In today's America, everyone from President Bush to advertising executives to liberal activists appears to agree that freedom is about having choices and that having more choices means having more freedom. Choice, even in mundane matters, embodies the larger ideal of the individual as arbiter not just of what tastes or feels good but also of what is good. This is why we now regard 32 kinds of jam in the supermarket, 50 styles of jeans in the department store and 120 retirement plans in the workplace as signs of both economic progress and moral and political progress. Choice is what enables all of us to live exactly the kind of lives we want to and think we should.

But this "wisdom" is suspect for two reasons. First, most Americans do not think that freedom is about exercising more and more choice. And second, even for those who do equate freedom with choice, having more choice does not seem to make them feel freer. Instead, Americans are increasingly bewildered — not liberated — by the sheer volume of choices they must make in a day.

As behavioral scientists, we have found that the people who frame freedom in terms of choice are usually the ones who get to make a lot of choices — that is, middle- and upper-class white Americans (most of our study participants are white; we can't make any claims about other racial and ethnic groups). The education, income and upbringing of these Americans grant them choices about how to live their lives and also encourage them to express their preferences and personalities through the choices they make. Most Americans, however, are not from the college-educated middle and upper classes. Working-class Americans often have fewer resources and experience greater uncertainty and insecurity. For them, being free is less about making choices that reflect their uniqueness and mastery and more about being left alone, with their personality, integrity and well-being intact.

Social class is difficult to measure — it's a complicated amalgam of education, income and occupational prestige — but in the U.S.'s quasi meritocracy, education has arguably become its most important facet. And so in our research we often identify social class with education.

In a recent study with Nicole Stephens at Stanford University, we asked college students to pick "three adjectives that best capture what the word 'choice' means to you." A higher percentage of those who had parents with a college education said "freedom," "action" and "control," while more of those whose parents had only a high-school education responded with "fear," "doubt" and "difficulty."

We also analyzed how freedom and choice are presented in one of our most pervasive and influential cultural products: popular songs. In every region, Americans with higher education and higher incomes typically prefer rock music over country. We found that rock lyrics had a lot more talk of choice, control and self-expression, as in the Rolling Stones' refrain, "'Cause I'm free to do what I want any old time." But when we analyzed country music, preferred over rock by less-educated Americans in every region, we heard more mentions of self-protection and defense, as in Darryl Worley's observation, "We didn't get to keep [our freedom] by backin' down." When choice was mentioned, it was often as a prelude or coda to tragedy, as in George Jones's lament "Now I'm living and dying with the choices I've made."

Several experimental studies also show how these divergent conceptions of freedom and choice shape working- and middle-class Americans' daily lives. One set of studies used an approach common to many social-psychology experiments: an everyday setting and a deliberately mundane task were exploited to reveal significant psychological processes. Our researchers approached shoppers at malls and airports and asked them to take part in a marketing study. The researcher displayed five different black pens and invited the participant to choose one to keep. Half the time, the participant then used the chosen pen to answer a list of questions, including several about how much he or she liked the pen. This was the "choice" condition. The other half of the time, after the participant chose a pen, the researcher took it away, explaining: "I'm sorry, you can't have that pen. It's the last one of its kind that we have. Here, take this one." The participant was then given another pen to answer the list of questions. This was the "no choice" condition. True to our observation that middle-class Americans have primarily positive associations with choice, we found that among participants with at least a college degree, those who got to choose their pen liked it more than those who were given a pen they hadn't chosen. By contrast, participants who had less than a bachelor's degree liked pens chosen by someone else just as much as they liked the pens they chose for themselves.

In another alleged marketing study, we asked construction workers, firefighters and maintenance workers, who had no more than a high-school diploma, and students and employees with at least a bachelor's degree, to rank 10 recently released CD's from least liked to most liked and to choose one of their middle-ranked CD's as a gift for themselves.They then reranked the CD's after making their choice. We found that the mere act of choosing a CD caused the college-educated participants to like their gift CD more after choosing it than they had before. On the other hand, those without a college degree did not like their gift CD's more just because they had chosen them.

Another study that compared people in different occupations showed that those employed in middle-class jobs got upset when a friend or neighbor bought the same car as theirs because they felt that the uniqueness of their choice had been undercut. But those in working-class jobs liked it when others chose the same car because it affirmed that they had made a good choice.

In part because of the higher social status of middle-class Americans, the equation of freedom with choice is the one most loudly broadcast. Every corner of life is now rife with choices, as well as with talk of the control and self-expression that choosing imparts. But is this middle-class conception of freedom the "right" one? Empirical evidence suggests that we should be careful what we wish for. Americans are increasingly overwhelmed by all these choices. We feel less free now than when we had fewer choices, and we show it in our behavior.

