Today most foreign visitors either have a job to do or are visiting expat friends. And it may feel self-indulgent to travel for pleasure in Afghanistan now -- why aren't you helping the poor or starting a business and working six days a week like the other internationals?

It shouldn't. The country badly needs tourism to bring cash to the provinces, especially isolated, mountainous areas unlikely ever to develop other legitimate sources of income. While many visitors are under the impression that Kabul is safer than the outlying provinces, the reverse is usually the case. Common sense would dictate staying out of actual war zones -- these days, that's Helmand and Kandahar provinces -- but after six trips to Afghanistan and visits to 42 other countries, I'd say that the 10 Afghan provinces I've visited are no more dangerous than rural South America or Africa, places that routinely attract determined visitors.

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Journalist Liz Perle's "Money, a Memoir" is a case in point. The crucial error occurs very early in the book. After recounting the end of her first marriage, she describes her long-delayed "examination of my convoluted relationship with money" at the age of 42. "[That examination] ultimately lead[s] to my conversations with hundreds of other women," she continues. "When it comes to money, women everywhere have so many fears and fantasies in common." Huh? How did we go from Perle's anxieties and issues to surveys of hundreds of women? In the next 240 pages, she never convinced me that women have any more convoluted relationships with money than men do, or even that her relationship with money has much to do with her being female. Don't people everywhere have fears and fantasies in common having to do with money? But that observation wouldn't necessarily sell books.

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It was a tremendous thrill knowing that Amir, at thirty four, was as crazy about me physically as I was about him. At forty four I could see signs of decay in my body even if he could not, even if those who saw us together could not. But most of what I've loved about being with younger men, including him, hasn't been reassurance about my looks. The real joy is in being able to be more emotionally generous. Because it is not so deadly serious, because I don't think in terms of marrying these men, because I am not trying so hard, I can be the flexible, reasonable and solicitious woman that I wish I were all the time.

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Almost any woman Bill would date in New York would be up for some highly stylized submission. These women are tired of androgyny, sick of men who treat them like pals. And they want to feel the boot occasionally. The wish to be dominated doesn't extend to important stuff, however, like choosing restaurants and movies. As my friend John says, American women want to be "forced" to do the things they already want to do. It's sexy to be tied up and kissed, but boring to be dragged along for an afternoon of auto parts shopping.

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If you're old enough to have followed politics in the '70s, you'll remember that liberals used to be the exciting ones. They were more open-minded, more imaginative and, well, sexier than conservatives. And one big reason Bush won in 2004 was that many of us who were ambivalent about the man and his politics -- I voted for Gore in 2000 -- found the Democrats and their candidate smugly self-righteous, prissy and joyless. Sure, red-staters can be smug, too, but it's as incongruous in liberals as it is in garage bands. My liberal friends asked how I could support the candidate of the Christian right, but Kerry came off as so plastic and corporate, so backpedaling and two-faced, that by election night I felt that wearing a Bush button was a punk rock gesture.

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What grabbed us is the people, their warmth and paradoxical openness. They can give of themselves fully. My driver in Baghdad -- everyone I knew there, and Jon Lee Anderson, too, bonded with their driver -- spoke to me about his life. It felt no different from listening to a good friend. I am sure there are thoughts he did not want to share with an American, a non-Muslim and a woman, but he shared his feelings. This is a trait I've noticed in Afghans, too, and I've come to the conclusion that it is the one positive effect of living under oppressive or corrupt governments.

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Sitting presidents have an advantage everywhere in the world, but it is rarely as large as in media-poor Afghanistan. Most Afghans cannot read well enough to understand the newspapers, which are pitched to a high school reading level. In Ghor Province, Afghanistan's poorest, the mention of the word "rouznameh" (newspaper) produced blank stares, as well it might in a province where only a small percentage of the people outside the local capital can read. Together with small, colorful posters found even in village shops, radio and TV are the main sources of information (where there is reception). But in Herat, as in other provincial capitals, there is just one TV station. (The rich here, as elsewhere, have satellite TV.) Before President Karzai deposed local strongman Ismail Khan three weeks ago, the station showed all Khan, all the time. Now it shows a mixture of Kabul and local programming, but the Kabul news coverage is all Karzai, all the time. The other night, I watched nearly real-time coverage of Karzai's recent visit to the United Nations. None of the other 17 candidates for the presidency appeared at all.

