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5/29/2005 7:01:54 PM ADT (GMT -3)
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Mark Webber�s European Grand Prix at Nurburging lasted only the distance to the first corner on the opening lap of 60, when he and McLaren-Mercedes driver, Juan Pablo Montoya, collided. Several cars became embroiled in the incident but Webber was the only lasting casualty, the BMW Williams driver sliding off into the gravel with damaged front left suspension and into early retirement.

Despite an initial good start at the lights, another poor run down to the first corner left Webber vulnerable, the 28-year old Australian having to do everything within his power to defend his position while those around him attacked.

�Obviously I�m very disappointed not to have been able to build on our result in Monaco last week,� said Webber. �But, what we did demonstrate at Nurburgring was that the pace of the FW27 is certainly very respectable and reliable, and we can now begin to close the gap to McLaren and Renault.�
�I was very happy how qualifying went considering the strategy I was on, and so it was a shame we weren�t able to realize that potential � it would have been an interesting race. Going out on the first lap is always the most painful thing to do. I had to protect my position heavily from Jarno Trulli and Fernando Alonso and when I arrived at turn one, there wasn�t quite enough room for both Juan Pablo and I, and unfortunately I made slight contact with the right rear tyre of the McLaren and that was enough to damage my front left suspension.�

Mark Webber

 

Alonso Wins 4th Grand Prix Of The Season


Alonso accepts title is in sight
EUROPEAN GP RESULT
1 F Alonso (Renault)
2 N Heidfeld (Williams)
3 R Barrichello (Ferrari)
4 D Coulthard (Red Bull)
5 M Schumacher (Ferrari)
6 G Fisichella (Renault)
7 JP Montoya (McLaren)
8 J Trulli (Toyota)

European Grand Prix winner Fernando Alonso says he is on course to become Formula One's youngest world champion.
The 23-year-old has now won four of this year's seven Grands Prix and has a 32-point lead with 12 races to go.

"If we keep this consistency, every time we will have more and more points. It seems we can do it," he said.

F1's youngest world champion so far was Brazilian Emerson Fittipaldi, who was 25 when he won his first title with Lotus in 1972.

Under the current system, it will prove very hard for anyone to catch Alonso because a driver can pick up points even if he finishes in eighth place.

A win is worth 10 points, with second place earning eight.

Then it is six points for third, five for fourth and so on down to eighth place, which receives one point.


To be probably the best car on the grid again, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race
Fernando Alonso

Alonso was pleased that Renault had recovered from a poor performance last weekend in Monaco, where they were unable to keep pace with Raikkonen after suffering major tyre problems.
"I am extremely happy, more than the victory I am happy because after fourth place at Monaco the team and I were not happy at all," he said.

"We had a very good car in Monaco and we didn't take as many points as we believed were possible.

"To be probably the best car on the grid again, to manage the tyres in the race, is probably better news for the rest of the season than winning the race."


Story from BBC SPORT:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/sport2/hi/motorsport/formula_one/4591847.stm

Published: 2005/05/29 15:37:48 GMT

� BBC MMV
 

Podium: race winner Fernando Alonso with Nick Heidfeld and Rubens Barrichello
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-29 (N�rburgring): Sunday raceThe Weekly Wrap

Iceman Frozen With Finish In Sight � May 29, 2005


Alonso Victorious On Last Lap

The final lap of a race is clearly not the safest and most secure time during a Grand Prix, especially for any Finnish driver in a Mclaren. Think back to the Spanish Grand Prix in 2001, when Mika H�kkinen was forced to retire due to a clutch failure on the last lap. Now, it was his followers turn, as Kimi R�ikk�nen was forced to hand over victory to title competitor Fernando Alonso on the last lap following a suspension failure that sent him flying off track at the beginning of the final lap of the race. Instead of closing the points gap to twenty points, the gap between first and second in the title race has sprouted open once again to 32 points.

Thankfully, I'm not the journalist who has to interview R�ikk�nen after the race, because there's probably not much fun in asking him any questions at the moment. R�ikk�nen had controlled the race from the beginning, overtaking pole-sitter Nick Heidfeld in the run-up to the first corner and never looking back. Unlike previous races, Kimi was forced to relinquish his lead during the pitstops for a matter of laps, but nonetheless was set to take his third victory in a row. Despite a strong charge from Fernando Alonso towards the end of the race, when Kimi's speed was hampered by an almost square front right Michelin, the pair entered the last lap with one and a half seconds of difference, enough to ensure the Mclaren a most probable victory.

Thus, Alonso has once again opened up his lead in the championship but, with twelve rounds to go, there's still a lot of ground to cover. The way the season is shaping up could not be any better for audiences with some of the most exciting races in modern F1 coming weekend after weekend, the European GP being no exception today. Right from the off the sparks were flying. As expected, the tight first corner provided immediate drama when a collision between Mark Webber and Juan Pablo Montoya ended Webber's race and stirred up the event for several others including Takuma Sato, Michael Schumacher and his brother Ralf. Whilst Schumacher emerged unscathed yet behind, Ralf and Sato were forced to pit for new nosecones.

David Coulthard took full advantage of the first corner m�l�� and rose from twelth on the grid to fourth place, holding a very good pace from thereon out. A penalty for speeding in the pitlane ended his hopes for a podium, which would have been realised without his drive-through as the Scot eventually finished fourth, thirteen seconds behind Rubens Barrichello. Red Bull Racing definitely proved its worth on the grid once again, and sadly was forced to miss out on another chance at a podium (one that will most certainly be achieved before the season is over), and DC even led the race for a short period of time between pitstops!

Alonso, obviously elated at the misfortune of R�ikk�nen, did not look like a great challenger early on, racing in fifth place behind Coulthard until the first pitstops. Even then, his speed was not comparable to the front running R�ikk�nen and Heidfeld, and only towards the end of the race did the threat of his Renault truly become apparent. Heidfeld, racing on a three-stop strategy, was never in the position to challenge for the win, having to make an extra pitstop very late in the race for a final spray of fuel into the Williams. Alonso, however, only increased his pace late in the race, while R�ikk�nen was clearly beginning to struggle following a pair of lockups that most certainly contributed to the tyre failure that ended his race.

Alonso was close to throwing it all away, as well. In his charge for fast laps prior to his second and final pitstop, Alonso spun at the Dunlop-hairpin and lost what at that point seemed like the deciding handful of seconds that would ensure R�ikk�nen's grip on the lead. It soon became clear that Alonso would receive another chance, when the onboard camera view from R�ikk�nen's car proved all too clearly how his tyre was falling apart lap by lap. It wasn't the most beautiful thing to watch, and anyone supporting him could only hope it would hold out for the last number of laps.

Alas, the tyre was causing such vibration in the suspension that it was the suspension which let go completely under braking for the first turn of the final lap, and Kimi was relegated back to eleventh place on the official timing sheet. Michelin will have a significant amount of explaining to do, with Felipe Massa also experiencing a tyre failure that made him lose many places in the final laps of the race. Obviously, these kinds of things happen in racing, but it will not be fun for Mclaren to look back on at the end of the year if Kimi were to lose out to Alonso in the title race by the amount of points lost at the Nurburgring. It happened two years ago, when Kimi's Mercedes let go whilst in the lead, and the Finn lost the championship to Michael Schumacher by two points.

The North American tour is up next, with the Canadian race at Montreal in a fortnight followed by the United States Grand Prix in Indianapolis a week later. Ferrari is climbing back up, with strong performances from both cars at this weekend's race, and the next two races have been friendly for their team. Historically, these races have also been successful races for the Mclaren squad, but with Alonso's current form, the Spaniard will be a tough contender to beat...


The Weekly Wrap By Jens Sorensen
Discuss this edition of the Wrap in the Forums

More Weekly Wraps
 

Michael Schumacher
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-27 (N�rburgring): Friday practice 2

 

Mark Webber off-track
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-27 (N�rburgring): Friday practice 2

 

Nick Heidfeld
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (N�rburgring): Saturday practice 2

 

Fernando Alonso
F1 > European GP, 2005-05-28 (N�rburgring): Saturday practice 1

Alonso wins tense European GP
Racing series F1
Date 2005-05-29 (Nurburgring)

By Nikki Reynolds - Motorsport.com

Fernando Alonso took his fourth win of the season at the European Grand Prix, in what was a tense race that seemed to be going Kimi Raikkonen's way. But in the closing laps, when Raikkonen was leading, his McLaren had trouble with the right front tyre and eventually the Finn crashed out on the last lap, promoting Alonso's Renault to the lead and the victory.

Williams' Nick Heidfeld took his second consecutive second place with a strong drive that kept him in the top three throughout the race. Ferrari was finally back on the podium, as Rubens Barrichello kept himself out of trouble to come home third. The Nurburgring event was mostly about strategy and tyres -- and the notorious first corner.

Giancarlo Fisichella stalled on the grid at the start of the formation lap and the Renault appeared to be stuck in gear as the marshals couldn't move it. Eventually mechanics were allowed back onto the grid and removed the car to the pit lane on a jack, and Fisichella started from there. The rest of the pack lined up again and the first corner changed the whole look of the race.

Raikkonen got ahead of pole man Heidfeld in the run down to turn one and the trouble happened behind them. Third placed Mark Webber had another poor start in the Williams and Juan Pablo Montoya's McLaren came hurtling up along side him. Webber braked quite late and Montoya turned in, resulting in contact that sent them both off.

Meanwhile, Ralf Schumacher's Toyota hit the back of Alonso's Renault and Ralf also spun, while the Ferraris and the BAR of Takuma Sato got mixed up in it as well. Somewhere in all the confusion, David Coulthard's Red Bull went barrelling through to fourth from 12th and Sauber's Felipe Massa also made his way through, up to sixth from 11th.

Once the mess had sorted itself out, Webber was out of the race and Sato and Ralf dived in the pits for front wing changes. Webber was disappointed but did not blame Montoya. "Getting away (from the line) hasn't been one of our strengths," the Australian said ruefully.

