Travel Bug

Travel is heuristic. It's adventure, exploration, survival, renewal, discovery, danger, opportunity, and other qualities ad infinitum. Here's why. Enjoy.

Photo: Brandon Steiner, a 2005 Virginia Tech graduate, teaching a class at a high school in Shizuoka Prefecture, southwest of Tokyo.

The New York Times
February 25, 2006
A Year Abroad (or 3) as a Career Move
By HILLARY CHURA

It was a few months before she was to graduate from Colgate University in 2002, but Lauren DiCioccio was not ready for the briefcase or the Brooks Brothers look. Armed with a bachelor's degree in art and art history, she did what an increasing number of college graduates are doing: she bought a plane ticket to a country she had never visited, backpacked around the region, got a job in that country and then traveled some more.

According to one estimate, 35,000 young Americans realize that working abroad, whether teaching, bartending, taking care of children, typing or picking grapes, has moved well beyond just trust-fund children.

Far from being career suicide, it can actually provide a professional boost. "When I went, I was hesitant because people looked at me and were surprised that I would graduate with a degree from Colgate and take time off to work and backpack around Australia," said Ms. DiCioccio, who picked grapes and was a short-order cook at a roadhouse in the outback.

"So when I came back and had it on my résumé, I couldn't believe all of the interviews were about my time in Australia." Once back in the United States, she said, she applied for 10 jobs, received 5 interviews and was offered 2 positions at the beginning of 2004. She became a program assistant at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, Calif.

Ms. DiCioccio, now 25, obtained her working papers through Bunac, an organization that helps graduates obtain work permits, volunteer opportunities or community work in foreign countries. Other programs include WorldTeach, Princeton in Asia and the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, as well as offerings by religious groups like the Jesuits and the Quakers.

People unencumbered by technicalities — like working legally — will branch off on their own with little more than a debit card, confidence and a copy of "Work Your Way Around the World." Caroline Miceli, 26, chose the legal route.

As she was preparing to graduate from Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., in 2002, she responded to a posting through her college for a year's international project management internship at BMW headquarters in Germany. She earned 880 euros a month (about $1,000 in today's money) and went into credit card debt to travel.

"I ate bread and sausage, but I got experience working for a world-class brand that everybody recognizes," she said. Working abroad "is a career move." "It's not a money-making move," she said. "It puts you in a position to leverage yourself."

When her year ended, she returned to BMW in North America, then an interim project in China with a BMW supplier and then to a Toyota Motor Sales management training program in Torrance, Calif. She said her time in Germany convinced her that she could be on her own in Asia for five months.

"Four years from graduation, I have international experience with a couple of different major automotive companies and fashion companies," she said. Many aspiring expatriates live at home and work a few months to save money before they leave.

Ms. DiCioccio, for example, worked for nine months doing office work, retail jobs and house sitting to give herself a financial cushion, but ended up saving another $700 or so from her Australian jobs. Many travelers depart not knowing how they will earn a living once they hit the ground.

With hustle, they often find employment before the jet lag wanes (to the relief of worried parents), according to some who have taken the plunge. Those working legally tend to earn more, but their stays have a set duration — generally, four months to three years, depending on the country or program.

People working illegally may earn less but can slip under the radar and stay in a country longer. A word of warning: that can result in deportation in extreme circumstances. No nationwide survey measures the number of young Americans working abroad, but William Nolting, director for international opportunities at the International Center of the University of Michigan, maintains a rough estimate.

From tracking the major organizations, he said at least 34,900 people worked and volunteered abroad in formal programs in the academic year 2002 through the summer of 2003. That is up from about 29,000 a year earlier.

Mr. Nolting said the actual figure could be twice as high since he does not count participants in small organizations or those working illegally. By comparison, about 191,000 students studied abroad for credit in 2003-4, out of an estimated 14 million college and university students, according to figures from the Institute of International Education.

Years ago, recent graduates headed for Britain and other parts of Europe. That has changed. "Most students and young people have been to Europe on vacation and seem to be thinking much further afield," said Anna Crew, director of Bunac USA. Australia and New Zealand are popular.

Her group is starting a volunteer program in Cambodia. Brandon Steiner, 24, is in his first year as a teacher with the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program. Though he does not plan to teach after Japan, he will stay another two years or so. A 2005 graduate of Virginia Tech, he earns about $32,000, has minimal expenses since he lives in a rural area about three hours from Tokyo, and pays no United States or Japanese taxes.

"Admittedly, it is a way to goof off and have a good time in a foreign country," he said, but he added that "having international experience under your belt — employers are enthusiastic." "It looks good and is not a bad step out of college," he said. "It shows you already are open-minded."

Sometimes those who have worked abroad do not realize the benefits until long after the adventure has ended. Julie Androshick, now 41, spent two years teaching English, history and algebra to high school students in American Samoa from 1987 to 1989 with the Jesuit Volunteer Corps.

Room and board were free, and she taught algebra on the side. After Samoa, Ms. Androshick spent more than a year tending bar and getting a master's degree in international relations from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

Ms. Androshick later worked as a journalist and a McKinsey & Company analyst. She now helps big clients manage internal information as a partner with Kenning Associates, a small consulting firm. Based in Manhattan, Ms. Androshick said working abroad had expanded her worldview, gave her the courage to purse long-shot jobs and made her a more loyal employee.

"Because I did it for three and a half years and traveled so much, I wanted to settle down and establish a career and focus on that," she said. "The thought of picking up now and living abroad actually stresses me out." Foreign experience demonstrates entrepreneurship, resourcefulness and independence, according to recruiters.

Rosalind Clay Carter, senior vice president for human resources at A&E Television Networks, said people who work and support themselves overseas tend to be inquisitive, flexible and adaptive — valuable skills in today's workplace. "You are interested in that person who can move quickly and is nimble and has an inquiring mind," she said. ###

Elder Non-hostile

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Above: Stan and Peggy Northup-Dawson in the courtyard of Glacier Circle, communal housing in Davis, Calif., that they developed with 10 friends.

Right: Some of the residents of the Glacier Circle complex gathered last week for a meeting at the home of Dorie Datel. Clockwise from left, Lois Grau, Mary Ellen and Ray Coppock, Ms. Datel (obscured), and Stan and Peggy Northup-Dawson.

Elderhood. We're all headed there. So why not design our own spaces ? This is one of those ideas whose time has not only come, but also has come for all the time thereafter.

This is such an important article that it will also be posted at "Living Well..." and "Favorite Things" Blogs today. Enjoy.

The New York Times
February 27, 2006
In California, New Kind of Commune for Elderly
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

DAVIS, Calif., Feb. 23 — They are unlikely revolutionaries. Bearing walkers and canes, a veritable Merck Manual of ailments among them, the 12 old friends — average age 80 — looked as though they should have been sitting down to a game of Scrabble, not pioneering a new kind of commune.

Opting for old age on their own terms, they were starting a new chapter in their lives as residents of Glacier Circle, the country's first self-planned housing development for the elderly — a community they had conceived and designed themselves, right down to its purple gutters.

Over the past five years, the residents of Glacier Circle have found and bought land together, hired an architect together, ironed out insurance together, lobbied for a zoning change together and existentially probed togetherness together.

"Here you get to pick your family instead of being born into it," said Peggy Northup-Dawson, 79, a retired family therapist and mother of six who is legally blind. "We recognized that when you're physically closer to each other, you pay more attention, look in on each other. The idea was to share care."

The four couples, two widows and two who are now living solo live in eight individual town houses, grouped around an inner courtyard. Still under construction is the "common house" with a living room and a large kitchen and dining room for communal dinners; upstairs is a studio apartment they will rent at below market value to a skilled nurse who will provide additional care. It is their own self-styled, potluck utopia.

"It's an acknowledgment that intimacy doesn't happen by chance," said John Jungerman, 84, a retired nuclear physicist and one of several Ph.D.'s in the group, who is perpetually clad in purple socks and sandals.

"At first John said, 'I'm not old enough,' " his wife, Nancy, said of the commune. "I said, 'You're 80 years old. How old do you have to be?' "

There are about a dozen co-operative housing developments for the elderly in development, from Santa Fe, N.M., to St. Petersburg, Fla., a fledgling movement to communally address "the challenge of aging non-institutionally," said Charles Durett, an architect in Nevada City, Calif., who imported the concept he named co-housing — people buying homes in a community they plan and run together — from Denmark in the late 1960's.

Though communal housing for the elderly is new, intergenerational communities have been around since 1991, when the first opened in this politically progressive university town. There are now 82 across the country.

In Abingdon, Va., residents are beginning to move into ElderSpirit, a development founded by a 76-year-old former nun, Dene Peterson. The community of 37, 10 years in the making, includes a "spirit house" for ecumenical prayer and meditation.

"I just thought there had to be a better way for older people to live," said Ms. Peterson, who formed a nonprofit development corporation with three other former Glenmary sisters, a Catholic order, and knit together a variety of private and governmental funds (16 of the 29 units are subsidized affordable housing).

Ms. Peterson says she was haunted and inspired by her work with elderly public housing residents in Chicago in the 1960's.

"The elderly were dying," she recalled, "and they were anonymous."

With millions of baby boomers moving toward retirement, gerontologists and developers are looking to communal housing for the elderly with growing interest, building on a generation's mythology that already includes communes and college dormitories.

In co-operative housing, said Janice Blanchard, a gerontologist and housing consultant in Denver, "the social consciousness of the 1960's can get re-expressed." Baby boomers, she predicted, "are going to want to recreate the peak experience of their lives. Whether a commune or a college dorm, the common denominator was community."

Rich Morrison, 79, a retired psychologist from Sacramento State University and the sole single man at Glacier Circle, only recently gave up his hobby, swimming the major rapids of the Colorado River. "Emotionally, there's no reason why I can't continue to grow until I'm 100, if I'm lucky," he said.

Mr. Morrison is once widowed and twice divorced. Like others in the group who have struggled through every loss, from a child's suicide to the death of a spouse, he speaks about now being able to make "heart choices," hard won.

"I've been lonely," said Lois Grau, 87, whose husband died three years ago. "Little things go wrong that he would have fixed."

Mrs. Grau and her friends have known each other for nearly 40 years, raising children in the same neighborhood. Many residents met through the local Unitarian Universalist Church, and they still begin weekly meetings by pledging to "listen deeply and thoughtfully" to each other. Davis is known for its involved citizenry who dash off to their book groups at 7 p.m. The Glacier Circle 12 even partake of what they call a "dream group," in which they discuss their dreams.

Their talents and resources are by no means typical. They are all accomplished professionals, and the market value of their homes allowed them to purchase land and build their dream at a cost of $3.2 million, or about $400,000 each, plus $350 a month in dues. They expect to collect $850 a month in rental income. Individuals own their own homes but share expenses of common areas.

Stan Dawson, 75, a resident who has a doctorate from the Harvard School of Public Health, retired as chief of air pollution standards for the State of California to navigate the project full time through bureaucratic hurdles.

"It was a wonderful thing my dad played golf every day," he said of his father's retirement. "But I wanted to further my life in old age."

The design-by-democracy may not work for everyone.

The architect, Julie Haney, 49, said tension broke out over the color of gutters and trim on their bungalow-style homes. As Ms. Haney explained, "Ann likes blue, Stan wanted brown, Ann hates brown, everyone liked purple."

Ms. Haney, whose own elderly parents died as the design was nearing completion, said the residents forgot things more often than her younger clients did but made up for it with perspective. "I asked, 'Do you want a 20-year roof or a 40-year roof?" she recalled. "They said, 'If it lasts five years, we'll be happy.' "

To be sure, the challenges are daunting. Sue Saum, 74, for instance, moved in with her husband Jim, 84, a retired professor who, during the course of planning the community, was told he had Alzheimer's disease. Shortly thereafter, Mrs. Saum was operated on for breast cancer, and recently she had back surgery. At some point, she acknowledges, her husband may need care beyond their friends' abilities.

"It's one of those day-at-a-time, figure-it-out-as-you-go things," she said. "But creating a community like this, you learn a lot about the strength of the human spirit."

Twelve friends' buying land at age 80 requires a certain leap of faith. By its nature Glacier Circle will change over time. A homeowners association, consisting of one resident from each unit, has the right of first refusal to buy any home when a vacancy arises, for whatever reason, or what Dr. Jungerman nonchalantly calls a visit from "the great father in the sky."

Glacier Circle is too small to legally mandate age restrictions, but Ray Coppock, 83, a retired editor, thinks that will take care of itself. "They'll take one look at us," he said. "That should reduce the potential buyer situation."

At ElderSpirit in Virginia, which will be fully occupied in late spring, spirituality is the major draw. Ms. Peterson defined spirituality as "people finding meaning in their lives, acknowledging ways to give up the ego and grow the soul."

Six more ElderSpirit communities, in St. Petersburg, Fla., Wichita, Kan., and elsewhere, are in planning stages, with some financing from the Chicago-based Retirement Research Foundation.

Not surprisingly, a streamlined form of community housing may be in the wind, as efforts spring up around the country to speed up the planning process, which normally takes two and a half to three and a half years.

