Room by Emma Donoghue
Don’t be put off by the lurid-sounding premise of this novel; it’s narrated by a little boy who has spent every moment of the first five years of his life in the 11-by-11-foot outbuilding where he and his mother are held prisoner by a man he knows only as Old Nick. Jack’s Ma has protected and nurtured him so fiercely the boy has no idea how stunted their circumstances are; she’s created an astonishingly rich world to share with him. Then hints of an impending crisis prompt Ma to train Jack for a desperate escape plan. Their bid for freedom makes for plenty of suspense, but it’s after Jack and Ma break out that “Room” ripens into a truly profound work, a meditation on the interplay between innocence and experience and on the paradoxes and reversals of mother-child love.
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A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
A woman steals her date’s wallet. Two teenage girls make the punk scene with a lecherous record producer in 1970s San Francisco. A disintegrating family goes on an African safari. A once-powerful New York publicist agrees to work for a sinister dictator. An exhaustively target-marketed concert — in a near-future America in which toddlers have become the premiere tastemakers — takes an improbable turn toward the transcendent. Each chapter of Egan’s novel at first seems only tangentially connected to the others, but as the book unfolds, jumping back and forth chronologically, these stories miraculously knit together into a many-faceted epic about popular music (so glorious, and yet so sordid!) and the dirty tricks and rough justice of time itself.
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Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
After the dust cleared — once the cover stories had run, the concerns had been raised and the h8rs had finished their howling — what remained were the hours we spent utterly transfixed by the story of the Berglund family and their flailing attempts to reconcile conscience and contentment in Bush-era America. Mere plot summary can’t convey the scope, humor, pathos and intelligence of this novel as it ranges through gentrification, YouTube, environmentalism, neoconservatism and the Iraq war, as well as such perennial concerns as parenthood, betrayal, sex, self-doubt, contrition and that most confounding and demanding of institutions, marriage. Filled with breathtaking prose and often painfully astute observations about contemporary life, “Freedom” is above all populated by characters who seem impossibly, miraculously, astonishingly real.
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Faithful Place by Tana French
In French’s hands, the crime novel (this is her third) is transformed from a serviceable entertainment into a supple instrument for investigating the unfathomable mysteries of the human condition. Detective Frank Mackey gets dragged back into the world he thought he’d left behind, specifically Faithful Place, a working-class Dublin street where everybody resents tall poppies, big dreams and cops. A suitcase discovered in an abandoned building suggests that Frank’s first love didn’t abandon him, as he has long believed, but may have met a darker fate. Figuring out what really happened 22 years ago forces Frank back into the toxic embrace of his family and a reckoning with his own equivocations and denial. As with all of French’s novels, the real puzzle lies in the dark heart of the detective himself.
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Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
Not too many years from now, in an America teetering on the brink of political and economic collapse, where people carry souped-up mobile devices that constantly emit, absorb and rank such data as the income, social status, physical fitness, emotional damage and “hotness” ratings of everybody in the room, an aging, nebbishy bibliophile falls in love with the young daughter of striving Korean immigrants. Is real love even possible in a society that revels in transparent jeans and a messaging service that urges its users to give up text and “switch to Images today”? What can Lenny Abramov, with his embarrassingly smelly collection of old books and his dubious blood serum cholesterol, have to offer the lovely, but self-hating Eunice Park? Shteyngart moves from the post-Soviet settings of his first two books to another faltering superpower, which turns out to be every bit as absurd. The razor edge of his social satire, however, is always in service of the fragile humanity we often seem eager to efface. Super-sad, yes, but most of all, true.
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But the difficulties Net entrepreneurs have faced obscure the fact that the Internet does not neccessarily equal the “new economy.” And the Internet, despite the flames engulfing technology start-ups of every description, just keeps chugging along. Exhibit A: the peer-to-peer movement led by Napster. Love Napster or hate it, it’s hard to deny that its success is a function of the structure of the Internet. And even though advertisers are suddenly shying away from the Net, Internet usage rates show no signs of declining. In the year 2000, more people got online and stayed online than ever before: playing games, exchanging music files, and, of course, sending e-mail.

In last year’s roundup, in words that will no doubt live on to haunt us, we wrote: “In 1999, the Net grew up and went to work — and its long-standing promise to change the way we do business became an inescapable reality.” There’s a bittersweet flavor to those words — for many, the inescapable reality of this year is having to file for unemployment benefits. So maybe the Net hasn’t quite grown up yet — maybe it’s still going through some unexpectedly painful period of puberty.

