In 1998, “Ecology of Fear” continued Davis’ critique of Los Angeles but added a new component: natural disaster. The book described the doom-laden geography of the city itself — the flood plains, the fire zones, the earthquake faults — and described the dangers those disasters represent, both on their own and when amplified by the worst disaster of them all: suburbanization. But he was not content to stay in Los Angeles.

Davis used part of his MacArthur Award funding to take one of his children to Greenland to see the melting Arctic with his own eyes. His books “Under the Perfect Sun,” “Late Victorian Holocausts” and “Dead Cities” widen the geography and range of topics of Davis’ interdisciplinary investigation. His latest book goes global. “The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu” looks at the potential for an avian flu pandemic, but goes beyond the usual “killer bug” narrative by focusing on the intersection of epidemiology, globalization and the chronic poverty of the developing world.

What follows is my recent conversation with Davis, a man who named one of his own daughters Cassandra, after the one skeptic who said, “Maybe we shouldn’t bring that wooden horse inside the walls of Troy.”

Your latest book, about the avian flu, is very topical these days. So let’s start there. We’ll get everybody good and scared. Let’s start with the basics. You were working on the topic a few years ago, before it was a big news story. How did you get interested in epidemiology?

This little book, “The Monster at Our Door,” is a spinoff of another project called “Planet of Slums,” and a chapter in it called “Slum Ecology.” I was doing some research on population densities in the slums of very large, very poor cities like Mumbai [India], Kinshasa [Congo] and so on. As I accumulated data and compared it with the major slums of the 19th century — the Lower East Side of New York, the East End of London — it became clear that today’s third-world slums are an order of magnitude larger than 19th century slums and even denser than the Lower East Side of our great-grandparents’ time, and so I had to ask a question: What does this mean for the transmission of disease?

It’s a Victorian relapse.

Well, we have a billion people on Earth by the official reckoning of the United Nations, living under dense, sprawled conditions in swamps with appalling conditions of sanitation. And in so many countries the public health infrastructure has been damaged by the International Monetary Fund and structural adjustment policies from the 1980s that forced hundreds of thousands of health workers in Africa and Latin America to immigrate. Now, so many urban people have no access to even elementary healthcare. In other words, it is indeed the Victorian world, writ large.

How does the avian flu fit in?

I decided, then, to take a contagious disease — an emerging disease — and think a little bit about what that would mean in terms of today’s megaslums as incubators of disease. Avian flu was my choice, and I was somewhat stunned to discover that slums haven’t really been factored in. Because, quite honestly, 98 percent of the debate that’s occurring about avian flu and other possible epidemics and pandemics is simply richer people in the richer countries selfishly worrying about their own health. No one had thought about how global poverty creates a perfect medium to spread the disease.

Meaning, we’re only worried about whether it will show up on our shores.

The sudden concern about avian flu is because Americans are finally realizing that it is a disease that won’t respect borders or the barriers that separate the lives of the rich from the poor. According to estimates by the Bush administration, up to 2 million or more Americans could die of avian flu. And Americans, of course, have been left naked and largely unprotected by the brilliant policies of this administration, which, for example, immediately after its election put “abstinence education” on a much higher priority than influenza — despite the fact that influenza, even in its normal, seasonal form, kills 35,000 or 40,000 Americans every year, a disproportionate number of those being elderly African-American people.

After September 11th, the defense agenda also got sidetracked by a lot of protection against biological weapons that are a much more distant danger than an avian flu pandemic.

When the administration decided that biowarfare was the great priority, they spent billions protecting us from Ebola fever and anthrax and smallpox. That was partly because of Washington’s new emphasis on bioterrorism and the idea that Saddam Hussein had bioweapons, all of which was part of the pretext for invading Iraq. It was only late in the day that the administration suddenly embraced what the World Health Organization and others have been saying since the avian flu first leapt from birds to humans in 1997 in Hong Kong — that this virus represents a real risk of being as deadly as the 1918 pandemic.

Which was extremely deadly.

It was the most single deadly event in human history, killing somewhere between 40 and 100 million people.

Avian flu is a big news story now, and there’s been a lot of reporting on it, but still little context. Your approach to thinking about the deep ecology of disease is unique. You describe the social conditions that provide tinder for a pandemic spark: the livestock revolution, the agro-industrial poultry production and so on. How is the stage set for a potential pandemic?

I’ll start with an anecdote. A few years ago I took my son to East Greenland. The East Greenlanders were the last population in the Northern Hemisphere to meet Europeans. In fact, two Danish naval lieutenants who finally managed to get up the treacherous coast of East Greenland were really expecting to meet Vikings, not Inuit. This was at a time when the germ theory of disease already existed in embryonic form, thanks to Koch and Pasteur. And so the East Greenlanders were intensely studied. At point of contact, they were a lean people, eating 98-99 percent seal meat. They had no infectious disease apart from the cold. Their health condition was probably the primordial condition of humans in the 90 percent of our history when we were hunter-gatherers. Then, there were no large concentrations of human beings — or, more importantly, large enough concentrations of human beings living side by side with large enough concentrations of animals to allow animal viruses or bacteria to jump to humans and assume a chronic or epidemic form.

It was as if the Danish scientists in the 1890s studying East Greenlanders looked back through 10,000 years of human history, before the era infectious diseases — because most infectious diseases came through the domestication of mammals and birds. That kind of disease is a product of dense populations or urbanization or large-scale agricultural society.

That’s what creates “disease transitions”?

Yes. It seems that diseases have emerged in fairly abrupt fashion, in what historians of disease call disease transitions. When the Mongols created their wonderful Eurasian world empire and made commerce between the Yellow Sea and the Atlantic possible, they also created a pathway for diseases like the Black Death to reach Europe. Every major step in the biological unification of the human race brings a massacre of populations. The European arrival in the New World led to the deaths of 90 percent of the population there. Those were disease transitions. And there’s broad agreement amongst historians of disease that we’re living through a fourth disease transition.

Resulting from economic and social globalization.

Fifteen years ago, an anthology of infectious disease studies was published warning that globalization would bring back old diseases in more virulent forms and lead to the emergence of novel, new diseases. There are various reasons: changing barriers between human and wild animal populations, integrated commerce and the absence of a counterpart investment in global public health. A few years later, Laurie Garrett wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Coming Plague,” much to the same effect.

Why is China the geographic origin of these coming plagues?

In the past, it was believed that almost all influenza originates in South China, where there’s this highly successful, extraordinarily productive agriculture that mixes domestic birds with pigs and fish and human beings. It’s an ideal crucible for bird diseases passing to mammals and ultimately to humans.