"Both Nick and I were a little bit on the back foot down to the first corner. I was trying to defend against Jarno (Trulli) and I couldn't quite turn in at the apex, so that was a shame. It's not up to Juan Pablo to give me room -- he turned in, for sure, but he's got to get round the corner too."

After the incident, the order was Raikkonen from Heidfeld, Trulli's Toyota up one to third and Coulthard fourth. Alonso gained one place to fifth but he had the problems of Coulthard and Trulli between him and the leaders. Massa was sixth and Red Bull's Tonio Liuzzi also gained from the confusion, up to seventh, as did Jenson Button's BAR in eighth.

One of Alonso's problems was solved when Trulli got a drive-through penalty, as the Toyota mechanics had spent too long on the grid after the 15 second signal was given before the start. Bad luck for Trulli and he rejoined in ninth. Montoya had dropped back to 10th and Michael Schumacher to 11th and they both started working their way up the order.

Rubens Barrichello had also lost out at the first corner but his Ferrari got past Button after a scrap through turns one, two and three to take eighth. Montoya then homed in on Button and got past, while Fisichella had got away from the pit lane start and had made his way up to 12th.

Barrichello closed down Liuzzi and dispatched the Red Bull at the Coca-Cola curve and further down the field the Jordans of Tiago Monteiro and Narain Karthikeyan were running 13th and 14th ahead of the Sauber of Jacques Villeneuve. Raikkonen was not escaping from Heidfeld, the gap between the top two just two seconds.

Trulli's penalty had promoted Coulthard to third and Michael finally got past Button for 10th in the run up to the first round of pit stops. Barrichello was first in on lap 11, a bit earlier than most had expected, and he and Heidfeld turned out to be on three-stop strategies. Heidfeld was in on the next lap and rejoined in fourth ahead of Massa, who was doing a good job keeping the Sauber in contention.

Villeneuve got past Karthikeyan, and Montoya was closing on Liuzzi, and Raikkonen was next to pit, also earlier than expected. He rejoined third behind Alonso, which left Coulthard in the lead. Liuzzi and Montoya dived into the pits together and Juan got the jump on the Red Bull to come out ahead.

Coulthard pitted next and subsequently got a drive-through penalty for speeding in the pit lane, which dropped him to fifth after he took it. Button and Fisichella had been arguing over 11th and Fisichella won the position but then went into the pits anyway. Alonso finally took his first stop on lap 22 and the order after the shakeout was Raikkonen, Heidfeld, Alonso, Barrichello, Coulthard, Massa, Michael, Montoya.

Ralf and Sato were late stoppers but the first corner antics had dropped them outside the top ten. Raikkonen was comfortably ahead of Heidfeld but then had a mad moment and it all went a bit pear shaped. The McLaren shot across the gravel and grass after the chicane then into the gravel at the next turn, allowing Heidfeld to nip past into the lead.

Raikkonen recovered and unfortunately for Heidfeld his three-stop strategy meant he had to pit again not long after. Minardi's Christijan Albers got a drive-through for ignoring the blue flags and Ralf was next to come grief, spinning into the gravel after going wide over the kerbs, which was the end of his race.

Raikkonen was having one or two random off track excursions, locking up at turn one and going wide, and it seemed the McLaren had flat-spotted a front tyre somewhere along the way. However, there was 15 seconds between him and Alonso so he was getting away with the odd mistake or half a dozen.

The middle stint of the race was fairly static, with the points scoring positions not changing. Montoya had a go at Michael at the first corner and they came so close to banging wheels but made it through unscathed. Michael then put some distance between them and Raikkonen was the first to take his second stop, on lap 44. The McLaren's right front barge board was broken but it appeared not to be a major problem.

Alonso took the lead and promptly set the fastest lap of the race, while Monteiro got a drive-through, also for ignoring the blue flags. Massa and Montoya pitted, Massa staying ahead, and Michael beat both of them in his stop to rejoin sixth. Alonso wandered into the gravel at the hairpin and lost some time, but scrambled out and took his second stop.

Massa was struggling with his tyres and was next into the gravel, going off track for a considerable amount of time and looking more like he was rallying than circuit racing. The Sauber apparently took some damage and a couple of laps later Massa was crawling round, then his left front tyre, which was peeling, hit the front wing and he had to go into the pits for a change.

That little episode let Montoya move up one and Raikkonen was next to start displaying some rather alarming tyre behaviour. His right front was indeed flat-spotted and wobbling like mad, little strips peeling off, although not quite delaminating. Alonso was closing at a rate of over a second a lap -- seven seconds the gap and seven laps left to run�

Michael charged through the gravel as well but was far enough ahead of Fisichella to stay in fifth, and Karthikeyan followed suit, narrowly missing teammate Monterio on the rebound. At the front Alonso was storming up behind Raikkonen, the gap now just 1.5 with three laps to go. Would Raikkonen's tyre hold to the end or would McLaren pull him in for change?

Such a move would probably have dropped Raikkonen to third, which may have been an acceptable compromise but it didn't happen. Kimi stayed out and with one lap to go the inevitable happened. The tyre was so unbalanced it broke the front suspension, rather than the tyre itself failing, and Raikkonen ditched into the barrier at the first corner, narrowly missing punting Button out as well.

Alonso sailed past to take the lead and the victory. "It was a very, very good race from our side," said the Spaniard. "It is true that I lost so much at the start. I nearly finished my race at the first corner, I don�t know who pushed me in the back, and I thought that maybe something broke in the back of the car but it felt okay and obviously I lost so much I was happy with the second place."

"The car was so nice to drive, so quick, and we were pushing McLaren and Kimi so hard until the point that they had a failure in the tyres. We were very lucky today, but at the same point we were also very strong and able to push them like at the beginning of the season, not like the last two races."

Heidfeld drove confidently to second after what was a fairly uneventful race for Nick. "Obviously, we did a three-stop race and a short first stint but we just did that because we hoped to get the best result, which we in the end got with the second place," he comemnted.

"I just pushed as hard as possible in the first stint and I tried to get a gap, which worked pretty well, and I think the car was really nice but as I had to push hard at the start I lost rear tyres a little towards the end."

Barrichello also had a pretty quiet time to come home third, while Michael made it a double points finish for Ferrari in fifth. Coulthard split the scarlet pair in fourth. Barrichello believes it's the start of the Ferrari revival that many have been expecting.

"It is very unfortunate that we have been out of the podium for a long time, the car is very reliable, the engine is good and the tyres are fantastic, it is just that we had a difficult time at some point into the season but we are coming back and I feel the Ferrari team will be very strong from now to the end of the year and we are going to be winning races hopefully soon," he said.

Fisichella bravely made up the lost ground from his pit lane start to cross the line sixth, followed by Montoya and Trulli in seventh and eighth respectively. It was a shame for Massa, after running in the points all through the race until his problems, who finally finished 14th, one behind teammate Villeneuve, who didn't really make an impression at all.

Liuzzi was ninth and Button and Sato had a tough time to finish 10th and 12th. Both Jordans and Minardis made it to the line, Monteiro and Karthikeyan in 15th and 16th, Albers ahead of Patrick Friesacher for 17th and 18th. It was quite a low attrition rate considering all the on and off track incidents. Raikkonen was classed 11th.

The result will give Renault and Alonso a bit of breathing space at the top of the standings, but while Raikkonen appears to be Alonso's main rival, Trulli and Heidfeld are only two points behind the Finn. The gap between Alonso and Raikkonen is now 32 points, and between Renault and McLaren 23 points.

The question most people will be asking is should McLaren have bought Raikkonen in for a tyre change? With hindsight the answer is obviously yes but at the time it was a very tough call to make. The risk was big but so was the gain if it worked out. It didn't work out and McLaren and Raikkonen had to pay the price.

"We jointly decided to go for the win and no member of the team including Kimi regrets this decision," said McLaren team principal Ron Dennis. "The resulting suspension failure was understanedable in the circumstances."

However, it maybe casts a bad light on the one set of tyres per qualifying and race rule. Tyres have become even more of an influence this season and many times we've seen drivers struggle with degrading rubber. Raikkonen's accident, although avoidable if the team had bought him in, perhaps calls into question the safety aspect of the tyre rule.

Despite that, Raikkonen is still a force to be reckoned with and Williams is rapidly gaining ground. Renault may have taken the victory at the Nurburgring but it was by luck rather than judgement. Alonso probably would have been on the podium anyway but the win was unlikely until Raikkonen's problems.

Canada and America are the next two back-to-back races and the battle looks set to be rejoined just as fiercely. First Renault's successes and then McLaren's had people saying that one or the other was going to be dominant, but so far this season has been anything but predictable. Final top eight classification: Alonso, Heidfeld, Barrichello, Coulthard, M. Schumacher, Fisichella, Montoya, Trulli.
 

Andy Rash

May 29, 2005
'Vindication': Mary Wollstonecraft's Sense and Sensibility
By TONI BENTLEY

IN 1915 Virginia Woolf predicted it would take women another six generations to come into their own. We should be approaching the finish line if Woolf's math was as good as her English. A little over a century before her, another Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, declared in her revolutionary book of 1792, ''The Vindication of the Rights of Woman,'' that not only had the time come to begin the long slog to selfdom, freedom, empowerment -- or whatever current feminist term serves -- but that she would be the first of what she called, using the language of taxonomy, ''a new genus.''

It took the renegade second child (of seven) -- and first daughter -- of Edward John Wollstonecraft, a drinker, and the unhappy Elizabeth Dickson, to take this virtually unimaginable plunge into uncharted waters. And she took this leap while displaying the full measure of female unpredictablity, while the world watched, astounded, dismayed and outraged. This Mary was quite contrary, and her reputation over time, unsurprisingly, has suffered from this complexity. Surely we women have a gene -- in addition to those saucy, but ill-mannered, hormones -- for theatrics, so frequently do they puncture our inner lives and decorate our outer ones in operatic robes. But occasionally high drama is the most efficient way to break through the status quo, and Mary Wollstonecraft's radical mission called for extreme measures.