For example, Sheena Iyengar and Wei Jiang at Columbia University found that giving people more 401(k) investment options makes them less likely to choose one at all, even though by not choosing they pass up employers' valuable matching funds. We see this result echoed in the panicked reactions of senior citizens to the drug-plan choices they now face. And when people manage to overcome paralysis and make choices — even sound ones — they are likely to be plagued with doubt, worried that their choice was not the best one. So the assumption that more choice means more freedom is false, at least as a general rule. American society has given the educated elites what they have asked for, and an increase in stress, anxiety and dissatisfaction has been a widespread result.

What conception of freedom should Americans pursue? While the upper and middle classes define freedom as choice, working-class Americans emphasize freedom from instability. These perspectives echo the distinction between freedom to and freedom from made by Franklin Roosevelt and by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin half a century ago. For all our red-versus-blue rancor, most Americans agree that ours is a free country. But what freedom is, and where it should be nurtured and where constrained, are hotly contested issues.

Similarly, many of the freedoms endorsed and advocated by U.S. foreign policy may not always resemble those desired by the people whom we hope to help. To govern well, both at home and abroad, Americans would be wise to listen to how freedom rings in different cultural contexts. Knowing that "we love our freedom," as President Bush said in his recent State of the Union address, should be the beginning of a national conversation, not the end of it.

Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and the author of "The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less." Hazel Rose Markus is a professor of psychology at Stanford University. Alana Conner Snibbe is the senior editor of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

For most of the 20th century, therapists in America agreed on a single truth. To cure patients, it was necessary to explore and talk through the origins of their problems. In other words, they had to come to terms with the past to move forward in the present.

Thousands of hours and countless dollars were spent in this pursuit. Therapists listened diligently as their patients recounted elaborate narratives of family dysfunction — the alcoholic father, the mother too absorbed in her own unhappiness to attend to her children's needs — certain that this process would ultimately produce relief.

But returning to the past has fallen out of fashion among mental health professionals over the last 15 years. Research has convinced many therapists that understanding the past is not required for healing.

Despite this profound change, the cliché of patients' exhaustively revisiting childhood horror stories remains.

"Average consumers who walk into psychotherapy expect to be discussing their childhood and blaming their parents for contemporary problems, but that's just not true any more," said John C. Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

Professor Norcross has surveyed American psychologists in an effort to figure out what is going on behind their closed doors.

Over the last 20 years, he has documented a radical shift. Psychotherapeutic techniques like psychoanalysis and psychodynamic therapy, which deal with emotional conflict and are based on the idea that the exploration of past trauma is critical to healing, have been totally eclipsed by cognitive behavioral approaches.

That relatively new school holds that reviewing the past is not only unnecessary to healing, but can be counterproductive.

Professor Norcross says he believes that cognitive behavioral therapy is the most widely practiced approach in America.

The method, known as C.B.T., was introduced in the late 1960's by Dr. Aaron T. Beck. The underlying theory says it is not important for patients to return to the origins of their problems, but instead to correct their current "cognitive distortions," errors in perception that lead them to the conclusion that life is hopeless or that everyday activity is unmanageable.

For example, when confronted with severely depressed patients, cognitive behavioral therapists will not ask about childhoods, but will work with them to identify the corrosive underlying assumptions that frame their psychic reality and lead them to feel bad about themselves. Then, systematically, patients learn to retrain their thinking.

The therapy dwells exclusively in the present. Unlike traditional psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, it does not typically require a long course of treatment, usually 10 to 15 sessions.

When cognitive therapy was introduced, it met significant resistance to the notion that people could be cured without understanding the sources of the problems. Many therapists said that without working through the underlying problems change would be superficial and that the basic problems would simply express themselves in other ways.

Cognitive advocates convinced colleagues by using a tool that had not been systematically used in mental health, randomized controlled clinical trials.

Although randomized controlled trials are the gold standard of scientific research, for most of the 20th century such research was not used to test the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic methods, in part because psychoanalysis, at the time the most popular form of talk therapy, was actively hostile to empirical validation. When research was conducted, it was generally as surveys rather than as randomized studies.

Cognitive behavioral researchers carried out hundreds of studies, and that research eventually convinced the two most important mental health gatekeepers — universities and insurance companies. Now the transformation is more or less complete.

"There's been a total changing of the guard in psychology and psychiatry departments," said Dr. Drew Westen, a psychodynamically oriented therapist who teaches at Emory University. "Virtually no psychodynamic faculty are ever hired anymore. I can name maybe two in the last 10 years."