A widening crucible, as China expands, urbanizes, industrializes its agriculture —

A little footnote here: Since the 1980s, 200 million people have left the Chinese countryside for Chinese cities. In less than a decade, China has added more people to its cities than did all of Europe in the 19th century, the so-called age of industrial revolution and city building. These people in the cities are demanding more protein, and that demand is being met with chicken. Chicken is now the second major protein after pork, which it will soon replace — if Avian flu doesn’t scare everybody off chicken, that is.

This has created unprecedented concentrations of poultry. In Southeast Asia, a lot of the chicken is manufactured by a huge company based in Thailand called CP, which has created an enormous, multinational factory-farming poultry operation. CP, incidentally, was involved in covering up the outbreak of avian flu in Thailand, and it even shipped sick chickens to Europe for sale. So you have these factors: an integrated, industrialized system of poultry production that looks more like the continuous flow of an oil plant than anything looking like animal husbandry; the fantastic rise in demand for animal protein; the increasing concentrations of people in larger and larger cities, many of them poor. Across Southeast Asia, the huge poultry farms sit side by side with small poultry farms, wild birds and human populations.

It seems like these factors clear a wide open path for new disease. Massive industrialized poultry provides a medium for the flu to move from a rare disease among wild migrating birds to the chronic, recurring bird epidemic that it has become. Since the disease mutates so adeptly, it then jumped species. And then it’s a matter of time before a few more mutations or a combination with human influenza makes it communicative between people.

It is an unprecedented phenomenon. This is happening not only in Asia. Two years ago, a different strain of avian flu jumped to people in Holland, killing a veterinarian with very similar symptoms as those in Southeast Asia. Last year, the same thing happened in British Columbia. People got sick but nobody died. What’s happening, essentially, is that we have changed the ecology of influenza. We provide food for its survival and evolution. Each time it moves into a new niche, H5N1 jumps another species barrier that was believed to be insuperable. Cats didn’t get influenza. They do now: This thing killed most of the tigers in the Bangkok zoo. And every time it moves geographically or crosses species, it diversifies the opportunities to change itself into a form that would spread in the same way ordinary flu does.

And unlike SARS, which caused a huge world scare in 2003, avian flu would be very difficult to quarantine. Because a person with SARS is contagious while also symptomatic, whereas with the flu, you’re contagious before you actually get sick.

And this means that flu can, because it spreads easily as a respiratory infection, avoid almost any barrier put in its path. It’s already on the move. Avian flu is in Russia, and arriving at the gates of Europe. More disturbing, the disease has almost certainly migrated with infected wild birds to the great lakes of East Africa. There, it essentially goes off the radar screen because there is no surveillance system. Countries like Ethiopia won’t even discuss the issue with the World Health Organization. Countries like Uganda and Tanzania would love to be able to monitor avian flu, but they don’t have the means to do it whatsoever. So right now, this disease with its vast potential to become the second great plague of globalization after AIDS/HIV just submerged, and when it reappears, it may be too late.

So in addition to the lack of defensive medicine, the missing public health defenses in the Third World represent a breach in the walls.

No one in Washington has proposed funding resources that would allow East Africans to match the level of surveillance that Southeast Asia has. And while all this has been happening, the basic work of defending humanity against infectious disease, which involves continual development of new antibiotics, vaccines and antivirals, has been totally abdicated by the pharmaceutical giants. Those companies have no interest in making antibiotics or vaccines or antivirals because they are unprofitable. Infectious diseases don’t create lifelong, expensive demand for medicines the way that chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease do. Nor are they as profitable as culturally defined illnesses like erectile dysfunction, the darling of the pharmaceutical industry. There is one drug for diabetes that earns more than the revenue from all vaccines and antivirals put together.

Should the government be stepping in? Bush’s recently announced plan earmarks money for this kind of research — not enough, and it’s about time, but is that a step in the right direction?

There’s a few of us old enough to remember that, for instance, the influenza vaccine was originally developed by Jonas Salk for the U.S. Army in the Second World War. It was manufactured by the federal government, which used to actually make drugs, but no more. The Bush administration has now offered billions of dollars in subsidies to [Big] Pharma, which strikes me as inherently ridiculous. The most that any politician in Washington, Democrat or Republican, can think of doing apparently is to lay billions of dollars in guaranteed profits at the feet of the pharmaceutical companies, to waive all questions of liability for the vaccines and products, and then beg them to produce these vaccines and antivirals. The old-fashioned socialist in me wonders, Why shouldn’t the federal government, in association with the public universities that produce most of the raw research that gets turned into these products, not produce lifelong medicines for free — as a human right?

Some people ask why we should worry about a disease for which we know of fewer than 200 human cases. When we live in a world where millions of children die each year of diarrhea, malaria and even a lack of clean water, isn’t this a fantastically rare disease?

And some people ask whether Bush’s invocation of the avian flu wasn’t just a plot to give money to the drug companies and divert attention from other issues. It is a reasonable question. The reason there should be real alarm is simply the experience of 1918. That was an influenza almost entirely novel to the human immune system, and it killed about 2 percent of humanity. Likewise, H5N1 is entirely new. And, more startling, researchers recently reconstructed the genome of the 1918 influenza and brought the virus itself to life for study, and they discovered that it was also a bird flu that jumped species, just like the emergence of the H5N1 avian flu of 1997.

Let’s talk a bit about the public health issue. The public health infrastructure in the United States is suffering. We’ve seen the HMO revolution reduce the number of beds, and it’s very clear, as we saw in Toronto with SARS, that in the case of even a small, localized outbreak, our public health system would be overwhelmed instantly. As a policy matter, massive public health revitalization ought to be at the top of the agenda. One of the things I kept wondering last year when I was covering the presidential campaign was why the Democratic side never equated all the resources spent on Iraq with the missed opportunities to make a sort of national security preparedness effort. The $200 billion thrown at Iraq could have been so much more efficiently spent on the public health infrastructure. As politics, it seems to be a no-brainer, a twofer: Invest at home, and address national security at the same time.

You talk about this a little bit in the book — how the amount spent on these kinds of public health preparedness in the last three years was a just couple of billion dollars, less than we spend in 10 days in Iraq. Even before September 11th, everybody in the security sector was talking about how the biggest single thing we could do defensive-wise was to rebuild the public health infrastructure. But people really balked at the price tag: $40 billion. Now we’ve spent hundreds of billions in Iraq. With that kind of money, we could rebuild the entire public health system from the ground up. We could make the whole country like Switzerland, with transformer mountains that turn into hospitals, robots dispensing vaccines, everyone equipped and trained with lifesaving techniques. So I’m asking you to address the clear politics of the avian flu.

