The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs, and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.

By Boris Kachka

HarperCollins occupies floors 1 through 22 of a giant steel-and-glass box on 53rd Street. But up on 26, the receptionist for a tiny offshoot of the company sits alone, gatekeeper to a few drab rows of empty cubicles. A glass container on a table holds a mysterious pile of bright-yellow lightbulbs.

“Welcome to our temporary home,” says 51-year-old publisher Bob Miller, ushering me into a colleague’s more inviting office. Inside, he and his staffers prepare to impart a cheery message: They’re going to fix publishing!

But first, a horror story. Debbie Stier, Miller’s No. 2 at HarperStudio (as this little imprint is called), has been collecting videos for their blog. “You want to see what happens to books after they go to book heaven?” she asks. On the screen of her MacBook, a giant steel shredder disgorges a ragged mess of paper and cardboard onto a conveyor belt. This is the fate of up to 25 percent of the product churned out by New York’s publishing machine.

Everyone’s eyes widen, as though watching some viral YouTube gross-out. “It’s like Wall-E,” says marketing director Sarah Burningham. “It’s depressing,” Miller adds. They had sent in a Flip camera with a warehouse worker. “You can see our books go through there,” says Stier. “The Crichton, the Ann Patchett.”

Miller recently left Hyperion, which he founded seventeen years ago, to start his own imprint at the urging of HarperCollins’s then-CEO, Jane Friedman. She was replaced in June, but HarperStudio lives on. For all its ambitions, it’s a modest outfit: Miller and three women, two of them in their twenties, hope to publish two books a month starting next May, having convinced 25 authors to forgo big advances in return for half of their books’ eventual profit. The books they’ll be doing aren’t particularly outré—Emeril Lagasse on grilling, 50 Cent is collaborating with The 48 Laws of Power author Robert Greene—but they’re hoping that their process will be revolutionary.

Over the past few weeks, Stier has turned her own Flip camera on friends and colleagues, asking them to hold up those yellow lightbulbs and share their “bright ideas” on publishing. She plays us a few of the clips, including one of a publicist who delivers Stier’s intended punch line, tentatively: “Have fewer authors and sell more books?” But the suggestion that gets the biggest laugh in the office is from Stier’s 12-year-old son, who says, “So maybe you have to turn all the books into movies so nobody has to waste their time.”

“It is a very trying time. I’m kind of down about it myself.” —JONATHAN GALASSI, PRESIDENT OF FARRAR, STRAUS AND GIROUX

The demise of publishing has been predicted since the days of Gutenberg. But for most of the past century—through wars and depressions—the business of books has jogged along at a steady pace. It’s one of the main (some would say only) advantages of working in a “mature” industry: no unsustainable highs, no devastating lows. A stoic calm, peppered with a bit of gallows humor, prevailed in the industry.

Survey New York’s oldest culture industry this season, however, and you won’t find many stoics. What you will find are prophets of doom, Cassandras in blazers and black dresses arguing at elegant lunches over What Is to Be Done. Even best-selling publishers and agents fresh from seven-figure deals worry about what’s coming next. Two, five years from now—who knows? Life moves fast in the waning era of print; publishing doesn’t.

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to be in turmoil. There’s the floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the whole business.

One by one, these would be difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a full-blown crisis—a climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

“Flat is not an acceptable position. We are always expected to grow.” —CAROLYN REIDY, CEO OF SIMON & SCHUSTER

In its heyday, publishing was a vast array of mom-and-pop shops, in which the pops tended to be independently wealthy. Their competitive advantage was not efficiency or low costs but taste. Maxwell Perkins at Scribner; Bennett Cerf at Random House; Roger Straus and Robert Giroux at Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Barney Rosset at Grove; and Alfred A. Knopf epitomized the gentleman editor as gallerist, snatching up unknown geniuses. One British publisher advised an American at the time: “Take lots and lots of gambles, but small ones.” So they did. They took poor writers drinking, put them up in their homes, and defended them in court. They made handshake deals, spent their personal wealth in lean years, and built backlists out of modernist classics. Discovering Faulkner was like buying Picassos in 1910.

In the early sixties, Knopf sold out to Cerf, who sold Random House to RCA, and the era of consolidation began. Formerly independent publishers shriveled into mere imprints of massive corporations. Knopf became part of Random House; so did Doubleday and Bantam and Ballantine and dozens of still smaller shops now distinguished mostly by their names, like corporatized Broadway theaters bearing the monikers of long-gone cigar-chomping producers.

By the nineties, five big conglomerates were divvying up the spoils and their lucrative backlists. Many of the smaller companies that had been struggling, like FSG, Ecco, and Crown, were flush with corporate resources. But in exchange, they gave up final say in how they’d publish their books—or even what books they’d publish. And suddenly an industry accustomed to 5 percent margins was being run by media moguls aiming for double digits.

The corporations began by doing what they knew how to do: acquire, expand, diversify, spend. Sign up all kinds of writers, pay some of them a ton, market the hell out of them, see what sticks. It was the nineties, after all. A few books sold spectacularly, but more failed, and in the last ten years, the bill has come due. So today, the order comes down from beleaguered CEOs: More blockbuster books, fast. Which leads to cutthroat auctions and ballooning advances. You can’t win big if you don’t bet big.

Lately, the whole, hoary concept of paying writers advances against royalties has come under question. Following their down payments to authors, publishers don’t have to pay a cent in royalties, which are usually 15 percent of the hardcover price, 7.5 for paperbacks, until that signing bonus is earned back. The system is supposed to be mutually beneficial; the publishers guarantee writers a certain income, and then both parties share in the proceeds beyond that level. But it only works for publishers if they’re conservative in their expectations. As auctions over hot books have grown more frequent, prudence has gone out the window— paying a $1 million advance to a 26-year-old first-time novelist becomes a public-relations gambit as much as an investment in that writer’s future.

That money has to come from somewhere, so publishers have cracked down on their non-star writers. The advances you don’t hear about have been dropping precipitously. For every Pretty Young Debut Novelist who snags that seven-figure prize, ten solid literary novelists have seen advances slashed for their third books.

Of course, back in the boom nineties, the corporations themselves were pumping up the expectations of midlist writers. Consider Dale Peck. His first novel, Martin and John, came out in 1993 to excellent reviews, and by his third book, in 1998, he was, by his own account, wildly overpaid. Books, he says, “were like Internet stocks, getting enormous advances without demonstrating any moneymaking whatsoever.” Having rarely sold more than 10,000 copies, he took up with superagent Andrew Wylie, developed a reputation for being a “diva,” and pretty soon couldn’t sell a book to save his life. Until he started specializing in genre fiction—first children’s books, then horror. Last year, Peck sold Body Surfing, a thriller about demons exiting people through sexual release. He’s now splitting $3 million with Heroes writer Tim Kring to produce a trilogy of conspiracy thrillers.

Peck sees an increasingly hostile environment for the kind of books he used to write. “When you get $100,000 for a novel,” he says, “you want $150,000 and then $200,000, so when they pay you $25,000 for the next one, and my rent is $2,500 a month, what do you do? The system works just fine for commercial fiction. But for literary fiction, I think we had a nice run of it in the commercial world.”

The good fiction that does manage to snag a stratospheric advance is mostly either a follow-up to or a knockoff of a freak hit. The astonishing success of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain led to a bidding war for his second book, which Grove/Atlantic editor Morgan Entrekin lost with great regret to Ann Godoff at Random House’s eponymous imprint (known as Little Random). Lucky him. The price tag, more than $8 million, might well have sunk Grove, one of the few biggish independent houses left, because Frazier’s follow-up, Thirteen Moons, sold less than 500,000 copies, according to BookScan. Ann Godoff was fired not long after the deal was made. “It is possible they broke Little Random’s neck,” says one agent. “Frazier’s wife will not have the luxury to buy another racehorse.”

But overspending isn’t going away, even with a rotten economy. Last month, Harvard economist Anita Elberse wrote a piece debunking the hypothesis of Chris Anderson’s anti-blockbuster blockbuster, The Long Tail (which Bob Miller acquired at Hyperion for a mere $550,000). Elberse led off with a tidbit from a study of Hachette’s Grand Central Publishing. Of 61 books on its 2006 list, each title averaged a profit of almost $100,000. But without the top seller, which earned $5 million, that average drops to $18,000. “A blockbuster strategy still makes the most sense,” she concludes.

It’s inherently risky, though. You have to wonder about the prospects for one new book that Elberse had her students case-study—Dewey: The Small-Town Library Cat Who Touched the World. Grand Central, inspired by the best seller Marley & Me, is betting on the new mini-genre of cat-related nonfiction. Grand Central initially offered $300,000, then went up to $1.25 million. Gobs more will be spent on marketing. You’ll likely be hearing about Dewey when it comes out this month, and if half a million of you still feel that you can’t get enough heartwarming pet stories, it just might earn back its advance.