Insurance companies likewise often prefer consumers to select cognitive behavioral therapists, rather than psychodynamically oriented practitioners. In the companies' view, scientific studies have shown that cognitive therapy can produce results in less than half the time of traditional therapies.

But is it really the case that understanding the past is not necessary to healing? Could thousands of people have saved time and money by skipping over conversations about parents and cutting straight to retraining their thoughts and behaviors?

Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard, said reviewing the past could be therapeutically important because it could help patients construct narratives of cause and effect.

He pointed to cases of panic disorder. Many people have panic attacks, but a small percentage develop full-blown panic disorder, he said. Those who do not can usually find a rational explanation for their disturbing experience.

"They say, 'That's because I am about to take a midterm exam or I had too much coffee this morning,' explanations that de-catastrophize the bodily symptoms," Professor McNally said.

The rationalizations are effective, he said, even when the explanation is not correct. Merely asserting a logical sequence of cause and effect lets people feel that they have some control, that they are not victims of unexplained forces.

In the same way, people who experience depression can benefit from an explanation for their feelings, an interpretation that allows them to feel that they are able, based on their understanding of the cause, to predict and control their emotions. This is a function of therapies that focus on the past, Professor McNally said.

"Detailed narratives about the past can be assumed under a larger rubric of trying to find meaning or trying to impose order, and thereby controlling one's world and experience," he said. "People say, 'At least I know why I'm unhappy in life.' "

New research suggests that psychodynamic therapy exploring the past can be as effective as cognitive work. In the last three years, psychodynamic therapists have started to subject their approach to same vigorous research as that used for cognitive therapy. The studies show similarly good results.

The basic assertion that it is not absolutely necessary to review the past is now generally accepted. Even Professor Norcross, who says he regularly guides patients to the past when it is warranted, acknowledges that the data are not entirely solid.

"At the moment," he said, "there is no evidence that understanding the origins of your problems is necessary for effective psychotherapy. And there is some evidence that a preoccupation with the past can actually interfere with making changes in the present.

"Obsessive rumination about past events can trap patients in a self-defeating cycle from which they cannot extricate themselves. It can actually retard healing."

London

PSYCHOTHERAPY is having yet another identity crisis. It has manifested itself in two recent trends in the profession in America: the first involves trying to make therapy into more of a "hard science" by putting a new emphasis on measurable factors; the other is a growing belief among therapists that the standard practice of using talk therapy to discover traumas in a patient's past is not only unnecessary but can be injurious.

That psychotherapists of various orientations find themselves under pressure to prove to themselves and to society that they are doing a hard-core science — which was a leading theme of the landmark Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference in California in December — is not really surprising. Given the prestige and trust the modern world gives to scientific standards, psychotherapists, who always have to measure themselves against the medical profession, are going to want to demonstrate that they, too, deal in the predictable; that they, too, can provide evidence for the value of what they do.

And, obviously, if psychotherapy is going to attain scientific credibility, it won't do to involve such wishy-washy practices as "going back to childhood" or "reconstructing the past" — terms that when used with appropriate scorn can sound as though a person's past was akin to the past lives New Agers like to talk about.

Since at least the middle of the 19th century, Western societies have been divided between religious truth and scientific truth, but none of the new psychotherapies are trying to prove they are genuine religions. Nor is there much talk, outside of university literature departments, of psychotherapy trying to inhabit the middle ground of arts, in which truth and usefulness have traditionally been allowed a certain latitude (nobody measures Shakespeare or tries to prove his value).

It is, so to speak, symptomatic that psychotherapists are so keen to legitimize themselves as scientists: they want to fit in rather than create the taste by which they might be judged. One of the good things psychotherapy can do, like the arts, is show us the limits of what science can do for our welfare. The scientific method alone is never going to be enough, especially when we are working out how to live and who we can be.

In the so-called arts it has always been acknowledged that many of the things we value most — the gods and God, love and sexuality, mourning and amusement, character and inspiration, the past and the future — are neither measurable or predictable. Indeed, this may be one of the reasons they are so abidingly important to us. The things we value most, just like the things we most fear, tend to be those we have least control over.

This is not a reason to stop trying to control things — we should, for example, be doing everything we can to control pain — but it is a reason to work out in which areas of our lives control is both possible and beneficial. Trying to predict the unpredictable, like trying to will what cannot be willed, drives people crazy.

Just as we cannot know beforehand the effect on us of reading a book or of listening to music, every psychotherapy treatment, indeed every session, is unpredictable. Indeed, if it is not, it is a form of bullying, it is indoctrination. It is not news that most symptoms of so-called mental illness are efforts to control the environment, just like the science that claims to study them.