But change is still afoot. Napster’s assault on copyright laws in the year 2000 was just one manifestation of a much wider challenge to traditional concepts of intellectual property posed by the rise of networked computers. While libertarian fantasies of a world without borders or governments in which individual freedom is secured by unbreakable cryptography aren’t quite realized yet, it is nonetheless indisputable that in 2000, what was once rhetoric is now reality. Traditional legal approaches to copyright and free speech are being vigorously challenged by digital data transmission in a networked universe. Where it will lead, no one yet knows, but one thing’s for sure: Things will be different.

This year, Salon breaks with tradition — instead of providing our summary of the 10 biggest stories of the year, we’re presenting what we think are the five biggest stories, and the five biggest non-stories. And in a year marked by the annihilation of so many dot-coms, we thought we’d take the chance that instant karma might bite us on our collective butt — we’re wishing a not-so-fond farewell to the five Web sites that we think the world really didn’t need at all.

The five biggest tech stories of 2000

The dot-com downturn

We all knew it couldn’t last. But even the most foaming-at-the-mouth skeptic didn’t predict just how fast the Net hyper-boom would plummet into a full-scale dot-com downturn. Suddenly, the ONLY Net business story is a seemingly endless stream of tales of woe, the layoffs of thousands of workers, hundreds of millions of dollars scattered to the wind and scads of abandoned plans for world domination. But for every 10 money-grubbing charlatans who chased after the get-rich-quick scheme du jour now receiving a delicious comeuppance, there was at least one real businessperson who is also unfortunately eating dirt today. Take Toby Lenk, the founder of eToys. Just a year ago, he was the rare Net entrepreneur who business editors and writers would meet and think: “Finally! Someone bright with an impressive executive background and idea that’s actually marginally attractive. What parent doesn’t want to avoid the screaming brats at a toy store?” But right in the midst of the Christmas rush, eToys has announced that it will run out of money in March, face layoffs and scramble to sell the company. It’s enough to make a tech hack nostalgic for all those excessive launch parties. Yes, the dot-com craze is dead. Long-live the dot-com craze!

A Napster-ing we will go

Who could have guessed that when a little MP3-sharing application called Napster was unleashed on the Net, a year ago last month, the music industry would be turned upside down? Thirty million users, a litany of lawsuits and scores of magazine covers later, Napster and its quiet wunderkind founder Shawn Fanning are rock stars.

How profound was the impact of this program? Well, Spin named “Your Hard Drive” its album of the year and nearly every band from Courtney Love to Metallica has felt the need to weigh in on Napster — with some, like the Smashing Pumpkins, using it as a promotional propaganda tool. And despite the ongoing music-industry lawsuits against Napster, both venture capital firm Hummer Winblad and the Bertelsmann media conglomerate still felt it was a smart move to invest. The SDMI coalition spent the year bickering about whether watermarks could really prevent MP3 pirates from swapping files, and me-too Napster clones like Scour and Gnutella cropped up (and, sometimes, just as quickly closed up shop).

Although it’s still unclear whether the ongoing lawsuit will shut Napster down entirely, one thing is patently obvious: The idea of file sharing is not going away any time soon. With Bertelsmann on board, Napster may eventually evolve into a secure subscription service (although how they would do this is murky); but even if Napster shuts down, competitors are eagerly scrambling to take its place. The idea is out of the box already.

Meanwhile, despite the record industry’s complaints about piracy, record sales are still up. Could Napster have injected life back into a moribund industry and made fans excited about music again? Or is it really just handicapping artists that are already struggling to get paid?

Free to be, P2P

Peer to Peer, P2P — on the surface, it sounds like just another buzzword, one of that endless series of acronyms (B2B, B2C) that occasionally overcomes the Net and then, thankfully, disappears again. But P2P seems to have staying power, and after a year of P2P hype it seems almost safe to say that this concept will go down as one of the fundamental killer apps of the Net.

P2P mania was launched, of course, by Napster — a software program that popularized the notion of connecting computers on a network to each other and letting those users share files and resources directly. A relative of distributed computing (read: SETI@Home, Distributed.net), P2P was first mainly embraced as a way to swap porn, warez and, of course MP3s. Software programs like Napster, Gnutella and FreeNet became popular for just this reason.

But by the end of the year a variety of geeks and entrepreneurs were figuring out new ways to use the P2P concept for everything from search engines to networks for privacy freaks like Mojo Nation, to curing cancer, or just renting out your unused CPU cycles for cash. P2P had even, dare we say it, stolen a bit of the open-source movement’s thunder with its utopian idealism and fight-the-man ideology.

Sure, P2P may still prove to be the “Push” of the new millennium, but with the best engineering minds of the Net behind it, we would be surprised if it did.