Unlike intergenerational co-operative housing, a niche market of about 5,000 people, communal housing for the elderly has "far more market potential," said Jim Leach, president of the Wonderland Hill Development Company in Denver, which is building Silver Sage, a communal housing development for the elderly scheduled to open in Boulder next year.

Dr. William Thomas, who developed the "Eden Alternative," a widely publicized effort to make nursing homes less institutional, is developing Eldershire in Sherburne, N.Y., south of Syracuse, a hybrid between co-operative housing and a traditional development. The idea is to build first and then attract residents who will run it themselves.

Dr. Thomas compares co-operative housing, and its time-consuming community planning, with "homemade bread — people get together, mix the ingredients, let the dough rise." He's trying to adapt the concept for broader consumption — "100 million people," he says, "buy bread at the store."

Even revolutionaries need to be flexible. At Glacier Circle, where the first tulips of spring are popping up, the group had approved special wall insulation for Mr. Morrison, who has a penchant for playing Mahler's Ninth Symphony at 3 a.m. When the bass and timpani pulse through his subwoofer, his neighbor Dorie Datel, a youthful 80-year-old, just lets it slide. For Ms. Datel, whose husband left her for "the other woman" he met at Elderhostel, this group's wisdom and resolve are embedded in the square footage.

"We've all lived through the Depression and war and the big stuff, so we know that things don't always stay the same," Ms. Datel said. "All of us are interested in living."
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Eat, drink, be merry

This emphasis on eating and obesity is too much ado about not enough adieu - we can't seem to say goodbye to decades of poor eating habits - despite the scoldings by those who - somehow - know better.

I am Cajun enough not to care about those who would dictate to me my eating habits -i will simply smile, agree with them, offer them some boudin, then do exactly as I please - which is the exact approach most folks take. Enjoy.

The New York Times
February 26, 2006
Biblio File
The Right to Chew
By HOLLY BRUBACH

Back in the days when I lived in Paris, the so-called French paradox was often in the news, and the medical establishment was then, as now, at a loss to account for it. My American friends and I didn't care how it worked, but we invoked it often, fingers crossed. Mostly, we used it to justify another oozing wedge of Camembert, telling ourselves that the Bordeaux would cancel out the cholesterol.

The fact that Frenchwomen don't get fat (to borrow the title of Mireille Guiliano's best-selling book) did not escape our notice, but it never occurred to us that their example might be exported, much less packaged and sold as a whole new wave of diet advice.

Hard on Guiliano's heels are the books "Japanese Women Don't Get Old or Fat" (Delacorte Press), by Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle, and the forthcoming "Mediterranean Women Stay Slim, Too" (HarperCollins), by Melissa Kelly (with Eve Adamson).

The gist of these congenial, well-meaning books is that if only Americans ate like people do in (name of country here), they'd be thinner, healthier and happier. It's an appealing idea — optimistic, romantic and, if I may say so, so American in its supposition that people can make themselves into the person they'd like to be, at will.

As if, now that the world is one big village, we could pick and choose from an international smorgasbord of personality traits: German precision, Dutch tolerance, French elegance, Italian spontaneity. Kelly contends that "the Mediterranean lifestyle is about pleasure and passion, feeling good and embracing life." Who in their right mind wouldn't sign up for that?

It would be hard to argue with the wisdom these self-appointed experts have to offer. The recipes are pragmatic and welcome, if naïve on occasion (no one, it seems, has apprised Guiliano of how hard it is to find celery root in New York, much less in the rest of the country).

The exhortations to steer clear of foods that have been processed and to eat plenty of fruits, vegetables, whole grains and healthful fats are by now familiar but, I suppose, worth repeating. The "secret" to the way of life Guiliano and Kelly are advocating is, in a word, moderation. If only we allowed ourselves to eat the foods we consider forbidden, they would make us feel content and sated, which would in turn prompt us to stop eating sooner.

"Most Americans," Guiliano contends, "eat at least 10 to 30 percent more than needed, not to survive but to satisfy psychological hunger." What these authors fail to take into account is that the way we eat is more than mere force of habit — something William Leith has figured out the hard way.

In "The Hungry Years" (Gotham Books), Leith has written a memoir of his own struggles with compulsive eating. The binges, he understands, are merely the symptom. "I'm fat, and I hate being fat, but there is something else, something I believe is worse than being fat, something I can't bear to think about. What is it?"

Though his epiphany is ultimately not terribly astonishing to anyone who has undergone a round of psychotherapy, his candor, his curiosity and his skepticism come as a relief after Guiliano's and Kelly's more prescriptive approaches. Of the three, only Leith acknowledges that the crisis lies not only with the individual but also with the larger context of the culture:

"More is our creed, here in the greedy West," he writes. And yet, it's a great big place, the West, complex and diverse enough to encompass France and all those other Mediterranean countries where women don't get fat.

If Guiliano and Kelly underestimate how hard it is to emulate the way people of another culture go about their lives, perhaps it's because the behavior they're promoting is in keeping with the traditions in which they were raised — Guiliano, in France; Kelly, as the granddaughter of an Italian butcher on Long Island.

Neither seems to have considered the possibility that the pernicious cycle of crash dieting and binge eating, which has tyrannized so many Americans, may in fact have come about as a result of certain beliefs that we hold dear and take for granted.

When I moved to Paris, I set out to learn what Frenchwomen knew in their bones: I would study them and imitate them — their legendary aptitude for seduction, their capacity for moderation, their sense of style — until I had acquired their skills. I left Paris six years later, with a few new scarf tricks and a sense of resignation: it was, I decided, futile to try to graft their behavior onto mine.

Living in another country, you are constantly confronted with the fact that, for better or for worse, your personality has been shaped by certain assumptions that you never even consciously adopted — you just inhaled them in the air that you grew up breathing back home.

Take self-denial, to name just one example. Of the people in my immediate circle: Lisa has cut out carbohydrates, to keep her weight under control. Dan has eliminated wheat, because, he says, it makes him bloated. Michael has stopped drinking, to achieve "clarity." Christine swore off dairy products after reading a book that blamed them for causing breast cancer.

Lynn is seeing a nutritionist, who asked her whether there were any foods she craved. "Chocolate," she said. He then banned chocolate from her diet, because, he explained, the food you love the most is the food that you're allergic to. As for me, I figured I'd be thinner if I didn't eat cheese. "Can you explain to me," a bewildered Italian friend asked, "this American penchant for giving things up?"

That denying oneself pleasure can be perversely gratifying is something we understand all too well. My European friends chalk it up to our Puritan heritage. In my case, a Calvinist upbringing picked up where the Puritans left off. Whether out of guilt or self-loathing, or both, I learned early on to deny myself whatever it was I longed for.

A doughnut, or peanut butter, or a slice of toast was a small price to pay for the thrill of empowerment. Self-abnegation proved to be so addictive that by 17 I was anorexic, high on my capacity to override an urge as primal as hunger. Underlying this exercise is a suspicious, if not downright antagonistic, relationship with one's self: the notion that, given free rein, permitted to follow our instincts, we would inevitably self-destruct. Which is where the bingeing comes in.

Living in France and Italy, I came to the conclusion, however reluctantly, that though these all-or-nothing extremes aren't peculiar to America (Leith is English, after all), America has in many ways proven the perfect incubator for them.

The Land of Opportunity is, by extension, the Land of Unlimited Possibility, where the tradition of reinventing ourselves is practically written into the Constitution. We need to believe that life is a level playing field, despite blatant evidence to the contrary.

The most average guy can be elected president. Celebrity and wealth are everybody's birthright. Here, anything can happen, and our lives can change overnight. You can leave the past behind, move to another city, change your hair color, change your name and start all over.

You could win the lottery. You could get discovered. Hope springs not only eternal but irrational. All mitigating traces of the past, reminding us of failure and decay, are wiped away. No wonder we think that we can get away with excess. Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of our lives. It's a clean slate every morning.

Except, of course, that it's not.

My European friends routinely refer to the United States as a "young" country, the implication being not only that our civilization hasn't been around as long as theirs but also that there's something immature in our outlook on the world.

I always bristled at this, and yet I have to admit they have a point. Our collective behavior is often more adolescent than adult — reckless, refusing to acknowledge our own mortality or that even the smallest decision has ramifications. Forever young.

"I heard an item on the radio the other day," Leith recalls, "in which an obesity expert was asked, 'If the government could do one thing to stop the obesity crisis, what would it be?' The man paused, and said, 'That's the trouble. There is no one thing you can do. You have to do ... everything."'

As Leith observes, "If it's successful, a diet merely makes you temporarily look like a person who doesn't have your problems." In a society overrun with images of movie stars and supermodels, that's enough for most people.

Until, of course, it's not.
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Long empty spaces

This story intrigues me, because there's not much space, we are lead to believe, left here on the third rock from the sun. Yet here's a place where there seems to be lots of space - mostly filled with interesting characters who lead an intertesting way of life. Living well means - among many things - making the most of what ya got. They seem to be doing just that in Loving County, Texas. Enjoy.

The New York Times
February 25, 2006
1 Cafe, 1 Gas Station, 2 Roads: America's Emptiest County
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

MENTONE, Tex. — How empty is Loving County?

So empty that when Sheriff Billy Burt Hopper ran for office in 2004, he and his opponent attended each other's campaign barbecues. So empty that it cannot sustain two political parties: Republicans and Democrats all call themselves Democrats and vote in a single primary.

So empty that it has trouble seating 12 jurors who are not related to a defendant. (Not that there is much crime, although — or maybe because — Sheriff Hopper patrols in a pickup with two shotguns and an AK-47.) So empty that the jail was moved to Pecos in Reeves County, 26 miles away, in 1994.

In fact, this is the emptiest county seat of the emptiest county in the country.

At last count (by Sheriff Hopper toting it up in his head), 16 people make Mentone their home and 55 others are spread throughout the rest of Loving County's 645 square miles of parched, salty West Texas grassland and rattlesnakes — about one person for every nine square miles.

But Loving County, east of the Pecos River just below New Mexico, is blessed with mineral riches: 360 producing gas and oil wells and 18 more being drilled, creating an enviable problem for the county — forcing it to keep lowering its tax rate.

Yet it is modest enough, as a plaque outside the courthouse confesses: "Mentone has no water system (water is hauled in) nor does it have a bank, doctor, hospital, newspaper, lawyer, civic club or cemetery."

And since Mentone is the only town, neither does Loving County.

What it does have is the Boot Track Café (open mornings), a post office, a gas station and the yellow Deco two-story courthouse. There are two roads. There is no operating church, although the county's oldest building, a 1910 schoolhouse, is open for nondenominational worship. Seven children ride a school bus 33 miles to Wink in the next county.

"When I was little, I couldn't wait to leave," said Beverly Hanson, the county clerk. Then, she said, "I went to see the bright lights" — she became an apartment manager in Dallas — married and divorced and happily returned home. "I knew I was safe here," she said.

Loving County may be empty all right. But not so empty that it escapes the burden of history: three of its sons have fought in Iraq. And it landed $30,000 in antiterrorism money from the Department of Homeland Security to upgrade its emergency radio system.

Loving County never had an easy time. It is the only Texas county to have been organized twice. It was named for Oliver Loving, a trail-blazing cattleman who drove Texas herds to Illinois before the Civil War; he was later shot by Indians and, according to one story, crawled five miles chewing on a kid glove for food before eventually succumbing to gangrene. He appears as Augustus McCrae in Larry McMurtry's novel "Lonesome Dove."

With only three people on record as living in Mentone — named by a homesick French surveyor in tribute to a city in his native land — somehow 83 votes were cast to organize the county in 1893. But within a few years, the county officials had fled the area. The county was dissolved in 1897 and not reorganized until 1931.

Sheriff Hopper's forebears settled in Loving County in 1906. He was born in Odessa and arrived in Mentone as a 1-year old in 1938. The town was booming then, he said, with 300 people and four restaurants, three gas stations, a hotel and a bowling alley. But residents started moving away during World War II.

By 1951 Mr. Hopper was among only eight students in the high school, which shared a single schoolhouse with the lower grades. The next year he was the last of the eight to leave, moving to the high school in Pecos.

Mr. Hopper, a former Air Force nuclear weapons technician, became the deputy sheriff in 1999 and ran for sheriff in 2004 against a former sheriff's son. The race went down to the wire, ending in a tie, 41 to 41; Mr. Hopper won the runoff, 51 to 38.

Curiously, both vote totals exceeded the entire population of Loving County, put at 67 by the census in 2000. (In 2004, the Census Bureau estimated the population at 52, while Sheriff Hopper, after a house-to-house count, puts it now at 71).

Easily explainable, the sheriff said. Election time brings family members flocking in from afar or sending in absentee ballots. They may not live here year-round, he said, but as long as they "intend" to make it their home they may keep Loving County as their voting address to swing elections to relatives or friends and defeat tax-raising bond-issues.

But others had caught on to the system too.

The newly elected sheriff had barely pinned on his star in January 2005, he recalled, when his phone rang with an old-fashioned warning: "You don't know it, but you're in trouble." A group was planning a takeover of the county, said the caller, a woman in Arizona who promised to send him some information by e-mail.