So publishing ends up looking like a mini-Hollywood, but even more dependent on sleeper hits and semi-reliable franchises. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code buoyed Random House tremendously in the past five years, but with Brown’s sequel delayed, sales were down 5.6 percent last year. When Simon & Schuster announced that sales were off almost 10 percent in the first half of ’08, it cited the 2007 success of The Secret as the reason for the relative shortfall. Other companies did better—but on the strength of surprise hits. Sales grew 11 percent both at Penguin and at Hachette’s U.S. division, largely on the backs of two authors—Oprah-touted self-helper Eckhart Tolle at Penguin and Stephenie Meyer at Little, Brown.

Morgan Entrekin remembers meeting Larry Kirshbaum, then-CEO of Time Warner Books, right after two of Kirshbaum’s books had been anointed by Oprah in 1999. “It’s like winning the lottery twice,” says Entrekin, “but Larry didn’t seem that happy. He said, ‘Now my bosses are going to expect me to do better next year.’ ’’ Kirshbaum eventually left to become an agent.

“If someone like Jane Friedman can’t survive the industry, who can?” —AN EDITOR AT A HARPERCOLLINS RIVAL

The ideal publishing CEO can “read vertically and horizontally,” in the words of ex-Penguin CEO Peter Mayer. But even those who clearly can do both, like Jane Friedman, seem powerless to keep their bosses happy. Friedman had an odd retirement party. It was thrown not by her former employer, HarperCollins, but by her rival and close friend, Doubleday publisher Steve Rubin. The turnout for mid-August was impressive: Power agents Amanda “Binky” Urban and Mort Janklow and legendary editors Sonny Mehta, Gary Fisketjon, and Dan Halpern all converged on Rubin’s elegant roof deck off Central Park West. They surprised the guest of honor by wearing disturbing Jane Friedman masks. Friedman herself gave a defiant speech insisting that it wasn’t a retirement party at all. “Books mean civilization,” she said, perched on iron steps that resembled a barricade from Les Misérables. Later she proclaimed, “I am not done, and I am not done by a long shot!”

Friedman was an emblem not of publishing’s genteel old days but rather its postmillennial media- and tech-savvy era. She came up through publicity at Random House, and over a decade as CEO, she turned HarperCollins from a floundering beast into the business’s tightest, shiniest ship. She also attended personally to writers. She had such a good relationship with Michael Crichton that he followed her from Random House to HarperCollins. Yet a few days after being the belle of the industry’s annual confab, BookExpo, held in L.A. last spring, she went into Rupert Murdoch’s office and was told that her own protégé, Harper No. 2 Brian Murray, was replacing her. As one editor puts it, “She went over there thinking they were going to discuss [her] contract, and instead she got a two-by-four across the face.”

Friedman was never known as a gentle soul, but her brutal “resignation” spooked the industry. What exactly had she done to deserve this? HarperCollins’s recent numbers were down but had recovered reasonably by June. With both parties refusing to comment, theories abounded, the most plausible of which is that Murdoch thought she had become more noise and trouble than she was worth, running a part of his conglomerate that, relatively speaking, isn’t worth all that much to him. There was her messy dismissal of Judith Regan following the O. J. debacle—a tabloid event that dovetailed too well with Friedman’s reputed love of publicity. Murdoch, people at the company say, didn’t like seeing Friedman’s name all over the papers.

Murray looks to be a less conspicuous character. He promises to continue Friedman’s innovations, and to accelerate a worldwide expansion of the business. “We have a green light from News Corp. to invest in our business,” he says. Friedman, meanwhile, is said to be mulling an Amazon consulting gig.

The new face at the top of Random House, who replaced Peter Olson as CEO the week before Friedman left, is 40 and has never worked in book publishing before. Markus Dohle, a veteran of Bertelsmann’s printing business, cuts quite a different figure from, say, dapper, laconic Knopf editor Sonny Mehta, a man who’s survived many a CEO and is said to have shrugged comically when he found out—via the New York Times—that Olson was out. “It’s like Dohle’s 27 years old: He sort of bounces on the balls of his feet the way college athletes do,” says one longtime industry observer.

Dohle has spent the last three months on a listening tour, and his subjects nervously await the results. So far, many prefer his demeanor to that of Olson, a man whose voracious reading failed to make up for his coldness (an in-house joke was that he was a Swede pretending to be a German). But managerially, Olson had one saving grace. “He left people alone,” says the industry observer. “But [Dohle] doesn’t come out of a tradition of editors as geniuses who need to be left alone in a room to smell manuscripts and decide on them.”

Random House had a weak 2007, and publishing sources say Olson didn’t do enough to eliminate its endemic inefficiencies. Imprints are still allowed to bid against each other for books, thus driving up prices, and every one of them has a major problem or two. Little Random has been without an official editor-in-chief since Daniel Menaker left last year. Doubleday, post–Da Vinci Code, is overextended. And two of Random’s down-market imprints, Crown and Bantam, are said to have dragged down past earnings; Bantam Dell head Irwyn Applebaum is a frequent object of anticipatory Schadenfreude. “When business is slow, tongues are fast,” responds Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum, Irwyn’s brother, declining a request to speak to Dohle and calling the speculation “fantasy-league Random House.” He says there is “zero change” at the imprints, and that Bantam “consistently delivers some of the company’s biggest-selling hardcovers and paperbacks.”

Dohle has been popping into editorial marketing meetings, something Olson almost never did. At the end of July, Mehta brought Dohle as a surprise guest to a Knopf meeting. Looking over a sales spreadsheet, he muttered to Mehta, “This isn’t how the other imprints do it.” Editors who were called in during the meeting hadn’t all been told Dohle would be there. One such editor, herself a former executive, said of a book with disappointing sales, “It’s dead in the water. Don’t worry about it.” Another person in attendance says, “You could see Dohle’s eyebrows going, ‘Oh boy, that was candid.’ ” What was his take on the proceedings? Where would these little observations lead, and how would they affect the people in this room? No one yet knows.

“I think agents often like for there to be problems, because they can be the stalwart support behind a writer.” —GARY FISKETJON, KNOPF EDITOR

The blockbuster era makes retaining marquee writers an increasingly complex proposition. Back when Grove’s Barney Rosset was boozing around Paris with Samuel Beckett, agents were adjuncts, the ones who handled the details (in fact, Rosset became Beckett’s agent too). The editor, both best friend and midwife to genius, had it made. The pay was awful, but what company! And all in the service of art. “We publish authors, not books,” FSG’s people like to say—and for decades, through best sellers and duds, great writers and prestigious publishers were inseparable. Some still are: Philip Roth, thus far, has stuck by Houghton Mifflin even after its painful merger with Harcourt. John Updike, at Knopf, doesn’t even have an agent. But early this year, two of publishing’s tightest bonds were broken. Richard Ford left Knopf’s star editor, Gary Fisketjon, for Dan Halpern at Ecco (Binky Urban, the agent who handled Frazier’s deal, did this one, too). And, after 42 years at FSG, Tom Wolfe left for Little, Brown.

Fisketjon, renowned for his close friendships and even closer edits (Raymond Carver, Cormac McCarthy, et al.), was more than Ford’s editor—he and the novelist “would kill furry animals in the woods together,” as one colleague puts it. But doing business together had become tricky. Ford’s literary reputation and popularity had fallen out of alignment; his last book, The Lay of the Land, sold less than 100,000 copies, per BookScan. Slow-and-steady Knopf didn’t seem fazed, but the author himself was. He thought house enthusiasm had waned, and “he never felt the money was commensurate with the work that was produced,” says the colleague. It couldn’t have been easy when the Lauren Weisbergers of the world were getting better deals than he was. “He’s 64, looking for that one last score in the literary world.” Knopf offered Ford roughly $750,000 per book, at which point Mehta capped the money, according to the source; Ecco offered $3 million for three books.

Others say that Ford had simply grown unhappy with Fisketjon’s editing. Cormac McCarthy left Fisketjon, too, but he stayed with Knopf and had Mehta edit him. When Ford decided to leave, says the source, he left Fisketjon a phone message explaining his move. It was never returned. He sent a follow-up e-mail, which Fisketjon answered with a surly note. Only Ford and Fisketjon know what exact words were exchanged (and both refuse to comment on their relationship after the move), but Ford later told someone that “Gary has to learn he’s no longer in high school.” This was business, after all.

Tom Wolfe kept FSG afloat in its last decade of independence with The Bonfire of the Vanities, but Jonathan Galassi shrugs off making him a lowball offer earlier this year. Little, Brown paid about $7 million for his next novel, a Miami race parable, after Galassi reportedly balked at an early request for $5 million. “We went through a court dance,” says Galassi. “Everyone acted their part, and the result could have been predicted from the beginning.”

Wolfe says his divorce was cordial, noting that 42 years is a lot of loyalty—which, by the way, is a two-way street. “Making a living as a writer is much more like Protestantism than Catholicism. In the Catholic Church you built up your bank account through some good works, even if you’ve had terrible sins.”