Showdown at the software programmer’s corral

Law and software collided in 2000. For many programmers who previously might have believed that they could code whatever they wanted and never face any consequences, this was the year in which they were forced to recognize that they could be held responsible for what others did with their code. Hackers who only wanted to play DVDs on their Linux machines suddenly found themselves accused of illegally reverse engineering proprietary software. And in the world of music all hell broke loose.

Suddenly, Shawn Fanning wasn’t just the wunderkind music-lover behind Napster; he was also a mastermind of copyright infringement. The weight of lawsuits launched by the Axis powers of intellectual property — the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), sent one company, Scour, into bankruptcy and cost MP3.com hundreds of millions.

Indeed, despite free-speech arguments, even posting links to certain programs became an illegal act in 2000. And while the Napster case and many other lawsuits have not been settled, few would deny that the landscape has changed. Information may want to free, but in 2000, it first had to prove that it was legal.

Wireless rules!

Long touted as the next big high-tech wave, wireless became a major story in 2000. Cellphones became necessities instead of luxury items, and the Web pushed hard onto Palm Pilots and newer personal digital assistants like the Blackberry. The migration wasn’t perfect; wireless access remains slow and expensive, plus only the most-trafficked sites are available on most small-screened devices. But grass-roots interest in local area high-bandwidth wireless networks that can connect to the Net is surging and venture capital is still flowing toward mobile start-ups. And while one can theoretically see the appeal in getting apps, news and stock quotes downloaded to your cell, the real attraction of wireless is the same as the old land-lined limited Net: e-mail. When the Blackberry earned the nickname “Crackberry” for its addictive e-mail capabilities, few could deny that wireless communication had made its mark.

Five stories that just weren’t worth all the hype

All hail Bill Gates

After all the press attention, all the days in court, all the frenzied attention to every breath from Judge Jackson or Bill Gates, and finally, after this summer’s climactic order to break up Microsoft, what are we left with? A big pile of nothing, that’s what. Microsoft is still whizzing along merrily. Not only did it win the browser wars, but now it’s beginning to focus its attention on taking over the computer gaming market, of all things. The Microsoft antitrust trial is Salon’s choice for the No. 1 non-story of the year 2000.

Six months ago, the prospect of an incoming Bush administration attempting to defang the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft seemed inconceivable. But after this past election, would anyone be surprised at what the new powers-that-be feel entitled to do? And now that the fate of Microsoft is in the hands of an appeals court known to be opposed to antitrust enforcement, would-be trustbusters might as well pack up their briefcases and call it a day.

And pity poor David Boies, the lawyer who six months ago was enjoying unimpeachable street cred as the most lethal hired legal gun in the known universe. First he defended IBM from the government, then he (seemingly) successfully prosecuted Microsoft for antitrust violations for the government. But now that victory seems a little less secure, and in the meantime, he’s been swallowed up by the Napster affair and failed to win Vice President Al Gore any points with the Supreme Court.

Microsoft recently reported that it was lowering its estimates for profit and revenue for the current fiscal quarter — a rare admission from the software juggernaut. But in an atmosphere where everybody else is doing just as badly or worse, Microsoft seems poised to continue rolling along.

The marriage of Time Warner and AOL

First, there was the Gerry Levin/Steve Case hugging, back-slapping, hand-waving fest. Then, there was the regulatory dickering with the Federal Trade Commission about what curbs on its power would keep the new corporate monolith from becoming an all-out media monopoly. And then there was the endless cloak-and-dagger speculation about which executives will really wield power inside the combined TV, cable, music, movie, magazine and online service monster company. But the real AOL-Time Warner story has yet to be told, because what effect this merger will really have on the Net isn’t known. How will it affect our access to broadband? And what impact will it have on the content on AOL? No one really knows. For now, it’s just so much crystal-ball gazing, the kind of speculative stories that make tasty fodder for the very magazines that AOL-Time Warner owns. Now, that’s synergy!

Where have all the free-software flowers gone?

OK — free software is not dead, or even dying. But we’re putting it in the category of biggest non-stories of the year because in 2000 the billowing hype that had been associated with all things open-source and Linux-y suddenly evaporated. In 2000, the free software growth curve flattened out. Progress became incremental and boring, rather than lightning-fast and earth-shattering.

Just as free software benefited disproportionately in 1999 from the excesses of the dot-com economy, which helped launch Red Hat and VA Linux to the tune of huge IPOs, so also, in 2000, did the collapse of the new economy drag down the valuations of Linux companies and other open-source startups. The career trajectory of hacker Bruce Perens, who went from coordinating the Debian GNU/Linux project to running a venture capital fund devoted to open-source, to becoming a consultant for Hewlett-Packard is just one snapshot of the overall trajectory. Even the heated Microsoft/Linux clashes of 1999 receded into the background in 2000.

