for the Moscow Times , and also played pro baseball for the Red Army and Spartak in a Russian professional league and forward for a basketball team in the Mongolian Basketball Association. In 1997, he and a partner set up a paper called the eXile that stressed both aggressive political reporting and practical jokes. One early favorite: approaching Mikhail Gorbachev as a representative of the New York Jets, telling the former Soviet leader that then-coach Bill Parcells wanted him on his staff as a "perestroika coordinator." When Gorby's people bit, the eXile ran the entire "via facsimile" correspondence in the paper.

Now that he's back in the States, he plans to marry his fiancée, Masha Hedberg, and settle into his new gig. "I'm a writer, right?" Mr. Taibbi said. "Obviously, what I want to do is write well."

- Sridhar Pappu

There was something of a bullying tone to the lecture, a warning to Arab culture that it must change, or else. Mr. Russert was expressing an ideology as strong, and self-satisfied, as the anti-communist ideology that was all over the airwaves in the 50's and 60's.

The lecture was also a sign of the influence of Thomas Friedman. The New York Times columnist has become the principal interpreter of the Arab world for the well-informed. Everyone reads him; my liberal friends are always quoting him. He's frequently on television, and Mr. Russert's lecture could very well have been cribbed from Tom Friedman, and maybe even was. When former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger uses the term "stagnation" in The Washington Post , he's piping a Friedman word.

Thomas Friedman is not at all afraid to go over there; he has been all over the Arab world, and gotten three Pulitzer Prizes to boot. All the books about Islam that people bought after 9/11 tend to gather dust; they've proved complex and difficult to penetrate. But Mr. Friedman is not at all difficult to penetrate.

He believes, in essence, in the clash of civilizations-that the anti-Americanism in the Arab world, from which 9/11 flowed, had little to do with American practices and everything to do with the Arab world's failure to participate in globalization. These are stagnant societies that cannot play in the new arrangements of capital and talent that the computer and the end of the Cold War brought about. They don't have democracy, which would allow them to participate; they don't harness the engines of education, free speech and women's rights, which maximize human capital. They are falling behind. This leaves their embittered, underemployed men to sit around burning with resentments against their own society and ours, and thus to become the playthings for Osama bin Laden.

"He poses as Friedman of Arabia," says the author James North. "He is influential because he speaks with total assurance about matters that any intelligent and knowledgeable person would have plenty of doubts and hesitations about."

Thomas Friedman writes clearly and emphatically. He is obviously a liberal Beltway Democrat, I'm sure a good supporter of abortion rights, and he has a pleasant mustachioed presence on television.

The problem with Mr. Friedman is that for all his time in foreign lands, he has little ability to see things from someone else's point of view. There is a secret xenophobia about him. He travels everywhere, and everywhere reports to his wife, according to the diary portion of his latest book, Longitudes & Attitudes: Exploring the World After September 11 . "You know, honey, the wheels aren't on very tight out there." Somehow, nowhere are they tight enough for Mr. Friedman except home-when he is in the neat, clean Washington subway or at Camden Yards. (The No. 7 train would probably give him the willies.)

For all his time in the Arab world (including five years in Beirut), it is hard to read his work without concluding that he really is anti-Arab. He cannot abide Arab culture as it is; it is all of it infected by bin Laden–ism. "Mr. Hobbes's neighborhood," he calls the Arab world in his latest book. "Backward," he said of young Arabs in a recent column. He writes dismissively of "the wall in the Arab mind."

It's one thing when George W. Bush and the right-wingers demonstrate blanket insensitivity to Arab societies. They would be that way. They would, after all, heedlessly cause the destruction of the Iraqi museum, the dispersal and erasure of its cultural treasures.

But Thomas Friedman's constituency is liberals, the museum audience. This makes his point of view more significant. For he is fostering a mistrust and disdain in this community for an entire culture and region of the world, precisely when it is the liberals and internationalists-the people who gave America the Peace Corps, the civil-rights movement, affirmative action and multiculturalism-who have a responsibility now to see the variations in that alien world and figure out other ways of relating to it than aggression. In the Peace Corps, at least, they have to speak the language; for all his expertise on the Arab mind, Mr. Friedman told me that he can get along in Arabic, even do an interview in a pinch, but "I'm not fluent-I would never describe myself as fluent."

There is always the sense about Mr. Friedman that he is playing "Gotcha!" with the Arabs, and there is never any subtlety. This is best demonstrated by an incident in his latest book. His plane from London is about to arrive in Riyadh, and an "attractive raven-haired" Saudi woman in the seat beside him begins to fret. She has left her veil at home. She is calling home madly on her cell phone to make sure someone has come to the plane with her veil.

