"That's Boom Boom," he says, referring to his old girlfriend. "She actually wasn't that pretty."

Yetnikoff, now 70, isn't that pretty either, but at least he's alive after some hard-drinking, hard-drugging years at the top. Velvel, as his grandmother called him, moved from a hardscrabble Brooklyn youth to Columbia Law School, then to CBS Records, where he became president in 1975. Over the next 15 years, CBS's revenues swelled from $485 million to a whopping $2 billion. Yetnikoff oversaw the biggest growth spurt in record-industry history at the biggest label in the world -- he merged CBS Records into Sony in 1987 -- and became notorious in the process. His partying and cruelty became almost as well known as his profitability.

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"Every time someone says, 'I'm a George Bush Republican, I hear them saying, 'I'm a dick,'" she says.

As for the so-called red states that voted for Bush, well, says Garofalo, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, "I call them the 'pee-on-me states.'" The level of self-loathing required to vote for George W. Bush, she says, calls for a drastic solution. "We should hire a dominatrix -- just to get it over with."

The audience response, though, is decidedly mixed. An enthusiastic shout of "he is crazy" comes from the front, but then I spot a few people standing up to leave. A tall woman with red hair, standing near the exit, tells me that she's had enough musical activism for the night.

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For the past decade, Bardach, now a columnist for Newsweek's international edition, has been the most vigorous reporter on the Cuban scene. Everything from Cuba's post-Soviet lunatic paradoxes to Miami's tolerance for terrorism has been the subject of her investigative attention. In the midst of a world filled with intrigue and polarization, she's always managed to be an equal opportunity critic. Leaders on both sides of the Florida Straits have learned to fear her efforts.

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Forget "Changing Lanes," the film buffs argue from their pedestals behind a tall maroon counter. For a real dose of class struggle, grab Brando's "On the Waterfront." Ignore "Star Wars," they demand; instead watch its epic predecessor, "The Seven Samurai."

Snobby cultural up-selling is exactly what you'd expect from a place that has "cult," "classics" and "independent" sections that each occupy twice the space allotted to new releases. But still, the rack of Kim's employee picks is full of confusing choices. If the group of 44 films is meant be a microcosm of film geek opinion, a democratic canon of the best classics new and old, then much of what was once considered important appears to have been lost.

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"The Martyrs of Columbine: Faith and the Politics of Tragedy" (to be published Nov. 9) meticulously documents this enduring use of martrydom for political purposes. Author Justin Watson, a religious professor at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., explains how the two girls have become contemporary Daniels in the lion's den: how their stories have been exploited for political purposes by both the left, which saw Columbine in terms of weak gun laws, and the right, which argued that Harris and Klebold were the direct result of secularization.

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Clearly, founder Daniel Gluck would like us to believe this is a museum that will make sex clean, fresh, sanitized -- intelligent and academic. Ignore the frosted windows that keep passersby from seeing what's inside. This is a cultural institution with a mission "to preserve and present the history, evolution, and cultural significance of human sexuality." (Note: Salon has a marketing relationship with the Museum of Sex.)

Titillation is not the goal. Unlike the Sex Museum in Amsterdam, with its brothel-like red walls and lights, New York's lily-white Museum of Sex aims to inform -- and its first exhibit has several Ph.D. advisors to prove it.

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But these gilded connections haven't kept the born-and-bred New Yorker from ripping into the nation's financial giants like an armor-piercing bullet. While Congress and the SEC's Harvey Pitt dither in the face of widespread corporate malfeasance, Spitzer is a busy man. You could call him the nation's toughest corporate cop. He's certainly the most feared man on Wall Street.

Spitzer's crusade first attracted public attention in April, when the Princeton- and Harvard-educated prosecutor announced that his investigation into analysts' stock-buying recommendations had turned up a smoking gun. E-mails from within the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch proved that analysts privately slammed stocks that they were publicly praising. Their behavior reflected a classic conflict of interest. Merrill Lynch was afraid to antagonize clients who were filling its coffers with millions of dollars of investment banking fees.