That’s true, and more. The politics of public health anywhere begin with nutrition, and even right here in California we have a shockingly large number of children who go to bed hungry every night. We have malnourished children and malnourished adults. Fifteen percent of the children in Los Angeles have suffered from malnutrition. If the first level of public health is nutrition, the second level is basic immunization. Immunizations and vaccines should be an absolute human right in this country, freely available to everybody. The third level is our local health facilities, which have been closed by the thousands across the United States in the recent years. The fourth level is hospitals and, above all, intensive-care facilities. Think about what would happen in the case of pandemic influenza, where you need to hospitalize an enormous number of people in intensive care and some degree of isolation. Los Angeles has lost something like 17 percent of its hospital beds since the year 2000, largely due to HMOs, which operate on the “just in time” system of closing hospitals, getting rid of hospital beds and raising the profit margins — as if epidemics, and surges in intensive-care cases, will never occur.

Wasn’t there a spike in normal influenza a few years ago that swamped the capacity of hospitals, private and public, in Los Angeles County?

That case is used now in textbooks. It’s a real crisis. In San Diego, just after Katrina, they wanted to bring in 150 people from Louisiana with serious health conditions and offer them beds as a kind of gesture. Then they discovered those hospital beds didn’t exist in San Diego County! In many ways, we’re worse off than we were in 1918, when the country had a greater surge capacity and more hospital beds per capita than now.

It’s absolutely incredible that the first-responder capabilities haven’t been totally refurbished since September 11th.

Another dimension is that you need a community response, and what’s most effective is giving people actual roles. As in the natural disaster planning in Japan, where there’s an equivalent of the citizens alert. In San Francisco, the city identifies block by block anybody who has medical, engineering or law enforcement skills — anything that would be useful in a disaster. This is because San Francisco has counted on being isolated by another earthquake for a matter of days with no outside aid. They’ve dealt with this by trying to create a grass-roots network, so everybody who has a skill is prepositioned and knows how to use it. That seems to make more sense than hoarding toilet paper and water and waiting to be dug out of the rubble, as we’re told now.

The greatest danger, of course, in any pandemic is fear. Even if it wasn’t that deadly we’d all be so scared that society would disintegrate. It’s surprising how thin the veneer of civilization is.

That’s what happens when you’re left in a passive role — when you’re told you have no civic responsibilities; you know, it’s each person for themselves, run to the hills, try and get some Tamiflu and hide it, keep it for your family. There’s an atomization of society. That’s what we have instead of the kind of civic solidarity that would exist if people had roles and if resources were available in communities on an equal basis.

Why, if this is all so obvious, and if you have so many medical professionals and good people trying to shout about this at the top of their lungs, why hasn’t it improved? Why has this not translated into any kind of effective political protest or political action?

This brings us back to the absence in the country of a real opposition party. There’s no political force capable of mounting serious battles on behalf of most of the basic issues for people in this country and abroad. John Kerry had every opportunity during the election to tack George Bush to the wall over the question of his failure to prepare for a pandemic influenza. It’s an absolutely logical thing to do, particularly because the election was taking place in the middle of a flu crisis — one of the two major vaccine suppliers collapsed in the fall of 2004.

When the Democrats do make noises, it seems the terms are framed by the Republicans.

That’s why no one questions, for instance, the need to give away billions of dollars to the drug companies to get antivirals.

Let me try to end my endless riff with this. Roche is the pharmaceutical company with the patent, and therefore monopoly, on producing the antiviral medicine Tamiflu. It can save your life, and it’s all made in a single plant in Switzerland. If you line up to buy it from Roche, like the Bush administration’s doing, you stand in line for two or three years to get it. And then there won’t be enough anyway. The administration is ordering 2 million courses. That’s less than 1 percent of the population. This extremely limited supply sets up a “Sophie’s choice” — who will get this in an emergency?

Why are we waiting around? There’s absolutely nothing to prevent the president of the United States from saying that the health of Americans overrides everything else, and we’re going to start making Tamiflu and we’ll have supplies in six months. It can be done, but it will never happen. And there’s not, as far as I know, a single Democrat who is talking about this. Where is everybody? This is millions of people we’re talking about. Wouldn’t real leadership do something?

But five years on and let’s be real: Isn’t this starting to feel tiring, repetitive, cloying, misguided, weird seeming? One of the many pleasures in reading “How We Are Hungry,” Eggers’ recent collection of stories, is that it reminds you of his abilities as a writer. He can dazzle, and at his best he can move effortlessly between classic storytelling and the more experimental. There’s a sense of maturity to the book, and so it seemed like a fine time to check in on the author — to talk about the collection, about how his attitude toward writing and publishing has changed since 2000. (For some reason, if only because Eggers is the sort of person who tends to inspire assumptions, it feels relevant to state that we didn’t know each other before I interviewed him, though I have written for the Believer.)

In conversation Eggers is funny, chatty, uninhibited, and a true master of the extended tangent. We had a long telephone conversation, very long, probably much longer than either of us realized, one that took place with Eggers driving, then talking in a parking lot for another half hour. Among the topics discussed: Eggers’ take on short fiction, his adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are” for Spike Jonze — and, yes, the culture of McSweeney’s and the culture that’s chosen to define itself in opposition to it.

One thing I’ve noticed about your stuff lately is that you seem to be willing to just put it out there at various stages and see how it sticks, which is something I think a lot of writers fear — exposing the machinery before it’s running smoothly. I guess I’m thinking of the novel in installments you were doing for Salon, and didn’t you republish your novel “You Shall Know Our Velocity” with a different name ["Sacrament"] and ending?

No, it had a different middle, actually. Just some punctuation changes toward the end. But, yeah, the big difference was that I was not always that guy. I had become really precious. I was a terrible freelancer. Magazines would hate me because I’d take some assignment and then I would freeze up, because I’d be like, “Well, they’re not going to print it the way I want it to be. What am I doing? I shouldn’t have taken this stupid assignment in the first place! It’s never going to be as good as it should!” And then I would just obsess forever and then when it was due, I would back out. I did that probably a dozen times. And then after that first book ["A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"] came out, I froze up even more because I thought, “Oh, shit.” It becomes a lot harder. I wrote on my own for about a year and a half and came up with a 600-page book that I never published. It was good for me to write — I don’t think anyone else would be interested in it. It was after “Velocity” that I really started loosening up.