It would clearly be naïve for psychotherapists to turn a blind eye to science, or to be "against" scientific methodology. But the attempt to present psychotherapy as a hard science is merely an attempt to make it a convincing competitor in the marketplace. It is a sign, in other words, of a misguided wish to make psychotherapy both respectable and servile to the very consumerism it is supposed to help people deal with. (Psychotherapy turns up historically at the point at which traditional societies begin to break down and consumer capitalism begins to take hold.)

If psychotherapy has anything to offer — and this should always be in question — it should be something aside from the dominant trends in the culture. And this means now that its practitioners should not be committed either to making money or to trivializing the past or to finding a science of the soul.

If you have an eye test, if you buy a car, there are certain things you are entitled to expect. Your money buys you some minimal guarantees, some reliable results. The honest psychotherapist can provide no comparable assurances. She can promise only an informed willingness to listen, and the possibility of helpful comment.

By inviting the patient to talk, at length — and especially to talk about what really troubles him — something is opened up, but neither patient nor therapist can know beforehand what will be said by either of them, nor can they know the consequences of what they will say. Just creating a situation that has the potential to evoke previously repressed memories and thoughts and feelings and desires is an opportunity of immeasurable consequence, both good and bad. No amount of training and research, of statistics-gathering and empathy, can offset that unique uncertainty of the encounter.

As a treatment, psychotherapy is a risk, just as what actually happens in anyone's childhood is always going to be obscure and indefinite, but no less significant for being so. Psychotherapists are people whose experience tells them that certain risks are often worth taking, but more than this they cannot rightly say. There are always going to be casualties of therapy.

Psychotherapy makes use of a traditional wisdom holding that the past matters and that, surprisingly, talking can make people feel better — even if at first, for good reasons, they resist it. There is an appetite to talk and to be listened to, and an appetite to make time for doing those things.

Religion has historically been the language for people to talk about the things that mattered most to them, aided and abetted by the arts. Science has become the language that has helped people to know what they wanted to know, and get what they wanted to get. Psychotherapy has to occupy the difficult middle ground between them, but without taking sides. Since it is narrow-mindedness that we most often suffer from, we need our therapists to resist the allure of the fashionable certainties.

Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and the author, most recently, of "Going Sane: Maps of Happiness."

One student skipped class and then sent the professor an e-mail message asking for copies of her teaching notes. Another did not like her grade, and wrote a petulant message to the professor. Another explained that she was late for a Monday class because she was recovering from drinking too much at a wild weekend party.

Jennifer Schultens, an associate professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, received this e-mail message last September from a student in her calculus course: "Should I buy a binder or a subject notebook? Since I'm a freshman, I'm not sure how to shop for school supplies. Would you let me know your recommendations? Thank you!"

At colleges and universities nationwide, e-mail has made professors much more approachable. But many say it has made them too accessible, erasing boundaries that traditionally kept students at a healthy distance.

These days, they say, students seem to view them as available around the clock, sending a steady stream of e-mail messages — from 10 a week to 10 after every class — that are too informal or downright inappropriate.

"The tone that they would take in e-mail was pretty astounding," said Michael J. Kessler, an assistant dean and a lecturer in theology at Georgetown University. " 'I need to know this and you need to tell me right now,' with a familiarity that can sometimes border on imperative."

He added: "It's a real fine balance to accommodate what they need and at the same time maintain a level of legitimacy as an instructor and someone who is institutionally authorized to make demands on them, and not the other way round."

While once professors may have expected deference, their expertise seems to have become just another service that students, as consumers, are buying. So students may have no fear of giving offense, imposing on the professor's time or even of asking a question that may reflect badly on their own judgment.

For junior faculty members, the barrage of e-mail has brought new tension into their work lives, some say, as they struggle with how to respond. Their tenure prospects, they realize, may rest in part on student evaluations of their accessibility.

The stakes are different for professors today than they were even a decade ago, said Patricia Ewick, chairwoman of the sociology department at Clark University in Massachusetts, explaining that "students are constantly asked to fill out evaluations of individual faculty." Students also frequently post their own evaluations on Web sites like ratemyprofessors.com and describe their impressions of their professors on blogs.

Last fall, undergraduate students at Syracuse University set up a group in Facebook.com, an online network for students, and dedicated it to maligning one particular instructor. The students were reprimanded.

Professor Ewick said 10 students in one class e-mailed her drafts of their papers days before they were due, seeking comments. "It's all different levels of presumption," she said. "One is that I'll be able to drop everything and read 250 pages two days before I'm going to get 50 of these."

Kathleen E. Jenkins, a sociology professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, said she had even received e-mail requests from students who missed class and wanted copies of her teaching notes.