The material described the plans of a Libertarian faction in its own words "to win most of the elected offices in the county administration" and "restore to freedom" Loving County. The blueprint, called "Restoring Loving County," said that land was hard to come by but that a ranch had been split up and members were in the process of buying sections.

"The people who are living there will be able to register to vote," it said. "They must swear that they intend to make Loving their home."

The goal, said an e-mail message attributed to a group member, was to move in enough Libertarians "to control the local government and remove oppressive regulations (such as planning and zoning, and building code requirements) and stop enforcement of laws prohibiting victimless acts among consenting adults such as dueling, gambling, incest, price-gouging, cannibalism and drug handling."

Leading the effort, the material showed, was Lawrence Edward Pendarvis, a computer analyst from Brandon, Fla., and operator of a Philippine mail-order-bride Web site who has run into a storm of opposition for trying to establish a similar "Free State Project" in Grafton, N.H. He was convicted in Florida in 1997 of downloading child pornography, but the charges were overturned on appeal due to a prosecutorial error.

Days after he received the material, Sheriff Hopper said, Mr. Pendarvis and two other Libertarians, Bobby Y. Emory and Don B. Duncan, showed up to look for land and last fall, claiming they had bought property on eBay, filed voter-registration forms. But, the sheriff said, after checking deeds at the county courthouse, he talked to the presumed sellers, who were in California, and was told the property had been sold to other buyers. He and the Texas ranger in Fort Stockton, 75 miles away, then filed misdemeanor charges against the three men, who had left the state.

"We need people, we need people bad, don't get me wrong," said Sheriff Hopper, 68, who is also the registrar of voters, tax assessor and collector. "But we don't need that deal."

Mr. Pendarvis, reached in Florida, said that his group had a canceled check that proved they had properly bought the 126 acres for $30,000 and that they were operating within the law. "We've been trying to buy land for a year," he said, "but every time they find out who it is they say, 'Oh, we made a mistake.' "

Sheriff Hopper said even though the charge was only a misdemeanor, the three men faced arrest if they showed up in Loving County. "We're letting them know we know what they're up to," he said.

Now pictures of the three decorate a poster on the sheriff's door at the Loving County Courthouse under the timeworn Wild West legend: "Wanted by the Texas Rangers."

Meanwhile, the sheriff said, life was getting back to normal in Loving County. "See those doves," he said, nodding at the birds silhouetted on a wire. "I counted 205 one night waiting to get into the trees."
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Fallible Doctors

To really live well, we must know not only our own limitations, but also those of others upon whom we rely - such as doctors. Enjoy.

The New York Times
February 22, 2006
Why Doctors So Often Get It Wrong
By DAVID LEONHARDT

ATLANTA

ON a weekend day a few years ago, the parents of a 4-year-old boy from rural Georgia brought him to a children's hospital here in north Atlanta. The family had already been through a lot. Their son had been sick for months, with fevers that just would not go away.

The doctors on weekend duty ordered blood tests, which showed that the boy had leukemia. There were a few things about his condition that didn't add up, like the light brown spots on the skin, but the doctors still scheduled a strong course of chemotherapy to start on Monday afternoon. Time, after all, was their enemy.

John Bergsagel, a soft-spoken senior oncologist, remembers arriving at the hospital on Monday morning and having a pile of other cases to get through. He was also bothered by the skin spots, but he agreed that the blood test was clear enough. The boy had leukemia.

"Once you start down one of these clinical pathways," Dr. Bergsagel said, "it's very hard to step off."

What the doctors didn't know was that the boy had a rare form of the disease that chemotherapy does not cure. It makes the symptoms go away for a month or so, but then they return. Worst of all, each round of chemotherapy would bring a serious risk of death, since he was already so weak.

With all the tools available to modern medicine — the blood tests and M.R.I.'s and endoscopes — you might think that misdiagnosis has become a rare thing. But you would be wrong. Studies of autopsies have shown that doctors seriously misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20 percent of the time. So millions of patients are being treated for the wrong disease.

As shocking as that is, the more astonishing fact may be that the rate has not really changed since the 1930's. "No improvement!" was how an article in the normally exclamation-free Journal of the American Medical Association summarized the situation.

This is the richest country in the world — one where one-seventh of the economy is devoted to health care — and yet misdiagnosis is killing thousands of Americans every year.

How can this be happening? And how is it not a source of national outrage?

A BIG part of the answer is that all of the other medical progress we have made has distracted us from the misdiagnosis crisis.

Any number of diseases that were death sentences just 50 years ago — like childhood leukemia — are often manageable today, thanks to good work done by people like Dr. Bergsagel. The brightly painted pediatric clinic where he practices is a pretty inspiring place on most days, because it's just a detour on the way toward a long, healthy life for four out of five leukemia patients who come here.

But we still could be doing a lot better. Under the current medical system, doctors, nurses, lab technicians and hospital executives are not actually paid to come up with the right diagnosis. They are paid to perform tests and to do surgery and to dispense drugs.

There is no bonus for curing someone and no penalty for failing, except when the mistakes rise to the level of malpractice. So even though doctors can have the best intentions, they have little economic incentive to spend time double-checking their instincts, and hospitals have little incentive to give them the tools to do so.

"You get what you pay for," Mark B. McClellan, who runs Medicare and Medicaid, told me. "And we ought to be paying for better quality."

There are some bits of good news here. Dr. McClellan has set up small pay-for-performance programs in Medicare, and a few insurers are also experimenting. But it isn't nearly a big enough push. We just are not using the power of incentives to save lives. For a politician looking to make the often-bloodless debate over health care come alive, this is a huge opportunity.

Joseph Britto, a former intensive-care doctor, likes to compare medicine's attitude toward mistakes with the airline industry's. At the insistence of pilots, who have the ultimate incentive not to mess up, airlines have studied their errors and nearly eliminated crashes.

"Unlike pilots," Dr. Britto said, "doctors don't go down with their planes."

Dr. Britto was working at a London hospital in 1999 when doctors diagnosed chicken pox in a little girl named Isabel Maude. Only when her organs began shutting down did her doctors realize that she had a potentially fatal flesh-eating virus. Isabel's father, Jason, was so shaken by the experience that he quit his finance job and founded a company — named after his daughter, who is a healthy 10-year-old today — to fight misdiagnosis.

The company sells software that allows doctors to type in a patient's symptoms and, in response, spits out a list of possible causes. It does not replace doctors, but makes sure they can consider some unobvious possibilities that they may not have seen since medical school. Dr. Britto is a top executive.

Not long after the founding of Isabel Healthcare, Dr. Bergsagel in Atlanta stumbled across an article about it and asked to be one of the beta testers. So on that Monday morning, when he couldn't get the inconsistencies in the boy's case out of his mind, he sat down at a computer in a little white room, behind a nurse's station, and entered the symptoms.

Near the top of Isabel's list was a rare form of leukemia that Dr. Bergsagel had never seen before — and that often causes brown skin spots. "It was very much a Eureka moment," he said.

There is no happy ending to the story, because this leukemia has much longer odds than more common kinds. But the boy was spared the misery of pointless chemotherapy and was instead given the only chance he had, a bone marrow transplant. He lived another year and a half.

Today, Dr. Bergsagel uses Isabel a few times a month. The company continues to give him free access. But his colleagues at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta can't use it. The hospital has not bought the service, which costs $80,000 a year for a typical hospital (and $750 for an individual doctor).

Clearly, misdiagnosis costs far more than that. But in the current health care system, hospitals have no way to recoup money they spend on programs like Isabel.

We patients, on the other hand, foot the bill for all those wasted procedures and pointless drugs. So we keep getting them. Does that make any sense?

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com
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Eat. Enjoy.

For Cajuns everywhere - this is a no-brainer !

February 20, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Go With Your Gut
By HARRIET BROWN
Madison, Wis.

LAST week's reports that low-fat diets may not reduce the risk of heart disease and cancer have left Americans more confused than ever about what to eat. I'd like to make a radical suggestion: instead of wringing our hands over fat grams and calories, let's resolve to enjoy whatever food we eat.

Because, as it turns out, when you eat something you like, your body makes more efficient use of its nutrients. Which means that choking down a plateful of steamed cauliflower (if you hate steamed cauliflower) is not likely to do you as much good as you think.

In the 1970's, researchers fed two groups of women, one Swedish and one Thai, a spicy Thai meal. The Thai women — who presumably liked the meal more than the Swedish women did — absorbed almost 50 percent more iron from it than the Swedish women. When the meal was served as a mushy paste, the Thai women absorbed 70 percent less iron than they had before — from the same food.

The researchers concluded that food that's unfamiliar (Thai food to Swedish women) or unappetizing (mush rather than solid food) winds up being less nutritious than food that looks, smells and tastes good to you. The explanation can be found in the digestive process itself, in the relationship between the "second brain" — the gut — and the brain in your head.

Imagine sitting in your favorite Japanese restaurant before a plate of sushi, chopsticks poised. You take in its fragrance and the beautiful cut of the fish, the shapely rice and nori rolls. Those delectable smells and sights tell your brain that the meal will be enjoyable, and the brain responds by pushing your salivary glands into high gear and ordering your stomach to secrete more gastric juices.

Result: you get more nutritional bang for your buck than you would, say, faced with a platter of lutefisk. In that case, your brain might send fewer messages to your mouth and stomach, causing the food to be less thoroughly digested and metabolized.

Does this mean we should be reaching for the Krispy Kremes and forgoing the raw cauliflower? No. The food has to have nutritive value in the first place. But maybe we could take a lesson from the French, whose level of heart disease is lower than ours despite their richer diet. The French savor the taste and texture of food and the experience of eating; we tend to eat dutifully (how much cauliflower can you choke down?), on the run (hardly realizing what we're eating), or rebelliously (devouring a whole box of Entenmann's because we feel deprived).

In fact, we're hard-wired to enjoy food; it's a survival mechanism. Volunteers in the 1946 University of Minnesota Starvation Study, who spent six months at half rations, developed a slew of peculiar rituals around eating. They devoted hours to meals that might normally take a few minutes, cutting a slice of bread into tiny bits with a knife and fork, arranging the bits on the plate, chewing each mouthful 200 times — all behaviors engineered to prolong both the act of eating and the enjoyment of the limited food available.

The health writer Lawrence Lindner tells of a committee that gathered to hammer out the wording of the United States Dietary Guidelines in 1995. One committee member suggested that the first guideline read "Enjoy a variety of foods" — language that was rejected as "too hedonistic." (In the end, Mr. Lindner wrote, the committee "opted for the apparently less giddy 'Eat a variety of foods.' ") So let's vow to enjoy our food, not wolf it down in the car with a heaping order of guilt. Call it Slow Food, conscious eating, or eating the French way, the point's the same: eating well and with pleasure is more than hedonism — it's good nutritional policy and practice. Bon appétit!

Harriet Brown, the editor of the forthcoming anthology "Mr. Wrong," is working on a book about anorexia.



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Red Meat

Buying quality food is part of "Living Well" and it is getting harder all the time because of tricks such as this one. Be forewarned.

photo: Tony Cenicola/The New York Times
Both of these steaks were red when bought on Feb. 3. Kept refrigerated, they were then photographed on Feb. 16. Why the difference? The one at top was treated with a gas process that has some consumer groups angered.




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February 21, 2006
Which Cut Is Older? (It's a Trick Question)
By MARIAN BURROS
If some of the meat in supermarkets is looking rosier than it used to, the reason is that a growing number of markets are selling it in airtight packages treated with a touch of carbon monoxide to help the product stay red for weeks.

This form of "modified atmosphere packaging," a technique in which other gases replace oxygen, has become more widely used as supermarkets eliminate their butchers and buy precut, "case-ready" meat from processing plants.

The reason for its popularity in the industry is clear. One study, conducted at Oklahoma State University for the Cattlemen's Beef Board in 2003, said retailers lost at least $1 billion a year as meat turned brown from exposure to oxygen, because, though it might still be fairly fresh and perfectly safe, consumers simply judged meat's freshness by its color.

The carbon monoxide is itself harmless at the levels being used in the treated packaging. But opponents say that the process, which is also used to keep tuna rosy, allows stores to sell meat that is no longer fresh, and that consumers would not know until they opened the package at home and smelled it. Labels do not note whether meat has been laced with carbon monoxide.

The Food and Drug Administration approved use of the process in 2004. The Washington Post reported in its Monday editions that Kalsec, a Michigan producer of a natural food extract that helps slow the discoloring of the meat but does not "fix" it in the same way as carbon monoxide, had petitioned the agency to reverse that decision.

The Consumer Federation of America and the advocacy group Safe Tables Our Priority have written a letter to the agency in support of the petition because, they say, the bright red color could mask spoilage and dangerous bacteria in older meat or meat that has not been kept at the proper temperature.

Supermarket chains including A.&P. and Pathmark do not carry the treated meat, but it is showing up with increasing frequency elsewhere. In New York City, it is sold at 30 Gristede's stores, at D'Agostino markets under the labels Laura's Lean Beef and Creekstone's, and at the Morton Williams stores in the Associated chain. A spokeswoman for Safeway did not respond to phone calls and e-mail messages about sale of the treated meat there, but it was available at a Safeway market in Bethesda, Md., earlier this month. SuperTarget stores are also selling it, and Wal-Mart reports carrying it in 150 stores.