Steve [Elliott, author of "Happy Baby," which Eggers edited] has been somebody that’s been important to me in terms of a colleague whose work I like a lot, and he doesn’t overthink everything. He doesn’t overthink stuff from a publishing or career aspect. Also, I need deadlines, just like everybody else, especially coming from magazines, newspapers, and stuff like that. I need daily or weekly deadlines to get stuff done, or I continue to do things and not go off on a year of unproductivity.

Unproductivity — that’s not something I’d think anyone would associate with you. You seem to always be doing a million things. You’re doing a book on teachers’ salaries now, a biography of a Sudanese refugee, a compilation of prisoners’ oral histories — among others. To sound momentarily like the little old lady who lurks in the back of every reading everywhere, what’s your workday like? How do you fit everything in?

It goes in little patches. I’ve always written really late at night. Like the first book, I never started writing till [my brother] Toph went to bed. It got to the point where I would start writing at midnight and I would write until four, so I’m used to working kind of odd hours or working late. Sometimes, when we [me and wife Vendela Vida] need to get writing done, we’ll spend a month away somewhere without a phone.

I have this thing where in order to feel productive I have to feel like I’m procrastinating — so I’ll take on a bunch of work, even stuff I don’t really want to do, just so I have an excuse to put it down and pick up something else…

Yes! You said it way better than I could. It’s been that way for me basically forever. I was thinking about writing “Heartbreaking Work” the whole time that we did Might magazine –and that, for me, was competing with my time to maybe write that story out. And then I worked for Esquire for a year and I was supposed to be writing there but all I was doing was working on the memoir, for the most part. And then while I was stalling on that, that’s where McSweeney’s came from. I thought, “Fuck that, I haven’t published anything and I don’t know where I’m going with this memoir, but I have this idea for a magazine!”

You only want to work on the stuff you’re not supposed to be working on. That’s how it always is. I’ll always be working on five things at once, usually with those documents open at the same time because if I get stuck somewhere I’ll jump over to something else. That’s how my head has always worked. I don’t know if it’s ’cause I watched too much TV as a kid or what. It really could be that.

Since you’re your own publisher, I’m curious about who edits you.

Vendela, my wife, is probably the first person that reads things. And then Eli Horowitz, our managing editor — those are probably the two main people. I don’t know if you ever do this, but I’ll pick people for certain stories and I’ll say, “If this one doesn’t make sense to you, I’m doing something wrong.”

The classic line about the short story is that it’s nothing what it used to be, that it’s on its last leg as being culturally or literarily relevant or whatever. Anyone writing professionally knows how hard they are to sell — to magazines, and especially as books — that the whole machinery, except MFA programs, discourages them from being written. It’s all about the novel — and long novels in particular. I guess maybe that’s why I like a lot of the shorter pieces in “How We Are Hungry,” which I want to talk about. Maybe I’ll sound like an ass saying this, but they were quick and fun, which I think is kind of rare.

Thanks. You know, it’s funny: I was in Minneapolis the other day and I did a morning NPR show. There was a substitute radio host who interviewed me — I’m not sure where the regular person was. This substitute person wasn’t incredibly in touch with what’s going on in contemporary books, but she was nice enough, until the end. The last question — it’s like how they teach journalists to hold your tough questions until the end — so the last question is, “Do you think that some of these stories that are very short … well, what would you say if I said I kind of found them sort of gimmicky?” This woman felt very, I think, alienated, like the stories weren’t for her and they made her feel old or unhip.

I just didn’t know where to start. I keep thinking we’ll wake up someday and everyone will remember that every memorable piece of art we’ve ever had surprises us in its form. Part of it is the assumption that you’re not supposed to have fun with the short-story form. [Laughs.] It should not be fun, they say. Gertrude Stein died in 1946 or something, and yet I print a story that’s seven blank pages ["There Are Some Things He Should Keep to Himself"] and people throw up their hands in exasperation.

What’s the deal with that story, anyway?

There was a story there, seven pages, until a few weeks before we went to press. And it was a very personal and painful kind of story, and I thought it fit in the collection. But then I was advised that it wasn’t such a good idea to put it in, and so instead I changed the title and left the pages blank. In a weird way it went from the most wrenching part of the book to what appears to be a quick gag.

I want to talk about the idea of funny: What annoys me is how on one hand it’s not cool if a book’s obviously trying to be funny — or it’s at least harder to get “respect” — and at the same time every book that gets critical respect is now described in reviews as “containing prose that’s both unapologetically serious and, at times, disarmingly hilarious” or whatever. I’ll read those books, and I’m always struck by how unfunny they are. Good maybe, but not funny. Do critics just have no sense of humor?

Yeah — well, it’s true that if you want to know what’s fall-down-laughing funny, there aren’t too many pundits who are going to recognize it. Sam Lipsyte and Jonathan Ames are duly recognized for being funny, thank god. But generally, there are really only about two or three truly funny books published any given year. I think the Jon Stewart book is really funny, partly because it’s totally reckless. I had no idea it’d be that reckless! That and the Onion — they’re funny because they’re unbridled; you just don’t know when they’re going to say “motherfucker” or just jump the rails in some way. That Jon Stewart book is one of the best books of the year, but it’s not going to win any awards.

When I was reading “How We Are Hungry” I was struck by something: It seemed less angry than your stuff in the past. I don’t mean to say that both “Heartbreaking Work” and “Velocity” were similar books, but they both felt fueled in large part by anger.

“Heartbreaking Work” is a really angry book in a lot of places. It was meant to be and I’m fine with it being that way, but I can’t really tap into that as much anymore.

What changed?

Well, there was a lot of solipsism to “Heartbreaking Work.” The book itself talked about that, about the self-centeredness of people that age. It was supposed to be an indictment of that, too — about how you’re 25 and you truly think your thoughts and your goals are the main engine that keeps the world turning. And that’s true and completely ludicrous at the same time. Anyway, I think that’s why so many first novels are either semi-autobiographical or baldly autobiographical, because at that age, you’re really trying to figure out your own sense of self and what you are and what you mean to the world. I think “Velocity” might have been a transitional book, and this book, I think, is inching to go further. I mean, outside of journalism, I didn’t even write in the third person until this collection.

Did you find that tough? Freeing?