Behind the scenes, however, hackers are still busy, of course, and one could argue that the whole rise of the peer-to-peer movement is just the latest wave of what free software is all about. And ultimately, what difference does it make if the companies attempting to capitalize on open-source rise or fall. Hacker’s will hack, regardless.

No armageddon here

The world didn’t end on January 1, 2000. Airplanes didn’t fall from the sky, the ATM machines didn’t go berserk, the power grids stayed up and the Net did not shut down. There was no chaos in the streets, the stock market didn’t even burp and the survivalists hiding out in the hills had nothing to hide out from.

Nope: Despite years of hype, the Millennium Bug did not make its much celebrated appearance this year. Blame this, perhaps, on the frantic work of Y2K programmers who diligently patched up the buggy code that would supposedly go kablooey when the computer clocks ticked over to 00. Or perhaps the problems were more imagined than real — a result of overstimulated minds secretly hoping for a little excitement. And so another New Year’s clicked by uneventfully. Disappointed?

Wireless sucks!

Maybe you’re a cellphone addict, or you can’t live without your Blackberry strapped to your belt or your Palm Pilot in your purse. But unless you live in Finland or Japan, it is still unlikely that you are doing anything more exciting than making phone calls on your cellphone or reading your e-mail on your Blackberry. Because of the quagmire of competing formats that have yet to sort out in the wash, this year’s U.S. version of the “wireless revolution” has been as big of a non-event as it was last year. This was supposed to be the year that we’d see the rise of “m-commerce” — that’s “mobile commerce” — replacing the boom of e-commerce. Instead, e-commerce fumbled before “m-commerce” could really get out of the gate. Yes, some day we probably will all be conveniently ordering our Christmas presents from a crowded bus or instant-messaging our friends in Paris through our cellphones on the streets of Manhattan. Just not this year.

Five Web sites we were glad to see go

No more waiting for The Man

Kick TheMan.com out of bed, throw his skanky clothes in the front yard and make yourself an omelet to celebrate. Because selling fuzzy handcuffs — this was in fact the site’s top-selling item — is not a $100 million business model, even on the Internet. If the short, stupid life of this men’s content and commerce site proved anything, it was that even a cover story in Time magazine cannot float a company that hopelessly condescends to its audience, treating millennial men like they are hopelessly clueless Neanderthals. If you never had the pleasure of reading this exercise in ball-scratching — now the site is just a shell for its laid-off workers’ résumés — try to imagine a magazine for the Maxim man’s really dumb younger brother, with a schlock e-commerce spin. TheMan-dot-who? No, we never met the guy.

The continuing consolidation of the online pet retail supply sector

Dog food! Chew toys! Sock-puppet marketing! A revolution in shopping!

Pets.com is gone, and we’re wagging our tails with joy. No other site better epitomized the contagion of enthusiastic stupidity that seized the Internet over the last couple of years. The San Francisco company didn’t just believe that anything stores could do, Web sites could do better; it actually convinced investors that a business based on delivering 50-pound bags of dog food was sexy, cool, savvy and safe. Forget the sock puppet — which, let’s be honest, was pretty annoying anyway — Pets.com’s greatest asset was its ability to woo investors. Here’s a company that persuaded Amazon to buy a 30 percent stake, raised $82.5 million from its February IPO — and raced toward a final debt tally of over $146 million.

Then, as if such colossal losses weren’t enough to justify a good grave-stomping, Pets.com dug itself deeper, announcing that its top 10 executives would receive six-figure bonuses for sticking around to help close the company that they ran into the ground. Do they really need the money? More to the point, do they deserve it? Of course not — which is why Pets.com is dead, and why we’re happy to see it go.

To hear is to obey

One thing made Mylackey different from other dot-coms; it was humble. In fact, it was annoyingly, cutely humble, promoting an army of chipper grunt-workers-for-hire who would do anything from swabbing your kitchen floor to schlepping home your dry-cleaning. The cheeky CEO had the temerity to go by the title “Chief Lackey Officer.” Imagine the glowering this cheesy gesture of corporate hip-itude must have elicited among the real lackeys at the company, the drones doing the work. But even a few months ago when the hyper-economy was inflating disposable incomes, there just wasn’t a market for an aggregator of personal services, a portal of whistle-while-you-work Seven Dwarfs who will merrily do all your shit work for you. For now, the local bulletin board or community newspaper classifieds will remain the place where we search for servants to pick up after us. And the lackeys are free, free at least from their humiliating job titles as well as their worthless stock options.