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In the first 10 minutes of her lecture, she mentions the sexually transmitted disease three times, and HIV only once. She shows graphic pictures of people with HPV infections but no photographs of anyone with AIDS. And when she speaks at length about HPV, in a slight Ross Perot drawl that cements the impression that she's a straight shooter, Sulak seems to revel in the virus' frequency and effects.

"How many people know that human papillomavirus is the most common sexually transmitted disease and that it causes cervical cancer?" she asks. Then she offers a handful of factoids: "Fifty percent of sexually active women have been infected ... In one study, 90 percent of sexually active adolescents were infected with HPV ... Even if a small percentage develops problems, so many people are infected that we have a huge health problem in this country."

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But lo and behold, Laura Grindstaff, a sociology professor at the University of California at Davis, has managed to throw my conclusion into doubt. Her new book, "The Money Shot: Trash, Class and the Making of TV Talk Shows," convincingly makes the case that TV talk-show producers have the worst gig going.

These people spend their days and nights wooing and catering to the most difficult members of society, everyone from drug addicts to wife beaters to the emotionally disturbed. They work crazy long hours, make less money than their prime-time peers, and are generally treated by the public and the guests themselves as the bottom-feeding, slime-oozing slugs of American culture. It's no wonder, Grindstaff argues, that "the emotional labor required of producers in securing emotional displays from guests leaves them wondering two things: how much longer can I do this? And, should I be doing this at all?"

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The outpouring of expression began just hours after the World Trade Center towers collapsed. One year after the trauma, that flow is cresting with the publication of dozens of books, many of them meant to help put the events and our emotional reactions into perspective. Among the more reflective tomes are those that attempt to act as records of our thoughts, feelings and actions at the time of the tragedy and immediately after. Many of them do an admirable job.

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But this baby boom, as healing and heartwarming as it may seem, doesn't appear to exist. It's true that there are couples who decided to conceive as a result of the attacks. People like Stacey Stapleton and her husband Paul -- who successfully conceived after hearing fighter jets fly over their Manhattan apartment, according to an Associated Press report in November -- are not exactly unique. They can be found in cities and towns all over the country. But for every couple who decided to have children in the wake of the disaster, there seems to be one or more who decided not to bring new life into an uncertain post-9/11 world, or, even more likely, simply did not see the attacks as an impetus for parenthood.

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It's a question that has caused heated debate ever since Napster exploded on the scene in 1999. And as sales of recorded music have declined over the past two years, it's a question that has taken on ever-greater importance -- for the music business, Congress and music fans.

Up until recently, there has been little hard data to support anyone's claims that file trading is hurting -- or helping -- music sales. But at least one researcher, University of Texas (at Dallas) economist Stan Liebowitz, author of an upcoming book (set for publication Sept. 7) titled "Rethinking the Network Economy," is digging hard for quantitative answers.

In May, Liebowitz published a paper suggesting that the record industry would soon be seriously harmed by MP3s. But in June, by the time Salon caught up with him, he was questioning his own conclusions after having examined the numbers and finding little solid proof that file sharing was hurting CD sales.

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These facts about the Berlin meeting are not in dispute. Everything else is. The question of exactly what was said in Berlin and how it was translated to the Taliban has become the centerpiece of a vast dispute about the Bush administration, Osama bin Laden and the buildup to the Sept. 11 attacks. On the left, it has become an article of faith for many that the U.N.-sponsored meetings were part of a concerted Bush administration effort to push for an oil-and-gas pipeline through Afghanistan. When the talks fell apart, it's been alleged, the administration used the diplomats to issue a military threat, which was carried back to the Taliban. Bin Laden, the theory goes, then decided to strike first, making the Sept. 11 attacks not a random act of terrorist violence, but rather a preemptive strike -- a calculated response to the Bush administration's love of oil, and its irresponsible saber-rattling in pursuit of it.