I think in general it’s an effort — not an effort, but an inevitability that I’ve been moving further and further away from self-analysis and self-concern and just more into … I’m trying to put it in a way that’s not really corny. 826 Valencia [the tutoring center in San Francisco] was really born out of a feeling that I’d spent a good year and a half pretty much alone writing the unpublished book, and then “Velocity,” thinking what I was writing was so crucial to the world that I had to spend all this time just doing that and thinking about it, to the exclusion of all else.

We lived in Costa Rica for a while, then Iceland, and all the while we weren’t speaking English much, and we were just these people living in little shacks, writing books, without any contact with anyone, without any ties to the community. And living that way, you spend far too much time inside your own head. You’re really not re-energized with your connection to people and just how, I don’t know, soul-strengthening that can be.

I lost a bunch of people in my life in those years, between 2000 and 2003, a couple of suicides among them, and not that I wasn’t in touch with mortality before, but I became more so in terms of people my age. I had always advised my friends that were really depressed and directionless to try to direct some of that energy outward and get involved in other people’s lives and help people — to address the concerns and needs of people who are even needier than they. So many people I knew were just tearing themselves up and devouring themselves, full of regret and torment, and I had this theory, based on nothing, really, that they might be saved if they leave the house and use their educations and healthy arms and brains to help people who might need their expertise or energy. But it was weird, because I would always advise this but I wasn’t really taking the advice so much myself.

Tell me a little about how 826 Valencia started.

When we moved back to San Francisco — that was in summer of 2001 — right away we rented this building in the Mission District. We didn’t have 501(c)(3) status; we had nothing. We just sort of rented the building and started tearing it up. It was a mess when we moved in. I convinced a high school friend of mine, Barb Bersche, to move out, and she and Vendela and I just started getting this building together and buying computers and that kind of thing, without really any definite clue of what we were doing.

I had friends who were teachers in San Francisco, and we’d been talking about how we could get the writing community involved in the public schools on a pretty massive scale, and we had an inkling it would work. And personally, it was just an effort to get out of my head a little bit and be able to come home at night and talk about something other than my own writing.

I already know you’re going to hate this next question, but I feel it has to be asked. Let me put it like this: When I wrote that piece a while back in the Believer [dealing with the literary world's fetishization of youth], I ended up on a panel talking about it. Anyway, there was this notion that I was the “McSweeney’s guy,” as if I’d sat around a fire with you and [co-editor] Heidi Julavits concocting something, when the reality was I’d just pitched Heidi cold, and then wrote a piece. I guess what I’m getting at is the animosity that is, within the little world you were just describing, directed at McSweeney’s, and what your thoughts are about that.

Just a warning, it’s definitely not a subject I want to get too far into. It gets into crazy people, and it always puts me in a bad mood to talk about crazy people. I personally don’t ever hear much about people like your panelist friend, because here in San Francisco it’s a sort of ridiculously supportive atmosphere. What always cracked me up about some of the initial reaction by a few to the Believer was that here was this magazine that was designed to talk calmly, enthusiastically and intelligently about books, and some people were, I guess, threatened by that.

At the beginning, it was very much like the Believer was saying, “Hey everyone, let’s be a bit more mature and calm when we talk about books, and here’s some good stuff you might not have heard about.” And of course that got certain people even angrier.

It’s pretty funny, when you think about it, right? It’s like an anti-violence movement being crushed by military force. You can’t win, right? I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness. It’s not such a controversial position, when you really think about it.

A related, though less taxing question: What’s it like being your own publisher, in the sense that you have information, like how any copies you’ve sold, that many writers make a point of pretending doesn’t exist?

I’m going to call it a strange Victorian idea, that the authors are away somewhere in a château and all of the people are somewhere else down in the engine room, shoveling coal into the furnace. A lot of authors are like this, where they really want to be completely divorced from all of the mechanics and the making of the books and all that. And then there are those who are always at war with it and always feel like their publisher isn’t doing enough for them and they got screwed or whatever.

The problem is, some publishers won’t even tell you the truth. They want to keep it all mysterious. But I do adult seminars in San Francisco every month, where we have panels of published writers talking to aspiring writers, and I always make the point that the publishing business, at any level, is still a very gentlemanly business. It’s eccentric and still peopled by book-loving people, and the profit margins are narrow, and everyone’s overworked and doing the best they can.

In terms of the numbers, I think if the truth is out there for everybody, then everybody is a lot better off. It quells some of the misunderstanding that goes on. I’ve had so many friends that were published — and I think published well — and then they get really angry because they don’t even understand how it works and they think, “Well, my book about South American dog trainers in the 16th century only sold 4,000 copies, and it’s my publisher’s fault!”

That’s the thing with writing — the numbers are most often so dismal. It can be frightening, always worrying you’re not selling enough, that no publisher will give you a second or third shot. You don’t think that always staring the numbers in the face can have an adverse effect?

It’s true, we know all the numbers. There are only four people at McSweeney’s, so we all know how much money a book makes, how much it costs to print a book in Wisconsin, how much it costs to print a book in China, how much it costs to print a book in Iceland. We know how much of the cover price the bookstore takes, how much the distributor takes, how much it costs to ship a box of books to Canada overnight.

But it’s empowering, incredibly empowering, to know how it all works. If we didn’t know how it works, we wouldn’t be able to put out Stephen Dixon’s book ["I"] that no one else would publish, and William Vollmann’s book ["Rising Up And Rising Down," which is seven volumes and thousands of pages] that no one else would publish, because we know the numbers and we know how to figure them out to work for these authors and these strange projects.

OK, last question: So I understand you’re working on a film adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are”?

Yeah, I’ve been working with Spike Jonze for about a year on the script. The movie’s in production, I guess you’d say. Maurice Sendak has signed off on the basic storyline we did. So that’s been really fun. I never thought I would write screenplays, in any form. I just sort of consciously avoided it with “A Heartbreaking Work.” Nick Hornby and D.V. DeVincentis wrote a screenplay for that. I really didn’t want to be involved at the time. But Spike is one of my favorite directors and “Malkovich” in particular is one of my very favorite movies. I don’t know how much detail I can or should go into about “Wild Things,” but it’s very — as you would expect from Spike — it’s not really what you would expect. It’s what Maurice wants for the book, but it’s very odd, too. I think I better go now. I’m in the parking lot.

What does that mean?

I’m standing in the parking lot of a mall. I called you on the way to the mall, then I got to the mall, and we were still talking. I didn’t want to go into the mall talking to you, because it’d be too loud. So I’ve been standing in the parking lot for the last half an hour. It’s kind of cold and…

Yeah, you should go inside.