A close friend of Wolfe’s says it wasn’t about Galassi, it was about Roger Straus, the charismatic old-line chairman of FSG who died in 2004. After Bonfire, Random House had offered Wolfe millions to leave Straus, but he’d refused. With his old friend gone, Wolfe relied on his most trusted surviving confidante: his agent, Lynn Nesbit.

Writers looking for a boost from a new publisher would do well to remember the cautionary tale of one Salman Rushdie, exhibit A in the case of Editor v. Agent. Sonny Mehta was his editor; they shared virtually identical tastes and backgrounds, and each had helped the other’s career. Enter Rushdie’s agent, Andrew Wylie, in the late nineties, pitching what would become Rushdie’s 1999 novel, The Ground Beneath Her Feet. “Wylie held Sonny up,” says a publisher at another house. “Sonny said no and [Wylie] said, ‘Well, cheers, we’re leaving.’ Despite low sales of Rushdie’s previous novel, Holt paid $2 million for the new one (plus some paperback rights). It promptly tanked. Rushdie eventually returned—not to Knopf but to Little Random. His career has never been the same.

Many agents contend that, with younger editors being laid off or jumping around to start new imprints, the job of nurturing an author has been left to them. “You hear every day of an editor changing houses,” says longtime agent Mort Janklow. “J. R. Moehringer [best-selling author of The Tender Bar], I sold him to Hyperion.” Two of Moehringer’s editors left the house. “Then Bob Miller decides to leave. This is a young man who writes a book about abandonment! Who does he turn to? The departed publisher?! I take care of him.”

Meanwhile, morale among many editorial staffers is dipping to all-time lows. Forget literary taste; everything is cost-benefit analysis. “What I’ve heard from editors is, ‘My judgment doesn’t count any longer,’ ” says Kent Carroll, who left his company, Carroll & Graf, after it was sold to a mini-conglomerate, and who now runs the boutique Europa Editions. “There used to be a reason to get into publishing,” says Carroll. “Whether they know it or not, they all want to be Maxwell Perkins. It’s a kind of secondary immortality. They didn’t flock to publishing because they want to publish Danielle Steel.”

“Some people say there’s not enough marketing done for a book, and I think that’s total bullshit. You do the marketing that works, and not much is working right now.” —PETER MILLER, DIRECTOR OF PUBLICITY, BLOOMSBURY

One key advantage of corporate publishing was supposed to be its marketing muscle: You may not publish exactly the books you’d like to, but the ones you publish will get the attention they deserve. Yet in recent years, more accurate internal sales numbers have confirmed what publishers long suspected: Traditional marketing is useless.

“Media doesn’t matter, reviews don’t matter, blurbs don’t matter,” says one powerful agent. Nobody knows where the readers are, or how to connect with them. Fifteen years ago, Philip Roth guessed there were at most 120,000 serious American readers—those who read every night—and that the number was dropping by half every decade. Others vehemently disagree. But who really knows? Focused consumer research is almost nonexistent in publishing. What readers want—and whether it’s better to cater to their desires or try harder to shape them—remains a hotly contested issue. You don’t have to look further than the pages of The New YorkTimesBook Review or the shelves of Borders to see that the market for fiction is shrinking. Even formerly reliable schlock like TV-celebrity memoirs doesn’t do so well anymore. And “the next thing,” as Publishers Weekly editor Sara Nelson notes drily, “is not bloggers writing books.”

Marketing a book these days is like playing a slot machine; hitting one 7 won’t get you a dime. “There has to be this constellation of events,” says Daniel Menaker, whose departure was tied in the press to the low sales of Benjamin Kunkel’s much-ballyhooed debut novel, Indecision. “Not only a Times Book Review front cover but Don Imus talking about it and Ellen Pompeo actually reading the book on-camera. And Barack Obama has just bought it.”

It’s plausible that publishing would already be in the red if it weren’t for Oprah. And “she is reportedly going off the air in a few years,” says former Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos. “The most effective marketing tool they have for a book isn’t going to be there. If I were still there, I would be figuring out, now, different and better ways to market in anticipation of that being taken away.”

This would mean far more than just the few book “trailers” you see online. “They’re all the rage right now,” says Bloomsbury’s Peter Miller, “but I would love to see an example of one video that really did generate a lot of sales. There’s a sense of desperation.”

“We just don’t know what our business looks like without Borders. And that’s terrifying. There’s just no way of getting around it.” —SIMON LIPSKAR, AGENT

If you think marketing is impossible, talk to the people in sales. Their job—forcing books into a shrinking handful of outlets—involves all the supplication of publicity without all the fun and free booze of book parties. And it has the added bonus of bleeding their companies dry.

Borders Group, which controls 10 to 12 percent of the bookselling market, is on death watch, putting publishers in an even less enviable negotiating position with bookstores. The remaindering and shredding of books—a cost borne largely by the publisher—is a relic of a consignment model developed during the Depression that makes no modern sense. Publishers also pay for placement in big bookstores, which they call “co-op,” under a complicated arrangement meant to cover up the fact that it’s payola (or, as some call it, extortion). Those 300 copies of, say, American Wife stacked precariously at the entrance? Bought and paid for by the publisher. “You feel raped having to pay for placement in a store you’re selling to,” says an agent.

But at least with two major chains, you can play one against the other. Even in its weakened state, Borders can still boost a book into best-seller contention. If something is selling well at Borders, a publisher can pressure an increasingly stingy Barnes & Noble to reorder. If Barnes & Noble absorbed Borders’ business, it would control 30 percent of the market—versus 10 percent for all the independents combined, with big-box retailers and Amazon controlling most of the rest. (At its nineties peak, the indie-only American Booksellers Association had 4,700 member stores; today it has 1,700.) This matters because the following response from Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio is only technically true: “We buy every title published—our business is a long-tail business—less than 5 percent is from bestsellers.”

Editors insist that plenty of books get skipped. Richard Nash, head of indie publisher Soft Skull Press, estimates that one in twenty are passed over, though ten to fifteen copies are shipped into their warehouses in case there’s a special order. Many more are getting smaller initial orders than ever. That’s a very long, very skinny tail.

Barnes & Noble, briefly interested in Borders, has since recanted. Recently William Ackerman, a major Borders shareholder, suggested they should sell to Amazon instead. That probably won’t happen, but his reasoning is clear. Barnes & Noble is old news. Amazon is the future.

“The fear of Google [BookSearch] is ridiculous paranoia. The fear of Amazon is enlightened self-interest.” —MIKE SHATZKIN, BOOK-INDUSTRY CONSULTANT

Attendance at this year’s BookExpo was way down, but you wouldn’t have known it if you were among the 700-odd people at a presentation by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Lean, wiry, shaven-headed, and big-eared, Bezos talked up the Kindle, the new e-reader that may or may not account for 1 percent of the book market. No one knows. But while bookstore sales were to drop 7.1 percent that month, Amazon was on its way to 31 percent sales growth (albeit for all media products) for the second quarter. The audience greeted Bezos warily: His sleek, West Coast style made Jane Friedman look like Vladimir Nabokov.

In a Q&A session billed as “Upfront and Unscripted,” none other than Chris “Long Tail” Anderson quizzed Bezos on his plans. He couldn’t get many straight answers (though Bezos was delighted to discuss the suborbital space vehicle he’s working on). How many books would Bezos like to have available on the Kindle? “Well, I probably won’t be happy unless we have 20 million, but I’m hard to make happy,” he said, and then let loose a honking laugh.

Publishers have been burned by e-book hype before. A few years back, analysts were predicting we’d all be reading novels on our Palm Pilots. Barnes & Noble even began selling e-books. Though it doesn’t quite look the part, Bezos’s chunky retro Kindle is the closest so far to being the iPod of books. In mid-August, a Citigroup analyst doubled his estimate for this year’s sales of the readers—to almost 400,000.

Why weren’t publishers elated? What’s wrong with a company that returns only 10 percent of the books it buys and might eventually eliminate the cost of print production? Well, it doesn’t help that Amazon, which has been on an intense buying spree (print-on-demanders BookSurge; book networking site Shelfari), lists publishers as its competitors in SEC filings. Editors and retailers alike fear that it’s bent on building a vertical publishing business—from acquisition to your doorstep—with not a single middleman in sight. No HarperCollins, no Borders, no printing press. Amazon has begun to do end runs around bookstores with small presses. Two new bios from Lyons Press, about Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain, are going straight-to-Kindle long before publication.

Amazon, in short, plays hardball. When Hachette Livre UK couldn’t come to terms over Amazon’s U.K. payments, Amazon removed the BUY NEW button from its listings for the company’s key books. Hachette’s CEO responded with an open letter, saying, “Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours.”

The ultimate fear is that the Kindle could be a Trojan horse. Right now, Amazon is making little or nothing on Kindle books. Lay down your $359 and you can get most books for $9.99. Publishers list that same Kindle version for about $17.99, though, and—as with all retailers—charge Amazon roughly half that price for it. Which means that Amazon keeps only a dollar on each book, while the publishers make $9.