Don’t panic about this epidemic

Blink and you might have missed Epidemic.com; and if you did, you were lucky. This company rose in the public consciousness last year during the Super Bowl, when it anted up for one of those infamous $3.5 million ads. Epidemic was essentially an overfunded spam company: Epidemic members would agree to include graphic “epiAds” in all the e-mail they sent out to the world, and if their friends clicked on one of those ads, Epidemic would pay them an undisclosed fee.

We cringed at the thought of a flood of e-mail stuffed with graphic ads, of every online acquaintance becoming a potential spammer in hopes of making some extra bucks off us. But fortunately, everyone else apparently thought the idea stank, too: Epidemic went bankrupt this fall.

No boo-hoos for Boo.com

When Boo.com launched, six months late and amid much fanfare, observers scratched their heads in puzzlement. Sure, the site looked cute, and there were some funky clothes for sale, but where had the much-touted $120 million in funding gone? Some Flash animations of rotating shoes and a mascot named Miss Boo who offered coy commentary? And what the hell did that stupid name mean?

The site was slow and the animations frivolous; the clothes weren’t cheap and worst of all, the project reeked of hubris. Sure, the European founders of Boo.com knew something about style, but their plans to hawk overpriced street fashion in seven languages and 18 different currencies seemed less than thought out. According to the New York Times, the company spent $42 million on advertising alone, much of which appeared months before the delayed launch; and then there were expenses like the founders’ $100,000 apartments in London. The company was clearly more concerned with being hip than being profitable.

So when Boo.com went bankrupt less than six months after launch, few cried. The assets — including the annoying Miss Boo — were sold off to Fashionmall.com for less than $2 million, the staff résumés were posted at the post-Web site Web site and Boo.com went down in Net history as a lesson in extravagance. No boo-hoos from our corner.

I find in deciding to do so that I have become ensnared by the dilemma that all in this trade sooner or later confront: that what makes some places so very special is the public’s general ignorance of their existence. And so in all candor, and while it must be in wholesale conflict with whatever principles guide the odious business of travel writing, I have to declare that I simply do not want the general public, despite my warm regard for democracy and prosperity and freedom and such other excellent modern notions, to go there.

Not at all. I want Keep-Out notices posted for miles around, all suggestive finger-posts and hoardings and direction signs taken down, all telephones disconnected, a clutch of moats and ha-has dug, fences of barbed wire, chain-link and chain-mail put up and (since for unexplained reasons in Patagonia there are plenty nearby already) a few minefields strewn, to keep the unwary at bay.

Not, however, that I want absolutely everyone to be ignorant of the place — if I wanted that, I wouldn’t be writing about it at all. But I am sure I’m not alone in thinking that the only people whom we want to turn up in those special places that we discover serendipitously, are people who are more or less — to put it bluntly — like us. The common herd may come and go as it pleases, but only our friends, or people whom we are sure we would like to be our friends, should come. The mines and the ha-has are for keeping out the herd — the rest we cordially invite, to enjoy what I and my two companions have lately found so transporting a delight.

So within the following sentences I have buried clues, a modest sufficiency of pointers that are neither too obscure nor too cryptic, from which I trust some substantial percentage who have not yet tired of this preamble may be able to work out most of the unstated elements of the story. The correct answer — the exact name of the place, which is to be found on any good map — can be e-mailed to my esteemed Salon editor,who will in turn send full details of the hotel to readers who, he and I feel sure, will by virtue of having taken the trouble to solve the little mystery be like-minded enough to go off and help keep this demi-paradise in business.

The hotel is in Patagonia, as I have mentioned. I first heard about it from a young Canadian whom I had met in the Antarctic. It was an old Scottish-built ranch, he said, set in splendid countryside; it had big old rooms and fireplaces and the best of food and wine, and there was plenty to do — fishing, riding, playing gaucho, pretending to be a Patagonian estancia-worker. He gave me directions: I was simply to drive up the main road from the docks, Route 9, until I spotted the 135-kilometer marker post. A few yards after that, just before a small bridge, there was a dirt road on the left. The estancia was half a mile down the road; it would be impossible to miss.

The day I set off north was classically Patagonian, with a huge sky of ragged clouds, a terrific westerly wind howling across the plains, the kind of temperature that zealots call bracing. The wind made controlling the car difficult at first, and each time we passed another vehicle, usually a vast mutton truck heading for the nearby frigorifico, the dust it kicked up bombarded our windshield like shrapnel — drivers in these parts go through two or three a year, and it is said that you cannot buy windshield insurance south of the 40th parallel.

Once past the outskirts of town, and past the airport and its weather-beaten warplane hangars, there was nothing — just mile upon mile of scrub, the small patches of vegetation straining wildly in the gale. The fields were bordered by endless miles of barbed wire, from which hung clumps of wool, and against which occasionally lay the skeleton of a dead animal. From time to time we passed a gaucho herding his sheep: He would be sitting casually on his horse, swathed in a woolen poncho, his guitar over his shoulder, his dogs running behind him to keep the animals in check.