"This is what is going to happen in the meat business," said John A. Catsimatidis, chairman and chief executive of Gristede's. "The meat looks great. It looks as red as the day it was cut."

Processors say treated ground meat can be sold for 28 days after leaving the plant, and solid cuts for 35 days. The agribusiness company Cargill says it has sold 100 million packages in the last year.

Randy Huffman of the American Meat Institute Foundation, an industry group, said, "The primary benefit in providing this product to consumers is the red color they have grown to expect."

In a firsthand look at the treated meat, a package of a conventionally wrapped rib steak and one with the carbon monoxide were both red when bought on Feb. 3 near Washington. They were then kept refrigerated. By Feb. 16, when they were photographed for the pictures that appear with this article, the conventional meat was brown, but the treated meat was still rosy. And as of yesterday, other treated meat bought at the same time was still red despite having been left unrefrigerated on a kitchen counter since Feb. 14.

Some food scientists who approve of other forms of modified atmosphere packaging as a way of extending a product's life say this form of it can be unsafe. Michael Doyle, director of the Center for Food Safety at the University of Georgia, says one study found that when meat in modified packages that included carbon monoxide was stored at 10 degrees above the proper temperature, salmonella grew more easily.

Representative John D. Dingell of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, has asked the F.D.A. to explain its approval of the process.

"It's just common sense that when consumers buy meat, they use color as an important indicator of its freshness," Mr. Dingell said in an e-mail message to a reporter. "For F.D.A. to rely on a promise of some stamp on the package that says 'use or freeze by' is just naïve."



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Julia Child

ANYTHING having to do with Julia Child is proof of "living well." Period. Enjoy.





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February 19, 2006
Food
Eat, Memory: Sacré Cordon Bleu!
By JULIA CHILD with ALEX PRUD'HOMME
By late 1950, I felt ready to take my final examination and earn my diplôme from the Cordon Bleu in Paris. But when I asked Mme. Brassart, the school's director, to schedule the test — politely, at first, then with an increasing insistence — my requests were met with stony silence. The truth is that Mme. Brassart and I got on each other's nerves. She seemed to think that awarding a student a diploma was like inducting them into some kind of secret society; as a result, the school's hallways were filled with an air of petty jealousy and distrust. From my perspective, Mme. Brassart lacked professional experience, was a terrible administrator and tangled herself up in picayune details and politics. Because of its exalted reputation, the Cordon Bleu's pupils came from all over the globe. But the lack of a qualified and competent head was hurting the school — and could damage the reputation of French cooking, or even France herself, in the eyes of the world.

I was sure that the little question of money had something to do with Mme. Brassart's evasiveness. I had taken the "professional" course in the basement rather than the "regular" (more expensive) course upstairs, which she had recommended; I never ate at the school; and she didn't make as much money out of me as she would have liked. It seemed to me that the school's director should have paid less attention to centimes and more attention to her students, who, after all, were — or could be — her best publicity.

After waiting and waiting for my exam to be scheduled, I sent Mme. Brassart a stern letter in March 1951, noting that "all my American friends and even the U.S. ambassador himself" knew I had been slaving away at the Cordon Bleu, "morning, noon and night." I insisted that I take the exam before I left on a long-planned trip to the United States in April. If there was not enough space at the school, I added, then I would be happy to take the exam in my own well-appointed kitchen.

More time passed, and still no response. I was good and fed up and finally spoke to Chef Bugnard, my professor, about the matter. He agreed to make inquiries on my behalf. Lo and behold, Mme. Brassart suddenly scheduled my exam for the first week in April. Ha! I continued to hone my technique, memorize proportions and prepare myself in every way I could think of.

On the big day, I arrived at the school, and they handed me a little typewritten card that said, "Write out the ingredients for the following dishes, to serve three people: oeufs mollets; côtelettes de veau en surprise; crème renversée au caramel."

I stared at the card in disbelief.

Did I remember what an oeuf mollet was? No. How could I miss that? (I later discovered that it was eggs that have been coddled and then peeled.) How about the veau "en surprise"? No. (A sautéed veal chop with duxelles, or hashed mushrooms, on either side, overlayed with ham slices and all wrapped up in a paper bag — the "surprise" — that is then browned in the oven.) Did I remember the exact proportions for caramel custard? No.

Zut alors, and flûte!

I was stuck, and had no choice but to make everything up. I knew I would fail the practical part of the exam. As for the written exam, I was asked how to make fond brun, how to cook green vegetables and how to make sauce béarnaise. I answered them fully and correctly. But that didn't take away the sting.

I was furious at myself. There was no excuse for not remembering what a mollet was or, especially, the details of a caramel custard. I could never have guessed at the veau en surprise, though, as the paper wrapping was just a lot of tomfoolery — the kind of gimmicky dish a little newlywed would serve up for her first dinner party to épater the boss's wife. Caught up in my own romanticism, I had focused on learning far more challenging fare — filets de sole à la Walewska, poularde Toulousaine, sauce Vénetienne. Woe!

There were no questions about complicated dishes or sauces, no discussion about which techniques and methods I'd use. Instead, they wanted me to memorize basic recipes taken from the little Cordon Bleu booklet, a publication written for beginner cooks that I had hardly bothered to look at. This exam was far too simple for someone who had devoted six months of hard work to cooking school, not to mention countless hours of her own time in the markets and behind the stove.

My disgruntlement was supreme, my amour-propre enraged, my bile overboiling. Worst of all, it was my own fault.

I despaired that the school would ever deign to grant me a certificate. Me, who could pluck, flame, empty and cut up a whole chicken in 12 minutes flat! Me, who could stuff a sole with forcemeat of weakfish and serve it with a sauce au vin blanc such as Mme. Brassart could never hope to taste the perfection of! Me, the supreme mistress of mayonnaise, hollandaise, cassoulets, choucroutes, blanquettes de veau, pommes de terre Anna, souflée Grand Marnier, fonds d'artichauts, onions glacées, mousse de faisan en gelée, balantines, galantines, terrines, pâtés, laitues braisées . . .me, alas!

Later that afternoon, I slipped down to the Cordon Bleu's basement kitchen by myself. I opened the school's booklet, found the recipes from the examination — oeufs mollets with sauce béarnaise, côtelettes de veau en surprise and crème renversée au caramel — and whipped them all up in a cold, clean fury. Then I ate them.



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Côtelettes de Veau en Surprise (Veal Chops Surprise)


11 tablespoons unsalted butter
2 large shallots, finely chopped
10 ounces mushrooms, trimmed, rinsed, dried and finely diced
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
6 veal chops, trimmed, 6 ounces each
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
12 thin slices cooked ham
1 egg white, beaten.

1. Heat 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over low heat. Add the shallots and sauté until softened. Increase the heat to high and add the mushrooms. Season with salt and pepper. Sauté until all the moisture has evaporated, then spread the mixture on a plate to cool.

2. Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Season both sides of the chops with salt and pepper. Heat the oil and 1 tablespoon of the butter in a large skillet over high heat. Add the chops and brown lightly on both sides. Transfer to paper towels to drain, and pat dry.

3. Cut six 12-by-10-inch rectangles of parchment paper. Melt the remaining 7 tablespoons butter. Position a rectangle of parchment so that the 10-inch side is directly in front of you. Brush with butter, and place a tablespoon of the mushroom mixture in the middle of the lower half of the rectangle. Top with a slice of ham, topped with a veal chop. Cover the veal with another slice of ham and another tablespoon of mushrooms. Repeat with the remaining pieces of parchment paper, veal chops, mushrooms and ham.

4. Brush a ¼ -inch border of egg white along the 3 edges of the lower half of the rectangles. Fold the upper half of the rectangle over the veal, and align the edges. Again brush the 3 edges with egg white, then fold and crimp the edges to make a strong seal. Continue until all six chops are encased in parchment. Brush the surface of the parchment with the remaining melted butter, and brush the crimped edges again with egg white. Lay the veal packets on a baking sheet and bake until the packets are puffed and brown, about 15 minutes. Transfer each packet to a plate to be opened at the table. Serves 6. Adapted from Le Cordon Bleu.



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Crème Renversée au Caramel (Caramel Custard)

½ cup plus 2/3 cup sugar
2 cups milk
1 ½ teaspoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
4 large egg yolks.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. In a small saucepan, combine ½ cup sugar with

¼ cup water. Bring to a boil over low heat, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Increase the heat to high and cook, without stirring, until the syrup turns a light caramel color. Remove the saucepan from the heat and dip the bottom into cold water to stop the cooking. Pour the caramel into a 4-cup charlotte mold, and tilt so that it covers the bottoms and sides. Let cool.

2. In a small saucepan, bring the milk and vanilla to a boil. In a heatproof bowl, beat the eggs, egg yolks and cup sugar until blended. Whisking constantly, pour the hot milk into the egg mixture; let rest for a few minutes, then strain. Pour the custard into the caramel-coated mold.

3. Put the mold in a small but deep baking or roasting pan, and add hot water to come about two-thirds up the sides of the mold. Place the pan on the stove over medium heat, and bring the water to a simmer. Transfer the pan to the oven. (The water should stay at a low simmer at all times; do not let it boil or the custard will overcook.) Bake until a knife inserted into the center of the custard comes out clean, 40 to 50 minutes. Keep the custard in the baking pan until the water cools. Remove from the pan to finish cooling. To serve, run the tip of a knife around the top of the custard to loosen it. Invert a serving platter over the mold and quickly turn it over again. Carefully remove the mold. Serves 6. Adapted from Le Cordon Bleu.

Julia Child was an author of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and the host of "The French Chef." She died in 2004. Alex Prud'homme, Childs's nephew, is the author of "The Cell Game." This article is an excerpt from "My Life in France," by Julia Child with Alex Prud'homme, to be published in April.



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Staying "well"

For folks to live well, they usually want to feel that they are taking care of their health by doing certain things (or NOT doing certain things). This article does a good job explaining some recent findings about women's health that were surprising. Enjoy.

The New York Times
February 19, 2006
News Analysis
Women's Health Studies Leave Questions in Place of Certainty
By DENISE GRADY

So what do women do now? The results of two major studies over the past two weeks have questioned the value of two widely recommended measures: calcium pills and vitamin D to prevent broken bones, and low-fat diets to ward off heart disease and breast and colon cancer.

Should women abandon hope, since it looks as if nothing works? Abandon guilt and assume diet makes no difference? Or muddle on with salad and supplements, just in case?

The studies — part of the same government research project that in 2002 found hormone treatment for menopause did more harm than good — have confused women and prompted renewed examination of the regimens that many have been carefully following. Researchers find themselves parsing the results, and debating about how far the scientific rules can be stretched when it comes to measuring results and searching for evidence in smaller groups of patients within a large study.

The researchers admit that the findings were an unexpected and puzzling challenge to firmly held, almost religious beliefs about nutrition and health. And though some experts said the results meant women should look for other ways to prevent heart disease, cancer and bone loss, the scientists who conducted the studies insisted that hints of benefit in parts of the data could not be ignored.

"We just didn't come out with as strong a finding as everyone expected," said Dr. Marcia L. Stefanick, head of the study's steering committee. "The results weren't clear enough, weren't black and white."

"We're still debating amongst ourselves," Dr. Stefanick said.

The studies, which involved thousands of women and cost hundreds of millions of dollars, were the largest and most rigorous look ever at the effects of diets and supplements, and are unlikely to be repeated.

News of the findings spread rapidly, and women interviewed in several cities were aware of them.

Pouran Zamani-Hariri, 68, of Chicago, said she had been taking calcium and vitamin D every day for five years and planned to ask her doctor about the calcium study. But the results did not surprise her, Ms. Zamani-Hariri said, because despite taking the supplements, she has broken her shoulder and her leg within the last two years. "Maybe it proves that it doesn't work," she said.

Kim Curtis, 39, a portfolio accountant from Winthrop, Mass., said she chose full-fat foods over reduced-fat products because she worried about sugars and preservatives being used to replace fat in processed food. "The way things are, you're going to get cancer anyway," Ms. Curtis said.

But the researchers who conducted the study said their findings were not a signal to binge on bacon cheeseburgers.

"I was a little uncomfortable with some of the reactions," said Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, the program that has created the stir. It worries him, he said, that some people think the studies mean fat and calcium do not matter.

"It's not what we say, and I don't think it's what the papers say," Dr. Rossouw said.

"For folks who are on a low-fat diet, by all means continue," he added. "If you're on a high-fat diet, certainly get it down. That's the message we would like to send."

As for calcium and vitamin D, he said, the recent study had "enough hints" of benefit that women whose diets do not provide adequate amounts should take supplements.

The studies were part of the health initiative, which started in the 1990's. The one on the low-fat diet, which included nearly 49,000 women ages 50 to 79, found that overall, after eight years, the diet had no effect on the rates of breast cancer, strokes, heart attacks or colon cancer.

Similarly, the calcium study, which included more than 36,000 women, found that taking supplements for seven years did not prevent broken bones or colorectal cancer, but it did produce a 1 percent increase in bone density in the hip.