But Amazon may be offering a sweet deal now in order to undercut publishers later. If their low, low prices succeed in making e-books the dominant medium, they can pay publishers whatever they want. “The concern is they want to corner the market,” explains one books executive, and then force publishers to accept a genuine 50 percent discount. “If they took over as little as 10 to 20 percent of the market,” says an agent, “publishers simply would not be able to exist.”

“We’re an industry more willing to watch the boat sink than rock it a wee bit.” —ONE FRUSTRATED PUBLISHER

While many in publishing wait in their bunkers, HarperStudio and a few others forge ahead. Back in February, Bob Miller and Jane Friedman met at the bar of the Omni Berkshire hotel for one of their freewheeling chats. “How would you do it differently if you could start all over again,” she asked him. He said he’d try to reduce advances and returns, put out only a few books, and focus on cheap Internet marketing. “Why don’t you do that?” she asked, and within a week they had a deal.

Miller has worked out separate contracts, co-op and all, with booksellers and authors—capping advances at $100,000 and reducing returns. Their list now includes not just 50 Cent but Michael Eisner, his former boss at Hyperion; John Lithgow (a memoir); and Isabella Rossellini adapting her short-film series on bug sex. All these authors will contribute to their own pre-publication marketing.

Miller doesn’t wait for agent submissions, instead accosting writers at conferences, telling them how much more a writer can make under 50-50 profit-sharing. He’s even throwing in something literary, 22 previously unpublished stories by Mark Twain, who, Miller points out, ran a profit-sharing publisher that made a killing on Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs. “If he were alive, this is exactly the deal he’d want,” Miller says brightly.

Other industry folk, while supportive, note that precious few writers—except those with trust funds—would forgo advances, and that it generally works best for those who have a pre-existing fan base that will gobble up their books. As for Miller’s other key ingredients, profit-sharing is not a new concept, and online marketing is catching on everywhere. If there’s anything Miller shares with the departed Friedman, it’s a knack for making restructuring look like revolution. But in a business as illogical as publishing, maybe it is.

One indie publisher has been pitching an imprint around town that would go beyond what Miller’s doing—expanding into print-on-demand, online subscriptions, maybe even a “salon” for loyal readers. He envisions a transitional period of print-on-demand, then an era in which most books will be produced electronically for next to nothing, while high-priced, creatively designed hardcovers become “the limited-edition vinyl of the future.” “I think they know it’s right,” the publisher says of the executives he’s wooing, “but they don’t want to disrupt the internal equilibrium. I’m like the guy all the girls want to be friends with but won’t hop into bed with.”

Nearly all of these new ideas already exist in some form or another at independents like Dave Eggers’s brainchild, McSweeney’s. But can they survive inside a corporate, blockbuster-bound culture? “You can’t turn a camel into an alligator,” says longtime agent and former Grove editor Ira Silverberg. “I’d rather we have several soft years when investors get out and people who care about the values in the business reinvest.”

But going back in time isn’t an option. A hundred Bennett Cerfs wouldn’t save the current publishing model—not without a hundred Bob Millers puzzling out the way forward, unhampered by fear or complacency. The kind of targeted, curated lists editors would love to publish will work even better in an electronic, niche-driven world, if only the innovators can get them there. Those owners who are genuinely interested in the industry’s long-term survival would do well to hire scrappy entrepreneurs at every level, people who think like underdogs.

It’ll be rough going in the meantime; some publishers will transform, some will muddle through, some will die. And there will, no doubt, be a lot of editors for whom even this diminished era will look like the last great golden age, when some writers were paid in the millions, some of their books produced in the millions, and more than half of those books actually sold. Book publishing is still a big-league business, and that’s a hard thing to let go of. “There’s something terrible,” says an editor at a prestigious imprint, “about admitting that you’re not a mass medium.”

Labels: business, Stuff

Ever since its inception, one of the internet's most commonly used features is the limitless pool of jokes and wacky pictures. Millions of people around the world devote large chunks of time to this phenomenon, particularly college students who can't get enough of dorm room gags, especially if they involve beer, bloopers, and topless girls. In the winter of 2000, connoisseurs of college humor and aspiring business students Josh Abramson and Ricky Van Veen created a website that would cater to this discerning demographic of 18 to 24-year-olds, giving students a forum for their often tasteless, crass comedy. The pair, friends since the sixth grade in Baltimore where they grew up, had the goal of finding enough online advertisers to pay for their beer (a considerable campus expense) and creating a website fully dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt. There was never a business plan. The greatest thing about starting a business in college, says Abramson, is that there is very little risk. There was a $30 a month server fee and that's it.

CollegeHumor.com was launched with $200 of savings. Abramson and Van Veen spent their summer in a basement. They made flyers and let their campus know what they were up to. The workload was minimal until the pair started getting swamped with videos and photos of campus life from across the country. Only a month after it launched, CollegeHumor.com needed its own dedicated server to cope with traffic. Their hunch about the demand for the site was clearly spot-on. Van Veen says: "We just made it available to everyone. We just lifted up a rock and it was there".Their job is to filter the material photos, movies, links, and columns and serve it up on the basic website. Not that the filter is that rigorous. Expect to find plenty of photos of drunk students, animal bottoms, silly signs, and stories on such things as an outbreak of chlamydia at a San Francisco zoo. The CollegeHumor.com team has a list of things that aren't funny that includes midgets, Bill Gates, pimps, and Helen Keller jokes, but there is still a lot of room for bad taste.

Within three months it became clear that this business could pay for a lot more beer than Abramson and Van Veen could drink. The site gave advertisers direct access to the hard-to-please 18-to-24-year-old demographic of technology savvy, early adapters who were bombarding the site every day. The pair received several early offers to buy the business (one for $9 million), but Abramson and Van Veen were not interested. They were having too much fun. We'd be doing this if we were making less money. The point is we are doing something we enjoy,says Van Veen. The buy-out offers inspired them to take the project more seriously. We thought we could feed ourselves if we went full-time at it, says Van Veen. In 2003, revenue reached $250,000, and in 2004 it climbed to $2 million.

Early on, Abramson and Van Veen made an alliance with Zilo, a media company that specifically targets college and young adults through television, live events, and its online presence. They never put us as a priority, says Abramson, who has constantly had to deal with not being taken seriously because of his age. While young people don't necessarily have the experience to do certain things, this has no impact on their ability to be creative and have ideas.” The Zilo alliance did not last.

Today, CollegeHumor.com is based in New York in a $10,000-a-month Tribeca loft, and the founders, now graduates, have been joined by Zach Klein and Jakob Lodwick. Advertisers on the site include DreamWorks, Toyota, Coca-Cola, and sports betting agencies that pay up to $60,000 a month. 2005 revenues are forecast to tip $5 million, a slice of that coming from the sales of irreverent Tshirts (What would Ashton do?). The site receives around 600 pictures and 100 movies every day. It has 6 million unique visitors each month and 200 million page views. Staff numbers have deliberately remained low and margins, says Abramson, remain high. The partners apologize for some of the site's disorder. This is how the Internet works when you have four people running a site that should have two dozen.

CollegeHumor.com now has a parent company, Connected Ventures (run by Van Veen and Abramson), that collects the advertising revenue and product sales from the various websites it runs including Busted Tees (for all those crass T-shirts), Big Shocker (an in-joke hand signal that has been made into a range of Big Shocker products), a college dating site, and various other CollegeHumor spin-offs including video file sharing and a forum for music writers. In August 2006, InterActiveCorp bought a majority stake (51%) in the business. Abramson remains president of Connected Ventures, Van Veen content editor. The boys are living the fantasy life of every college student, New York loft, flatscreen TVs, positive cash flow, and meetings with high-level entertainment industry executives looking for ways to leverage the very marketable CollegeHumor.com brand. There are books, a possible Paramount movie in the pipeline, and a steady increase in advertising revenue for the site.

Abramson, an accomplished jazz pianist who used to work in a piano bar, was always seen as an entrepreneur. He went to the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond, but does not rate this academic experience as contributing anything significant to his business career. His former professor of economics Robert Dolan describes him as a very laid back guy on the surface, but he was definitely someone with a plan. “You can tell the wheels are churning. He's an entrepreneur, he says. Abramson was selling string bracelets in high school, and later on he worked out that he could earn more in one night as a DJ with some sound equipment than his buddies were making in a fortnight as employees. "Ever since I was little kid it was my dream to run a company," he says. Abramson is one of those who believes that the entrepreneurial spirit is something some people have while others don't. Some people have the natural ability, some people don't. It is a way of looking at an opportunity. You could study business your whole life and still not get it. By Emily Ross & Angus Holland, exclusive online extract from 100 Great Businesses & the minds behind them. Buy online

Labels: business, Stuff

Published on April 30, 2008


By Jelani Harper

Donte Murry is a busy man. The Morehouse College senior, who recently partnered with Michael Cooke to executive produce his first feature-length documentary, Hustle 101, has his hands full. He is simultaneously handling promotions for the film, running a website and writing an upcoming book—on top of juggling a full course load and planning to attend film school after graduation.