In her wonderful, and deeply sobering, new book, Lyndall Gordon, the distinguished biographer of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bront� and Henry James, tackles this formidable woman with grace, clarity and much new research. Despite occasional slips into strangely purple prose (when she reproaches her lover, ''retorts -- great sprays of indignant eloquence -- would fountain from her opening throat''), Gordon relates Wollstonecraft's story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified.

Here's how things stood for women in the world Mary was born into, the England of 1759: your property and your children were the property of your husband, divorce was impossible, and if you dared to leave your horrid -- or abusive -- husband you had to desert your children in the process and become an outlaw. Marital rape was perfectly legal, and probably frequent. (In all fairness, a new law in 1782 stated that a husband should not beat his wife with a stick wider than his thumb.)

Samuel Johnson identified the real issue: ''The chastity of women is of all importance, as all property depends on it.'' While women were not admitted to universities for another hundred years, the education they did receive was about conduct and little else. One Mrs. Barbauld, a well-known writer and former boarding-school mistress, summarized this teaching when she explained to young ladies, ''Your BEST, your SWEETEST empire is -- TO PLEASE.''

Miss Mary Wollstonecraft, however, was not interested in pleasing anyone, most especially a member of the opposite sex. She declared at 15 that she would never marry. Nor, as her life would prove, would she ever internalize her own subjugation to such frivolous teachings. This was no empty declaration, coming as it did from a girl who slept across the threshold of her parents' bedroom to protect her mother from her father's rages. Despite her mother's unloving demeanor, the young girl developed a compassion for women that became what she would call ''the governing propensity'' of her entire life. She was obsessed with educating herself against all odds, writing as a teenager, ''I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble.'' The prospects for a woman in her time who chose not to marry were limited to schoolteacher, paid companion, governess and prostitute -- all of which Wollstonecraft essayed except the last.

BY 1787 Wollstonecraft had landed in London, setting up house near the publisher Joseph Johnson, and was participating in intellectual circles that included William Blake (who illustrated an edition of her book ''Original Stories from Real Life'' in 1791), the naturalist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), the painter Henry Fuseli, the radical philosopher William Godwin and Thomas Paine. Said Godwin of this outspoken woman, ''I . . . heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.''She began publishing novels and essays while doing translations (German, Italian, French), book reviews and anthologies. In her first book, ''Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,'' she gives us the 18th-century version of ''he's just not that into you,'' when she deplores women's ''susceptibility to unsuitable men.'' She declared there to be no greater misery, besides, than loving someone whom reason cannot respect.

In late 1790 Wollstonecraft's ''Vindication of the Rights of Men,'' the first counter to Edmund Burke's treatise on the dangers of the French Revolution, was published anonymously; ''all the best journals of the day discussed it.'' But when she produced ''The Vindication of the Rights of Woman'' just 14 months later, her name was on the title page and all hell broke loose. It was the most immodest emergence of a woman's voice in memory and the 32-year-old Wollstonecraft became famous. While the American statesman Aaron Burr declared ''your sex has in her an able advocate . . . a work of genius'' (and John Adams teased his wife, Abigail, for being a ''Disciple of Wollstonecraft!'') Horace Walpole's reaction was more typical. He called her a ''hyena in petticoats.''

In her masterwork, Wollstonecraft expounded in dense and literate prose -- Gordon might have quoted more extensively here -- on the necessity of women becoming less trivial and more rational and educated creatures. She suggests that women ''labor by reforming themselves to reform the world.'' A hyena, definitely.

''The minds of women are enfeebled by false refinement,'' she wrote, continuing: ''Dismissing then those pretty feminine phrases, which the men condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind . . . and sweet docility of manners, supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, I wish to show . . . that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being.'' So begins her uncompromising polemic, a document as necessary an admonition today as in her own in its plea to the owners of wombs to invest in that invisible fortification called character before fluffing their petticoats or tattooing their bellies.

And then, astonishingly, within two years, this brilliant, focused woman moved to Paris to write about the French Revolution, lost her virginity at 34 -- yes, she was, notably, a virgin when she wrote her germinal work, and perhaps the wiser for it -- to the charismatic though clearly ''unsuitable'' American adventurer Gilbert Imlay and gave birth to their daughter, Fanny. She attempted suicide with laudanum when Imlay proved faithless. Within two weeks, Imlay persuaded her to spend several months, with baby and French nanny in tow, on a mysterious, madcap mission to Scandinavia to recover, on his behalf, �3,500 worth of silver cargo from a treasure ship. There was no silver, no ship and, when she returned to England, no Imlay; he had taken another mistress.

Still, Wollstonecraft had written a wonderful travel book about her Scandinavian adventures. Then this woman, who so reasonably advocated reason for her own sex, lost her own, and jumped in the Thames in her second suicide attempt in five months. Miraculously, she was found, unconscious, revived and thus lived to have what Virginia Woolf considered the most fruitful experiment of Wollstonecraft's experimental life -- her love affair with William Godwin. Yes, the William Godwin who only a few years earlier had wanted less Wollstonecraft and more Paine.

It is here that one rejoices that this woman who struggled with poverty her entire life (she supported both her father, and numerous siblings, as often as she could until her dying day), who withstood a reputation as a wanton and reckless woman, the writer of an ''amazonian'' book, a cornerstone treatise for women's liberation, attains at the end of her life some experience of comfort, elation and kindness in the arms of a man she could respect.

The story of their love is all the more touching for its brevity -- 17 months. Godwin, a reserved bachelor three years her senior, wrote of Wollstonecraft in 1796: ''I found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it.'' William Hazlitt wrote of Godwin that he has ''less of the appearance of a man of genius, than any one who has given such decided and ample proofs of it,'' while a certain Mr. Horseman proclaimed that Godwin and Wollstonecraft were undoubtedly ''the two greatest men in the world.''

After three failed attempts to consummate their attraction, recorded concisely in Godwin's diary as ''chez moi,'' ''chez elle'' (twice), victory is finally denoted by ''chez elle toute'' -- surely one of history's most succinct sexual success reports. Wollstonecraft's diary indicated that while it was not entirely ''toute'' for her -- not the ''rapture'' of Imlay, her only other lover -- it was an experience of ''sublime tranquillity.''

Once starting their affair they meticulously practiced the most sophisticated birth control of the day: abstention for three days following menstruation and then frequent sex for the remainder of the month (frequency was thought to lower the possibility of conception.) Bingo! Within a few months Wollstonecraft was pregnant and these two outspoken opponents of marriage, married, though they maintained their separate abodes and their mutual, and separate, circles of acquaintances.

Meanwhile Godwin held fast to his belief that matrimony offers ''the most fertile sources of misery to mankind,'' while Wollstonecraft softened up considerably to her new marital status, declaring, ''a husband is a convenient part of the furniture of a house, unless he be a clumsy fixture.''

Deciding to have her baby at home with a midwife -- hospitals were rife with infection -- Wollstonecraft produced, after an 18-hour labor, a girl child on Aug. 30, 1797. But the placenta had not fully expelled itself and a doctor was called in to rip out the rest -- for four hours -- without anesthesia. She said afterward that she had not known pain before. The botched operation left her with an infection that killed her 11 days later. She was 38.

Her last words were that Godwin was ''the kindest, best man in the world.'' He recorded the precise time of her death in his diary followed by three trailing blank lines. In his memoir of his wife, he wrote that she had an ''unconquerable greatness of soul.'' One does not doubt him.

And, in turn, that daughter, the future Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley, sent forth, 20 years later, in 1818, what she called ''my hideous progeny'' in the most famous horror story of all time, ''Frankenstein.'' Thus the great Mary Wollstonecraft became grandmother to the most wounded of motherless children and his cautionary fable about the hubris of men, the fears of pregnancy, the dangers of child-rearing and the destruction and despair that ensue from the unloved child. The tale is chilling as legacy alone.

Two years earlier, Mary's half-sister, Fanny (Wollstonecraft's daughter by Imlay), had succeeded where her mother had failed, and killed herself with laudanum at age 22. ''The best thing I could do,'' she wrote, ''was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate. . . . You will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed.'' An eerie loss -- and choice of words -- indeed.

Who can say that we women are not now all members of the new genus Wollstonecraft so brazenly constructed? Or that each of us does not benefit? Gordon's book is worthy of its subject. It is also a welcome reminder of a brave woman who lived her brief and difficult life for us, whom she never knew. Or did she? Besides, according to Virginia Woolf, we're only three generations away from the promised land. Let's hope we all make it there, and see what the visionary Mary Wollstonecraft saw for us over two centuries ago.

Toni Bentley is the author, most recently, of ''The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir'' and ''Sisters of Salome.''

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A botanical jihad?

Afghan Poppycock
Hamid Karzai's halfhearted jihad.
By David Bosco
Posted Wednesday, May 18, 2005, at 4:16 AM PT

There's all sorts of good news coming out of the Afghan drug war. Hamid Karzai recently announced that opium cultivation might be down as much as 30 percent this year. In April, the United States nabbed alleged Afghan drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai. U.S. and European money are helping Karzai's government build special drug courts and train paramilitary interdiction teams. One might almost be convinced that Afghanistan�site of an ongoing political renaissance�has pulled off another miracle.

Don't believe it. The truth is that the war against opium in Afghanistan is stumbling badly. A bureaucratic struggle on counternarcotics strategy inside the U.S. government produced an unhappy compromise. For its part, the fragile Afghan government is too timid to do serious crop eradication. There may be a drop in opium production this year, but it will be due primarily to recent flooding and to the huge stockpiles from last year's bumper crop.