Given the findings, then, how can researchers like Dr. Rossouw still recommend low-fat diets and supplements? The answer depends on how one interprets data. These studies included women who were treated and a control group that took placebos or, in the diet study, ate whatever they wanted. The researchers tracked their health, comparing the groups.

According to standard rules based on probability, the difference in results between the groups has to be of a certain size to qualify as a genuine, or statistically significant, difference, and not something that could happen by chance.

In the diet study, the difference in breast cancer rates was not statistically different. But Dr. Rossouw said it was so close — a 9 percent reduction in risk, whereas 10 percent would have been significant — that if the study had gone on longer, it might well have become significant. That was one of his main reasons for continuing to defend a low-fat diet. In addition, he said, the women who started out eating the most fat and then reduced their intake seemed to have the biggest reduction in risk.

Dr. Larry Norton, a breast cancer expert at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, also said the reduction in breast cancer risk came too close to significance to ignore. "Any minute now that study could turn positive," Dr. Norton said.

He added, "It's a trend, a strong hint that something is happening and we need to follow these patients longer." The patients are still being monitored.

Dr. Norton is an author of a study in which a 50 percent reduction in dietary fat reduced the risk of cancer recurrence in women who had already had breast cancer.

A participant in the government study, Connie Elsaesser, 76, of Cincinnati, said she had mostly given up butter and cut back on cheese and desserts. At times she had cravings, Ms. Elsaesser said, but she had no intention of resuming old eating habits.

"I've been brainwashed," she said.

The debate about the studies stems from findings in subgroups of patients, a kind of result considered questionable by many scientists.

A basic rule in setting up experiments is that a study must be designed from the very beginning to look for certain effects in a certain type of patient. It is generally not considered legitimate for researchers to go back over the data afterward and slice it up into smaller groups — sometimes called data snooping — until they find a result they like. That result could be false because it arose from chance.

In addition, if there is no statistically significant finding in the larger group, it is considered even worse to dig around in subgroups.

"Subgroup analyses can get you in trouble," Dr. Norton said. "They don't prove anything." But, he added, effects found in subgroups can lead to further studies.

In the calcium study, the researchers noticed intriguing differences in certain subgroups. The ones who took most of their calcium, 80 percent of the pills, had a 29 percent reduction in hip fractures. Women over 60 also had a reduction, 21 percent.

Those findings persuaded Dr. Rossouw and Dr. Elizabeth G. Nabel, the director of the health initiative and of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, to recommend supplements for women whose diets did not include enough calcium. "I think those are fair health messages," Dr. Nabel said. "I don't think it's overstating the data or cheating."

But statisticians say that subgroup analyses are seductive and perilous, and that the danger is in believing too much.

The health initiative investigators are cautious and conservative in their analyses, Dr. Rossouw said. They decide ahead of time on subgroups they plan to examine — women of different ages, women who did and did not follow their assigned treatment, women of different races — and give greater weight to those analyses than to ones they decide to do after the study is completed.

But what does it mean when, as happened in this study, the subgroup analysis found that women in their 50's had more hip fractures if they took calcium and vitamin D? What does it mean if the women who were deficient in calcium were not helped by the supplements?

The temptation, statisticians say, is to pick the subgroup analyses that support a favored hypothesis and disregard the ones that do not.

"The probability that you will see a spuriously positive effect gets very big very quickly," said Dr. Susan Ellenberg, a former Food and Drug Administration official who is now a statistician at the University of Pennsylvania.

The health initiative investigators say they are aware of the pitfalls.

One way to decide whether to use a subset, Dr. Rossouw said, is "the reality check." He explained: "For a person knowledgeable in this field and knowing what is likely to be plausible, what do you believe?"

That, for example, is why the health initiative investigators emphasized their analysis of women who complied with their assigned treatment, be it placebos or calcium and vitamin D supplements.

Donald Berry, a statistician at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he would not be so critical of the analysis of women who took most of their pills, although he was not overwhelmed by the effect. The annual rate of hip fractures in women who adhered to the regimen was 10 per 10,000, compared with 14 per 10,000 in women taking placebos.

"One thing that is absolutely clear," Dr. Berry said. "If there is a benefit, it's not great, no matter which subgroup we're talking about."

Dr. Ellenberg quoted another statistician, Richard Peto of Oxford University, who said of subgroups, "You should always do them but you should never believe them."

Dr. Nabel acknowledged that statisticians often frowned on using subgroups, but, she said: "Medicine is an art. You take the data you have in hand and do your best to interpret it for the individual sitting across the table from you."

These studies are not the last word from the health initiative. There will be more reports and analyses, many based on subgroups, Dr. Nabel said.

Dr. Rossouw said, "Probably 15 to 20 papers a year for the next 5 years would be a conservative estimate."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Maureen Balleza from Houston, Gina Kolata from New York, Gretchen Ruethling from Chicago, Andrea Zarate from Miami and Katie Zezima from Boston.
###

Through a bulb, dimly

Finally, a marriage made in lighted heaven.

Dim the light fantastic
Rheostats and fluorescent bulbs: Together at last!

Andrew Leonard

Feb. 15, 2006 | If it weren't for the damn dimmer switch problem, my house would be entirely lighted by compact fluorescent bulbs. Never mind the environmental benefits: The fact is that C.F. bulbs use far less electricity and last far longer than their incandescent competitors. For convenience reasons alone, I love them. I can plug 'em in, and forget about them for years.

But, alas, a previous owner of my house was driven mad by a lust for rheostats; there are dimmer switches everywhere, and one of the things everyone is warned about compact fluorescents is that they do not play well with dimmer switches. C.F.s aren't even supposed to be turned off and on too frequently -- their 10,000 hours of life is best achieved if they are left switched on for long periods.

(The reason for this has to do with the "electronic ballast" that is a key part of C.F. bulbs. Essentially a solid-state circuit that maintains the correct power frequency for efficient operation, the ballast doesn't prosper when the incoming voltage is altered by a heavy hand on the dimmer switch. While there are some C.F. bulbs that can be dimmed, they're more expensive and sometimes require special switches.)

So, imagine my excitement when today's newsletter from TerraPass alerted me to a new kind of compact fluorescent, a "cold cathode fluorescent" bulb, manufactured by Litetronics. Not only do these new bulbs last for an incredible 25,000 hours, we are told, but they love to be dimmed, and they don't even mind being strobed! What's not to like? I'm going to a buy a bushel of them, and never look back.

I'm probably overly optimistic, but incremental technological breakthroughs such as these make me frisky with hope. Conservation and the development of alternative sources of renewable energy aren't the only sustainable answers to the depletion of our fossil fuel reserves. So, of course, is steadily ratcheting up the efficiency with which we consume energy. Fifty or a 100 years from now, if we survive peak oil and global warming and nuclear terrorism, our descendants will look back at the present era as the the Great Age of Waste. They will be like the Fremen in Frank Herbert's science fiction novel "Dune," who lived in an environment so devoid of water that they were forced to develop technologies for saving every drop of their own sweat. The very thought of a person doing something as extravagant as taking a shower struck the Fremen as unconscionably obscene.

My grandchildren will be equally repulsed by the repugnant concept that people once changed a light bulb every few months. They will treat the gruesome horror that Americans used to get only 10 miles to the gallon in their SUVs with the same incomprehension as my own children deal with my claim that I once changed the channel on the TV with my bare hands.

-- Andrew Leonard

Aging Well

Residents of Beacon Hill in Boston, 52 to 98, grow old at home with support from a community group. Above, a personal trainer, Jan Burgess, coaches David B. Arnold Jr., 83.

If ya gonna grow well into your senior years - this is how to do it !





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February 9, 2006
Aging at Home: For a Lucky Few, a Wish Come True
By JANE GROSS
BOSTON

ALONE in his row house on Beacon Hill, with four precipitous flights of stairs and icy cobblestones outside the front door, John Sears, 75, still managed to look after himself after he was hit by a taxicab and left with a broken knee.

That is because Mr. Sears was one phone call away from everything he needed to remain in his home, the goal of more than 80 percent of the nation's elderly as they confront advancing age, according to consistent polls.

Mr. Sears required both practical assistance and peace of mind: Transportation to and from the hospital. An advocate with him at medical appointments. Home-delivered meals from favorite restaurants. Someone at his side as he hobbled to the bank and the barber. Someone else to install grab bars in his bathroom. A way to summon help in an emergency. People to look in on him.

All these services were organized for Mr. Sears by Beacon Hill Village, an innovative nonprofit organization created by and for local residents determined to grow old in familiar surroundings, and to make that possible for others. Community-based models for aging in place designed by the people who use them are the wave of the future, experts say, an alternative to nursing homes and assisted living centers run by large service providers.

At Beacon Hill Village, members must pay dues and must live in either the storied Beacon Hill or Back Bay neighborhoods. Though the model would probably be more difficult to adapt to poorer communities, the organization is poised to show others how to do what it has done. And the offer of expertise comes as the first wave of baby boomers turns 60, many of them dismayed by their parents' long-term care options and anxious about their own.

"Let's hope we're spreading the seed of what could be a prototype," said Mr. Sears, a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives in the 1960's and of the Boston City Council in the 70's and the loser, in 1982, to Michael S. Dukakis in the state's gubernatorial race. "Maybe once a decade somebody has an idea where you have to say, 'Why didn't someone do this sooner?' "

Beacon Hill Village originated with a dozen civic-minded residents of this neighborhood of 19th-century gas lamps, red brick sidewalks and ancient elms. They all wanted to remain at home, even after transportation and household chores became difficult or dangerous, the point at which many older people quit familiar surroundings. They also wanted to avoid dependence on adult children.

They were unwilling to be herded by developers into cookie-cutter senior housing and told what to do and when to do it by social workers half their age. They had no intention of giving up the Brahms Requiem at St. Paul's Chapel for a singalong at the old folks' home, or high tea at the Ritz-Carlton for lukewarm decaf in the "country kitchens" that are ubiquitous in retirement communities.

"I don't want a so-called expert determining how I should be treated or what should be available to me," said 72-year-old Susan McWhinney-Morse, one of the founders. "The thing I most cherish here is that it's we, the older people, who are creating our own universe."

Five years ago, Beacon Hill Village was a wish, not a plan.

Today, it has 340 members ages 52 to 98, an annual budget of $300,000, an executive director and staff, a stable of established service providers and enough foundation support to subsidize moderate or low-income members, who number one-fifth of the total. The annual fee is $550 for an individual and $780 for a household, plus the additional cost of discounted "à la carte" services.

The grass-roots experiment here drew praise in a recent AARP publication, and has been hailed by an array of research institutes, including the AgeLab at M.I.T. and the North Carolina Center for Creative Retirement in Asheville, N.C. It has also been a hot topic at citizens' roundtables in a dozen communities as people met to discuss how to lead fulfilling lives in the retirement years.

Beacon Hill will publish a how-to manual next month, intended to guide others through the complexity of creating a business plan and surveying community needs. That manual will encourage imitations, according to Judy Goggin, a vice president at Civic Ventures, a research institute focusing on baby boomers and aging, which is helping set up the nationwide roundtables.

"This is a business model that could easily be replicated with subsidies from a city or county," Ms. Goggin said. "And once other communities realize that, even more of them will start to pay attention."

In the Beacon Hill model, membership dues cover weekly trips to the supermarket, rides from volunteers, group exercise classes and lectures on topics related to aging. Paid services — including home repair or home health aides — are generally discounted anywhere from 10 to 50 percent from the going rate.

Most valuable, many members say, is the comfort that comes from being one phone call away from familiar staff members who patiently talk them through problems. "We are more than a Rolodex," said J. Atwood Ives, a founding member, who is called Woody.

Beacon Hill Village sees a new source of revenue in helping others replicate what it has done. The manual will be priced at $300 for nonprofits and neighborhood groups and $500 for for-profits and municipalities. That income, along with $1,200-a-day fees from a new consulting service, will be plowed back into member services, said Judy Willett, executive director of Beacon Hill Village.

The manual will describe mistakes as well as successes. The biggest mistake, Ms. Willett and the board members agree, was a marketing strategy that failed to reckon with the fact that most old people do not want to admit they need help. Ms. Willett has 700 names in her file of prospective members who have all said they are "not ready yet."

"I call them the N.R.Y.'s," Ms. Willett said. "They still haven't fallen or been to the E.R. at Mass General."

To persuade the N.R.Y.'s, new promotional materials eliminated mention of age or infirmity, along with the phrase "virtual retirement community," and substituted the slogan "plan for tomorrow, live for today."

Even the founding members are vain about their own vitality. One, David B. Arnold Jr., 83, said the only Beacon Hill Village service he uses is a private trainer who keeps him limber for downhill skiing.

Mr. Arnold, like many of the founders, is a Harvard alumnus, a trustee of many cultural institutions in the city and a millionaire. After selling a technology business, he said he enjoyed the challenge of inventing something from scratch that would benefit his neighborhood. In that, he is like another founding member, Mr. Ives, 69, a semiretired investment advisor, who said that people with "passion, time, wisdom and wealth" had the responsibility to spearhead projects like this one.