Murry's precociousness typifies the entrepreneurial spirit of Hustle 101, which provides an unflinching glimpse into the recent development of professional collegiate party promotions. The film dissects the typical material trappings that attract employees and patrons alike to "the lifestyle," while championing the much needed social work and corporate infrastructure necessary to fuel this lucrative phenomenon sweeping through college campuses nationwide.

Jelani Harper: How did you come up with the idea for the film?

Donte Murry: The idea originally came to me last spring to write a screenplay. That idea came from friends I had who were telling me the inside of party promotions, and some of these stories I would hear would just absolutely blow my mind. There were stories of how other promoters recruit people to their teams, dirty tricks that they pulled against each other, money being stolen. I was like "Wow, this has never been shown before, on any level." Whenever you see the black collegiate experience it's about fraternities or sports, but there are plenty of people who would say a lot of these major Atlanta University Center party promoters are looked at as kings. It's bigger than fraternities, it's bigger than sports and nobody's ever shown that before.

So you wanted to showcase this entrepreneurial spirit?

I like to see young black men starting businesses and making money because some of these young guys really are making a lot of money. And they're getting a good experience on how to handle a business. These promotion teams are real businesses with LLC's and they structure themselves accordingly as they get more mature. Some of the companies that have been around for a longer time are really organized in the way that they operate, the way that they have a title and the way they distribute money and set aside a portion for future investments. I think it's good to see young black men doing that.

How'd you go from the screenplay to a documentary?

In May I ended up trying out for the show College Hill Interns. I made it as a finalist so they flew me out to L.A. When they flew me out to L.A., I was like "Man, this idea would be a good reality show, actually." So I was out there pitching the idea as a reality show and people liked it. But it was something that was so foreign to them they couldn't really grasp it. They were like, "We need something visual." I came back and made a pilot, although I wasn't able to land the pilot, people liked the footage so much they were like "You should make a movie."

How effective was the Internet as a marketing tool for the film?

Initially we had the movie up on our website and let people download it. And it was very successful for us. We had over 1,500 downloads in our first month because the word of mouth on us was crazy. It was January the seventh when we initially put it out there. It was just an experiment. We wanted to see would this really work because we had hyped it up, we had the trailers online, people from across the nation were hitting us up on Facebook and MySpace. So we wanted to see if we actually give them an avenue to watch this movie are people going to pay to watch it, and it worked. It was successful. Now we're selling DVDs and we're working on a distribution deal and all that good stuff.

One of the most poignant moments in the film is when one of the promotion teams sanctions a fashion show to raise funds and awareness for AIDS victims in Africa.

That was Pedro. When I first met him and first met Sky High Entertainment, he told me that when they were first starting he would see all these party promoters, and all it's about is money and women and how good they look. But he was like. "If we could get some pull, I want to use that pull to have an impact and raise awareness of issues." That's what he's doing and that's what he plans to keep doing.

The film goes beyond the typical images of excess associated with the party lifestyle.

There's a deeper meaning to it that I feel maybe only 15 to 20 percent of people see. Really what it was about, to me, was this follower mentality—this follow the leader mentality. I tried to get that across as best I could—how people get wrapped up into following a message and almost the cult-like status of it. To me what was so crazy about it was to see these kids that just wanted to be a part of something so badly. It was just like the same thing going all the way back to Hitler and the Nazis, or gangs or anything like that where people just do something just to be a part of something because they get caught up or wrapped up in the message.

You mean the people who want to join the different promotion teams?

Right. So you notice how we had the girl on there—and the thing is I can't wait to do a sequel because I can't wait to get this message across better—but for instance the girl, Courtnei, who was a part of the promotional team. You realize how excited she was. She was like, "We're not getting paid right now, but I love these guys" and she was going out and doing all kinds of stuff for them. And in the turn of one semester to see her at the very end she was like, "This isn't for me." And, like she said, somebody's going to jump in and fill her place.

How has the public reacted to the film?

Some people see the message that I said—the follower mentality. Some people see that these guys are hustlers; they're really doing their thing. And then some people are like, "Am I missing something?" And that's exactly how I felt before I made the film. I felt like, am I missing something? How are these people so hyped into a party that they'll pay 40 dollars at the door just because people have amped their name out so much?

Throwing the money out, wearing the jewelry... everything is fake. Nothing is real. And that's another thing I tried to get across: it's all an illusion. That's why we had the guy at the end say believe none of what you hear, half of what you see. We interspersed that with the promoter talking about, "We're getting money, we're taxing them." That's something a lot of people see that I want them to get from the film.

Aside from another Hustle 101, what other future projects are you working on?

Another thing I'm working on that I feel really strong about, really passionate about, is a book called Brother to Brother. I see a lot of these books that are done by older black men where they try to reach out to young black men. Like the guy that did Letters To A Young Brother where he pulled in all these celebrities and had them give these messages of hope and whatnot. But the thing that I know from my community service and from being at Morehouse is that young men listen to other young men. Our words have a lot of relevance to each other because we understand a lot of the same things. So I'm working on a book where I'm taking 20 guys from Morehouse and we're all collaborating on this book called Brother To Brother, just to give a message of hope out to other young brothers out there.

Labels: Stuff

By BENEDICT CAREY

Two monkeys with tiny sensors in their brains have learned to control a mechanical arm with just their thoughts, using it to reach for and grab food and even to adjust for the size and stickiness of morsels when necessary, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The report, released online by the journal Nature, is the most striking demonstration to date of brain-machine interface technology. Scientists expect that technology will eventually allow people with spinal cord injuries and other paralyzing conditions to gain more control over their lives.

The findings suggest that brain-controlled prosthetics, while not practical, are at least technically within reach.

In previous studies, researchers showed that humans who had been paralyzed for years could learn to control a cursor on a computer screen with their brain waves and that nonhuman primates could use their thoughts to move a mechanical arm, a robotic hand or a robot on a treadmill.

The new experiment goes a step further. In it, the monkeys’ brains seem to have adopted the mechanical appendage as their own, refining its movement as it interacted with real objects in real time. The monkeys had their own arms gently restrained while they learned to use the added one.

Experts not involved with the study said the findings were likely to accelerate interest in human testing, especially given the need to treat head and spinal injuries in veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This study really pulls together all the pieces from earlier work and provides a clear demonstration of what’s possible,” said Dr. William Heetderks , director of the extramural science program at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. Dr. John P. Donoghue, director of the Institute of Brain Science at Brown University, said the new report was “important because it’s the most comprehensive study showing how an animal interacts with complex objects, using only brain activity.”

The researchers, from the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University, used monkeys partly because of their anatomical similarities to humans and partly because they are quick learners.

In the experiment, two macaques first used a joystick to gain a feel for the arm, which had shoulder joints, an elbow and a grasping claw with two mechanical fingers.

Then, just beneath the monkeys’ skulls, the scientists implanted a grid about the size of a large freckle. It sat on the motor cortex, over a patch of cells known to signal arm and hand movements. The grid held 100 tiny electrodes, each connecting to a single neuron, its wires running out of the brain and to a computer.

The computer was programmed to analyze the collective firing of these 100 motor neurons, translate that sum into an electronic command and send it instantaneously to the arm, which was mounted flush with the left shoulder.

The scientists used the computer to help the monkeys move the arm at first, essentially teaching them with biofeedback.

After several days, the monkeys needed no help. They sat stationary in a chair, repeatedly manipulating the arm with their brain to reach out and grab grapes, marshmallows and other nuggets dangled in front of them. The snacks reached the mouths about two-thirds of the time — an impressive rate, compared with earlier work.

The monkeys learned to hold the grip open on approaching the food, close it just enough to hold the food and gradually loosen the grip when feeding.

On several occasions, a monkey kept its claw open on the way back, with the food stuck to one finger. At other times, a monkey moved the arm to lick the fingers clean or to push a bit of food into its mouth while ignoring a newly presented morsel.

The animals were apparently freelancing, discovering new uses for the arm, showing “displays of embodiment that would never be seen in a virtual environment,” the researchers wrote.

“In the real world, things don’t work as expected,” said the senior author of the paper, Dr. Andrew Schwartz, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Pittsburgh. “The marshmallow sticks to your hand or the food slips, and you can’t program a computer to anticipate all of that.

“But the monkeys’ brains adjusted. They were licking the marshmallow off the prosthetic gripper, pushing food into their mouth, as if it were their own hand.”

The co-authors were Meel Velliste, Sagi Perel, M. Chance Spalding and Andrew Whitford.

Scientists have to clear several hurdles before this technology becomes practical, experts said. Implantable electrode grids do not generally last more than a period of months, for reasons that remain unclear.

The equipment to read and transmit the signal can be cumbersome and in need of continual monitoring and recalibrating. And no one has yet demonstrated a workable wireless system that would eliminate the need for connections through the scalp.