Once in a while, too, there would be less familiar animals — the long-necked guanaco (a cousin to the llama, the vicuna and the alpaca, but which distinguishes itself by liking to spit, and is possessed of a deadly aim), the flightless rhea known as the nandu (which runs along the road in front of the car stepping high and flourishing its skirts like a can-can dancer), the bright Alice-in-Wonderland-pink flamingo and, soaring high above us and all-too-rarely, the Andean condor.

All of which excitement made us very nearly miss our exit at milepost 135. But we slewed the car dangerously across the gravel, rattled across the wooden sheep-barrier grid called a guardaganado and made for the grove of gnarled trees that surrounded and protected the farm and its outbuildings. We pulled up outside the main house — a large twin-gabled mansion, its sidings painted yellow, its tin roof red, its door solid, wooden, well-varnished. There was a flagpole outside on the lawn — a memorial, said a plaque, to the Scotsman Alexander Morrison Mackenzie, who had founded the estancia in 1891.

Old Mr. Mackenzie’s great-grandson, John Dick, runs the 20,000-acre farm now, with 5,000 head of sheep, a few hundred Angus cattle, a few hundred llamas. But his decision to turn the homestead into a hotel was forced upon him, he says, by the whims of politics. The entire farm had been expropriated during the 1970s, when on orders from the capital many of the larger estancias were handed over to the local campesinos.

But the caprices of Latin American politics — in this case, a coup d’etat and a nasty assassination a thousand miles away — allowed the former owners to buy it back 15 years ago. Thus it was that John Dick and his mother, Marietta, decided that in order to keep the old place standing and the farm running at a time when, for economic reasons, farms all over Patagonia were closing forever, they would have to move the family into one of the outbuildings and rent out the eight bedrooms of the old homestead to passing strangers.

And it was as passing strangers that we arrived — and stepped through the well-varnished door into a world that it seemed old Alexander Morrison Mackenzie had never left. The rooms have heavy Victorian furniture, all antimacassars and samplers and faded sepia pictures on the walls; there is an ancient Victrola that plays 1920s dance music, a Zenith radio with Hilversum and Schenectady on the dial, and from which antique music mysteriously (since there is no local radio station) also seeps. The bedrooms have huge old brass beds, English hunting scenes (slightly foxed) on the walls, baths with great brass taps and iron stains on the enamel.

In the kitchen is a wood-burning two-oven solid iron range, built in England in 1902 and shipped out at vast cost — and which baked the finest bread I have ever tasted and roasted the sweetest lamb we have ever known. In fact, it was as we were sitting later that night — it is still light in Patagonia until 11, at least — in front of a fire, drinking an old local cabernet and slicing lamb so tender it might have been made of butter, that we declared that we could recall no finer moment in any hotel, inn, hosteria, residencia, caravanserai, way-station or motel on the planet. And the slim guestbook, when we read through it, suggested much the same: that all who take the trouble to come, find the place utterly adorable and vow to come back, whatever the distance, however severe the cost.

But it was after dinner that our fate of eternal enslavement to this magic place was settled once and for all. The estancia’s gauchos had saddled up three horses — sheepskin on top of the leather, for added comfort — and had given us vague directions to the fastest, flattest plains. And so we set off, down over hills and then onto the flat where we spent an idyll riding like the wind — scaring up unwary sheep, raising flocks of ducks and pheasants into the air, splashing in the shallows of the great and (according to local lore and language) mysteriously sorrowful trout river that courses through the farm’s lowlands.

For an hour, as the sun inched its way down along the horizon, and as the stars began to shine over the immense emptiness of the property, we rode and rode, suffering happily for all that cabernet-induced indolence before the fire — until finally we turned for home, toward the little pool of light among trees where old Mr. Alexander Morrison Mackenzie, late of sheep-farming in Ayrshire and the Falkland Islands, had made his final family home.

And it is as home, more than anything, that the old estancia seems to be best remembered by those lucky enough to find it, and to stay. The beds were soft that night, the plains were soundless except for the occasional rattle of tin roof in the now-abated wind, and at breakfast the next day there was more fresh bread and eggs and milk, and smiling cooks to help with the packing. And Marietta was happily on hand to say: “No need to pay now, if you don’t wish — just send me a check when you get home. Anyone who makes it here is someone to trust, I’m sure.”

As I am equally certain. Those who have worked their way through the myriad clues above, and who then manage to find their way to one of the most pleasing little places on earth, can, I have no doubt, be trusted in all ways — to pay their bills, of course, but much more importantly, to preserve this lonely Patagonian farm as a paradise, and keep it as their own special kind of secret, too.