Alexandra Lahav, an associate professor of law at the University of Connecticut, said she felt pressured by the e-mail messages. "I feel sort of responsible, as if I ought to be on call all the time," she said.

Many professors said they were often uncertain how to react. Professor Schultens, who was asked about buying the notebook, said she debated whether to tell the student that this was not a query that should be directed to her, but worried that "such a message could be pretty scary."

"I decided not to respond at all," she said.

Christopher J. Dede, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education who has studied technology in education, said these e-mail messages showed how students no longer deferred to their professors, perhaps because they realized that professors' expertise could rapidly become outdated.

"The deference was probably driven more by the notion that professors were infallible sources of deep knowledge," Professor Dede said, and that notion has weakened.

Meanwhile, students seem unaware that what they write in e-mail could adversely affect them, Professor Lahav said. She recalled an e-mail message from a student saying that he planned to miss class so he could play with his son. Professor Lahav did not respond.

"It's graduate school, he's an adult human being, he's obviously a parent, and it's not my place to tell him how to run his life," she said.

But such e-mail messages can have consequences, she added. "Students don't understand that what they say in e-mail can make them seem very unprofessional, and could result in a bad recommendation."

Still, every professor interviewed emphasized that instant feedback could be invaluable. A question about a lecture or discussion "is for me an indication of a blind spot, that the student didn't get it," said Austin D. Sarat, a professor of political science at Amherst College.

College students say that e-mail makes it easier to ask questions and helps them to learn. "If the only way I could communicate with my professors was by going to their office or calling them, there would be some sort of ranking or prioritization taking place," said Cory Merrill, 19, a sophomore at Amherst. "Is this question worth going over to the office?"

But student e-mail can go too far, said Robert B. Ahdieh, an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta. He paraphrased some of the comments he had received: "I think you're covering the material too fast, or I don't think we're using the reading as much as we could in class, or I think it would be helpful if you would summarize what we've covered at the end of class in case we missed anything."

Students also use e-mail to criticize one another, Professor Ahdieh said. He paraphrased this comment: "You're spending too much time with my moron classmates and you ought to be focusing on those of us who are getting the material."

Michael Greenstone, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he once received an e-mail message late one evening from a student who had recently come to the realization that he was gay and was struggling to cope.

Professor Greenstone said he eventually helped the student get an appointment with a counselor. "I don't think we would have had the opportunity to discuss his realization and accompanying feelings without e-mail as an icebreaker," he said.

A few professors said they had rules for e-mail and told their students how quickly they would respond, how messages should be drafted and what types of messages they would answer.

Meg Worley, an assistant professor of English at Pomona College in California, said she told students that they must say thank you after receiving a professor's response to an e-mail message.

"One of the rules that I teach my students is, the less powerful person always has to write back," Professor Worley said.

MORGAN ADAMS, a recent college graduate, decided that her picture on her home page at MySpace.com had lingered a little too long, a full month. To snap a new one she called on the only photographer she thought she could trust: herself.

In her bedroom in Lubbock, Tex., Ms. Adams, 21, tried out a variety of poses — coy, friendly, sultry, goofy — in the kind of performance young people have engaged in privately for generations before a mirror. But Ms. Adams's mirror was a Web cam, and her journey of self-expression, documented in five digital self-portraits, was soon visible to the 56 million registered users of MySpace.

"Everyone's a little narcissistic," Ms. Adams said. "Being able to take pictures of yourself in privacy allows you to do it without inhibitions. Each person takes better pictures of themselves than anyone else can because they know their own bodies, they know their own minds."

The era of cheap, lightweight digital cameras — in cellphones, in computers, in hip pockets, even on key chains — has meant that people who did not consider themselves photography buffs as recently as five years ago are filling ever-larger hard drives with thousands of images from their lives.

And one particular kind of image has especially soared in popularity, particularly among the young: the self-portrait, which has become a kind of folk art for the digital age.

Framing themselves at arm's length, teenagers snap their own pictures and pass the cameras to friends at school or e-mail the images or upload them to the Internet. For a generation raised on a mantra of self-esteem, striking a heroic, sultry or brooding pose and sharing it with the world comes naturally.

"It's a huge phenomenon," said Matt Polazzo, the coordinator of student affairs at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, referring to the compulsive habit of teenagers to snap everything in their lives, especially self-portraits. "Just yesterday I had a girl sitting on the couch in my office," he said. "She took out her cellphone and said, 'Here, I'm going to show you a picture of my best friend,' snapped a picture of herself and showed it to me, all in one fluid motion."