The two men enlisted the help of Harvard Business School friends who give pro bono advice to nonprofit startups. They also had connections at Massachusetts General Hospital and arranged access, and timely appointments, for their members to an otherwise closed geriatric practice. They found foundations to subsidize memberships for 63 neighbors with annual incomes below $45,000.

They also made sizable donations themselves during the costly trial-and-error startup. Even now, when almost half the organization's income of $297,863, or $132,863, comes from membership dues, board members, like Mr. Arnold and Mr. Ives, contributed more than $100,000 last year, according to the 2005 annual report.

That raises the obvious question of whether a Beacon Hill Village is possible in less privileged communities. Some experts, like Ms. Goggin at Civic Ventures, say that municipalities or foundations could provide money. Others, like Jon Pynoos, a professor of gerontology at the University of Southern California, point to federal and state pilot programs in supporting the elderly at home.

The United States Administration on Aging, for example, is currently paying for service coordinators at 60 "naturally occurring retirement communities," or NORC's, neighborhoods or apartment buildings where many people have grown old together. And a few state Medicaid programs are giving the elderly vouchers to buy home care services, when Medicaid has historically been limited to nursing homes.

The needs of Beacon Hill Villagers range from minimal to all-consuming.

Ruth Barclay, 85, welcomes a steadying hand on her elbow and help with her packages when she goes grocery shopping. Suzanne Stark, 80, who pays $100 a year in membership because of her moderate income, called for help when she couldn't get her sick cat into the carrier for a trip to the vet. Dorothy Newell, 75, needs someone to water her plants because she can no longer lift the watering can. Miriam Huggard, 97, has an aide five days a week in her second-floor walk-up apartment; she is one of 15 members with full- or part-time help at home.

The cost of an aide, about $25 an hour, would be prohibitive for many. On a case-by-case basis, Ms. Willett said, she can turn to a foundation to keep someone out of a nursing home. But as an organization, Beacon Hill Village made an early decision, for financial and legal reasons, not to own real estate or directly provide medical care. Thus, it has no homegrown solution for members who cannot stay at home.

Mr. Sears wants no part of the assisted living center in suburban Concord where his twin sister lives. But he cannot afford round-the-clock help should he need it, Mr. Sears said, describing himself as real-estate-rich and cash-poor. And his Acorn Street treasure, five stories high and one room deep, demands that he be mobile.

On his lap is a dinner tray — ravioli and merlot brought in from a neighborhood bistro by a young Beacon Hill staff member. Mr. Sears sits in a scarred leather chair almost invisible behind stacks of yellow newspapers and towers of history books that reference his ancestors.

Mr. Sears can summon an ambulance and open the front door with the push of a button on his key fob, relieving the dread of days alone lying on the floor. Recently, he slept on the parlor couch a few nights rather than risking the stairs. But that is no long-term solution when the kitchen is one floor up and the bathroom one floor down.

Mr. Sears said everybody at Beacon Hill Village was concerned about him being alone. It helps that the "cane brigade," as some of the women call themselves, escort him to "little functions," Mr. Sears said. On this bitter night, Erin Lehman, Beacon Hill's 29-year-old program coordinator, not only brought dinner but also kept him company while he ate. So did Cynthia Scott, 65, a member who said she should have been at home with her husband, who had a cold, but was enjoying Mr. Sears's charming patter.

"Just look at the rough-looking mob here this evening," Mr. Sears said, with an exaggerated sweep of the hand toward his helpers. "There's always somebody around if I need them. This is a marvelous aid to older people, especially those of us who live alone."



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Cowabunga !

Do i really have to explain why this photo and this article express the very essence of what it feels like to live well ?

The New York Times
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February 8, 2006
At Mavericks, Thousands See the Best Wipe Out
By STEVE HAWK

HALF MOON BAY, Calif., Feb. 7 — It used to be that the most well-publicized surf contests were held at places where the size of the parking lot mattered more than the size of the surf. Not anymore.

On Tuesday, spectators descended on this underprepared seaside town about 20 miles south of San Francisco to watch the so-called Super Bowl of Surf Contests at Mavericks, one of the world's most consistently dangerous — and photogenic — surf spots.

In front of an estimated 30,000 spectators, most of whom could not discern one rider from another or even see more than a fraction of each ride, the South African Grant Baker, 32, stroked into one of the biggest and best-shaped waves of the hourlong final to take home the Mavericks Surf Contest's $30,000 first-place check.

Using the famously understated yardstick of big-wave surfers, Baker and other competitors were calling his heat-winning wave a 20- to 25-footer, but photos and video replays show that the wave face was clearly closer to 45 feet, if not bigger.

Later in the same heat, Baker stroked into an even bigger one, but he could not manage to get down it far enough before the upper half heaved, taking him with it. It was one of the one of the worst wipeouts of the event.

"I told him to go on that one," said his fellow finalist Evan Slater, 34, of Vista, Calif. "I didn't want it. Sometimes you tell the other guy to go, and you hope he doesn't make it but still comes up O.K."

Tyler Smith of Santa Cruz, Calif., finished second and took home $10,000. Brock Little of Haleiwa, Hawaii, was third and won $5,000.

This was the fifth time that Jeff Clark, the contest organizer who pioneered this spooky surfing spot in the mid-70's and surfed it alone for nearly 15 years, determined that the swell and local weather conditions were favorable enough to hold the event. These were also, by all accounts, the cleanest and biggest waves at Mavericks in several years.

"If you drew it on paper, in a perfect world, this is how it would be drawn," Clark, 48, said after the event. "Perfect weather, perfect conditions and really big waves."

Like most of the cities along coastal Northern California, Half Moon Bay is a beach town where people rarely go to the beach. The default weather report calls for overcast or foggy skies, and the ocean water stays in the 50's year-round. But on Tuesday, a high-pressure system brought T-shirt-and-sandals weather to the coast, creating smiles on the faces of the contest's promoters and sponsors.

Although Mavericks is far from a spectator-friendly surf spot, thousands of people stood or squatted in the crumbly, unstable bluffs of Pillar Point, which overlooks the waves a quarter-mile offshore. Some complained about inadequate parking and toilet facilities, but the crowd's overall attitude was genial and appreciative.

The weather proved to be ideal for big-wave surfing, with light offshore winds grooming the muscular, long-distance waves into thick, intimidating cylinders.

"This was one of the best days out here in a few years," said the longtime Mavericks standout Grant Washburn, who placed fifth. With only six competitors in the water at a time, and after having surfed two 45-minute preliminary heats before the final, Washburn said that fatigue caused him to be uncharacteristically selective when the bigger waves rolled through.

"I passed up some waves that would have been among the best waves you'd ever want," he said. "I had a couple where I had a nice ramp at the top to get in, but I didn't go because it was still going to be a coin flip whether you'd make it or not."
###

Finding your inner Woman

Here's an interesting theory: to be an effective leader, develop your feminine side. Enjoy.

The New York Times
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February 5, 2006
Follow Me
By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE

That irritating American Express commercial is blaring again during the college basketball telecasts. The scrappy Polish guy from Chicago is standing in front of his bench, his feet firmly planted on the holy hardwood of Duke's Cameron Indoor Stadium, his jaw locked with intensity. For years, Mike Krzyzewski, the legendary Coach K, has been pounding your team, my team and every other damn team in America, but here he is saying that he's not, really, all about basketball. His purpose is a higher one. "I don't look at myself as a basketball coach," he says in the ad. "I look at myself as a leader who just happens to coach basketball."

So, three national championships and 10 Final Four appearances, all achieved with his usual roster of clean-cut all-Americans, and now this: the high priest of Blue Devils basketball as corporate icon. Leadership guru.

Ethics exemplar. And soon to become, in marketing terms, "the Michael Jordan of college coaches," according to his agent, David Falk (who is, yes, Jordan's agent).

Krzyzewski (pronounced sha-SHEF-ski) has been doing about 30 corporate speaking gigs a year for about $50,000 a pop. (He plans to cut back on the number of speeches while raising his fee to $100,000.) He is host of an annual conference at Duke's Fuqua School of Business. The university, in an unusual move, put its basketball coach's name on an academic center, the Fuqua/Coach K Center of Leadership & Ethics, and made Krzyzewski an "executive in residence" with the expectation that he will be able to become a professor whenever he stops coaching. In addition, Duke Corporate Education, which consults to businesses, has developed a program that uses Krzyzewski's methods as a teaching tool. PricewaterhouseCoopers has so far sent about 500 senior associates and managers — most of them "partners in the making," as they were described to me — to study Duke basketball in a "metaphoric context" to help them reach personal and professional goals.

All of this is easy to ridicule because Krzyzewski is, after all, a mere coach — and in some quarters, especially among rival fans in the bitterly competitive Atlantic Coast Conference, a reviled one. "The Anti-Duke Manifesto," which is widely circulated on the Internet and typical of some of the vitriol aimed at Krzyzewski, reads something like a federal indictment and, at more than 6,000 words, runs about as long. Its anonymous author makes the impossible-to-prove charge that even within the foulmouthed fraternity of college basketball coaches, Krzyzewski's language on the sideline is more profane than most. The manifesto attributes much of Duke's success to favorable calls from referees, which seems far-fetched. More broadly, Krzyzewski is accused of being a sanctimonious, self-satisfied hypocrite.

What the manifesto demonstrates, mainly, is how satisfying it can be to hate success and, even more so, to hate success linked to virtue. It is far more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, to try to understand it.

Is Krzyzewski smug? Well, anyone who wants to beat you — and then sell you the book on how it was done — can be accused of that. But there is a larger truth to keep in mind. Krzyzewski is not lucky. Nobody stays lucky for a quarter-century. He's good. And not simply good in an Al Davis "Just win, baby" kind of way. In an era of rapacious C.E.O.'s, crooked congressmen and predatory lobbyists who rip off Indian tribes, a man who runs a squeaky-clean program within the dubious world of big-time college sports just might be worth listening to.

Alan D. Schwartz is the president of Bear Stearns, a Wall Street firm that generated more than $7 billion in revenue last year. Sitting in his office one recent morning, looking out over much of Manhattan, he told me that Krzyzewski was his role model: "I think executives like me aspire to be his peer, and I don't say that tongue in cheek. Leadership is such an intangible quality, but it's really clear when you see it. I said to him once, 'You may be better at what you do than anybody I know is at what they do."'

So what is the secret to Krzyzewski's success? For starters, he coaches the way a woman would. Really.

Almost everything in leadership comes back to relationships.

Chapter 2: Building Your Team, From "Leading With The Heart: Coach K's Successful Strategies For Basketball, Business, And Life" (2000), By Mike Krzyzewski, With Donald T. Phillips

About a month into the current basketball season, Krzyzewski's 26th at Duke, I walked into his cubbyhole of an office at Cameron Indoor Stadium, just steps away from the basketball court. (He has another, much bigger office in a building next door.) "Don't get too close," he said. "I might stink a little bit." He had just finished lifting weights and was still perspiring. He also seemed agitated, all revved up in a way I had not seen before. That afternoon's practice was soon to begin, and he told me, with evident glee, that he planned to rip into his players.

The Duke Blue Devils at that point had won their first seven games and were ranked No. 1 in the nation, but in several of those contests they had sputtered and prevailed only because of superior talent or, in one case, last-second heroics: a Duke player's heave from near midcourt swished through the net as time expired, giving Duke a 2-point victory over Virginia Tech.

A coach has just a few moments each season to galvanize a team and lift it to a higher plateau, and Krzyzewski knew that this afternoon was one of them. He had a couple of targets in mind: two talented freshmen on whose development he believed the season rested. They weren't playing "fast enough," he said. Their tentativeness was making a mess of Duke's usually fast and fluid motion offense. He wanted the freshmen to be more engaged in each moment (rather than the one just past or the one coming up) and to play more instinctively and without fear of making mistakes. It was the opposite of the guidance you might expect — which would be to counsel young players to slow down and think about what they were doing. He actually wanted them to think less.

Krzyzewski explained his method for getting such points across. "You gotta go just like this," he said as he formed his right hand into a claw, then extended it toward me and rotated his wrist as if he were about to rip my chest open. "You gotta get through all their layers and right into their hearts and say, 'I want this from you and I want it right now.' They're not used to that. Nobody has ever come at them like that before. So I've got to go after them really hard."

Later, after we spoke, Krzyzewski confronted his team behind closed doors. "He told us freshmen to stop playing passive and to play with an attacking style," Greg Paulus, a first-year point guard, told me. "We heard him. Loud and clear."

Krzyzewski is a tough man, obviously, as well as sort of a guy's guy, someone who knows how to use his iconic status as the coach of one of America's fabled sports programs to great effect. Men want to be around him. They want his attention, his approbation. Long after they have given up their dreams of being sports stars, they can still hope to be what he is: the executive at the top of his game. I heard him begin a speech to a corporate group by recognizing several friends in the audience, including a renowned knee surgeon who many years ago had operated on his ankle. "Let me introduce a great surgeon to you," he said, before adding, in jest, "He screwed up my ankle, so then he started doing knees." That jocular one-two punch of ridicule and praise is a distinctly male thing and something that most women would not attempt; Krzyzewski, a master of the form, pulled it off with aplomb.