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These are just a few of the questions that would get you fired if you couldn't survive without having them answered. And yet, to completely forget how we have shaped and been affected by the various things that surround us amounts to ignorance. Many of the modern products we regularly overlook -- plastic trash bags, to take a more trivial example -- have dramatically altered the nature of our society. They are parts of the honeycomb we've built to make life easier, cleaner or better-looking. Because they envelop and reflect us, they deserve to be analyzed and discussed.

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"They're too expensive," they kept saying. "Forget it, we're not spending nearly $100 on footwear."

Until now. Finally, I've won. After agreeing to split the cost, after working at a flower stand to earn my share -- and especially after finding a store that sold the overhyped kicks for $50 -- I've convinced my parents to let go of their anti-materialistic urges. They've brought me here, to a dingy, musty store housed in the basement of an old brick factory in Worcester, Mass. And they've conceded defeat. My 12-year-old palms are sweating. Through the skewed lens of my memory -- in which all things visual are clear while emotions are remembered as vague but intense -- I think I'm afraid. As I sprint through the aisles looking for my size, I remember thinking: What if they don't have my size? What if my parents suddenly decide to rescind their offer? What if I never get the shoes?

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"You can't see pollution," Estrella says, running a hand through her frosted blond hair. "But you can see the beauty of the ocean and the tragedy of it being ruined."

She points to a downed strip of fence that lies in the marsh, glistening like a silver bridge. "The fence has been down for a while," she says. Later in the day, I see a group of kids playing nearby; Estrella's teenage son tells me that sneaking into the site has become a Fairhaven rite of passage.

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Today, Stiglitz's lifetime of work is suddenly all too relevant. Consider, for example, his theory of "asymmetric information." Stiglitz spent years demonstrating that one party in a transaction -- say, the owner of a factory -- often possesses more information than the other about that transaction, and thus has an advantage that allows for market inefficiencies, and potentially, human suffering. His work won Stiglitz the 2001 Nobel Prize in economics, but more to the point, it handily explains why Enron and other companies successfully hid their accounting tricks for so long. Because executives have the power to determine how to arrange their profit-and-loss numbers, the theory holds, they'll always have a leg up on detectives and accountants who are trying to uncover misdoings.

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Gilmore has never been afraid to speak his mind on any issue, but the politics of Internet governance are particularly close to his heart. And right now, that means keeping a close eye on ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers. ICANN is the international body in charge of managing the Internet's domain name system -- the numbers and names that identify Internet addresses.

Critics from across the political spectrum have claimed for years that ICANN is secretive, slow, inefficient and, worst of all, firmly in the pocket of special interests. But in recent weeks, the rhetoric has gone up a notch. Suddenly, ICANN is at a crossroads.

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Will the injection of free-market ideals like competition ruin or save public education? Who gains and who loses from a voucher-based system? And will such a system undermine the hope that public education can be a fundamental force of equality and democracy?

These are just a few of the questions on the minds of parents and educators all over the country. But in the explosive debate that has followed the court's ruling, one question is more immediate: Will the decision inspire only debate, or will it inspire systemic change?

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If there was one thing that could legitimately be hoped for after the biggest corporate bankruptcy of all time, it was that accounting rules would be tightened, and the rush to dismantle regulatory oversight over the kind of complicated financial games that Enron specialized in would be reversed. But instead, the people most responsible for loosening the rules are being put in charge.

The CFTC is the government agency that is supposed to be the watchdog over such advanced "financial instruments" as derivatives trading. But Bush's nominees boast what critics call a laughable regulatory record. Walter Lukken is the drafter of a law passed in 2000 that gave Enron's online trading arm the right to act without a shred of oversight. Sharon Brown-Hruska is a free-market economist and protigi of Wendy Gramm, the former CFTC commissioner who, after shepherding through a regulatory exemption for Enron, resigned from the commission and joined the company's board of directors.

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