Yet Dr. Schwartz’s team, Dr. Donoghue’s group and others are working on all of the problems, and the two macaques’ rapid learning curve in taking ownership of a foreign limb gives scientists confidence that the main obstacles are technical and, thus, negotiable.

In an editorial accompanying the Nature study, Dr. John F. Kalaska, a neuroscientist at the University of Montreal, argued that after such bugs had been worked out, scientists might even discover areas of the cortex that allow more intimate, subtle control of prosthetic devices.

Such systems, Dr. Kalaska wrote, “would allow patients with severe motor deficits to interact and communicate with the world not only by the moment-to-moment control of the motion of robotic devices, but also in a more natural and intuitive manner that reflects their overall goals, needs and preferences.”

Labels: Science, Stuff

At first glance, the Web sites elasticwaist.com, productfiend.com and dailybedpost.com look like garden-variety blogs created by average civilians. There’s little clutter, no ads, links to other sites with similar post-feminist themes (dieting, skin care and sex, respectively) and sporadically updated content.

But upon closer inspection, there’s something suspiciously … slick about the layout of all three, isn’t there? Aha! Down the left-hand side of each loom the logos of Glamour, Allure and Self, rendered in varying shades of pink. And then in size 7.5 Veranda font, tucked away at the bottom of the page, is the telltale line: “Copyright © 2007 Condé Nast Publications. All rights reserved.”

As magazine publishers continue to try and refine their confused, semi-committed approach to the Internet, these little-known sites—in-house name: “The Network”—are a company trial of sorts, a slick repackaging of “girl”-illa blogs edited by Susan Kaplow, previously a director of development at the teen-marketing site alloy.com. Though they all link with mysterious persistence to Condé Nast products and advertisers, Ms. Kaplow refused to call them “Webvertorial.” “They’re separate from the magazines,” she said. “These sites give us the opportunity to create a lot of content and really develop a conversational exchange.”

But is anyone talking? Traffic to the sites seems modest. It would’ve taken 335,000 unique visitors per site for elasticwaist (founded in March 2007) or dailybedpost (which went live in September 2007) to get officially tracked by Nielsen Online, which provides Web statistics, in June 2008; this didn’t happen. On a July 24 post, one blogger with the name Erin Flaherty asked in a poll: Do you ever use makeup remover? As of July 29, 32 people had voted. (In case you want to know, 14 said, “Nope. My cleanser works just fine, thanks.”)

Ms. Kaplow declined to give her own sense of the readership numbers—“We’re not going to get into that,” she said, “we just want the traffic to grow and the usership to grow”—so Off the Record reached out to a variety of bloggers, all of whom were listed on at least one of the three sites’ blogrolls, to get an anecdotal sense of who might be stopping by for a little kvetching and product information.

“Haha I have never heard of them, i’m sorry!” wrote Anna Holmes, editor of Jezebel, in an e-mail.

“I’m not familiar with that site (and didn’t actually know we were on their blogroll, which is always very appreciated), but I will certainly check it out!” wrote Jessica Morgan, the author of Go Fug Yourself, of elasticwaist.

“Quite honestly, I don’t read those sites,” wrote Faran Krentcil, a blogger for Fashionista.

According to one Condé Nast executive, the company is not investing all that much in “The Network.” “They’re not getting a lot of resources,” said this person, “because they are little experiments.”

The authors of all “The Network” blogs are freelancers, according to a Condé Nast spokeswoman, and they keep a low profile. Off the Record managed to locate one former contract worker for productfiend, Saryn Chorney, who called her salary “supplemental.”

“I wasn’t living off of it,” she said.

Last year, Ms. Chorney put together several videos for the site, one of which—a tour of a beauty store in Soho—debuted as recently as July 23.

Asked to address the mission of the site, she responded not in the rah-rah rebel-sister spirit of cyberspace but like a good little company soldier. “The voice on productfiend is witty, it’s not a lot of the blogs like Jezebel or perezhilton,” Ms Chorney said. “Those sites are almost like overly attitudinal. Productfiend is cute. It’s funny—sometimes. It’s about being serious about perfect skin and they do take it seriously. It’s educational.”

Labels: Media, Stuff

By HELENA ANDREWS

Voodoo dolls riddled with safety pins, inexplicable late-night telephone calls, clandestine hotel rendezvous and secret messages sent over the airwaves sound more Stephen King than Oprah Winfrey.

But according to a popular Internet conspiracy theory, Ms. Winfrey, along with Bill Cosby, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and others, employed those tactics and more to oust Dave Chappelle from his Comedy Central hit, “Chappelle’s Show,” because its “outrageous tone” was “setting race relations back 50 years.” For months this conjecture has inundated the blogosphere and e-mail in-boxes, but recently it has enjoyed a resurgence with the premiere of “Chappelle’s Show: The Lost Episodes.”

ChappelleTheory.com, supposedly written by a retired public relations executive with connections, claims that a cabal of African-American leaders, known as the Dark Crusaders, used their influence and wealth to harass Mr. Chappelle out of his now infamous $50 million contract.

Not too shocking to most, none of this is true. The hoax, while as imaginative as a Chappelle skit, was a marketing scheme employed to sell T-shirts.

“I think we all recognized it was a joke when it first came out,” said Tony Fox, a spokesman for Comedy Central. “I don’t think it requires any official comment by us.”

Tomorrow Comedy Central will broadcast the last of Mr. Chappelle’s finished work in the third installment of “The Lost Episodes.” Mr. Chappelle has called the network’s decision to show those sketches “a bully move.”

Mr. Chappelle’s spokeswoman, Carla Sims, had little to say about the conspiracy.

“If we responded to every hoax that was out there, I wouldn’t get any work done,” she said, before adding that commenting officially about the site would do nothing but give it unearned credence.

The overblown theory has been deflated as a viral Internet marketing scheme, a way for a Web site to gain popularity through file sharing and blogs. The original postings about the theory all came from Jason Hill, 33, co-founder of the Philadelphia-based Web development company WebLinc LLC.

According to several sites, WebLinc registered the domain name ChappelleTheory.com in October, two months before its unofficial debut. The plan was to use the site to promote a clothing site called anti-social.com, which sells Dark Crusaders T-shirts for $18.

“We’re definitely getting a resurgence of traffic now,” Mr. Hill said.

After a lull of several months, the Chappelle Theory site reached a high this month of 4 million hits in one day, compared to about 2 million in the last few months, according to the Internet traffic monitor Alexaholic.com.

WebLinc attributes the spike in interest to the broadcast of Mr. Chappelle’s newest material.

Chappelle Theory first came to fame on the gossip site Defamer, and then made the rounds on MySpace and Friendster in early December, a time when the Web was rife with Chappelle conjecture.

This was before Mr. Chappelle’s interviews with Oprah Winfrey and James Lipton and after the rumors of drugs, insanity and his escape to Africa. But Mr. Chappelle, though much talked about, was not talking.

“So that was the perfect time for it because everyone was sort of wondering,” said Todd Jackson, editor in chief of dead-frog.com, a news blog for what he calls “comedy nerds.”

Mr. Jackson was one of the first to debunk the conspiracy theory.

“When I first saw the site I was pretty certain it was obviously a fake,” said Mr. Jackson, 35, who, as the former editorial director of Comedy Central’s Web site, once worked down the hall from “Chappelle’s Show.”

He pointed to one of the more fantastic claims as proof. It alleges that while Ms. Winfrey interviewed Tom Cruise in January 2004 (the couch-jumping incident occurred in May 2005), she faced the camera and said, “Dave Chappelle, you should be ashamed of yourself.” She added, “I’m going to make sure you never work in Hollywood again.”

According to the conspiracy, as written by Mr. Hill and his friends, Ms. Winfrey taped that message and somehow transmitted it solely to Mr. Chappelle’s home television in Ohio.

Through the blog tracker Technorati.com, Mr. Jackson discovered the connection between WebLinc and the theory. He later exposed it on his blog.

“A lot of people were savvy enough to know this was viral marketing, but I still see the link every once in a while, and I still see people saying, ‘Hey, I don’t know if this is true or not,’ ” said Mr. Jackson, who said he received a free Dark Crusaders T-shirt in the mail.

Darren Hill, 30, Jason Hill’s brother and co-founder of WebLinc, admitted that Chappelle Theory was published to “promote the Anti Social brand.” Still, he said, he saw some value in the Web site.

Mr. Jackson agreed. “As long as it’s making people laugh, there’s some validity to it,” he said.

Labels: Stuff

1. They look for and find opportunities where others see nothing.

2. They find a lesson while others only see a problem.

3. They are solution focused.

4. They consciously and methodically create their own success, while others hope success will find them.

5. They are fearful like everyone else, but they are not controlled or limited by fear.

6. They ask the right questions - the ones which put them in a productive, creative, positive mindset and emotional state.

7. They rarely complain (waste of energy). All complaining does is put the complainer in a negative and unproductive state.

8. They don’t blame (what’s the point?). They take complete responsibility for their actions and outcomes (or lack thereof).