Art historians say that the popularity of the self-portrait is unprecedented in the century-long history of the snapshot. "I think it is probably a new genre of photography," said Guy Stricherz, the author of "Americans in Kodachrome, 1945-65" (Twin Palms, 2002), which includes snapshots culled from 500 American families. Mr. Stricherz said he reviewed more than 100,000 pictures over 17 years in compiling the book but found fewer than 100 self-portraits. These days you can find as many by clicking through a few home pages on MySpace, Friendster or similar social networking sites.

Jeff Gluck, a public relations executive, who lives in Woodcliff Lake, N.J., and his wife, Elizabeth, often find one of their two oldest daughters, ages 10 and 13, taking pictures of themselves with cellphone cameras. They do it in the back seat of the car or on the sofa watching television. When not mugging for their own cameras, the girls experiment with the family camera. "Many times with our regular digital camera I'll go to download photos at the computer, and I'll find six pictures of one of the kids that they obviously took themselves," Mr. Gluck said.

To a certain extent new technology is driving the new self-portraiture. Cellphone cameras and other digital cameras are sold with wide-angle lenses that allow a picture taken at arm's length to remain in focus. Computers are essentially $1,000 darkrooms that permit sophisticated manipulation of images.

But technology alone can't explain the trend. Even in previous generations when cameras were cheap, they were generally reserved for special occasions. "In 1960 a person just wouldn't take a Kodak Brownie picture of themselves," Mr. Stricherz said. "It would have been considered too self-aggrandizing."

Psychologists and others who study teenagers say the digital self-portraiture is an extension of behavior typical of the young, like trying on different identities, which earlier generations might have expressed through clothing and hairstyles. "Most of what I've been seeing is taking place in the bedroom," said Kathryn C. Montgomery, a professor of communication at American University, referring to teenage self-portraits. Dr. Montgomery studies the relation of teenagers to the digital media. "It's a locus of teen life where they are forming their identities, and now it's also a private studio where they can develop who they are.

"What better tool could they have than one that allows them to take pictures of themselves and manipulate them like never before?"

To Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a developmental psychologist, digital self-portraiture is a high-tech way of expressing an impulse among teenagers and young adults that psychologists call "the imaginary audience."

"This is the idea that adolescents think people are more interested in them than they actually are, that people are always looking at them and taking note of what they are doing, even if it is just walking across the school cafeteria," said Dr. Arnett, who is a Fulbright scholar at the University of Copenhagen.

To Dr. Arnett, the role-playing evident in many self-portraits found online is "a form of pretend: the adolescent version of children dressing up." Others speculate that today's young people are different from earlier generations because they are more comfortable with public self-exposure.

"When I was a kid I didn't want my picture taken," said Jim Taylor, a trend consultant at the Harrison Group in Waterbury, Conn. "But these kids are fabulous self-marketers."

He added: "They see celebrities expressing their self-worth and want to join the party. This is a free forum to do so."

"Self-branding is a big deal for kids, and self-produced entertainment is a big deal," Mr. Taylor said. In their pictures, ordinary young women metamorphose into glamour queens or pinup girls, thanks to a few well-rehearsed come-hither poses and mood lighting reminiscent of an old Hollywood studio portrait. Average boys turn themselves into brooding antiheroes by gazing intently into their camera lens in a darkened room, face half buried in shadow.

"There's always a theatrical quality to their shots," Mr. Taylor said. "Kids love melancholy and sadness. There is lots of obvious symbolism about whether they see themselves as an actress, a model, a Christ figure or a Hamlet."

Young people have become so candid in sharing their intimate images online that some parents and lawmakers are concerned. This month the attorney general of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, promised an investigation into MySpace, spurred by complaints of parents that minors could have access to sexual images on the site or could post suggestive pictures that could make them vulnerable to sexual predators. Members have included pictures of themselves in scanty attire or suggestive poses. For many, MySpace functions as a dating site.

But the operators of the Web site, which is owned by the News Corporation, the media conglomerate controlled by Rupert Murdoch, insist that a third of the work force is devoted to policing the site for inappropriate material. Offending members can be banned from the network, and MySpace says it will contact law enforcement officials in serious cases.

Not everyone who compulsively snaps self-portraits sees it as a journey of self-discovery. Tim Zebal, 23, an audio engineer in San Francisco, posted on MySpace an arresting shot of himself taken at a dramatic angle, wearing a billowing shirt and framed in a baroque gold mirror. "I had a new camera phone and snapped a picture in the mirror of a bar restroom," Mr. Zebal explained in an e-mail message. "I thought it looked cool. That's it."

Amber Davidson, 19, a freshman at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minn., refreshes her self-portrait on MySpace every couple of weeks and puts a lot of thought into it.

"There's been a big increase in creativity over the past couple of years," she said, referring to the self-portraits on the site. "A lot of people get inspired by what they see in other people's pictures."