To Mr. Friedman, this is a great sadness. What a waste of time-she is so attractive. Think of all the useless energy she and other Saudi women who seem to actually like the veil are expending, putting on the chains of servitude ….

But Mr. Friedman never really talked to the woman, and the resulting observations are facile and self-serving. A subtle mind, a truly inquiring mind, would be forced to different observations. Like: She is from a very different culture from my own, and she sees a value in this thing that seems hateful and pointless to me. But then, think of all the energy that women in our culture spend to deal with the same essential condition-men stare at them-by prettifying themselves with expensive makeup. Is that a waste of time and resources? Is a free-speech culture inevitably one of public pornography, as these Arabs often say? And what does that do to civilization?

No, Mr. Friedman can be counted on to go into any situation and come back with a hosanna to globalization. He is a sort of modern-day Babbitt. At the dinner table, he advises his girls that they can believe anything they want, but they can never not love America and not thank God that they were born Americans. He repeatedly calls the World Trade Center a "temple" of our "civic religion," which apparently is invention and making money.

And in the wake of the war, he can be counted on to bash Arab societies because their media and elites have failed to recognize the American "liberation" of Iraq. They are guilty, in his view, of "Saddamism," anti-democratic backwardness.

I would like Arab society to change as well, for Islamic fundamentalism to soften. But bullying and dismissals of "the Arab mind" won't achieve that. And we shall see about the removal of Hussein. Can you simply wave a wand and change a culture? Their traditions may not suit democracy, not in the form that we have it here; the absence of women in public life seems more complex and consensual than the assertion that they are oppressed; and their brand of capitalism will surely be different from the "civic religion" that Mr. Friedman worships at Wall Street.

The belief he states in his book, that you can separate church and state in the Arab world, is at odds with the view of Islam offered by Muslim scholars, say Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his book Islam .

The description of Wall Street as a civic religion is inherently anti-spiritual. Spiritual life involves non-material issues, and Islamic people have a strong spiritual life. They meditate on who they are, on what happens in this life and the next one-the sort of questions that secularists have drained from public life in the West. Obviously, some Muslims' answers to these questions are hateful and murderous. The adherents of those views deserve our attack by whatever means-but who are we to tell Arab cultures that they should begin to worship capitalism? The insistence on this point suggests the stagnation in our own intellectual culture. We seem to have embarked on a new McCarthy era, when bellicose centrist voices echo one another with a corporatist, self-justifying air.

The war has not only demonstrated the supremacy of our military, but the willingness of American reporters to serve as flacks. The use by the networks of banners like "Operation Iraqi Freedom" and "Let Freedom Ring" is an abandonment of objectivity, when who knows for sure what mayhem we have created. The example of Peter Arnett, voicing criticism of American strategy and getting fired, sends a clear signal. After Christiane Amanpour observed, during the statue jubilation, that Afghanistan a year later is being carved up by warlords, you didn't hear much from her. What you do hear often seems jingoistic. Chip Reid talks about an "absolutely beautiful" outpouring by Iraqis thanking American troops, and reporters routinely referred to General Ali Hassan al-Majid as "Chemical Ali."

Or there was George Stephanopoulos on his ABC Sunday-morning show, giving several minutes to an American weapons inspector denouncing General Amir al-Saadi, the Iraqi weapons chief who had turned himself in the day before. General Al-Saadi had said that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, and Mr. Stephanopoulos showed pictures, from German TV, of him kissing his wife goodbye and then getting into an American truck. But he never let the official, who spoke English, speak for himself. Incurious George was merely observing the new rules: You can't give a voice to the other side, merely summarize it and denounce it.

The right has always reveled in this sort of arrogance; now the center left has joined it, with the ideology of which Mr. Friedman is the prime spokesman. Mr. Russert's self-congratulatory lecture, and Mr. Friedman's civic religion, are soulless advertisements for our way of life, and the hint of a totalitarianism-It's our way or the highway-worthy of the Soviet Union. Now more than ever, democracy's best hardest lesson is tolerance.

Two weeks later, an almost 5,000-word piece on the March 3 Times was marveling at "the speed with which [the Saudi peace initiative] has swelled from a little-noted idea in a newspaper column into a serious force in the Middle East."

In The Times ' coverage, the subplot to this sequence of events has been the influence of a New York Times columnist who, from the perch of the Op-Ed page, can best the abilities of a diplomat in tackling a dispute as intractable as the Middle East.

But other news organizations have been, not surprisingly, less willing to give Mr. Friedman credit as a roving peace-maker. Competing papers have consistently criticized the proposal in his column as vague and unoriginal. Critics have also suggested that Mr. Friedman was little more than a high-profile pawn for the Saudis' latest diplomatic gambit.