9. While they are not necessarily more talented than the majority, they always find a way to maximise their potential. They get more out of themselves. They use what they have more effectively.

10. They are busy, productive and proactive. While most are laying on the couch, planning, over-thinking, sitting on their hands and generally going around in circles, they are out there getting the job done.

11. They align themselves with like-minded people. They understand the importance of being part of a team. They create win-win relationships.

12. They are ambitious; they want amazing - and why shouldn’t they? They consciously choose to live their best life rather than spending it on auto-pilot.

13. They have clarity and certainty about what they want (and don’t want) for their life. They actually visualize and plan their best reality while others are merely spectators of life.

14. They innovate rather than imitate.

15. They don’t procrastinate and they don’t spend their life waiting for the ‘right time’.

16. They are life-long learners. They constantly work at educating themselves, either formally (academically), informally (watching, listening, asking, reading, student of life) or experientially (doing, trying)… or all three.

17. They are glass half full people - while still being practical and down-to-earth. They have an ability to find the good.

18. They consistently do what they need to do, irrespective of how they are feeling on a given day. They don’t spend their life stopping and starting.

19. They take calculated risks - financial, emotional, professional, psychological.

20. They deal with problems and challenges quickly and effectively, they don’t put their head in the sand. They face their challenges and use them to improve themselves.

21. They don’t believe in, or wait for fate, destiny, chance or luck to determine or shape their future. They believe in, and are committed to actively and consciously creating their own best life.

22. While many people are reactive, they are proactive. They take action before they have to.

23. They are more effective than most at managing their emotions. They feel like we all do but they are not slaves to their emotions.

24. They are good communicators and they consciously work at it.

25. They have a plan for their life and they work methodically at turning that plan into a reality. Their life is not a clumsy series of unplanned events and outcomes.

26. Their desire to be exceptional means that they typically do things that most won’t. They become exceptional by choice. We’re all faced with live-shaping decisions almost daily. Successful people make the decisions that most won’t and don’t.

27. While many people are pleasure junkies and avoid pain and discomfort at all costs, successful people understand the value and benefits of working through the tough stuff that most would avoid.

28. They have identified their core values (what is important to them) and they do their best to live a life which is reflective of those values.

29. They have balance. While they may be financially successful, they know that the terms money and success are not interchangeable. They understand that people who are successful on a financial level only, are not successful at all. Unfortunately we live in a society which teaches that money equals success. Like many other things, money is a tool. It’s certainly not a bad thing but ultimately, it’s just another resource. Unfortunately, too many people worship it.

30. They understand the importance of discipline and self-control. They are strong. They are happy to take the road less traveled.

31. They are secure. They do not derive their sense of worth of self from what they own, who they know, where they live or what they look like.

32. They are generous and kind. They take pleasure in helping others achieve.

33. They are humble and they are happy to admit mistakes and to apologize. They are confident in their ability, but not arrogant. They are happy to learn from others. They are happy to make others look good rather than seek their own personal glory.

34. They are adaptable and embrace change, while the majority are creatures of comfort and habit. They are comfortable with, and embrace, the new and the unfamiliar.

35. They keep themselves in shape physically, not to be mistaken with training for the Olympics or being obsessed with their body. They understand the importance of being physically well. They are not all about looks, they are more concerned with function and health. Their body is not who they are, it’s where they live.

36. They have a big engine. They work hard and are not lazy.

37. They are resilient. When most would throw in the towel, they’re just warming up.

38. They are open to, and more likely to act upon, feedback.

39. They don’t hang out with toxic people.

40. They don’t invest time or emotional energy into things which they have no control of.

41. They are happy to swim against the tide, to do what most won’t. They are not people pleaser's and they don’t need constant approval.

42. They are more comfortable with their own company than most.

43. They set higher standards for themselves (a choice we can all make), which in turn produces greater commitment, more momentum, a better work ethic and of course, better results.

44. They don’t rationalize failure. While many are talking about their age, their sore back, their lack of time, their poor genetics, their ‘bad luck’, their nasty boss and their lack of opportunities (all good reasons to fail), they are finding a way to succeed despite all their challenges.

45. They have an off switch. They know how to relax, enjoy what they have in their life and to have fun.

46. Their career is not their identity, it’s their job. It’s not who they are, it’s what they do.

47. They are more interested in effective than they are in easy. While the majority look for the quickest, easiest way (the shortcut), they look for the course of action which will produce the best results over the long term.

48. They finish what they start. While so many spend their life starting things that they never finish, successful people get the job done - even when the excitement and the novelty have worn off. Even when it ain’t fun.

49. They are multi-dimensional, amazing, wonderful complex creatures (as we all are). They realize that not only are they physical and psychological beings, but emotional and spiritual creatures as well. They consciously work at being healthy and productive on all levels.

50. They practice what they preach. They don’t talk about the theory, they live the reality.

Add a habit or two of your own to the list.

Labels: Deep Thoughts, Stuff

John Maynard Keynes was twitted with changing his mind. He replied, "When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?"

My favorite example of a change of mind was Norman Mailer at The Village Voice.

Norman took on the role of drama critic, weighing in on the New York premiere of Waiting for Godot.

Twentieth century's greatest play. Without bothering to go, Mailer called it a piece of garbage.

When he did get around to seeing it, he realized his mistake. He was no longer a Voice columnist, however, so he bought a page in the paper and wrote a retraction, praising the play as the masterpiece it is.

Every playwright's dream.

I once won one of Mary Ann Madden's "Competitions" in New York magazine. The task was to name or create a "10" of anything, and mine was the World's Perfect Theatrical Review. It went like this: "I never understood the theater until last night. Please forgive everything I've ever written. When you read this I'll be dead." That, of course, is the only review anybody in the theater ever wants to get.

My prize, in a stunning example of irony, was a year's subscription to New York, which rag (apart from Mary Ann's "Competition") I considered an open running sore on the body of world literacy—this due to the presence in its pages of John Simon, whose stunning amalgam of superciliousness and savagery, over the years, was appreciated by that readership searching for an endorsement of proactive mediocrity.

But I digress.

I wrote a play about politics (November, Barrymore Theater, Broadway, some seats still available). And as part of the "writing process," as I believe it's called, I started thinking about politics. This comment is not actually as jejune as it might seem. Porgy and Bess is a buncha good songs but has nothing to do with race relations, which is the flag of convenience under which it sailed.

But my play, it turned out, was actually about politics, which is to say, about the polemic between persons of two opposing views. The argument in my play is between a president who is self-interested, corrupt, suborned, and realistic, and his leftish, lesbian, utopian-socialist speechwriter.

The play, while being a laugh a minute, is, when it's at home, a disputation between reason and faith, or perhaps between the conservative (or tragic) view and the liberal (or perfectionist) view. The conservative president in the piece holds that people are each out to make a living, and the best way for government to facilitate that is to stay out of the way, as the inevitable abuses and failures of this system (free-market economics) are less than those of government intervention.

I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.

But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.

I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.

To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.

Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious bullshit and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.

Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well.

Do I speak as a member of the "privileged class"? If you will—but classes in the United States are mobile, not static, which is the Marxist view. That is: Immigrants came and continue to come here penniless and can (and do) become rich; the nerd makes a trillion dollars; the single mother, penniless and ignorant of English, sends her two sons to college (my grandmother). On the other hand, the rich and the children of the rich can go belly-up; the hegemony of the railroads is appropriated by the airlines, that of the networks by the Internet; and the individual may and probably will change status more than once within his lifetime.

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

But if the government is not to intervene, how will we, mere human beings, work it all out?

I wondered and read, and it occurred to me that I knew the answer, and here it is: We just seem to. How do I know? From experience. I referred to my own—take away the director from the staged play and what do you get? Usually a diminution of strife, a shorter rehearsal period, and a better production.

The director, generally, does not cause strife, but his or her presence impels the actors to direct (and manufacture) claims designed to appeal to Authority—that is, to set aside the original goal (staging a play for the audience) and indulge in politics, the purpose of which may be to gain status and influence outside the ostensible goal of the endeavor.

Strand unacquainted bus travelers in the middle of the night, and what do you get? A lot of bad drama, and a shake-and-bake Mayflower Compact. Each, instantly, adds what he or she can to the solution. Why? Each wants, and in fact needs, to contribute—to throw into the pot what gifts each has in order to achieve the overall goal, as well as status in the new-formed community. And so they work it out.

See also that most magnificent of schools, the jury system, where, again, each brings nothing into the room save his or her own prejudices, and, through the course of deliberation, comes not to a perfect solution, but a solution acceptable to the community—a solution the community can live with.

Prior to the midterm elections, my rabbi was taking a lot of flack. The congregation is exclusively liberal, he is a self-described independent (read "conservative"), and he was driving the flock wild. Why? Because a) he never discussed politics; and b) he taught that the quality of political discourse must be addressed first—that Jewish law teaches that it is incumbent upon each person to hear the other fellow out.