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-- Seymour M. Hersh, the New Yorker, May 24.

Poolside in Baghdad last June, I told some American journalists that I thought Iraqi men were pretty cute. They thought I was joking. The invective exploded: "Fat, sexist Arabs" was the party line. I was shocked, not least because these same reporters routinely criticized the American occupation for treating Iraqis poorly. And I was hurt, too. Many Iraqis looked like my own people. They looked like Jews. If Arabs are fat and sexist, what are they saying about Jews behind my back? Slurs against Arabs are, after all, just another form of anti-Semitism.

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Half their people want to come here anyway; instead of worrying about visas and quotas and green cards and policing our borders, we could make there become a lot more like here, with decent-paying jobs and free public education and the rule of law and freedom of speech and the newspapers to prove it, with driver's licenses and auto insurance and real roads and building permits and trash pickup and all of the rest of it. Farewell to child labor, honor killings, female infanticide, illiteracy, casual bribery. Liberals will have to stop whining about wars for oil, because the oil will be ours, and conservatives will have to stop whining about foreign aid, which won't be foreign anymore. European intellectuals will have to stop comparing Ariel Sharon to Hitler, because the Palestinians will have a state, and it will be one of ours.

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The reality, when I made two trips to Afghanistan in 2002 to teach English and buy supplies for schools, was otherwise. From schoolboys at play to university students, Cabinet ministers to legendary commanders, Afghans were quieter, gentler and more self-contained than Americans. One young man confided that to him and his friends in northern Afghanistan, Americans' body language and loud voices seemed exaggerated, like the gestures of stage actors.

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And handcuffs -- well, seeing them at Sam Goody made me wistful. Once upon a time, you could still shock a guy by pulling them out. I suspect that there's a connection between the collapse of masculine authority and the mainstreaming of S/M; neither gender is too good at distinguishing power and authority, and nostalgia for male authority can translate into fetishizing symbols of power. Women secretly want men with authority, but they fall for insecure passive-aggressive guys who view every aspect of life as a power struggle, or for cranky killjoys or petty sadists.

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Kemal continued in his perfect, nuanced American School English, speaking of a loss of faith that had been spurred by reading Omar Khayyam, and I almost laughed. This reminded me of the last man I'd cared about, the only Muslim I'd ever dated. Amir had said he was a believer, but the two men shared a bedrock gravity and naiveté about religion I'd never found in a Christian or Jew I had dated. Here was also a seriousness about the written word I could only envy as a writer. Oh, I could imagine a fundamentalist Christian turning against his upbringing and cursing Jesus, but I couldn't imagine it happening because of a poet. In Anglo-Saxon culture, poetry has not had such power for hundreds of years. But Muslims are people of the book, and as a student of Farsi I knew the centrality of poetry to Islam.

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That line from cultural critic Hillel Schwartz comes from his 1994 book, "The Culture of the Copy," but it speaks directly to the current controversy over human cloning. Late last month, the House of Representatives passed a bill that bans human cloning for both reproduction and stem-cell research. So irrational was the panic over cloning that an exception to the cloning bill for stem-cell research was also defeated. The bill is not likely to gather the necessary 60 Senate votes, largely because stem-cell research has many and eloquent defenders. But human reproductive cloning, currently ineligible for government funding, is likely to be banned in the near future.

This prospect, though expected, should not pass unremarked. As Schwartz implies, there is a large irrational element in our feelings about doubles and clones, and I would argue that the severity of the House bill -- those who defy the ban would be liable for a fine of $1 million and up to 10 years in prison -- has more to do with our fears than with public-policy objectives or science.