On Feb. 28, the Los Angeles Times described the Saudi land-for-peace plan as a "formula, which emerged as nothing more than a trial balloon in The New York Times. " Even The Boston Globe , which is owned by The New York Times , wrote in a Feb. 27 editorial, titled "A Scoop for Peace," that Mr. Friedman had only "printed the Mideast peace plan divulged to him by the Saudi ruler."

Mr. Friedman, however, was not up to discuss his involvement in the Saudi plan, or the reaction to it.

"I'm not interested in doing an investigation of what really happened," Mr. Friedman told Off the Record on March 4. Of his column, he said, "Everyone has their own reaction. My position is, let a hundred flowers bloom." He added: "The column speaks for itself. I'm just sitting back and watching it play out."

But Mr. Friedman is no ordinary columnist. Even before Sept. 11, the mustachioed two-time Pulitzer winner, Middle East expert and best-selling author had evolved into a Times heavyweight, one who showed little compunction about expressing himself in forums outside the paper. Since Sept. 11, Mr. Friedman's profile has only grown, as he has appeared on programs like Today, Good Morning America, Meet the Press, Face the Nation and even the Late Show with David Letterman.

Some of Mr. Friedman's colleagues at The Times were eager to pat him on the back. "It looks good for the paper if he played a role in bringing peace," one said.

Others, however, thought The Times may be overstating its case. "There's a certain amount of hubris to these people that they think they can negotiate Mideast peace," a Times source said. "The self-importance is hard to take."

A reporter covering the story for another news organization said he suspects that Mr. Friedman was simply being used by the Saudis to plant a story. "Hats off to Friedman for getting the access," the reporter said. "I suspect that Crown Prince Abdullah knew what he was doing. He knows The New York Times is the most influential paper in the U.S., and Tom Friedman is the most influential foreign-affairs columnist at The Times. "

-Gabriel Snyder

Page Six, meet The Wall Street Journal . The Wall Street Journal , meet Page Six.

While The Journal has broken a lot of important stories over the past several months-including the Red Cross giving away thousands of dollars in relief aid to undeserving Tribeca residents-none had the sexy oomph of its scoop on Monday, March 4. In a formidable yet delicately handled gossip coup, the WSJ outran the tabloids by disclosing a "romantic relationship" between Jack Welch, the married former chairman of General Electric, and Suzy Wetlaufer, editor of the Harvard Business Review .

The Journal appeared to go out of its way to downplay real dirt in the piece. Entitled "Harvard Editor Faces Revolt Over Welch Story," the story ran in the B section of the paper. Written by reporter James Bandler, its opening paragraphs described a "staff mutiny afoot" at the Review . It talked about the Review 's editors seeking the resignation of Ms. Wetlaufer after she pushed to abort a profile she'd written about Mr. Welch.

It was not until deep in the fourth paragraph that Mr. Bandler delivered the payoff: "Several weeks before the story was pulled, Ms. Wetlaufer told at least three Review staffers that she and Mr. Welch were having a relationship."

It was akin to breaking a story about Gary Condit's relationship with Chandra Levy in the fourth paragraph of a story about agricultural reform. But by mid-afternoon on Monday, the piece had become the talk of Boston writers, who had seen a delectable local story swiped by a national outlet.

Not that the local wags were averse to challenging the way The Journal handled it. "Why wasn't the story on page 1?" said Howie Carr, a columnist at the Boston Herald . "I'm surprised they didn't have it above the fold. If it were my story, here's my lead: 'A $276,000-a-year Harvard Review editor's under fire after telling co-workers of her relationship with Jack Welch.' It seemed like The Wall Street Journal was embarrassed to report the story. And I don't know why. It's the best story in the paper."

But Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam put it this way: "It's one of the great advantages of the bigger papers like The Times and The Journal . They can have a story placed further back in the paper and have it become the biggest story of the day. I thought the story was a masterpiece of understatement."

Mr. Bandler, himself a former Globe reporter, declined to comment. Likewise, Mike Miller, the paper's page 1 editor, declined to go into the matter but said: "We always want to be sure not to overplay a story or underplay a story."

Mr. Miller said that the decision on where to put the story rested in the hands of managing editor Paul Steiger. Mr. Steiger declined comment, and Steve Goldstein, a vice president with Dow Jones, the paper's parent company, said: "We don't comment on issues of placement."

However, another executive at the paper said: "It's a fascinating story, but it didn't have the richness of detail that warranted placement on page 1."

When reached by Off the Record, Ms. Wetlaufer declined to comment. A spokesperson for Mr. Welch meanwhile said: "His only comment is that it's a personal matter."

However, Mr. Carr offered a possible venue where Mr. Welch could address the topic.