Krzyzewski's toughness and his wisecracking, just-one-of-the-boys manner are certainly part of his leadership style. These qualities buttress his status and authority, but they form just one layer, an outer layer.

In Krzyzewski's office that day, a few minutes after he thrust his clawed hand toward my chest, I said to him that I had noticed something about his approach to leadership: despite the unquestioned authority he commands, his style, on balance, is more feminine than masculine. At Duke games, after he gives his instructions during a timeout — the classic command-and-control moment — his players break away from him and form their own huddle. To talk to one another. Duke players constantly consult with one another on the court without looking to the bench for direction or approval. Krzyzewski believes that even a practice should have a certain sound, by which he means he should hear his players communicating back and forth constantly.

When he recruits a player, Krzyzewski tells him, "We're developing a relationship here, and if you're not interested, tell me sooner rather than later." That word — relationship — is one he uses frequently. To players who may leave after a year or two for the National Basketball Association, he says: "If you come here, for however long, you're going to unpack your suitcase. We're going to form a bond, and you're going to be part of this family."

What I said to Krzyzewski, precisely, was: "You know what, you manage like a girl, basically." He laughed and, somewhat to my relief, agreed. "Mostly, I've been in a male world," he said. "Catholic high school, all boys. West Point, all boys. The Army, all boys. Basketball, all boys. But I don't do things in the way that background probably would predict I should. I'm a hybrid, which I think you should be."

Game day is not a day for long, drawn-out speeches. It is a time for interaction.

Chapter 8: Game Day

Krzyzewski grew up on the North Side of Chicago, and even after his quarter-century in Durham, N.C., you can still hear, in his nasal voice, inflections of the old neighborhood. (The word "this," for example, comes out sounding more like "dis.") He thinks about everything he does — how he presents himself is central to how he leads — so the accent is probably something he did not want to lose and may even at times accentuate. It is a remnant of roots that are working-class to the core. His father operated an elevator in a downtown office building, and his mother scrubbed floors at the Chicago Athletic Club. His older brother, Bill (his only sibling), went into the city's fire department and retired after attaining the rank of captain.

Krzyzewski was a savvy high school point guard but not talented enough to attract scholarship offers from the big basketball powers. The coach who came calling was Bobby Knight, then the head man at the United States Military Academy at West Point. "I don't want to be a soldier," Krzyzewski protested to his parents. His mother and father had a quick (and, as Krzyzewski recalls, angry-sounding) conversation in Polish. They later told him to accept the free education being offered because they didn't have the money to buy him one.

In the American Express commercial, Krzyzewski says, "My life isn't about playing games," but in a literal sense, that's all his career has been about. Krzyzewski played three years for Knight. After that, the boy who never wanted to be a soldier was granted his wish, more or less. While many of his classmates were serving in Vietnam, he spent three years coaching military basketball teams, then two years as the coach at a military prep school in Virginia. Capt. Michael William Krzyzewski then resigned his military commission, worked for one year as a graduate assistant to Knight (who had taken over at Indiana) and then — without ever having served as a full-fledged assistant coach in college — accepted a job as head coach back at West Point.

Krzyzewski likes to call West Point "the greatest leadership school in the world." In his mind, the other academies largely teach technical skills — how to fly a fighter jet or sail an aircraft carrier — but West Point, more than the others, teaches officers how to bond units together and lead them into battle.

Knight is the most obvious influence on Krzyzewski's career and coaching methods, but by no means the most important; his wife has long been that. He met the former Carol Marsh, known as Mickie, when he was home on break from West Point and she was working out of Chicago as a stewardess for United Airlines. On an early date, to a Chicago Bears football game, he somehow revealed that she had been his third choice, after two others turned him down. "I had never known someone who could be so honest and so blatantly stupid," Mickie Krzyzewski told me. "I was thinking, How can this guy be so dumb?"

The Krzyzewskis were married on his graduation day at West Point at the academy's Catholic chapel. (He was dressed in his Army "blues," a formal uniform he'd become eligible to wear only a few hours earlier, when he graduated as an officer.) They have three adult children, all daughters, meaning that the Duke coach has long dwelled in a world of women.

If you read a sampling of books and other advice on leadership, a recurring theme emerges: managers should be more "interactive" and less "command and control," meaning they should share rather than hoard information, spread decision making and initiative across all levels of the company, and make clear that individual goals can be met only through team success. The rationale is twofold: in a complex world, no one person can know everything and direct from on high. Collaboration among large numbers of people, all of them sifting and synthesizing information, is ever more important. And more basically: people no longer just do what they're told. Not in a workplace, in a family or on a basketball team. Father might still know best, but now he has to explain himself. He has to clearly state goals and invest everyone in reaching them.

The interactive, or relational, qualities of leadership are stereotypically feminine; the command-and-control ones, masculine. The books don't straight out tell male executives to be more like women, but that message is clear.

Mike Krzyzewski's interactive/feminine qualities of leadership may be partly innate, but to a large extent, he learned them from his family.

"There's an empathetic part of leadership, and this is where my wife and my daughters have had a huge impact on me," Krzyzewski says. "Guys don't share insights. If a guy does, we call him a blowhard or a know-it-all, so we don't do it. Every night at the dinner table, my wife and girls discussed their day. They remembered details. They remembered the feeling that the detail brought, and the feeling before that, where as men we remember only the final feeling. We're all about the end of the story, the punch line."

You must be able to read your players.

Chapter 7: Turn Negatives Into Positives

The plowing and replowing of emotional terrain inside the Krzyzewski household is the sort of thing that might make some men thankful for the occasional out-of-town business trip. And coaches do, of course, take lots of trips. Typically, they stay up late with their assistant coaches watching game film while eating pizza and drinking beer. But starting with his first year at Duke, Krzyzewski's wife has accompanied him to the vast majority of away games. (His daughters, when they were younger, often went, too, but had to attest that their schoolwork was under control to be allowed to make the trip.)

"Many nights we would be in our pj's, sitting on the floor and watching film with the staff," says Krzyzewski's middle daughter, Lindy Frasher. "And Mom would put in her two cents." Did she comment on matters involving basketball, like how a certain play should be run? "Absolutely," Frasher says. "It was usually more about what a player might be thinking or feeling, but if she has something to say about basketball, believe me, they listen to her."

Mickie Krzyzewski was raised in Alexandria, Va., and attended a small Southern Baptist college, but left before graduating. "Mike's ability to take risks has helped him, and it was risky, at the time, to include us like he did," she says. "Remember that this was before the time that TV cameras showed the families in the stands as a point of interest. But the girls and I had to live up to it. We couldn't be hysterical or whatever those stereotypes of women are. We had to add something that was valid."

Mickie says she and her husband made an agreement when he began coaching at Army: that he would never say she couldn't go somewhere with him because no other women would be there. (At West Point, when military rules prohibited her from riding on the bus, Mickie followed behind in her car.) It was not a hard thing for him to agree to because he did not believe, even then, that there was something sanctified about the all-male atmosphere of a men's college team. His game was basketball, not male bonding.

"His wife and daughters are around constantly," says J. J. Redick, a star of this year's team. "When you have all these males around and all that intensity, it's nice to get a hug sometimes."

That may sound trite or unimportant, and Redick's comments are of the type that could easily fire the imaginations of anti-Duke partisans who already like to taunt Duke players as soft preppie types. But in an era of rampant lawlessness in big-time college sports, Duke players have generally stayed out of trouble and away from the antisocial behavior that has occurred within the all-male caldrons of other programs. Yes, it is impolitic in some circles to suggest that the role of women is to civilize men. And there are surely higher callings than keeping watch over pampered college athletes. But it's also a fact that there are some things boys don't do when women are around — and at Duke, they always are.

Judy Rosener, an expert on gender differences in leadership who has written for the Harvard Business Review and other publications, told me that men and women respond to different signals. "Women tend to have more of a sensitivity to subliminal things," she says. "They pick up on body language. Tone of voice. They don't just look at the action or the result."

Mike Krzyzewski says that his wife has served as a kind of early-warning system, that she can see things he can't: "Mickie will say to me, 'There's something wrong with Shane.' I'll say, 'There's nothing wrong with him.' And she says, 'O.K., but there is.' I try to dismiss her, but I'm thinking, There's probably something bothering him. And sure enough, I'll take him aside, and there is. This kind of thing has happened hundreds of times over the years."

Krzyzewski's credo is teamwork — no one person can do it alone — and his family has been his team. His wife has poured her considerable energy and intellect into his career. His oldest daughter, Debbie Savarino, now oversees his charitable and community projects. Lindy Frasher has taken on part of the role that Mickie Krzyzewski always filled informally. As Duke basketball's "performance development coordinator," she attends practices and staff meetings and, according to the team's media guide, provides a "non-basketball perspective" for the coaches.

Frasher, who is also a high school teacher, explains to me that the Krzyzewski women provide more than a soft cushion of support. "It's sort of a protective thing, too," she says. "They're like my little brothers, and I'd kill someone on their behalf if I had to."

Believe that the loose ball you're chasing has your name on it.

Chapter 5: Teamwork

A strong high school principal might be a big man whose booming voice resounds down corridors, or a small-boned woman who once taught English and barely speaks above a whisper. A successful corporation might be led by a straight-from-the-gut guy like Jack Welch, or a recede-into-the-background geek like Bill Gates, or a visionary like Steve Jobs. A winning sports team might be inspired by a fire breather like Vince Lombardi, or a fatherly presence like Joe Torre, or a diffident intellectual type like Bill Belichick. They're all good. They all win. They are all celebrated as leaders.

This is why nearly anyone who has been successful can go out on the road as a leadership expert or write one of the dozens of books that are published on the subject each year. ("Joe Torre's Ground Rules for Winners," Rick Pitino's "Lead to Succeed," Pat Croce's "Lead or Get Off the Pot!," Donald T. Phillips's "Lincoln on Leadership.") No one can replicate Jack Welch's General Electric, but maybe if you listen to him closely enough, and read and reread his best-selling books, you can learn a little something to take back to your own shop.

I traveled to Colorado Springs last summer to listen in as Krzyzewski gave one of his corporate speeches. The setting was the Broadmoor, a fancy resort that was hosting a conference of several hundred hospital executives put together by McKesson, a company that specializes in health care services. There is a distinct internal psychology to these sorts of gatherings. The attendees may, in their day-to-day lives, feel burdened by various pressures and perhaps even be cynical, but here they dress down in business casual, breathe in the mountain air and open themselves up to inspiration.

The speaker must be a person of high achievement but, ideally, not so lofty in manner that no one can connect with him. Krzyzewski, who turns 59 this month, came onstage just after his American Express commercial finished playing on a giant video screen. He still has an athlete's build, but he walks stiffly after a series of orthopedic surgeries: two hip replacements and an operation on his back. Rather than standing behind a lectern, he paced at the front of a stage. He used no notes.

The house lights were up because he likes to find a few faces to focus on, "to make eye contact," he says. He always looks for a few women because "they're more emotional, and when I talk about those things, they get it. They're right there with me."

In the first few minutes of his speech, he joked about his appearance — his big nose and overly large ears — and noted that he is "not the best-looking guy in the world." He told stories about his Chicago roots and his mother, who despite never going beyond the eighth grade was the wisest person he has known. He said he likes to "belch after eating Polish sausage, because for a Polack that's like reliving a great experience."

It was cheesy after-dinner material, vaguely inappropriate — and utterly effective. When he talked about his mother, who died in 1996, it didn't come off as shtick; it was clear he missed her. The Chicago stories came with maybe a little bit more of the Chicago accent, but not too much.

His speech was titled "Victory Through Teamwork and Leadership,² and he segued into the substance of it by telling a story about his experience as an assistant coach of the 1992 United States Olympic basketball team, the so-called Dream Team. Michael Jordan was part of that team, and one day after practice he asked Krzyzewski to help him work on some offensive moves. Krzyzewski said he felt intimidated by Jordan, who was not only a huge National Basketball Association star but had played for the University of North Carolina, Duke's archrival. But when Jordan approached Krzyzewski and addressed him as "Coach," the small nod of respect resonated. "How much better did that make us as a team?" he asked.

Krzyzewski knows from his time in hospitals that they are big, complex workplaces with hierarchies that stretch from high-paid specialists to residents to nurses to orderlies and janitors. "Know their names," he told these hospital C.E.O.'s. "You know what? 'Please' and 'Thank you' go a long way. You can be damn sure that every guy on my team says that. The best way to get better as a team is if everyone has ownership, and if you do these things, they will."

This is hardly profound. On the other hand, perhaps this particular audience, which listened without a fork or a spoon clinking and without any low hum of conversation, needed to be reminded of this. And maybe leadership itself is not complicated but, rather, primal: one person's ability to reach another and persuade him to be part of a team, all pulling in some common direction.

Look each other straight in the eye, tell the truth, full disclosure.

Chapter 1: Getting Organized

When Krzyzewski started at West Point in the summer of 1965, one of his first tasks was to swim as far as he could in water seven feet deep while carrying a 10-pound brick. "Sir, may I make a statement?" he asked his instructor. He was given permission. "Sir, I can't swim!" He had been in the water before — Lake Michigan — but only up to his waist. He was told to swim anyway, and promptly sank and had to be pulled from the water. He spent the next year taking a three-times-a-week remedial swim class with about 30 other city kids.