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I say "alternate reality," because Fortune recently published its annual roundup of the 50 most powerful women in American business, and the roster of powerful corporations with female CEOs includes Kraft Foods, eBay, PepsiCo, Avon, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide, Hearst Magazines, Lucent, Sanford C. Bernstein, MTV Networks Music Group, Time and Xerox.

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We were in a small Greenwich Village restaurant, my boyfriend Scott and I, and our conversation lagged as we waited for the check. You could get pasta and a salad here for under $10, and the room was pleasant enough, so the place was packed with people in their 20s. As we waited, I calculated my share of the bill, reassured that I'd still have enough for lunch tomorrow, the subway, the Wall Street Journal. Payday, I could not forget, was the day after that.

Every workday I bought the Journal because I couldn't take enough from any one paycheck to buy a subscription. I lived very modestly and close to the financial edge. I found this poverty as surprising as my friends did, for as a financial analyst at an investment bank, I made more money than most 23-year-olds. But even in those days 20 grand did not go far in New York.

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Susan Maushart's heartfelt and incendiary "Wifework: What Marriage Really Means For Women" is a brief against traditional marriage that took me back to the galvanizing effect of reading Friedan 30 years ago. Coming at a time when the 50 percent divorce rate in the United States, Great Britain and Australia shows no sign of falling, and 40 percent of divorces affect children not yet out of kindergarten, any discussion of reforming marriage is welcome. When President Bush finds it necessary to launch a $300 million initiative to promote wedlock among poor women, we have good reason to figure out if this institution is worth saving, and why.

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He was scarcely even a puppy, a tiny black bit of fur the size of my own small hand, just able to walk across the beach. I scooped him up and turned around, looking for his owner. There was no one behind me, just the beach restaurant where my lunch had been cooked. It had been simple grilled fish with rice and a few tomato slices. The restaurant offered salt but no pepper or hot sauce -- expensive luxuries here.

Twenty feet in front of me, close to the turquoise sea, a group of Italian men with Cuban girls laughed and bantered. The men were 40-ish but fending off gravity better than most American males, and they didn't look bad in their bathing trunks. The women were spectacular in their tangas, not an ounce of fat on their 20-year-old bodies. They were ebony. There was an adage around that you heard once you'd been in Cuba a few times, that the Italian men always went for the really black Cubanas. What interested me about this was that in Italy, bourgeois Northern Italians will sneer at Sicily or even Naples as "Africa."

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The problem is institutionalizing this knowledge so that even in prosperous, relatively tranquil years like the decade that just ended -- times that will likely come again -- we remember how to act together, with respect for our common good. While flags are still selling out, while Americans are still asking what they can do for their country, we should give serious thought to forging a more democratic, egalitarian, caring society by restoring the concept of compulsory national service.

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1) "I think that in part people are kept from becoming their dysfunctional selves by working for a corporation."

2) "I should go out and hike those hills and I should go for those walks while I'm still young -- while I can still do that kind of stuff -- instead of just sitting here wasting away."

3) "I'm, like, telling people to go fuck themselves on a daily basis. And that's because being in this job, you realize that money is the bottom line in almost everything."

4) "So rather than try to compare people and talk about who's got power and who doesn't, I think we should all sort of just put our arms around each other's shoulders and drink a beer and say it's a hell of a life, you know?"

A) Advertising executive, B) university systems administrator, C) Air Force general, D) Kinko's worker.

Correct answers? 1: D, 2: B, 3: A, 4: C.

"Gig" is full of surprises like these -- stories of successful professionals filled with rage and regret and of workers in aggressive, demeaning or dangerous professions who are gentle, thoughtful or playful. The men and women interviewed in "Gig" range from preteen lemonade sellers to septuagenarians; they include a prostitute, a supermodel, an adhesives saleswoman, a taxidermist and a slaughterhouse human resources director. Perhaps because almost 40 interviewers participated, the individual voices remain distinct, with their personal, regional and class inflections intact.

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