HER MySpace home page contains five self-portraits created by pointing the camera toward herself, arm outstretched. She composed each shot so that the arm holding the camera is invisible. In one, Ms. Davidson wears a black-and-white spaghetti-strap dress and peers up winsomely at a camera over her head. It took about 15 tries to get it right, she said. "I don't want people to think I'm sitting there taking all these pictures of myself, even though I kind of am."

Since endless experimentation with digital photography costs little or nothing (you just delete the duds), many young camera owners like Ms. Davidson have practiced their art to the point where they have stumbled across sophisticated portraiture techniques of lighting, composition and camera angle that were once the province of professionals.

Take that shot with the camera held high above the head, so common on MySpace that some members refer to it as "the helicopter shot." It is a fairly sophisticated technique.

"Shooting from higher up stretches the neck muscles, and there is no double chin," said Ken White, the chairman of the fine-art photography department at the Rochester Institute of Technology, adding that it also accentuates the jaw line. "It is a glamorizing view."

In the era of the blog, when many deem the most trivial and personal information fit for public consumption, the self-reference of the new portraiture feels natural. "In a funny way I don't see this as photography anymore," said Fred Ritchin, an associate professor in the photography and imaging department at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. "It's communication. It's all an extension of cellphones, texting and e-mailing."

Many users consider digital self-portraits whimsical and ultimately disposable.

"People want pictures of a new hairstyle, outfit or makeup, and they want to show it to their friends," Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message. But, he added, "I suppose all folk art comes from necessity of some sort."

Before Deborah Tannen made her mark in her field in the 1980's, academic linguists primarily studied the sound, syntax and history of language. Dr. Tannen saw a bigger picture.

In the 1980's, she encouraged linguists to focus on everyday conversations — the way elements like interruption, intonation, indirectness and storytelling work together and the effects they have on people's relationships.

Her early work in broadening the scope of linguistics came in the thesis for her doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Titled "Conversational Style: Analyzing Talk Among Friends," the thesis (and later a book) was an extended analysis of taped discussion at a 1978 Thanksgiving dinner lasting 2 hours 40 minutes.

By the early 1990's, Dr. Tannen was taking her ideas to a wider audience. Her overwhelmingly successful book "You Just Don't Understand" focused on communication (or lack of it) between men and women. It was on best-seller lists from 1990 through 1994.

Now, Dr. Tannen, a professor at Georgetown University, is back on the list with her just-released "You're Wearing That? Understanding Mothers and Daughters in Conversation."

It appeared at No. 9 on the New York Times best-seller list on Sunday, within days of its publication.

The book is dedicated to her mother, Dorothy, who died in 2004, with whom Dr. Tannen had an admittedly stormy relationship.

"Writing it helped me see things more from her perspective," Dr. Tannen, 60, said in an interview this month in New York.

Q. Many of the women you've interviewed for your new book complain of mothers who criticize their appearance. Are they right to be annoyed?

A. "Right" and "wrong" aren't words a linguist uses. My job is to analyze conversations and discover why communications fail. The biggest complaint I hear from daughters is: "My mother's always criticizing me." And the mother counters, "I can't open my mouth; my daughter takes everything as criticism."

But sometimes caring and criticism are found in the same words. When mothers talk about their daughters' appearance, they are often doing it because they feel obligated to tell their daughter something that no one else will.

The mother feels she's caring. The daughter feels criticized. They are both right.

What I try to do is point out each side to each other. So, the mother needs to acknowledge the criticism part, and the daughter needs to acknowledge the caring part. It's tough because each sees only one.

Q. Is there a unifying theme to your 20 academic and popular books?

A. There's certainly a thread. My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.

There are many situations where problems arise between people because conversational styles vary with ethnic, regional, age, class and gender differences.

What can seem offensive to one group isn't to another. I've long believed that if you understand how conversational styles work, you can make adjustments in conversations to get what you want in your relationships.

Q. Can you give an example of communication problems based on what you've seen of mother-daughter conversations?

A. During an interview, a journalist told me she had called her grown daughter the night before and began, "I miss you." Her daughter replied: "Why do you miss me? I just talked to you last week!" The daughter felt criticized for not calling more often.

After our interview, the mother tried something she had never done before. She sent her daughter an e-mail in which she praised and reassured her.

The next day her daughter phoned to continue the conversation. So you see, by understanding how language works within relationships, you can change patterns you're not happy with.

Q. Why are mother-daughter conversations laden with so many pitfalls?

A. It's what one mother I interviewed said: "My conversations with my daughter are the best and the worst."

In the mother-daughter relationship, there's a lot of talk. For women, conversation is the glue that holds relationships together. Mothers and daughters talk to each other far more than mothers and sons, or fathers and daughters. And their talk is different.