The campaign is certainly not foundering for lack of passionate rhetoric. A few days after his election victory was assured last December, Karzai delivered a table-thumping speech to a collection of Afghan tribal elders. Afghanistan's booming opium trade, he said, was an affront to Islam. "Just as our people fought a holy war against the Soviets, so we will wage jihad against poppies."

The poppies may turn out to be the more stubborn foe. Afghanistan now produces more than 80 percent of the world's opium. In 2004, poppy cultivation reached an all-time high, and the drug economy now accounts for between a third and half of the country's economic output. A World Bank study estimates that opium cultivation can generate at least 12 times as much income as wheat, the main alternative crop. Because drug money flows to regional warlords and other malcontents, it threatens to derail an otherwise remarkably successful nation-building effort. (Last month, several more Taliban big fish accepted the government's amnesty offer and another batch of refugees returned from Pakistan, cheered on by Angelina Jolie.)

Karzai faces a torturous choice in trying to kick his country's habit. If he attacks the trade too aggressively, he could cripple the country's economy and generate a nasty political backlash. Aerial spraying is particularly touchy, since many Afghans still remember napalm runs by Soviet aircraft as they tried to crush the mujahideen. Rumors�unfounded, it appears�that spraying was under way forced Karzai to issue a flurry of denials and call in foreign diplomats for stern conversations. The United States is sensitive to Karzai's political limits, and outgoing U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad helped deflect pressure for a massive eradication campaign. Karzai, the administration realizes, would be a terrible thing to waste.

But if Karzai moves too slowly, the drug trade may infect his country's fragile institutions and fill the coffers of violent opponents including, possibly, al-Qaida (the intelligence on where drug money ends up is spotty at best). According to former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Bobby Charles, "One of the fastest ways you could design to cripple a young democracy is to allow the influx of substantial drug money."

In Washington, the opium dilemma has become a tussle between the State Department and the Defense Department. Curiously, the hawks on this issue are at State. Charles and his colleagues argued for large-scale aerial eradication and the involvement of U.S. and coalition military forces in interdiction. "The success we've had in Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia," he says, "has always involved the military."

The prospect of a militarized drug war makes the brass nervous. The Defense Department is keen to keep its footprint light and is wary of a drug war that could set the population against U.S. troops (last week's Newsweek-inspired anti-American riots will only deepen that fear). The Afghans, after all, have a history of kicking out technologically superior foreign soldiers. So the military has kept drugs on the back burner. Instead of getting its troops directly into the interdiction business, Washington is sending a few teams of DEA agents who will fly around the country in leased helicopters.

The generals aren't alone in resisting a full-on drug war. The idea is anathema to many regional experts, who believe that attacking Afghanistan's economic base without first establishing an alternative is political suicide. Barnett Rubin, an irascible NYU Afghan expert, has no patience for the drug warriors. "There's absolutely nothing to lead one to believe that you can abolish 40 percent of the economy without major implications." He argues for a slow, sequenced approach that begins by creating alternatives for Afghan farmers. Crop eradication, in his view, comes at the end�not the beginning.

That argument has had an effect, and U.S. policy has downshifted. Afghan officials, aided by U.S. contractors, are manually destroying some poppy fields, although it won't be many. Funds earmarked for massive eradication are being directed instead to supporting alternative livelihoods. (Rubin calls these funds a "a drop in the bucket.") For now, the Afghan drug war is a patchwork of sporadic manual eradication efforts, occasional clashes with traffickers, and a trickle of money to Afghan farmers for alternative crops.

It's a dangerous game for Karzai. Having called for jihad, his credibility is on the line. In deference to the president's exhortations, some Afghan farmers may have decided not to plant poppies this year. They'll be expecting assistance in return. If they don't get it, they may take out their frustration in this fall's parliamentary elections�or less constructively. Meanwhile, Karzai and his new security forces are poking at the country's nest of traffickers and drug labs without knocking them out. For the time being, Karzai and his Western backers have no choice but to hope they can continue cultivating a new democracy in a bed of poppies.

David Bosco is senior editor at Foreign Policy. He filed dispatches from Afghanistan last summer
 

Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

President Bush made his opposition to the stem cell bill known yesterday at the White House, showing off month-old Trey Jones, who was born as a result of one couple�s donation of frozen embryos to another.

May 25, 2005
House Approves a Stem Cell Research Bill Opposed by Bush
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, May 24 - The House passed a bill on Tuesday to expand federal financing for embryonic stem cell research, defying a veto threat from President Bush, who appeared at the White House with babies and toddlers born of test-tube embryos and warned the measure "would take us across a critical ethical line."

The vote, 238 to 194 with 50 Republicans in favor, fell far short of the two-thirds majority required to overturn a presidential veto, setting up a possible showdown between Congress and Mr. Bush, who has never exercised his veto power. An identical bill has broad bipartisan support in the Senate; moments after the House vote, the Senate sponsors wrote to the Republican leader, Bill Frist, urging him to put it on the agenda.

The House action is the first vote on embryonic stem cell research since August 2001, when Mr. Bush opened the door to taxpayer financing for the studies, but only with strict limits. The new bill permits the government to pay for studies involving human embryos that are in frozen storage at fertility clinics, so long as couples conceiving the embryos certified that they had made a decision to discard them.

"The White House cannot ignore this vote," said the bill's chief Republican backer, Representative Michael N. Castle of Delaware, adding, "I'm elated."

But opponents also said they were elated. Representative Joseph R. Pitts, Republican of Pennsylvania, said: "I hate to lose, but I feel pretty good about this vote. We beat a veto-proof margin by 50 votes."

The big question now is what will happen in the Senate. Dr. Frist, a heart surgeon from Tennessee who supports the existing policy, is already facing intense pressure from conservatives over the issue of Mr. Bush's judicial nominees and does not seem eager to schedule a vote on stem cell research. He said last week that he wanted to check with his colleagues before doing so.

The House vote followed an impassioned lobbying campaign by advocates for patients, including Nancy Reagan. Mrs. Reagan, who became a strong backer of stem cell research as her husband struggled with Alzheimer's disease, telephoned fellow Republicans this week urging a yes vote, Mr. Castle said.

But Mr. Bush countered with a powerful one-two punch, throwing the full weight of the White House behind the opposition. On Friday, he issued a rare threat to veto the Castle bill. On Tuesday, just hours before the vote, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with families created by a rare but growing practice in which one couple donates its frozen embryos to another.

"The children here today remind us that there is no such thing as a spare embryo," Mr. Bush said, amid the squeals and coos of babies cradled in their mothers' arms. "Every embryo is unique and genetically complete, like every other human being. And each of us started out our life this way. These lives are not raw material to be exploited, but gifts."

The parents, who worked through a Christian adoption agency, applauded enthusiastically. When Mr. Bush said that "every human life is a precious gift of matchless love," a mother behind him on stage mouthed the word "Amen."

The White House event, on what conservative Christians and the president call an important "culture of life" issue, demonstrated just how far Mr. Bush is willing to assert himself on policy that goes to what he considers the moral heart of his presidency. In another sign of how important the issue is to conservatives, the House Republican leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, managed the opposition to the bill, also casting it in stark moral terms.

"An embryo is a person, a distinct internally directed, self-integrating human organism," Mr. DeLay said, adding, "We were all at one time embryos ourselves. So was Abraham. So was Muhammad. So was Jesus of Nazareth."

He went on: "The choice to protect a human embryo from federally funded destruction is not, ultimately, about the human embryo. It is about us, and our rejection of the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others."

Human embryonic stem cells, isolated from human embryos for the first time in 1998, have the potential to grow into any cell or tissue in the body, and so hold great promise for treatment of disease. But the embryos are destroyed when the cells are extracted. So Mr. Bush, intending to discourage further embryo destruction, insisted in 2001 that federal financing be limited to studies of those stem cell colonies, or lines, that had already been created.

Instead, Mr. Bush is promoting research on adult stem cells, which are drawn from bone marrow and blood, including umbilical cord blood, and have narrower implications for medicine than embryonic stem cells. On Tuesday, the House voted 431 to 1 to approve a measure that would create umbilical cord blood banks to advance adult stem cell research.

But it was the embryonic stem cell debate that inflamed the passions of the House, sounding at various times like a lesson in cell biology, a theological discourse and a personal confessional. Lawmaker after lawmaker came to the House well to recount struggles with conscience and searing personal experiences with death and disease.

Representative Jim Langevin, Democrat of Rhode Island, rolled to the microphone in his motorized wheelchair to speak of his spinal cord injury, which he said could be helped by the research. Representative Jo Ann Emerson, Republican of Missouri, told of a young man named Cody, who had been paralyzed in a car accident at age 16 and asked her to rethink her opposition to embryonic stem cell studies.

"I later wrote a note to Cody's family telling them that even after hearing his story, I couldn't do as he asked," Ms. Emerson said, "and I have regretted writing that letter ever since."

But for every supporter with a compelling personal tale, there was an opponent like Representative Dan Lungren, Republican of California, whose brother has Parkinson's disease. "I've learned a lot of things from my brother," Mr. Lungren said, "But one of the things I learned most is that there is a difference between right and wrong."

The backers of the Senate measure, Senators Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, and Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, have scheduled a news conference for Wednesday to demand quick action. "I don't understand why Mr. Bush is doing this," Mr. Harkin said, adding, "I wish he would refrain from drawing lines in the sand."

Elisabeth Bumiller contributed reporting for this article.

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Marvi Lacar for The New York Times

Rich Cohen, 36, out with Scout and an audio book

May 26, 2005
Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading!
By AMY HARMON

JIM HARRIS, a lifelong bookworm, cracked the covers of only four books last year. But he listened to 54, all unabridged. He listened to Harry Potter and "Moby-Dick," Don DeLillo and Stephen King. He listened in the car, eating lunch, doing the dishes, sitting in doctors' offices and climbing the stairs at work.

"I haven't read this much since I was in college," said Mr. Harris, 53, a computer programmer in Memphis. And yes, he does consider it "reading." "I dislike it when I meet people who feel listening is inferior," he said.