And I look kind of suspicious out here, I think. People thinking I’m casing their cars.

Unless it’s about Texas, where fragile egos bruise — a tad hypocritically, I would argue, considering all the trash they talk — at the slightest joke. That’s an angular jab at those who didn’t approve too much of my disappointment — OK, outright disbelief — over Don DeLillo’s archival papers getting shipped to the Ransom Center at the University of Texas. Katherine Pelletier, the archivist who worked hard to get the “White Noise” author’s goods to Austin, even wrote politely to inform me that no one in New York, DeLillo’s hometown, stepped forward to claim the author’s miscellany as its own, letting me know along the way that I unfairly “obliterate[d] the difference between those who treasure the lessons of history through art and literature and those who may wreak havoc on our culture.” And I thought no one read my column!

Another righteous dude from Austin told me off for the same transgression, arguing correctly that the city is a “bastion of liberalism” that “[my] kind” — by that, I suppose he meant people from Long Beach, Calif., like Snoop Dogg — think only exist north of the Mason-Dixon line.

I thought long and hard about both accusations — before falling asleep from the mental strain. Look, I have nothing but love for Pelletier and my Mason-Dixon heckler — after all, without Austin, Texas might descend into a gay-bashing, creationism-teaching, Clear Channel-owned, Halliburton-nurturing, oil-funded, red-state dystopia. Whoops, too late!

In all seriousness, cultural figures as diverse as Gibby Haynes, Richard Linklater, Jim Hightower, Mars Volta, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, and many more go a long way toward redeeming Texas in my eyes — and they’ve received my undying loyalty, unwavering support and press coverage. But with a Texas-based administration screwing the nation out of the lives of its sucker-punched youth, waist deep in Iraq’s Big Muddy — not to mention trillions of dollars by the time 2008 rolls around — while sheltering unrepentant punks like Tom DeLay, Clear Channel, Kenneth Lay and countless more, you’ve got to cut me some slack for calling out the Lone Star faithful as red-state reactionaries. And remember, this is coming from a guy whose own state was taken over by the Terminator. (Yes, if you’re wondering, I am pissed off that the Texas Longhorns screwed my California Golden Bears out of a BCS bowl bid. But of course I’m a professional and that’s not affecting my attitude at all!)

“Eightball #23″
By Daniel Clowes
42 pages
Fantagraphics
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Some of you might be sick of seeing Fantagraphics’ name in my column, but don’t kill the messenger. They continue to turn out some of the most compelling comic narratives of our time, including this 23rd installment of Daniel Clowes’ award-winning “Eightball” series.

This time around, “Eightball” focuses on a troubled boy named Andy who, after taking a drag on a cigarette offered to him by a troublemaking best friend named Louie, wakes up a superhero. But this isn’t “Spider-Man”; Andy’s troubled past and outcast pal Louie come back to haunt him. All hell breaks loose once Andy receives a working Death Ray gun in the mail, at which point Louie recruits his friend-turned-Superman to kill off the neighborhood crooks and bullies.

But like his “Ghost World” before it, Clowes’ latest comic is about the fragile nature of childhood friendships.

“There’s a certain sadness about them,” Clowes says in a phone interview. “Because I think that most of us never have friendships like that ever again. Having that one friend, where it’s the two of you against the world in high school, is a very intense thing. As you get older, you tend not to allow that to happen to yourself ever again, or you just don’t have the room for it in your life anymore. So there’s something much more interesting about those younger friendships, but they almost never last. You can’t really move on if you’re stuck in that. It’s very unlikely that the two of you are going to develop simultaneously.”

Clowes recently wrapped up shooting “Art School Confidential” with Terry Zwigoff, the director behind both the Oscar-nominated “Ghost World” and “Crumb,” not to mention the hilarious “Bad Santa.” The two have formed a mutually beneficial relationship, one that is propelling Clowes past the comics crowd and into mainstream recognition. But don’t think that the ex-Berkeley, Calif., resident (suck it, Texas!) is letting that go to his head.

“I’ve had [producers] ask about some of my other comics,” Clowes explains, “but really not in the way they would if they thought the comics were really commercial. I would have people beating down my door, in that case. The interest I get is tentative and uncertain, as if they’re not sure whether these are the kind of films they really want to pursue. I think that ‘American Splendor’ came about through a producer who was a big comics fan; he’s a guy I’ve known for many years and he was talking about doing that film since long before this trend emerged. ‘Ghost World’ was a very singular thing — that was just Terry trying to find a book he responded to, which just happened to be ‘Ghost World.’ Terry’s not really interested in comics, even though he gets deserved credit for being one of the guys who brought them into the mainstream. But beyond that, there has been some kind of interest here or there in my comics, but most of them will never turn into films.”

“The Originals”
By Dave Gibbons
160 pages
DC Comics
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As one of the brilliant minds behind DC Comics’ canonical “Watchmen,” Dave Gibbons is a one-man tour de force. He’s lent his pen to everyone from “Superman” and Batman to the “Matrix” and “Alien” franchises, to say nothing of collaborations he’s had with giants of the industry like Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Stan Lee.

But “The Originals” is one of his most personal works yet, a dystopian look back at Britain’s mod explosion, a cultural movement that claimed Gibbons when he was a teenager. A meaning-laden black-and-white comic centered around the exploits of Lel, who wants more than anything to get in with the colorful mod gang known as the Originals, Gibbons’ latest work explores, like Anthony Burgess’ “A Clockwork Orange” before it, that peculiar postwar U.K. environment that birthed everything from mod, punk and the Beatles to Maggie Thatcher’s conservative revolution. But Gibbons maintains that the Burgess comparisons end there.

“What I had in mind was not to duplicate ‘A Clockwork Orange’ or ‘Quadrophenia,’” Gibbons says. “But I guess that’s one of the inevitable things if you’re doing a book about disaffected youth who think they’re grown up but actually aren’t. Not to quote the Who or anything, but I think that my generation was really the first that didn’t have to fight in a war or at least perform military service. And I think that, in some ways, joining a youth gang is a substitute for that. You clearly want to identify with a group of people, you want to have something that’s not connected to the home, something that can give you your own adventures, ones that have nothing to do with your childhood environment. Certainly, I remember Britain in the ’50s as being drab and gray, and it is that kind of austere backdrop that causes colorful fads to start to shine.”

As always, sex and violence rule the roost in youth culture, and “The Originals” is filled with both. But it’s not exploitative or transgressive — as we’ll see later with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s new “Son of the Gun” collection, also out from DC. If anything, it is the escalating gang violence of “The Originals” that signals the end of Lel’s innocence, as well as that of his favorite subculture. And all it takes is one gun.