And so I, like many of the liberal congregation, began, teeth grinding, to attempt to do so. And in doing so, I recognized that I held those two views of America (politics, government, corporations, the military). One was of a state where everything was magically wrong and must be immediately corrected at any cost; and the other—the world in which I actually functioned day to day—was made up of people, most of whom were reasonably trying to maximize their comfort by getting along with each other (in the workplace, the marketplace, the jury room, on the freeway, even at the school-board meeting).

And I realized that the time had come for me to avow my participation in that America in which I chose to live, and that that country was not a schoolroom teaching values, but a marketplace.

"Aha," you will say, and you are right. I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

At the same time, I was writing my play about a president, corrupt, venal, cunning, and vengeful (as I assume all of them are), and two turkeys. And I gave this fictional president a speechwriter who, in his view, is a "brain-dead liberal," much like my earlier self; and in the course of the play, they have to work it out. And they eventually do come to a human understanding of the political process. As I believe I am trying to do, and in which I believe I may be succeeding, and I will try to summarize it in the words of William Allen White.

White was for 40 years the editor of the Emporia Gazette in rural Kansas, and a prominent and powerful political commentator. He was a great friend of Theodore Roosevelt and wrote the best book I've ever read about the presidency. It's called Masks in a Pageant, and it profiles presidents from McKinley to Wilson, and I recommend it unreservedly.

White was a pretty clear-headed man, and he'd seen human nature as few can. (As Twain wrote, you want to understand men, run a country paper.) White knew that people need both to get ahead and to get along, and that they're always working at one or the other, and that government should most probably stay out of the way and let them get on with it. But, he added, there is such a thing as liberalism, and it may be reduced to these saddest of words: " . . . and yet . . . "

The right is mooing about faith, the left is mooing about change, and many are incensed about the fools on the other side—but, at the end of the day, they are the same folks we meet at the water cooler. Happy election season.

Labels: Stuff

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Labels: Stuff

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

PARIS — When Youssoupha, a black rapper here, was asked the other day what was on his mind, a grin spread across his face. “Barack Obama,” he said. “Obama tells us everything is possible.”

A new black consciousness is emerging in France, lately hastened by, of all things, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States. An article in Le Monde a few days ago described how Mr. Obama is “stirring up high hopes” among blacks here. Even seeing the word “noir” (“black”) in a French newspaper was an occasion for surprise until recently.

Meanwhile, this past weekend, 60 cars were burned and some 50 young people scuffled with police and firemen, injuring several of them, in a poor minority suburb of Vitry-le-François, in the Marne region of northeast France.

Americans, who have debated race relations since the dawn of the Republic, may find it hard to grasp the degree to which race, like religion, remains a taboo topic in France. While Mr. Obama talks about running a campaign transcending race, an increasing number of French blacks are pushing for, in effect, the reverse.

Having always thought it was more racially enlightened than strife-torn America, France finds itself facing the prospect that it has actually fallen behind on that score. Incidents like the ones over the weekend bring to mind the rioting that exploded across France three years ago. Since it abolished slavery 160 years ago, the country has officially declared itself to be colorblind — but seeing Mr. Obama, a new generation of French blacks is arguing that it’s high time here for precisely the sort of frank discussions that in America have preceded the nomination of a major black candidate.

This black consciousness is reflected not just in daily conversation, but also in a dawning culture of books and music by young French blacks like Youssoupha, a cheerful, toothy 28-year-old, who was sent here from Congo by his parents to get an education at 10, raised by an aunt who worked in a school cafeteria in a poor suburb, and told by guidance counselors that he shouldn’t be too ambitious. Instead, he earned a master’s degree from the Sorbonne.

Then, like many well-educated blacks in this country, he hit a brick wall. “I found myself working in fast-food places with people who had the equivalent of a 15-year-old’s level of education,” he recalled.

So he turned to rap, out of frustration as much as anything, finding inspiration in “négritude,” an ideology of black pride conceived in Paris during the 1920s and 30s by Aimé Césaire, the French poet and politician from Martinique, and Léopold Sédar Senghor, the poet who became Senegal’s first president. Its philosophy, as Sartre once put it, was a kind of “antiracist racism,” a celebration of shared black heritage.

Négritude and Césaire are back. When Césaire died in April, at 94, his funeral in Fort-de-France, Martinique, was broadcast live on French television. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his rival Ségolène Royal both attended. Just three years ago, Mr. Sarkozy, as head of a center-right party and not yet president, supported a law (repealed after much protest) that compelled French schools to teach the “positive” aspects of colonialism. The next year, Césaire refused to meet with him. Now here was Mr. Sarkozy flying to the former French colony (today one of the country’s overseas departments, meaning he could troll for votes) to pay tribute to the poet laureate of négritude.

That said, as a country France definitely sends out mixed messages. “Négritude is a concept they just don’t want to hear about,” Youssoupha raps in “Render Unto Césaire” on his latest album, “À Chaque Frère” (“To Each Brother”). A regular short feature on French public television, “Citoyens Visibles,” hosted by a young actress, Hafsia Herzi, celebrates French artists with foreign origins.

At the same time, it’s against the rules for the government to conduct official surveys according to race. Consequently, nobody even knows for certain how many black citizens there are. Estimates vary between 3 million and 5 million out of a population of more than 61 million.

“Can you imagine if French officials said, ‘Well, we’re not sure, the population of France may be 65 million, or maybe it’s 30 million’?” declared a somewhat exasperated Patrick Lozès, founder of Cran, a black organization devised not long ago partly to gather statistics the government won’t.

When he sat down to talk the other morning, the first two words out of his mouth were Barack Obama. “The idea behind not categorizing people by race is obviously good; we want to believe in the republican ideal,” he said. “But in reality we’re blind in France, not colorblind but information blind, and just saying people are equal doesn’t make them equal.”

He ticked off some obvious numbers: one black member representing continental France in the National Assembly among 555 members; no continental French senators out of some 300; only a handful of mayors out of some 36,000, and none from the poor Paris suburbs.

To this may be added Cran’s findings that the percentage of blacks in France who hold university degrees is 55, compared with 37 percent for the general population. But the number of blacks who get stuck in the working class is 45 percent, compared with 34 percent for the national average.

“There’s total hypocrisy here,” Léonora Miano said. She’s a black author, 37, originally from Cameroon, whose recent novel “Tels des Astres Éteints” (“Like Extinguished Stars”) is about race relations as seen through the eyes of three black immigrants.

“For me it was really strange when I arrived 17 years ago to find people here never used the word race,” Ms. Miano said over coffee one afternoon at Café Beaubourg. Outside, African immigrants hawked sunglasses to tourists. “French universalism, the whole French republican ideal, proposes that if you embrace French values, the French language, French culture, then race doesn’t exist and it won’t matter if you’re black. But of course it does. So we need to have a conversation, and slowly it is coming: not a conversation about guilt or history, but about now.”

“The Black Condition: An Essay on a French Minority” by Pap N’Diaye, a 42-year-old historian at the School for Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, is another much-talked-about new book here. “We are witnessing a renaissance of the négritude movement,” Mr. N’Diaye declared the other day.

The surge in popularity of Mr. Obama among French blacks partly stems from the hope that his rise “will highlight our lack of diversity and put pressure on French politicians who say they favor him to open politics up more to minorities,” Mr. N’Diaye said. “We in France are, in terms of race, where we were in terms of gender 40 years ago.”

He laid out some history: French decolonization during the 1960s pretty much pushed the original négritude movement to the back burner, at the same time that it inspired a wave of immigrants from the Caribbean to come here and fill low-ranking civil service jobs. From sub-Saharan Africa, another wave of laborers gravitated to private industry. The two populations didn’t communicate much.

But their children, raised here, have grown up together. “Mutually discovered discrimination,” as Mr. N’Diaye put it, has forged a bond out of which négritude is being revived.

The watershed event was the rioting in poor French suburbs three years ago. Among its cultural consequences: Aimé Césaire “started to be rediscovered by young people who found in his work things germane to the current situation,” Mr. N’Diaye said.

Youssoupha is one of those people. He was nursing a Coke recently at Top Kafé, a Lubavitch Tex-Mex restaurant in Créteil, just outside Paris, where he lives. Nearby, two waiters in yarmulkes sat watching Rafael Nadal play tennis on television beneath dusty framed pictures of Las Vegas and Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson. A clutch of Arab teenagers smoked outside. In modest neighborhoods like this, France can look remarkably harmonious.

“Césaire is in my lyrics, and I was upset when people misinterpreted what I wrote as anti-white because négritude is the affirmation of our common black roots,” Youssoupha said.

Ms. Miano, the novelist, made a similar point. “There is no such thing as a black ‘community’ in France — yet — partly because we have such different histories,” she said. “An immigrant woman from Mali and another from Cameroon view the world in completely different ways. You also shouldn’t think there isn’t racism among blacks in France, between West Indians and Africans. There is. But ultimately we’re all black in the face of discrimination.”

Then she smiled: “Too bad I forgot to wear my Obama T-shirt.”

Labels: African Americans, Media, Stuff, World News