Fortunately for Mr. Harris, the ranks of the reading purists are dwindling. Fewer Americans are reading books than a decade ago, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, but almost a third more are listening to them on tapes, CD's and iPods.

For a growing group of devoted listeners, the popularity of audio books is redefining the notion of reading, which for centuries has been centered on the written word. Traditionally, it is also an activity that has required one's full attention.

But audio books, once seen as a kind of oral CliffsNotes for reading lightweights, have seduced members of a literate but busy crowd by allowing them to read while doing something else. Digital audio that can be zapped onto an MP3 player is also luring converts. The smallest iPod, the Shuffle, holds roughly four books; the newest ones include a setting that speeds up the narration without raising the pitch.

"I wish I had had this feature while listening to 'Crime and Punishment,' " said Lee Kyle, 41, a math teacher in Austin, Tex., who now listens in bed instead of reading. It's more relaxing, he said, and he doesn't have to bother his wife with the light.

Audio books, which still represent only about 3 percent of all books sold, do not exactly herald a return to the Homeric tradition. But their growing popularity has sparked debate among readers, writers and cultural critics about the best way to consume literature.

"I think every writer would rather have people read books, committed as we are to the word," said Frank McCourt, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his memoir, "Angela's Ashes." "But I'd rather have them listen to it than not at all."

To make the audio version of his books more tolerable, Mr. McCourt said, he insists on narrating them himself. "Actors are always doing this phony breathing," Mr. McCourt said.

Among the questions facing audio book connoisseurs are: Which is better suited to the format, fiction or nonfiction? Can a bad narrator ruin a great book? If you've listened to a book, have you really "read" it?

Rich Cohen, the author of "Tough Jews," has found short stories are best while walking his dog on the Upper West Side, because of the likelihood of distraction, and the difficulty in rewinding.

"Sometimes your dog will attack another dog, and you're pulled completely out of the book," explained Mr. Cohen, who has experimented with various genres since discovering he could purchase audio books from Apple's online music store.

A book about string theory by the physicist Brian Greene proved entirely unable to hold Mr. Cohen's auditory attention, as did "Hamlet." With "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," however, he had the multitasking satisfaction of digesting a book he had always been curious about but did not want to devote the time to actually reading.

David Lipsky, another New York writer and frequent dog walker, said he often "shuffles" music on his iPod, and has similarly come to enjoy jumping among chapters of, say, James Joyce, Martin Amis and Al Franken as he circles the block.

Charlton Heston reading "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" proved a dud, even if it was sandwiched between Jeremy Irons reading "Lolita" and Robert Frost reading his own poems. "You keep waiting for him to announce that Kilimanjaro's been taken over by damned dirty talking apes," Mr. Lipsky said. "Now it's hard to read 'Kilimanjaro' without hearing Heston's voice."

The novelist Sue Miller said she prefers Henry James on tape because the narrator has untangled the complex sentences for her. But she found D. H. Lawrence unbearable. His notoriously repetitive prose "doesn't lend itself to an auditory experience," she said.

Some critics are dismayed at the migration to audio books. The virtue of reading, they say, lies in the communion between writer and reader, the ability to pause, to reread a sentence, and yes, read it out loud - to yourself. Listeners are opting for convenience, they say, at the expense of engaging the mind and imagination as only real reading can.

"Deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear," said Harold Bloom, the literary critic. "You need the whole cognitive process, that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you."

The comedian Jon Stewart, an author of the mock history textbook "America (The Book)," opens the audio version by lampooning the format. "Welcome, nonreader," he intones. Listeners are advised that the listening experience "should not be considered a replacement for watching television."

Audio book aficionados face disdain from some book lovers, who tend to rhapsodize about the smell and feel of a book in their hands and the pleasure of being immersed in a story without having to worry about the car in the next lane.

Gloria Reiss, 51, of St. Louis, said her officemates correct her when she mentions having read a book.

"They'll say, 'You didn't read it, you just listened to it,' " said Ms. Reiss, who switched to audio when her two jobs and three poodles made it hard to find time to curl up on the couch. Recently a colleague refused her urging to take a Stephanie Plum mystery along on a long drive.

"She goes, 'I like to read my books,' " Ms. Reiss said, "like that makes her better than me."

Most audio book lovers argue that one is not better than the other. Some say it was not until they started listening to books that they realized how much of the language they were skimming over in the books they read on paper. And then there is the sheer pleasure of being read to.

Ms. Reiss's husband, Ken, says he remembers more of books that he hears, perhaps because he's simply wired that way. Levi Wallach, 36, of Vienna, Va., says he's a slow reader, "so it's much more efficient for me to listen while I do other things."

Libraries say the growth in circulation of audio books is outpacing overall circulation. Book clubs are increasingly made up of hybrid listener-readers, and the market for children's audio books is booming. Sales at Audible, the leading provider of digital audio books, surged from $5 million in 2001 to $34 million last year. Half of its subscribers are new to audio books.

Still, a certain stigma lingers. Dan Barber, a chef, said he felt compelled to ask Louis Menand's permission to listen to his book, "The Metaphysical Club," on CD when Mr. Menand dined at his Greenwich Village restaurant, Blue Hill, last month.

Mr. Menand assented, but his dining companion, Adam Gopnik, the New Yorker writer, looked put off, Mr. Barber said. Or maybe Mr. Barber was projecting his own ambivalence about audio, as evidenced by his consumption of Mr. Gopnik's anthology, "Paris to the Moon."

"I read parts of it on tape," Mr. Barber said. "But I also read the whole book - what do you call it? Traditional-style?"

John Hamburg, 34, notes that audio books can be shared in a way that printed ones cannot. Mr. Hamburg and Mr. Barber, high school friends, were both sobbing while listening to "Tuesdays With Morrie" during a drive, Mr. Hamburg said.

Listening to authors read their own memoirs introduces an intimacy that cannot be achieved without the audio, Mr. Hamburg said. He found Bill Clinton's thick autobiography a bit daunting, for instance, but said listening to it "was kind of like being with an old friend."

Mr. Hamburg, a screenwriter, says he limits his audio habit to biography, eschewing fiction out of respect for authors whom he imagines did not intend for their creative work to be read "when you're doing 30 minutes on your elliptical trainer."

But when he came across the audio version of "The Kite Runner" online, it was hard to resist downloading it. The hardcover version of the novel, a coming-of-age story set in Afghanistan, has been sitting unopened on Mr. Hamburg's night table for weeks. It's still there.

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It's just a movie!

The Mr. Smith Fallacy
Was screening Frank Capra's classic the true nuclear option?
By Timothy Noah
Posted Tuesday, May 24, 2005, at 2:10 PM PT

In the absence of any other logical explanation, I conclude that what nudged the Senate back from the brink of a "nuclear option"�the majority-driven rule change disallowing the use of filibusters against judicial nominees�was the prospect that both Democrats and Republicans would screen Frank Capra's 1939 film, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, last night in the Capitol.

As I've explained before, I believe that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist should have taken his "nuclear option" one step further and eliminated the filibuster not only for judicial nominees but for legislation, too. This isn't because I favor the appointment of judges hostile to a woman's right to choose abortion; I don't. Rather, it's because I believe the filibuster is an inherently reactionary tool that, over the long term, has impeded and will continue to impede activist liberal government by imposing a 60-vote supermajority requirement on virtually every bill that comes before Congress. People would have an easier time grasping this if it weren't for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

In Mr. Smith, the idealistic Sen. Jefferson Smith, played by Jimmy Stewart, uses the filibuster to block legislation to build the Willet Creek Dam, the true purpose of which, we are told, is to line the pockets of political bosses. That sounds like a plausibly liberal goal today, when environmentalists routinely argue that dams destroy delicate ecosystems. And it seemed so during the last week of October 1972, when I, age 14, attended a screening of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington at Pomona College with my older brother Peter. Capra was there to answer questions from the audience afterward, and Peter's hand was the first one up. "Mr. Capra," asked my brother, "can I assume, based on what we just saw, that this Tuesday you'll cast your vote for George McGovern?" Capra looked balefully at his shaggy-haired, bearded interlocutor, whose political views, he knew, were shared by nearly everyone else in the audience. Then he mumbled, "Uh � no."

Capra idealized the common man, but he was nobody's idea of a liberal. And back when Mr. Smith was released�a mere six years after the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority�liberals were not the dam-haters they are today. New Dealers considered the building of federally funded dams vital to maintaining struggling family farms and to bringing electricity to the homes of the rural poor. Seen in its historic context, then, the fictional bill that the fictional Mr. Smith blocks is what today would be called "progressive legislation." It therefore fits right in with the sort of bills that filibusters have nearly always been deployed against in real life. Thanks to the filibuster, President Roosevelt was never able to pass anti-lynching legislation. More recently, the filibuster kept the Clinton administration from overhauling a century-old mining law that makes it impossible for taxpayers to block environmentally harmful giveaways to companies mining federal land. Today, the filibuster guarantees that the United States won't pass legislation extending health insurance to all its citizens. And saving it is a great liberal cause?

Another fallacy inherent in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington is the notion that the modern-era filibuster has anything to do with what Sen. Robert Byrd (citing Mr. Smith in a March 1 floor speech) grandly calls "the deliberative process." As Byrd well knows, contemporary practice eliminates the speechifying part of the filibuster altogether; these days, whenever a filibuster is threatened, the Senate majority will typically calculate whether it has the 60 votes necessary to cut off debate, and if it doesn't, it won't bother to bring the legislation in question to a floor vote at all. (Byrd, I should note, filibustered�the old-fashioned way�14 hours against passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That's the law that banned discrimination in public facilities! So forgive me if his views on the subject don't command my full attention.)