“A gun was unheard of,” Gibbons says, “certainly amongst these gangs back in the ’60s. Of course, you’re nobody now if you’re in a gang and don’t carry a gun, but in those days a gun would be a most unusual thing to have. In my whole lifetime of being a mod, I rarely ever saw anyone with a knife. Most of the violence in those days was of the short-lived brawl variety. But one of the things I wanted to do in ‘The Originals’ is show what happens when violence does get out of hand, when it turns from being a boyish schoolyard fight to palpable violence where people die and their lives are irrevocably altered. I certainly never murdered anybody!”

“Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists”
Edited by Ted Rall
127 pages
Nantier Beall Minoustchine Publishing
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Cartoonist/columnist Ted Rall has spent the last several years calling bullshit on the power brokers that have been running this country into the ground. This second anthology of up-and-coming or established alternative cartoonists is Rall’s love letter to the genre that has brought him to prominence.

“For years, I’ve been frustrated at the lack of attention generated by this genre of alternative weekly-based political and social satire cartoonists,” Rall explains over the phone, “which has been around pretty much since the late ’80s and early ’90s. And it’s true that you can argue that not all them are social or political cartoonists, or even in alternative weeklies — most of my clients are in dailies, actually — but there are certain things these comics have in common. They tend to be drawn by a certain age group; Generation X is certainly the wellspring of the first or second wave of the alt-weekly cartoonists. They feature stripped-down or abstracted drawing styles to convey complicated ideas; for that reason they tend to be wordy, text-based exercises. And since I work in that genre, I love it but am endlessly frustrated by the lack of exposure it gets. This stuff always falls between the cracks.”

Unless you’re there to catch it, which some, like Salon and other forward-looking publications, are. But no matter how much indie cred artists like David Rees, Keith Knight and Aaron McGruder receive for their outstanding work, there are toiling cartoonists like Tak Toyoshima, Emily Flake and Max Cannon who may never get the credit they deserve. Which is where Rall comes in.

“Here you have intelligent and funny comics being ignored because no one yet has pulled it all together as a genre,” Rall added. “That’s one reason why I felt these cartoonists had a hard row to hoe, because people need to have genres, to be able to categorize things. If it’s something you’ve never seen or heard before, it doesn’t fit anywhere. So the goal of the first book was to say there’s strength in numbers, and it did much better than I or my publisher ever expected. But this was before 9/11, so in a way the scene we were documenting changed right as we were putting the book to bed.” Ergo, the new book, which features interviews with the aforementioned, as well as 15 more budding Matt Groenings, many of whom deserve to be stars already.

“In the Shadow of No Towers”
By Art Spiegelman
42 pages
Pantheon
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I already covered Spiegelman’s massive rumination on 9/11 — and the terrorism gold rush it inspired — earlier this year. But memories are short. How else did a war against WMD become a campaign to spread peace and freedom? Spiegelman’s book should be a collector’s item soon, but that would be sad indeed. Most of the strips he created for the book were offered to high-profile publications that nixed them, for fear of stirring whiskey into John Ashcroft’s coffee. Wimpy bastards. Next to Peter Kuper’s “World War 3 Illustrated,” Spiegelman’s visually arresting release is the most damning indictment of U.S. policy and arrogance committed to paper this year.

“The Jungle”
By Peter Kuper
48 pages
NBM/ComicsLit
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Speaking of Kuper, he has rendered Upton Sinclair’s tragic story of Jurgis Rudkus and the Chicago meatpacking industry in harrowing colors — and just in time. With rampant corruption and multinational greed reaching an all-time high, the world could stand to read up on Sinclair’s socialist tracts, especially those that rail against corporate crime and hypocritical religious orders. Here Kuper mashes Soviet-era propaganda art with Picasso’s “Guernica” and more for a captivating peek into the world of those much less fortunate than you. The way things are going in the world right now, that contingency will grow by leaps and bounds. Don’t sleep on this one.

“McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern Issue 13″
Edited by Chris Ware
263 pages
McSweeney’s
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This gargantuan edition of Dave Eggers’ continuing promotion of all that is strange and good in literature and the arts is stacked to the spine with knockout artists, most of whom are already household names. Guest editor Chris Ware (“Jimmy Corrigan”) has compiled some heady material for this hard-to-find (at least the last time I checked) collection, including excerpts from Joe Sacco’s “The Fixer,” Art Spiegelman’s “In the Shadow of No Towers,” Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez’s “Love & Rockets,” and much more, as well as some vintage toss-offs like Charles Schulz’s early “Peanuts” scribblings. Way more wine-and-cheese than Rall’s macaroni-and-cheese compilation, “McSweeney’s 13″ is a capable introduction to the finest of what the contemporary comic set has to offer, although you’re not likely to find too many unknowns. But the edition’s astounding visual and textual arrangements are reward enough for the fairly steep price. Get it for those adult-alternative snobs who still think comics are for losers.

“Son of the Gun: Sinner”
By Alejandro Jodorowsky
112 pages
Humanoids/DC Comics
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Yeah, it might be DC Comics, but “Superman,” this ain’t. Unless the caped crusader is a South American street orphan born with a tail, raised by a transvestite/prostitute dwarf and suckled by a dog, that is. The infamous Alejandro Jodorowsky more or less created the midnight movie circuit with the hard-to-stomach 1970 cult western known as “El Topo,” before scaring the living crap out of deviant moviegoers everywhere with the twisted “Santa Sangre” and “The Holy Mountain.” He’s done the same in his various sci-fi comics like “Metabarons” and “Technopriest.” “Son of the Gun” has much more in common with Brian De Palma’s now-canonical film “Scarface” than with “Heavy Metal.” There is so much conscienceless violence — especially against women — in “Son of the Gun” that you’d be forgiven for tossing the book out the window. But Jodorowsky has built his guts ‘n’ gore rep on worse, and those hardboiled fans who think that Takeshi Miike’s films are just what Dr. Feelgood ordered will feel right at home here. For strong stomachs only.

“Locas: A Love & Rockets Book”
by Jaime Hernandez
780 pages
Fantagraphics
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In my own haughty opinion, this is the release of the year (see my Salon piece on Jaime for more on that score). Compiling more than 20 years of material from Los Bros. Hernandez’s pioneering “Love & Rockets” series, “Locas” follows the bisexual Maggie Chascarillo as she tries to find herself in the burgeoning Southern California punk rock scene. On the way, she also find Hopey Glass, a rebellious kindred spirit, and the two spend the rest of this massive tome simultaneously trying to escape and reconcile with each other. There are few comics that conscientiously attempt to represent alternative sexuality, and few authors in the genre as revered as Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. If you’re going to grab one book from this list for yourself, grab this one.