"Maybe he could talk about it on CNBC," Mr. Carr said, referring to Mr. Welch's job with the financial-news network. "Welch can interview Jim Cramer about his troubles, then Cramer could interview Welch about his."

-Sridhar Pappu

Every year, the reporters and editors at Business Week go through a laborious performance-review process, in which editors have to fill out a 20-question form on their employees on matters such as how many stories each person gets in the magazine, quality of writing and editing, etc. It all gets boiled down to a grade of 1 through 5, with 5 being the highest. For the Business Week staff, this matters because the higher your grade, the bigger your annual raise.

This year, Business Week decided to make the process a bit more laborious. In recent years, you see, there's been some staff griping about grade inflation, in which some supervisors were giving out more 4's and 5's than they really should.

Editor in chief Stephen Shepard said that when he asked his staff about the process, "one of the things they said is there should be more differentiation between outstanding performers and average performers." He added, "One senior editor or bureau chief may be more generous than others."

To that end, in mid-February, the top editors huddled together for most of an afternoon, going over every editorial employee's review, changing grades up and down to "even out the difference between graders, Mr. Shepard said."

The system may have been more fair, but it won't change the raise people will get. At the weekly front-of-the-book meeting on March 1, Mr. Shepard announced that there wouldn't be any raises at all this year.

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Business Week 's corporate parent, had set approved raises of 2.5 percent this year, but the magazine turned it down in order to, as Mr. Shepard said, prevent further layoffs. "We decided this was the least disruptive way to cut costs," the editor said.

- G.S.

Over a lifetime, the late Malcolm Forbes and his sons not only built a magazine, but a collection of antiquities that is hard to rival. The collection of Fabergé eggs on display at the Forbes headquarters off Fifth Avenue and is said to be the largest in the world.

But hey, what's history? On March 27, Christie's will auction over 200 items from the Forbes collection of American historical documents. The lot amounts to a history buff's dream and includes the handwritten manuscript of Lincoln's last public address and the August 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to Franklin Roosevelt that led to the development of the atomic bomb. A Forbes spokesperson added that further items would be auctioned in October. In addition, 61 non-egg Fabergé pieces will be auctioned off on April 19.

And, boy, will the money come in handy! Forbes ' January ad pages were off by 40.8 percent in January from its 2001 number, with advertising dollars off by 39.38 percent. In February, the company suspended matching contributions to its 401(k) plan and cut the pay of its senior managers.

In explaining the move, a Forbes spokesperson said the move had nothing to do with the financial state of the magazine or Forbes Inc. "They had determined to do this awhile ago. There's an awful lot still left. This is only a small part of the collection.

"That's what collectors do," the spokesperson continued. "They buy and sell things."

-S.P.

What's the difference between the average guy and a typical man? In the eyes of Men's Health , very little. Over the past year and a half, Men's Health has been running a monthly one-page feature on its back page called "The Average Guy." Each issue, the magazine compiles statistics about average guys, such as "Age at which the average married man is most likely to have an affair: 34" and "Number of men who've thrown out a piece of clothing because it was missing a button: 1 in 4."

The page has become something of a franchise for Men's Health (which means, one supposes, that a line of "Average Guy" calendars, day planners and barbecue mitts emblazoned with nifty stats are in the works). So when the magazine's editor, David Zincenko, opened the March issue of Esquire and saw their feature "The Typical Man," which listed factoids about the typical man ("About 1 in 6 men admit to having paid for sex" and the like), he was pretty upset.

"I'd imagine Esquire is under a lot of pressure to match our numbers, but I don't think that this is what [Hearst Magazines C.E.O.] Cathie Black had in mind," Mr. Zincenko said.

Over at Esquire , editor David Granger claimed ignorance of the Men's Health feature. "I admire the success [ Men's Health ] had in the 90's," he said, "but it's not the kind of magazine that forces one to read it on a regular basis, unless one is into, you know, health." His "Typical Man" feature started as an idea to find the typical man and profile him. He had some staffers do some statistical research. "The profile fell by the wayside, but when I wanted an amusing little two-pager to break up the feature well, we had the stats lying around," Mr. Granger said. He said Esquire wasn't planning to make "Typical Man" a regular feature "unless we get a lot of mail from Men's Health readers demanding it."

Mr. Zincenko retorted: "I admire Esquire- and their success throughout the 1960's."

One question we had for both editors: Don't you owe Harper's Magazine an apology for ripping off their "Index" franchise?

Mr. Zincenko: "No more than Harper's owes to the Guinness Brothers."

Mr. Granger: "Believe it or not, both statistics and lists of statistics in printed matter predate even Lewis Lapham. In fact, I believe it was Chemical Market Reporter from which Harper's borrowed the idea."

-G.S.