It's ironic that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington has become an argument-stopping sacred cow in Washington, because when the film premiered in 1939 at Washington's DAR Constitution Hall, it got an overwhelmingly hostile reception. Here's how Capra remembered it in his 1971 autobiography, The Name Above the Title:

By the time Mr. Smith sputtered to the end music, about one-third of Washington's finest had left. Of those who remained, some applauded, some laughed, but most pressed grimly for the doors. � [At the reception afterward,] I took the worst shellacking of my professional life. Shifts of hopping-mad Washington press correspondents belittled, berated, scorned, vilified, and ripped me open from stem to stern as a villainous Hollywood traducer.

In an interview with Richard L. Strout of the Christian Science Monitor, Senate Majority Leader Alben W. Barkley, a Democrat (he would later be Harry Truman's vice president), changed the subject from the debate over entering the war in Europe to Capra's film. Barkley called Mr. Smith

as grotesque as anything I have ever seen. � At one point, the picture shows the senators walking out on Mr. Smith as a body when he is attacked by a corrupt member. The very idea of the Senate walking out at the behest of that old crook! It was so grotesque it was funny. It showed the Senate made up of crooks, led by crooks, listening to a crook. � It was so vicious an idea that it was a source of disgust and hilarity to every member of Congress who saw it. � I did not hear a single senator praise it. I speak for the whole body.

A fascinating index of how our politics have changed since 1939 is that back when Mr. Smith came out, it didn't occur to members of the Senate�or even the press!�to identify with the film's authority-defying protagonist. Today, it would never occur to a senator�even a member of the Senate leadership�to identify with anyone else. Maybe that explains why the filibuster is proving so hard to kill.

Timothy Noah writes "Chatterbox" for Slate
 

Fred Moore, the founder of the Homebrew Club. Apple Computer's Stephen Wozniak came to the first meeting

May 22, 2005
Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out, Start the Computer Revolution
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN

LET'S get this straight: Jerry Garcia invented the Internet while he was tripping on acid. No, actually, it was Ken Kesey, who thought computers were the next thing after drugs - which, according to John Markoff, they really were.

"What the Dormouse Said: How the 60's Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" (Viking, 287 pages) is Mr. Markoff's hymn to the 1960's, and to the social idealists and, well, acid freaks who wanted to use computers to promote an agenda of sharing, openness and personal growth.

His brief is that the longhairs liberated computers from I.B.M. and the military industrial complex and profoundly shaped the technology that is ubiquitous today. Formerly sequestered behind forbidding glass walls, computers went on to become accessible, usable and friendly. The industry had its consciousness raised - became a vehicle of togetherness.

Grant, at least, that computers became cool. During my adolescence, computers were evil. You remember HAL - the electronic demon of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Computers made people powerless. They represented war, capitalism and grownups. Then (I think I was out for coffee) kids took over. So now computers are about freedom. As I explained to my daughter the other night, "Turn the darn thing off." Read a book, for Pete's sake.

According to Mr. Markoff, a senior writer for The New York Times and the author of other books on computers, the counterculture made it happen. He demonstrates that a good many of the electronics freaks who were working on inventing the future in the 60's and early 70's were, simultaneously, soaked in drugs, antiwar politics and weird ideas.

At the heart of his story is Doug Engelbart, a Navy veteran trained in radar during World War II who became obsessed with the idea that computers could augment human intelligence. Mr. Engelbart set up a research group at Stanford that, despite its Pentagon funding, became an outpost for young, creative and sometimes radicalized engineers.

In the 1960's, computers were machines for math - for "computing." Mr. Engelbart saw much more. His team invented or envisioned "every significant aspect of today's computing world" - point-and-click screen control, text editing, e-mail and networking. Mr. Kesey, the writer, was shown how Mr. Engelbart's computers worked and declared them to be "the next thing after acid." Even Mr. Engelbart, a white-shirted pied piper, experimented with LSD, encounter groups, Chairman Mao and est. It's a wonder he got anything done.

Actually, he didn't. In 1968, he demonstrated computer interactivity at a conference that wowed everyone and that the author, appropriately, dubs the "computing world's Woodstock." And then - nothing. Too dreamy to part with his technology until perfected, Mr. Engelbart never got around to developing commercial applications. His staff gradually defected to Xerox, which was actually interested in selling products. Xerox ultimately blew its commercial opportunity, but its technology would be widely cloned.

Occasionally, the tale splinters like an acid trip that goes on too long, with side trips and fervent hyperboles that, in a strange way, do put one in mind of the 60's. Engineers show up at Stanford, protest the war and drop out to join communes. One of them will "alter the world's politics"- by which Mr. Markoff means the engineering student staged a fast against the R.O.T.C.

Stewart Brand, one of the most interesting figures in the book, shepherds Mr. Kesey through an acid trip, an event to which Mr. Kesey invited guitarist Jerry Garcia and his band - giving rise to the Grateful Dead. Then, Mr. Brand turns up as the cameraman at Mr. Engelbart's computing Woodstock.

This is the kind of psychedelics-to-circuits connection that Mr. Markoff makes much of - sometimes too much. Anyway, Mr. Brand went on to found the Whole Earth Catalog, a very hip compendium of random information that was, as I recall, perfectly useless. But Mr. Brand had a singular insight with regard to information - "it wants to be free."

When Whole Earth got to be a drag, Mr. Brand staged a demise party, at which he stunned guests by giving away $20,000, his original investment. There was a debate over how to spend it. Came the sage investment advice, "Give it back to the Indians." It was decided that Fred Moore, an ardent pacifist of anti-R.O.T.C. fame, would safeguard the funds, which meant putting them in a tin can and burying them. Did this have anything to do with computers? Actually, it did.

Money made Mr. Moore unhappy. Computers excited him, as did a sense of community. In 1975, he founded an enthusiasts' society, the Homebrew Computer Club. Hundreds of hobbyists came to the first meeting, including Stephen Wozniak, who went on to co-found Apple Computer. The idea was that everyone would share information. Mr. Moore believed that his club "should have nothing to do with making money."

But it did. Twenty-three entrepreneurial seedlings, including Apple, would trace their roots to the club. Mr. Markoff writes, "The deep irony is that Fred Moore lit the spark . . . toward the creation of powerful information tools." This is hyperbole. Lit a spark would be fair.

The first commercial PC, the Altair 8800, had been developed - in New Mexico, 1,000 miles away - before Homebrew ever assembled. But the attendants did, excitedly, pass around a copy of software written for the Altair, which had been developed by the infant Micro-Soft, as it was then known. Bill Gates, its 20-year-old tycoon-to-be, sarcastically objected to the pirating of his product. "Hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share." Needless to say, Mr. Moore's view of sharing was not endorsed by Mr. Gates. At this point, Marx and the history of the software industry diverged.

IN Mr. Markoff's view, the PC era, which placed each user in charge of an isolated box, was a long detour from the higher aim of information sharing conceived by Mr. Engelbart. This purpose was vindicated by the Internet. The tension still persists between profit-seeking publishers and, ahem, idealists who would love to share what belongs to others - music rights, for instance. According to the author, this is today "the bitterest conflict facing the world's economy."

Such overwrought claims aside, at the core of "Dormouse" lies a valid and original historical point. Computer technology did turn out to be creative, spirited and even freeing. Most of this was a result of the fabulous advances in the power of the microchip. But perhaps, also, in the tactile clicking of the mouse, you can hear the faint strumming of a guitar.

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Darko Zeljkovic for The New York Times

Two Afghan workers scraped opium paste from a field of poppies near Kandahar. The U.S.-backed poppy-eradication program has had little effect.

May 22, 2005
U.S. Memo Faults Afghan Leader on Heroin Fight
By DAVID S. CLOUD and CARLOTTA GALL

WASHINGTON, May 21 - United States officials warned this month in an internal memo that an American-financed poppy eradication program aimed at curtailing Afghanistan's huge heroin trade had been ineffective, in part because President Hamid Karzai "has been unwilling to assert strong leadership."

A cable sent on May 13 from the United States Embassy in Kabul, the Afghan capital, said that provincial officials and village elders had impeded destruction of significant poppy acreage and that top Afghan officials, including Mr. Karzai, had done little to overcome that resistance.

"Although President Karzai has been well aware of the difficulty in trying to implement an effective ground eradication program, he has been unwilling to assert strong leadership, even in his own province of Kandahar," said the cable, which was drafted by embassy personnel involved in the anti-drug efforts, two American officials said.

A copy of the three-page cable, which was addressed to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was shown to The New York Times by an American official alarmed at the slow pace of poppy eradication.

The cable also faulted Britain, which has the top responsibility for counternarcotics assistance in Afghanistan, for being "substantially responsible" for the failure to eradicate more acreage. British personnel choose where the eradication teams work, but the cable said that those areas were often not the main growing areas and that the British had been unwilling to revise targets.

The criticism of Mr. Karzai reflected mounting frustration among some American officials that plans to uproot large swaths of Afghanistan's poppy crop have produced little success. These officials said they worried that heroin trafficking could threaten the American-led reconstruction effort in Afghanistan and worsen corruption in the country's fledgling central government.

In Washington, State Department officials defended Mr. Karzai, who is scheduled to visit next week, saying the effort had been hampered by bad weather and logistical problems as well as by political resistance.

"President Karzai is a strong partner and we have confidence in him," said the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher. "We are succeeding in our overall effort" to address the drug problem.

American and Afghan officials decided late last year that a more aggressive anti-poppy effort was too risky. State Department officials had proposed aerial spraying of poppy-growing areas, but the plan was opposed by Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and American military officials in Afghanistan who agreed, though effective at killing poppies, spraying fields by aircraft could lead to protests and unrest.

A spokeswoman for the British Foreign Office defended the choice of targets. "We don't believe we are picking the wrong targets, but we have a long struggle to go," she said. "We work very closely with the U.S. and other partners."

The spokeswoman said that eradication only worked if there were alternatives in place for the poppy growers, and that is where Britain is placing most of its emphasis.