"Before I got to West Point, I was the golden boy of my neighborhood," he says. "It just knocked me back because there was stuff I had never been exposed to. The first time we went out in the field to put up a tent, guys were digging ditches around them, in case it rained. I guess they'd been Boy Scouts. It rained, and my tent just floated away. West Point had a huge impact on me because it put me in positions to fail, so I got comfortable with failure being a part of success."

At Duke, Krzyzewski is able to attract golden boys like himself — only they are much better athletes, drawn from the top sliver of available high school basketball talent. And that's not the only advantage he starts with over his competitors. Duke players also tend to be better students than most National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball players at major programs and — though it is difficult to generalize about such things — more likely to come from stable, middle-class backgrounds. (As at most N.C.A.A. schools, an athlete at Duke can gain admission with lower — sometimes much lower — academic credentials than other applicants have, but his grades and test scores have to be high enough to indicate that he can cut it at one of the nation's most academically select institutions.)

Grant Hill, perhaps Krzyzewski's greatest player, was an extreme example of the Duke basketball demographic; his Yale-educated father played in the National Football League, and his mother was a classmate of Hillary Clinton's at Wellesley. Still, in a sport that draws heavily from a poor, inner-city population, Krzyzewski gets more than his share of kids who are the sons of white-collar professionals, teachers, nurses, coaches and pastors.

When asked if he thinks it's easier for him to coach the kind of students he is able to attract, Krzyzewski says their backgrounds do not make them smarter players, necessarily, but do give them other attributes he finds useful. "What it means is that they have probably already learned about discipline, about being on a team, about being part of something bigger than themselves," he says. "So when I teach those things, I'm able to start at a different level."

Krzyzewski thinks of prospective recruits as falling into one of four categories: high maintenance, medium maintenance, low maintenance and no maintenance. "We get a lot of low- and no-maintenance guys," he says.

Abe Lemons, who led college basketball teams in Texas and Oklahoma for a combined 34 seasons, once observed that there were only two plays: "Romeo and Juliet" and Put the Darn Ball in the Basket, by which he meant that basketball (and possibly life itself) was not much about strategy. It's straightforward. The game does not reward trickery or surprise — it has no equivalent of the flea-flicker in football or the squeeze play in baseball — and true innovations (as opposed to rule changes) are so rare that the last great step into the future was the jump shot, popularized by the N.B.A. pioneer Joe Fulks in the late 1940's. A skilled basketball coach assembles the right mix of players and motivates them to play hard, mesh together and attend to all the little things that lead to victory.

Because Krzyzewski attracts kids who tend to feel secure, and not just about basketball, he can put pressure on them similar to what he experienced at West Point, knowing that even when they fail, they are unlikely to feel like failures. He can ask for a little more than some other coaches and demand it more quickly. This year's team is a case in point. Its senior leaders, J. J. Redick and Shelden Williams, are candidates for national player of the year, and they (along with other seniors) are responsible for mentoring the team's talented core of freshmen. But Krzyzewski has cleverly framed the setup so that the responsibility flows both ways, telling the freshmen that the season will rise and fall on their performance: "I've said, 'Look, we don't have time to wait for you. I've got four seniors and this is their last year, and they want to win now."'

That's not something a lot of coaches would heap on young players. Krzyzewski uses a bit of circular logic to convince them that they can give what he is demanding of them: "I tell them, 'It's in you. I know it is. I wouldn't have recruited you if it wasn't."' (In other words, if you weren't great, you wouldn't be here.)

Before coming to play for Krzyzewski, Greg Paulus, one of the freshmen, was rated one of the top high school point guards in the nation, as well as the top quarterback prospect. He is the golden boy taken to a ridiculous extreme. If he hadn't enrolled at Duke to play basketball, he could have played football at Notre Dame. You could certainly break a kid like that by giving him more than he could handle, but it would not be easy.

"He believes in us so much, and we believe in him so much that whatever he tells us to do," Paulus says, "we're going to do it to the best of our ability."

Duke players understand the culture. They know it before they even arrive. They want, desperately, to fit in, measure up and please the man at the top. One former Duke player, Mark Alarie, recalls that Krzyzewski ripped a picture of him off the locker-room wall after a game, a theatrical move that would seem unworthy of a bad Hollywood sports drama. "In the picture I was diving for a loose ball," Alarie says. "He crumpled it up and said, 'When are we going to see the Mark Alarie who would do that again?' It was calculated, but when you're in the moment, it doesn't come across as that."

One definition of leadership is, simply, the ability to give constructive criticism — to demand better performance in a way that inspires rather than deflates. The ability to do so is based on the underlying relationship as much as on the actual spoken words. Alarie, now a venture capitalist, played five years in the N.B.A. "I had coaches in the pros say things to me that were not that different from what I heard from Coach Krzyzewski," he says. "But it didn't feel motivational. It hurt, to be honest."

To a man, the Duke players I talked to, both current and former, say they consider Krzyzewski's most important attribute to be his honesty, even if it is a sometimes brutal honesty. J. J. Redick says he felt disappointed when his sophomore season ended with a loss (to Connecticut) in the semifinal game of the N.C.A.A. tournament. "After the Final Four ended," Redick explains, "Coach told me I was personally unworthy of being a national champion. A lot of people would feel that was harsh, and it was harsh, but it was the truth."

Redick says that he was "living a college lifestyle. I wasn't eating right. I wasn't going to sleep. I partied, and it caught up to me. I apologized to my teammates, and I made some changes in my life."

In early December I watched Duke's showdown with Texas on TV, a pairing of what were then the two top-ranked teams in the nation. It wasn't even a contest. Duke, led by Redick's 41 points, ran Texas right off the court, 97-66. The announcers praised Redick's deadeye shooting but seemed most impressed by his energy. They speculated that he might be the best-conditioned player in all of college basketball.

Regularly ask yourself: What's your job, knucklehead?

Chapter 16: Life

Krzyzewski's early teams at Duke struggled. The first three won a combined 38 games, against 47 losses. It was not until the 1984-85 season, his fifth, that he posted a winning record in the Atlantic Coast Conference. In the midst of a dreary 1982-83 season (11-17, with a 3-11 record in the A.C.C.), his job was even rumored to be in danger. Attracting top talent to Durham was not the slam dunk it is now. Grant Hill, who came to Duke a decade into Krzyzewski's reign, told me: "He's extremely persuasive. Being a salesman is part of the job, and he should get credit for that."

But Krzyzewski has since had unparalleled success. Over all, he has coached 19 high school all-Americans and seven national college players of the year. Of all Krzyzewski's Duke players, only two have stayed the full four years and failed to graduate, a remarkable record in an era when some other elite programs routinely graduate fewer than half their players.

Rival fans quite understandably view the parade of elite talent that flocks to Duke as a tremendous advantage, which, of course, it is. But Krzyzewski's admirers in the corporate world consider his handling of such an array of stars to also be his primary challenge — and one that they specifically relate to their own businesses.

"In our business and his business, people like being stars," says John Mack, the C.E.O. of Morgan Stanley. "Leadership is trying to get them to buy into a team concept, and that's what Mike does so well."

Sim Sitkin, the faculty director of Duke's Fuqua/Coach K Center of Leadership & Ethics, is Krzyzewski's mentor at the business school and, to some extent, his student. The packaging of Krzyzewski's methods as a business school product is mostly Sitkin's doing. "Having the talent that Mike has — the best, the brightest — makes some things easier and some things harder," he says. "It is completely analogous to a lot of business situations. How do you take a group of people like that and say, 'Some of you are actually better than others? And let's deal with that honestly, in a way that does not demean some or inflate the egos of others, and design a system that allows everyone to use their talents well."'

Leadership has been part of the curriculum for several decades now in most M.B.A. programs, but as an academic discipline, it remains notoriously squishy — difficult to quantify and therefore difficult to teach. "I was a mathematician,² Douglas Breeden, dean of the Fuqua School of Business, says. "I mathematically modeled problems in finance. You would have two or three variables, or maybe five. In leadership, it's like you have 20 or 30 or 40. So it's hard, and there are skeptics, people who say it's just too soft — that, O.K., maybe Jack Welch was a great leader with his style, and somebody else was great with a different style, so what does it prove? But it is too important not to teach, and we're making progress in finding things that we can actually measure."

Breeden acknowledges there is a marketing and fund-raising aspect to Fuqua's alliance with Krzyzewski, but says he had no qualms about having the coach's name on the leadership center, which is something like an on-campus think tank, generating courses, ideas, seminars and energy around the concept of leadership. It opened in 2003 and raised about $8 million in its first year, including $2 million to endow a Coach K Professorship in Leadership. "I used to play basketball," Breeden says. "I didn't think of basketball coaches as mental giants." But he says of Krzyzewski: "I'll be honest with you, I was kind of surprised at how smart I felt like he is. He is totally compatible with what we do here."

The book "Built to Last," by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras, suggests that companies that endure and prosper over time do not usually offer innovative products, but that "the company itself is the ultimate creation." Such companies "thoroughly indoctrinate employees into a core ideology ... creating cultures so strong that they are almost cultlike." That is not a bad description of Duke basketball.

The Krzyzewski brand is so strong that he need not be physically present when Duke Corporate Education (which is separate from the leadership center) teaches Duke basketball as metaphor. It's a half-day of a weeklong program and is taught primarily by Krzyzewski's student managers. The PricewaterhouseCoopers employees suit up in basketball gear and learn a Duke play. One of the lessons is that the best shooter does not always get to take the shot; sometimes he has to pass the ball or set a screen.

Krzyzewski's teams turn a yearly profit for Duke. In addition, he has helped raise more than $30 million so far for the Duke basketball "legacy fund," which among other things provides basketball scholarships, and he helped create a 30,000-square-foot community center in downtown Durham (the Emily Krzyzewski Family Life Center, named for his mother). He has also raised funds for the "K Lab" (officially, the Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Research Laboratory at Duke Medical Center), a research center for the prevention of athletic injuries.

Krzyzewski is a wealthy man: he reportedly makes about $1.5 million a year coaching basketball at Duke and several million dollars more a year from endorsements and corporate speaking. He lives on 12 secluded acres in Durham, where he spends much of his free time tending his extensive flower gardens. He enjoys living well, but it's clear that his peripatetic off-court life is something other than a money grab. His forays into the corporate world are a way to stay engaged and, to some extent, to keep from getting bored by basketball. He is not planning to leave coaching any time soon — "Why would you quit something you absolutely love?" — and last year accepted a second basketball job (he's staying at Duke) as the head coach of USA Basketball. It's something like a corporate turnaround job. The United States was embarrassed with a bronze-medal finish at the 2004 Summer Olympics, and Krzyzewski was chosen to reclaim the gold.

The Duke coach counts several corporate titans among his close friends. Mack, of Morgan Stanley, is one, along with Steve Wynn, the Las Vegas casino magnate, and Schwartz at Bear Stearns. The friendships can, on the one hand, be viewed as rich, successful guys wanting to hang out with each other — and C.E.O.'s wanting to rub up against a sports figure. But I got the strong sense that for Krzyzewski, these relationships are part of his questing nature: he has things he wants to learn, and he figures they know some of them.

"I need different motivations beyond: I'm going to score more points than you," he says to me at one point. "O.K., I beat you in the last game, or you beat me. What the hell does that mean?"

I coach by feel. I follow my heart.

Chapter 8: Game Day

Krzyzewski nearly left Duke in 2004. Late in the summer of that year, after coming to his decision, he gave one of the occasional lectures he delivers at the university's Fuqua School of Business. He looked tired and a little drawn, but his audience was, if anything, more rapt than usual because they knew that just weeks earlier he had done something extraordinary: turned down a $40 million offer to coach the N.B.A.'s Los Angeles Lakers.

The M.B.A. students were (as at all top business schools) mostly in their mid-20's or older, and most had already been in the working world. They were future C.E.O.'s and entrepreneurs, go-getters on their way to big jobs and big salaries.

"You've heard of doing anything to make a deal work," he said to them. "My question is, Is that the last deal you're going to do?" He added: "All decisions are not bottom-line financial decisions. ... If money is your only passion, good luck and God love you."

Rejecting that kind of money, as Krzyzewski did, was its own kind of life-changing event — "a point of demarcation," his agent, David Falk, calls it. Paradoxically, turning down those millions was also an enhancement to the selling of Mike Krzyzewski, a way for him to become a bigger off-court presence.

Talking to the M.B.A. students at Fuqua that day, Krzyzewski was typically self-deprecating: "'What the hell did you do during the summer?' I turned down $40 million. You're probably thinking, We really want to hear what you have to say, you idiot."

But he knew he hadn't been an idiot. He turned down a job he didn't want. And at the same time, he had strengthened the Krzyzewski brand — the Winning With Virtue brand. All those national championships. The deep relationships forged with well-behaved, diploma-earning hoopsters. And then turning down millions to stay on campus. Mike Krzyzewski was, now, to his admirers, his corporate acolytes and — well, O.K., probably not to the author of the anti-Duke manifesto — ever more worthy of admiration.

Michael Sokolove is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.
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