Men young enough to be Hef’s grandkids also let the dance begin. Viagra guaranteed successful hook-ups for party animals who drink and drug all night, bodybuilders whose steroids pump them up in all the wrong places, porn stars and others who weren’t strictly erectile-dysfunctional. Since the drug hit the market last year, doctors in the U.S. have written more than 14 million prescriptions for over 6 million men, and uncounted others are getting the drug via the Internet.

This year several hundred European men died in Thailand, the international hot spot of the sex industry. Viagra, available over the counter there for $27, was found in the bloodstream of a sizeable percentage; most died from cardiac strain. Women found that Viagra engorges the clitoris, so adventurous ladies tuned in and turned on as well.

In Hefworld, the distaff equivalent to drug-assisted priapism isn’t Viagra-happy clits but volleyball breasts — which, in addition to other ills, decrease nipple sensation. Though Jenny McCarthy and Pamela Anderson betrayed the cause by plucking out their implants, poison chestballs remained a popular accessory on starlets and models. Possible presidential candidate Donald Trump reportedly ushered a handful of his imperfect friends — even some he wasn’t fucking! — to the plastic surgeon, in what could be an early bid for the flat-chested vote. If this is indeed candidate Donald’s version of a chicken in every pot, I challenge Ralph Nader to counter with a safer, possibly airbag-based implant.

A man deserves all the on-the-side robo-babes he can get, but the wife at home is, of course, loyal. That one-sided sanctity of marriage found an unexpected advocate in Stanley Kubrick’s supposed-to-be-hot “Eyes Wide Shut,” which actually shrank from both sex and (female) fantasy. A wife who merely imagines adultery sends her husband into a fevered dream of sexual dread. The premise was as wistfully out of touch as the orgy scene, which could have been a Halloween party at the Playboy mansion except that nobody had fun.

Joining Kubrick in the call to keep sex within marriage was Wendy Shalit, whose bestseller “Return to Modesty” advocates more shame among women and more “honor” among men. If the prize of feminism is the right to be a slut, Shalit declares, she’d rather go back to the good old economics, where women create demand for their sex by withholding supply, as advocated in “The Rules.”

Shalit’s platform reverberated with her peers. A recent study found that only 40 percent of college freshman believe “if two people really like each other, it’s all right for them to have sex even if they’ve known each other for a very short time,” down from 52 percent in 1987. And more than one in four 18- to 24-year-olds call premarital sex “always” or “almost always” wrong — a 50 percent jump since 1972.

The modesty movement makes sense in light of AIDS and the persistent reality of campus sex for girls — drunken hook-ups with boys who won’t look at you in class the next day. College boys and men in their 20s have grown up accepting women as equals — and as sexually active — but macho attitudes about sex linger. The young men seem nervous about playing on a rule-less field against women who could laugh at their penis size or claim date rape or both.

Their anxiety rumbles beneath the bravado of magazines like Details and (because Details was too highbrow?) Maxim. Like Playboy, the new manliness guides tell you what to buy, but they’ve also lifted the self-loathing lists that tell you what to be — “10 Signs She Thinks You’re Pathetic”; “37 Tricks for Flat Abs” — from Cosmo and Glamour.

The new himbo mags support Susan Faludi’s thesis in “Stiffed” that the “masculinity crisis” is the fault of consumer culture. Faludi points out that Madison Avenue has shaped “femininity” and “masculinity” to sell everything from dishwashers to sports cars, and two 1999 movies made the same argument.

In “Fight Club,” Brad Pitt says offhandedly, “I don’t think what we need is more women,” but he reserves his real bile for Ikea and duvets, foes he attacks by orchestrating fistfights and terrorist pranks from a dirty house. Kevin Spacey’s 40ish hero in “American Beauty” also hates “all the stuff” his suffocating job affords him, so he pumps iron, gets the red car he wanted in high school and pursues his daughter’s cheerleader friend.

Both movies are unable to conceive of a grown-up masculinity, and Faludi has to go back 50 years to find it. Vanquishing an enemy, conquering a frontier, some “institution of brotherhood” and providing for a family, she argues, are what make a man, and society stole those opportunities. What men have been sold in its place, she says, is “ornamental masculinity.” Men of the ’90s are trapped where women of the ’50s were — they have nothing to do, no path to fulfillment.

Manhood is now “displayed, not demonstrated,” so men define themselves with gym-sculpted bodies and chase notoriety rather than accomplishment. When Naomi Wolfgate broke, it only bolstered Faludi’s thesis: The author of “The Beauty Myth” was paid handsomely to dress Al Gore in earth tones and make him an “alpha male.” Unless Wolf really meant Gore should pee on the White House lawn or rut with Hillary, “alpha” is as ornamental as maleness gets.