The magazine, as has been reported elsewhere, is the brainchild of novelist Heidi Julavits, author of “The Mineral Palace,” and Vendela Vida, who wrote the female rites-of-passage investigation “Girls on the Verge,” and is, not incidentally, Dave Eggers’ fiancée.

Physically, it’s a very attractive product that has Vida’s future husband’s fingerprints all over it. Small ink drawings of animal skulls break up page after page of carefully justified, three-column text. There’s nary a sans serif typeface in sight, nor an ad. Footnotes are present, though not in such abundance that they represent a separate meta-commentary — these footnotes are really just footnotes. The masthead is demurely located on the back cover. The headlines and subheds are written in a gnomic style (“‘Badlands’ and the ‘Innocence’ of American Innocence, Featuring Martin Sheen as Donald Rumsfeld and a Voice-over by Our Laconic Complicity”) that’s clever, even if it ends up being tedious.

The longer pieces are paced by single-page literary experiments, including a travel-writing parody about a motel in Vermont, an analysis of the evolutionary development of the star-nosed mole, and an amusing attack on cute children. Cartoonist Charles Burns has contributed arresting, borderline-malevolent cover and interior art, including portraits of Salman Rushdie (who interviews Terry Gilliam) and Beth Orton, among others. There’s an elaborate chart tracing the international provenance of magic realism. Overall, it’s a compelling browse, even if it does suffer from the Eggers/McSweeney’s fixation on some rather dried-out visual ideas borrowed from Joseph Cornell and the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

However, as an exercise in cultural journalism, at this stage, the Believer is pretty uneven. It gets your hopes up, but doesn’t completely deliver on its quietly ambitious promise.

The magazine’s avowed editorial mission is to stake out fresh territory, somewhere between Harper’s or the Atlantic Monthly and a limited-circulation literary journal, but with an earnestness that the editors feel is lacking in these cynical times. “We will give people and books the benefit of the doubt,” reads point No. 6 of the introductory 10-point “Notes about The Believer.”

Now, it would be the easiest thing in the world to take some swipes at a publication whose editors have decided to run essentially unmolested Q & A interviews with an obscure English philosopher and Wes Anderson’s favorite Indian character actor, and an intensely personal profile of the ’80s-referencing band Interpol. The magazine’s name, in fact, seems like deliberate bait, given the cultlike reverence that arises around anything Dave Eggers gets involved with. Eggers evidently advised the Believer’s editors only on the design, while McSweeney’s Publishing provided distribution services, but no funds. Still, it’s hard to separate the Believer from Eggers’ overall agenda, which is to restore some honesty and passion to American letters.

We’ll see how it goes. My take on Eggers is that he’s an interesting and occasionally inspired writer, but his unacknowledged significance is that he’s one of the most important graphic designers of his generation. In fact, although his aesthetic is fairly reactionary and at times unbearably twee, he has a rare talent for the arcane art of typesetting and publication design.

The look of the Believer, with its sophisticated attempt to professionalize the shaggy, Bay Area broadsheets of the ’60s and ’70s, confirms my suspicion that Eggers’ goal is not to become postmodernism’s answer to Bennett Cerf, but to function as an update on the 18th century “gentleman printer” — a contemporary Ben Franklin. (Eggers, however, wants to be Franklin minus the political and scientific enthusiasms, which distracted the founding father from the altogether more fascinating business of printing.)

The Believer’s lead essay, however, is bound to convince some people that Eggers did more than recommend a typeface; some critics will doubtless conclude that he has locked Julavits and Vida in his mesmerist’s gaze and commanded them to use the magazine to extend some of his own Peter Pan-ish cultural preoccupations. In “Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!” Julavits, over the course of 9,000 words, complains about the state of contemporary book reviewing, mounting an argument against “snark,” which she defines as a twisted ethic of cheap shots embodied in such smartass urban newspapers as New York Press and the New York Observer (full disclosure: I’ve written for both).

To summarize, she wants book reviews to be as lively as they are responsible; she never, ever wants to encounter an innocent reader who was turned off to a deserving author by the careerist flimflam of some hot-shot media Turk looking to score points.

This amounts to a manifesto — one that Eggers himself would be sympathetic to. Unfortunately, it’s almost always a bad idea to make the lead story in a new magazine a manifesto, especially when its verdicts are so flaccid (manifestoes are supposed to be fiery and emboldening). “I want to encourage readers to sample books they might otherwise never open or hear about,” Julavits writes. Hoo-boy! Get out of my way as I rush the book-reviewing battlements, ready to poleax the purveyors of snark.

It’s an even worse idea to lead with a manifesto when it buries your best article, in this case a very Harper’s-esque report on San Francisco’s protest culture by Marc Herman. The Believer’s editors have forced it to languish behind Julavits’ meanderings and the first seven pages of Paul LaFarge’s insightful meditation on Nicholson Baker’s debt to New England literary realism. (At least Herman’s story fared better than the only other really good piece in the issue, co-articles editor Ed Park’s disquisition on the vigorous career of “True Grit” author Charles Portis, which dwells meekly in the four-spot.)

Herman’s take on the Bay Area’s lazy legacy of antiwar protests is focused, intelligent, well-reported and downright frisky. His core point, presciently expressed well before the United States invaded Iraq, is that our current round of taking to the streets, unlike many prior forms of civil demonstration, is unlikely to achieve its goals. Why? Because Bay Area protest culture is just that: a culture. Its overriding interest is in perpetuating itself, not effecting change. Organizers are obsessed with being inclusive rather than introducing discipline to their troops. According to Herman’s sources, this free-form tactic has made it easy for the media to ignore the protesters. Why give them column inches and airtime when all they do is deliver disorganized speeches, march on the wrong landmarks, and base their thinking more on Chomskian conspiracy theories than facts?

To me, Herman’s story plus the Believer’s distinctive, collectible design make it worth the $8 cover price. In future issues, I’d like to see a little more editorial ferocity. I think Julavits and Vida have it in them, but only time will tell. It might boil down to a fight between the good they want to do and the magazine they need readers to, well, believe in. The Believer hasn’t made me one yet, but given the generally sorry state of the American magazine, I’m more than willing to be patient with my faith.