A major reason Britain was put in charge of counternarcotics efforts is that much of the heroin produced from Afghan poppies ends up in European countries - roughly 50 tons a year, compared to the 20 tons estimated to go to the United States.

Mr. Boucher said his department was working to resolve the disagreements over the British targets.

Since beginning work last month, the country's Central Poppy Eradication Force, an American-trained group, has destroyed less than 250 acres, according to the two American officials. Its original goal was to eradicate 37,000 acres, but that target has recently been reduced to 17,000 acres. With the poppy harvest already under way, the actual eradication levels will probably be far lower, the American officials said.

The department's annual drug-trafficking report, released in March, warned that Afghanistan was "on the verge of becoming a narcotics state."

American officials have said publicly that Mr. Karzai recognized the severity of the poppy cultivation problem and was determined to combat it, albeit gradually, to avoid inciting unrest among Afghans whose incomes are dependent on growing poppies for the drug trade. Congress recently passed a supplemental spending bill that included $260 million for the State Department's anti-drug effort in Afghanistan this year.

A senior State Department official said that Mr. Karzai had wanted the eradication team to begin work before the poppy harvest season began in March, when he felt there was a better chance of persuading farmers to give up that lucrative crop. But because of bad weather and other delays the team did not begin work until early April.

The American officials involved said they also believed that Mr. Karzai might not want to challenge local Afghan authorities and thus incite opposition and even violence ahead of parliamentary elections scheduled for next fall.

The eradication effort got under way last month in the southern province of Kandahar and in neighboring Helmand and has now shifted to the Balkh Province in the north.

In Kandahar Province this week, farmers were scraping the last resin from poppy plants, in plain view of the main road, just 10 minutes outside the provincial capital, once a stronghold of the Taliban.

"Karzai's order will only be acceptable when he sends money to the farmers and helps them," said a poppy farmer, Jan Agha. After investing in water, fertilizer and labor, farmers would resist eradication, he said, adding, "In the villages people would fight."

A State Department official said that the United States remained optimistic that, through a combination of eradication and reduced plantings, it could achieve a 70,000-acre reduction in poppy planting from last year's record crop, which was estimated at more than 500,000 acres.

Because of the faltering eradication effort, much of the acreage reduction the Americans hope for is likely to be from farmers deciding not to plant, the officials conceded. And even if that goal is reached, the crop may still be the second largest ever, a senior American official said.

A Karzai spokesman, Jawed Ludin, said that foreign donors had failed to follow through on promises to help farmers shift to other crops and find other sources of income.

Mr. Karzai called for a "jihad" against drugs after his election last November, Mr. Ludin pointed out. But he also noted that Mr. Karzai would risk losing his moral authority if promised assistance to the poppy farmers was not forthcoming.

"It is actually the international community that is showing a lack of seriousness, by failing to show that there is an alternative for farmers," he said.

On their first day of operations in early April, in the Maiwand district of Kandahar Province, the eradication force encountered armed farmers blocking the fields. Gunfire broke out, resulting in the death of at least one Afghan protester and the wounding of several others.

The American officials said they suspected the protesters had been organized by traffickers and local officials with a stake in the drug trade.

Over the next eight days, according to the embassy cable, American and British officials in Kabul sought help from the Afghan minister responsible for the anti-drug effort, Habibullah Qaderi, to end the confrontation in Maiwand and a similar standoff in nearby Panjwayi. But he was unable to persuade the Kandahar authorities to help, the embassy cable said. Mr. Qaderi could not be reached for comment.

The embassy cable praised Muhammad Daoud, the deputy minister of the interior for the anti-drug effort, for trying to win access for the eradication teams, but it said he had "no support whatsoever from key members" of the government, "namely President Karzai."

When the eradication unit did begin work, it was permitted to destroy only limited amounts of poppies in fields designated by local officials, the cable said, which were widely scattered. On most days, only 40 to 100 workers showed up to help, not the 300 to 400 promised by the local leaders, the cable said. This month, the teams are working in the northern province of Balkh, officials said.

Afghan Bomb Kills U.S. Soldier

KABUL, Afghanistan, May 21 (Agence France-Presse) - One American soldier was killed and three others were wounded in a bomb blast in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, a military spokeswoman, Lt. Cindy Moore, said.

The casualties occurred during a patrol in the Shinkay district of Zabul Province, she said.

David S. Cloud reported from Washington for this article and Carlotta Gall from Kabul and Kandahar.

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Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Tim Havens, right, and Jan Vezikov in Manning Chapel at Brown University. Mr. Havens leads a morning prayer session in the chapel.

May 22, 2005
On a Christian Mission to the Top
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

For a while last winter, Tim Havens, a recent graduate of Brown University and now an evangelical missionary there, had to lead his morning prayer group in a stairwell of the campus chapel. That was because workers were clattering in to remake the lower floor for a display of American Indian art, and a Buddhist student group was chanting in the small sanctuary upstairs.

Like most of the Ivy League universities, Brown was founded by Protestant ministers as an expressly Christian college. But over the years it gradually shed its religious affiliation and became a secular institution, as did the other Ivies. In addition to Buddhists, the Brown chaplain's office now recognizes "heathen/pagan" as a "faith community."

But these days evangelical students like those in Mr. Havens's prayer group are becoming a conspicuous presence at Brown. Of a student body of 5,700, about 400 participate in one of three evangelical student groups - more than the number of active mainline Protestants, the campus chaplain says. And these students are in the vanguard of a larger social shift not just on campuses but also at golf resorts and in boardrooms; they are part of an expanding beachhead of evangelicals in the American elite.

The growing power and influence of evangelical Christians is manifest everywhere these days, from the best-seller lists to the White House, but in fact their share of the general population has not changed much in half a century. Most pollsters agree that people who identify themselves as white evangelical Christians make up about a quarter of the population, just as they have for decades.

What has changed is the class status of evangelicals. In 1929, the theologian H. Richard Niebuhr described born-again Christianity as the "religion of the disinherited." But over the last 40 years, evangelicals have pulled steadily closer in income and education to mainline Protestants in the historically affluent establishment denominations. In the process they have overturned the old social pecking order in which "Episcopalian," for example, was a code word for upper class, and "fundamentalist" or "evangelical" shorthand for lower.

Evangelical Christians are now increasingly likely to be college graduates and in the top income brackets. Evangelical C.E.O.'s pray together on monthly conference calls, evangelical investment bankers study the Bible over lunch on Wall Street and deep-pocketed evangelical donors gather at golf courses for conferences restricted to those who give more than $200,000 annually to Christian causes.

Their growing wealth and education help explain the new influence of evangelicals in American culture and politics. Their buying power fuels the booming market for Christian books, music and films. Their rising income has paid for construction of vast mega-churches in suburbs across the country. Their charitable contributions finance dozens of mission agencies, religious broadcasters and international service groups.

On The Chronicle of Philanthropy's latest list of the 400 top charities, Campus Crusade for Christ, an evangelical student group, raised more from private donors than the Boy Scouts of America, the Public Broadcasting Service and Easter Seals.

Now a few affluent evangelicals are directing their attention and money at some of the tallest citadels of the secular elite: Ivy League universities. Three years ago a group of evangelical Ivy League alumni formed the Christian Union, an organization intended to "reclaim the Ivy League for Christ," according to its fund-raising materials, and to "shape the hearts and minds of many thousands who graduate from these schools and who become the elites in other American cultural institutions."

The Christian Union has bought and maintains new evangelical student centers at Brown, Princeton and Cornell, and has plans to establish a center on every Ivy League campus. In April, 450 students, alumni and supporters met in Princeton for an "Ivy League Congress on Faith and Action." A keynote speaker was Charles W. Colson, the born-again Watergate felon turned evangelical thinker.

Matt Bennett, founder of the Christian Union, told the conference, "I love these universities - Princeton and all the others, my alma mater, Cornell - but it really grieves me and really hurts me to think of where they are now."


The Christian Union's immediate goal, he said, was to recruit campus missionaries. "What is happening now is good," Mr. Bennett said, "but it is like a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality."

And trends in the Ivy League today could shape the culture for decades to come, he said. "So many leaders come out of these campuses. Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Ivy League grads; four of the seven Massachusetts Supreme Court justices; Christian ministry leaders; so many presidents, as you know; leaders of business - they are everywhere."

He added, "If we are going to change the world, we have got, by God's power, to see these campuses radically changed."

An Outsider on Campus Mr. Havens, who graduated from Brown last year, is the kind of missionary the Christian Union hopes to enlist. An evangelical from what he calls a "solidly middle class" family in the Midwest, he would have been an anomaly at Brown a couple of generations ago. He applied there, he said, out of a sense of "nonconformity" and despite his mother's preference that he attend a Christian college.

"She just was nervous about, and rightfully so, what was going to happen to me freshman year," Mr. Havens recalled.

When he arrived at Brown, in Providence, R.I., Mr. Havens was astounded to find that the biggest campus social event of the fall was the annual SexPowerGod dance, sponsored by the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Queer Alliance and advertised with dining-hall displays depicting pairs of naked men or women. "Why do they have to put God in the name?" he said. "It seems kind of disrespectful."

Mr. Havens found himself a double outsider of sorts. In addition to being devoted to his faith, he was a scholarship student at a university where half the students can afford $45,000 in tuition and fees without recourse to financial aid and where, he said, many tend to "spend money like water."

But his modest means did not stand out as much as his efforts to guard his morals. He did not drink, and he almost never cursed. And he was determined to stay "pure" until marriage, though he did not lack for attention from female students. Just as his mother feared, Mr. Havens, a broad-shouldered former wrestler with tousled brown hair and a guileless smile, wavered some his freshman year and dated several classmates.

"I was just like, 'Oh, I can get this girl to like me,' " he recalled. " 'Oh, she likes me; she's cute.' And so it was a lot of fairly short and meaningless relationships. It was pretty destructive."