Not everyone looked backwards for their sexual roadmap this year. In its charmingly shallow way, HBO’s “Sex and the City” explored the possibilities of sex no longer male-taken and female-proffered. Unlike, say, Ally McBeal, who keeps waiting for hubbo, the four heterosexual women on the HBO sitcom are moving to frontiers settled by gay men, where a network of friends stands in for the nuclear family. In the show’s second year, the constant humping is more than ever for its own sake. Unrepentantly promiscuous, marriage-scorning Samantha is emerging as the role model, while prissy Charlotte strives to be better in bed.

A messier, more complex view of woman-driven sex is the no-brakes, no-steering wheel bad trip portrayed in Catherine Breillat’s “Romance,” billed as “the sexiest movie ever made.” Our heroine Marie, frustrated by the beautiful male model boyfriend who won’t touch her, grabs herself a variety of sex elsewhere but stays existentially miserable, moaning that she wants to be just a hole and doesn’t want to see the face of the men “stuffing my cunt.” But just as you want to smack her for being so perverse, mopey and over-philosophical (i.e. French), she communicates some sad-funny or gross-erotic nuance of sex you’ve never seen in a movie, et voila, you’re implicated in her masochism. “Romance” also includes hard-ons, those crucial drivers of a sex scene that male moviemakers hide like the undiscussed elephant in the room.

The unresolvable contradictions in “Romance” make it clear why so many people want to hide in the past. Being a female sexual taker is such virgin territory that I first thought the House of Spartacus was a joke. This establishment in, of all places, Johannesburg, is believed to be the world’s first brothel that sells men to women. “Upmarket male conversation, company and escort services” go for #30 ($50) an hour, and sex costs #80 ($130) an hour, according to the BBC.

Gay sex threatens the old ways even more than female-purchased sex, and in 1999 the battle between the patriarchs and the same-sexers ranged from amusing to horrific. Jerry Falwell pushed Tinky Winky out of the toy closet, and San Francisco flirted with the idea of electing the nation’s first openly gay mayor. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton backed away from the misbegotten “don’t ask, don’t tell” gays-in-the-military policy.

Though drag queens have been mainstream for a few years, female-to-male gender dysphoria hit the cineplex in the sympathetic film “Boys Don’t Cry.” British judges ruled in July that the National Health will cover hormone treatments for transsexuals and also that trannies can stay in the British army in non-combat positions. One wonders how much trail-blazing credit is due Benny Hill and Monty Python.

And by the end of the year Matthew Shepard had become a martyr: The response to his vicious murder permanently changed the political landscape. The Christian right denounced a homophobia it had never before acknowledged, and the push for hate crime legislation, though unsuccessful, moved middle America toward accepting gays as a minority deserving of legal rights and protections. The failure of the craven “gay panic” defense in the trial of Shepard’s killers suggested that straight men’s primitive fears about gay sex will never dictate public policy the same way again.

From Helen Fisher to Dave Barry, believers in the “essential differences” between men and women generally point to nature: Man is programmed to spread his seed and woman to lure a mate that will protect her young. But starting with the Pill, those laws of nature have been steadily repealed, and in 1999 reproductive science looked more and more like science fiction. Women had babies with dead men, with other women’s eggs and after menopause. By most accounts, we are a few years away from human cloning. And as sex moved further from baby production, genes for everything from monogamy to intelligence were isolated, raising the possibility that all differences — not just those of gender — may be smoothed out with gene therapy.

We have more data on sex than ever before, yet we’re still stumped by basic questions about femininity and masculinity. Are women ruining their chances for sexual and romantic fulfillment by “acting like men”? Do our differences extend beyond hormones and genitals? Do hormones and genitals account for “types” like Clinton the ravenous user and Monica the victim/opportunist/slut? Can the tenets of feminism, as Faludi suggests, help men as well and move us all toward more satisfying and fair relations?

Despite the confusion driving so many people to the past for answers, I think we’re getting there. Power struggles won’t ever disappear from sex; they will emerge as long as people lie down naked and open each other up. And we’ll always want protection from that exhilarating exposure and risk. But we can shed clunky old armor like “all men are dogs” or “she’s just a slut” along with the pantyhose and neckties. We won’t become sexless without these trappings: Just look at how hot all the sci-fi babes are in their clingy jumpsuits. I see us evolving into a species that has better sex by mating for joy, not gain, and with individuals, not stereotypes. Let’s thaw out our cryogenically preserved selves in 2100 and see if I’m right.