In his sophomore year, though, his evangelical a cappella singing group, a Christian twist on an old Ivy League tradition, interceded. With its support, he rededicated himself to serving God, and by his senior year he was running his own Bible-study group, hoping to inoculate first-year students against the temptations he had faced. They challenged one another, Mr. Havens said, "committing to remain sexually pure, both in a physical sense and in avoiding pornography and ogling women and like that."

Mr. Havens is now living in a house owned and supported by the Christian Union and is trying to reach not just other evangelicals but nonbelievers as well.

Prayers in the Boardrooms

The Christian Union is the brainchild of Matt Bennett, 40, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Cornell and later directed the Campus Crusade for Christ at Princeton. Mr. Bennett, tall and soft-spoken, with a Texas drawl that waxes and wanes depending on the company he is in, said he got the idea during a 40-day water-and-juice fast, when he heard God speaking to him one night in a dream.

"He was speaking to me very strongly that he wanted to see an increasing and dramatic spiritual revival in a place like Princeton," Mr. Bennett said.

While working for Campus Crusade, Mr. Bennett had discovered that it was hard to recruit evangelicals to minister to the elite colleges of the Northeast because the environment was alien to them and the campuses often far from their homes. He also found that the evangelical ministries were hobbled without adequate salaries to attract professional staff members and without centers of their own where students could gather, socialize and study the Bible. Jews had Hillel Houses, and Roman Catholics had Newman Centers.

He thought evangelicals should have their own houses, too, and began a furious round of fund-raising to buy or build some. An early benefactor was his twin brother, Monty, who had taken over the Dallas hotel empire their father built from a single Holiday Inn and who had donated a three-story Victorian in a neighborhood near Brown.

To raise more money, Matt Bennett has followed a grapevine of affluent evangelicals around the country, winding up even in places where evangelicals would have been a rarity just a few decades ago. In Manhattan, for example, he visited Wall Street boardrooms and met with the founder of Socrates in the City, a roundtable for religious intellectuals that gathers monthly at places like the Algonquin Hotel and the Metropolitan Club.

Those meetings introduced him to an even more promising pool of like-minded Christians, the New Canaan Group, a Friday morning prayer breakfast typically attended by more than a hundred investment bankers and other professionals. The breakfasts started in the Connecticut home of a partner in Goldman, Sachs but grew so large that they had to move to a local church. Like many other evangelicals, some members attend churches that adhere to evangelical doctrine but that remain affiliated with mainline denominations.

Other donors to the Christian Union are members of local elites across the Bible Belt. Not long ago, for example, Mr. Bennett paid a visit to Montgomery, Ala., for lunch with Julian L. McPhillips Jr., a wealthy Princeton alumnus and the managing partner of a local law firm. Mr. Bennett, wearing an orange Princeton tie, said he wanted to raise enough money for the Christian Union to hire someone to run a "healing ministry" for students with depression, eating disorders or drug or alcohol addiction.

Mr. McPhillips, who shares Mr. Bennett's belief in the potential of faith healing, remarked that he had once cured an employee's migraine headaches just by praying for him. "We joke in my office that we don't need health insurance," he told Mr. Bennett before writing a check for $1,000.

Mr. Bennett's database has so far grown to about 5,000 names gathered by word of mouth alone. They are mostly Ivy League graduates whose regular alumni contributions he hopes to channel into the Christian Union. And these Ivy League evangelicals, in turn, are just a small fraction of the large number of their affluent fellow believers.

Gaining on the Mainline

Their commitment to their faith is confounding a long-held assumption that, like earlier generations of Baptists or Pentecostals, prosperous evangelicals would abandon their religious ties or trade them for membership in establishment churches. Instead, they have kept their traditionalist beliefs, and their churches have even attracted new members from among the well-off.

Meanwhile, evangelical Protestants are pulling closer to their mainline counterparts in class and education. As late as 1965, for example, a white mainline Protestant was two and a half times as likely to have a college degree as a white evangelical, according to an analysis by Prof. Corwin E. Smidt, a political scientist at Calvin College, an evangelical institution in Grand Rapids, Mich. But by 2000, a mainline Protestant was only 65 percent more likely to have the same degree. And since 1985, the percentage of incoming freshmen at highly selective private universities who said they were born-again also rose by half, to 11 or 12 percent each year from 7.3 percent, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles.

To many evangelical Christians, the reason for their increasing worldly success and cultural influence is obvious: God's will at work. Some also credit leaders like the midcentury intellectual Carl F. H. Henry, who helped to found a large and influential seminary, a glossy evangelical Christian magazine and the National Association of Evangelicals, a powerful umbrella group that now includes 51 denominations. Dr. Henry and his followers implored believers to look beyond their churches and fight for a place in the American mainstream.

There were also demographic forces at work, beginning with the G.I. Bill, which sent a pioneering generation of evangelicals to college. Probably the greatest boost to the prosperity of evangelicals as a group came with the Sun Belt expansion of the 1970's and the Texas oil boom, which brought new wealth and businesses to the regions where evangelical churches had been most heavily concentrated.

The most striking example of change in how evangelicals see themselves and their place in the world may be the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. It was founded in Hot Springs, Ark., in 1914 by rural and working-class Christians who believed that the Holy Spirit had moved them to speak in tongues. Shunned by established churches, they became a sect of outsiders, and their preachers condemned worldly temptations like dancing, movies, jewelry and swimming in public pools. But like the Southern Baptists and other conservative denominations, the Assemblies gradually dropped their separatist strictures as their membership prospered and spread.

As the denomination grew, Assemblies preachers began speaking not only of heavenly rewards but also of the material blessings God might provide in this world. The notion was controversial in some evangelical circles but became widespread nonetheless, and it made the Assemblies' faith more compatible with an upwardly mobile middle class.

By the 1970's, Assemblies churches were sprouting up in affluent suburbs across the country. Recent surveys by Margaret Poloma, a historian at the University of Akron in Ohio, found Assemblies members more educated and better off than the general public.

As they flourished, evangelical entrepreneurs and strivers built a distinctly evangelical business culture of prayer meetings, self-help books and business associations. In some cities outside the Northeast, evangelical business owners list their names in Christian yellow pages.

The rise of evangelicals has also coincided with the gradual shift of most of them from the Democratic Party to the Republican and their growing political activism. The conservative Christian political movement seldom developed in poor, rural Bible Belt towns. Instead, its wellsprings were places like the Rev. Ed Young's booming mega-church in suburban Houston or the Rev. Timothy LaHaye's in Orange County, Calif., where evangelical professionals and businessmen had the wherewithal to push back against the secular culture by organizing boycotts, electing school board members and lobbying for conservative judicial appointments.

'A Bunch of Heathens'

Mr. Havens, the Brown missionary, is part of the upsurge of well-educated born-again Christians. He grew up in one of the few white households in a poor black neighborhood of St. Louis, where his parents had moved to start a church, which failed to take off. Mr. Havens's father never graduated from college. After being laid off from his job at a marketing company two years ago, he now works in an insurance company's software and systems department. Tim Havens's mother home-schooled the family's six children for at least a few years each.

Mr. Havens got through Brown on scholarships and loans, and at graduation was $25,000 in debt. To return to campus for his missionary year and pay his expenses, he needed to raise an additional $36,000, and on the advice of Geoff Freeman, the head of the Brown branch of Campus Crusade, he did his fund-raising in St. Louis.

"It is easy to sell New England in the Midwest," as Mr. Freeman put it later. Midwesterners, he said, see New Englanders as "a bunch of heathens."

So Mr. Havens drove home each day from a summer job at a stone supply warehouse to work the phone from his cluttered childhood bedroom. He told potential donors that many of the American-born students at Brown had never even been to church, to say nothing of the students from Asia or the Middle East. "In a sense, it is pre-Christian," he explained.

Among his family's friends, however, encouragement was easier to come by than cash. As the summer came to a close, Mr. Havens was still $6,000 short. He decided to give himself a pay cut and go back to Brown with what he had raised, trusting God to take care of his needs just as he always had when money seemed scarce during college.

"God owns the cattle on a thousand hills," he often told himself. "God has plenty of money."

Thanks to the Christian Union, Mr. Haven's present quarters as a ministry intern at Brown are actually more upscale than his home in St. Louis. On Friday nights, he is a host for a Bible-study and dinner party for 70 or 80 Christian students, who serve themselves heaping plates of pasta before breaking into study groups. Afterward, they regroup in the living room for board games and goofy improvisation contests, all free of profanity and even double entendre.

Lately, though, Mr. Havens has been contemplating steps that would take him away from Brown and campus ministry. After a chaste romance - "I didn't kiss her until I asked her to marry me," he said - he recently became engaged to a missionary colleague, Liz Chalmers. He has been thinking about how to support the children they hope to have.

And he has been considering the example of his future father-in-law, Daniel Chalmers, a Baptist missionary to the Philippines who ended up building power plants there and making a small fortune. Mr. Chalmers has been a steady donor to Christian causes, and he bought a plot of land in Oregon, where he plans to build a retreat center.

"God has always used wealthy people to help the church," Mr. Havens said. He pointed out that in the Bible, rich believers helped support the apostles, just as donors to the Christian Union are investing strategically in the Ivy League today.

With those examples and his own father in mind, Mr. Havens chose medicine over campus ministry. He scored well on his medical school entrance exams and, after another year at Brown, he will head to St. Louis University School of Medicine. At the Christian Union conference in April, he was pleased to hear doctors talk about praying with their patients and traveling as medical missionaries.

He is looking forward to having the money a medical degree can bring, and especially to putting his children through college without the scholarships and part-time jobs he needed. But whether he becomes rich, he said, "will depend on how much I keep."

Like other evangelicals of his generation, he means to take his faith with him as he makes his way in the world. He said his roommates at Brown had always predicted that he would "sell out"- loosen up about his faith and adopt their taste for new cars, new clothes and the other trappings of the upper class.

He didn't at Brown and he thinks he never will.

"So far so good," he said. But he admitted, "I don't have any money yet."

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