There's a great deal about personal matters, the small details of the day and problems in their lives. There's a daughter I interviewed who said, "Who else but my mother cares about every little thing in my life?" Another told me, "I call my mother every day and tell her what I ate for lunch."

One of the great strengths of the mother-daughter relationship is this intimacy. But daughters want their mothers' approval so much that even the slightest hint a mother thinks she should have acted differently about something can set a daughter off.

So when mothers and daughters spend a lot time talking about personal matters, it gives them countless opportunities to say the wrong things to each other.

Q. What kind of communication did you have with your mother?

A. Well, she died at 93. We had a lot of time for our relationship to evolve. When I was young, it was open warfare. We were very different. She was born in Russia, never graduated high school. I was intellectual, even as an adolescent, and so our communications frequently led to frustration. She'd get so angry at me.

The basic thing my mother always wanted is that I should be married. But I married my first husband at 23. We divorced when I was 29. After that, she was always trying to get me to go to Club Med to find a husband. She saw such advice as helpful; I felt hounded.

When I was 40, I met my second husband and my relationship with my mother quickly improved. The older she got, the more I realized how much mothers and daughters are like lovers. In my mother's old age, I brought her gifts and wrote her little notes telling her how much I loved her. And she just basked in that.

I kept it up because it was easy to do and because it was such a pleasure to get this positive reaction after all our conflicts.

Q. Your immigrant mother grew up in a different universe. Are some mother-daughter conflicts rooted in the fact that modern women often live different lives from their mothers?

A. The rapid pace of change in women's lives definitely ratchets up differences. But interestingly, a lot of baby boomer women I interviewed said they had better relations with their daughters than with their mothers.

Their daughters were likely to describe them as their best friends.

To see this relationship as both mother-daughter and a friendship is new — and perhaps particularly American.

There's a study of 12-year-old Austrian and American girls. None of the Austrians described their mothers as "friends," while all of the Americans did.

Q. How did you become a linguist?

A. I'd always loved words and talk. After my first marriage ended, I wanted to reclaim my intellectual life. I'd been teaching remedial writing at Lehman College in New York. With my newfound freedom, I registered for a summer institute in linguistics and fell in love with the discipline.

That summer, I'd found a calling. Linguistics combined my lifelong fascination with talk and my interest in people. Thirty-two years later, I can't imagine any other life.

Seattle

FIRST, a little of that full disclosure stuff: I have not actually seen "Brokeback Mountain" or "End of the Spear," both of which I'm going to discuss here.

But since when did not seeing a film prevent anyone from sharing his or her strong opinions about it? Before the posters for "Brokeback Mountain" were even printed, everyone from the blogger Mickey Kaus to the Concerned Women for America to gay men all over the country had already said a lot about the film. (Their opinions were, respectively, con, con and pro.)

So, let's get to it: Remember when straight actors who played gay were the ones taking a professional risk? Those days are over. Shortly after Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, both straight, received Oscar nominations for playing gay cowboys in "Brokeback Mountain," conservative Christians were upset when they learned that a gay actor, Chad Allen, was playing a straight missionary in "End of the Spear."

"End of the Spear" tells what happened after five American missionaries were murdered in 1956 by a tribe in Ecuador. Instead of seeking retribution, the missionaries' families reached out to the tribe, forgave the killers and eventually converted them to Christianity. An evangelical film company, Every Tribe Entertainment, brought the story to the screen. In a glowing review, Marcus Yoars, a film critic for Focus on the Family, noted that the "martyrdom" of the slain missionaries has "inspired thousands if not millions of Christians." But after conservatives took a closer look at the cast list, the protests began. Many felt Chad Allen's presence in the film negated any positive message.

The pastors claim they're worried about what will happen when their children rush home from the movies, Google Chad Allen's name, and discover that he's a "gay activist." ("Gay activist" is a term evangelicals apply to any homosexual who isn't a gay doormat.) They needn't be too concerned. Straight boys who have unsupervised access to the Internet aren't Googling the names of middle-aged male actors gay or straight — not when Paris Hilton's sex tapes are still out there.

Frankly, I can't help but be perplexed by the criticisms of Mr. Allen from the Christian right. After all, isn't playing straight what evangelicals have been urging gay men to do?

That's precisely what Jack and Ennis attempt to do in "Brokeback Mountain" — at least, according to people I know who have actually seen the film. These gay cowboys try, as best they can, to quit one another. They marry women, start families. But their wives are crushed when they realize their husbands don't, and can't, ever really love them. "Brokeback Mountain" makes clear that it would have been better for all concerned if Jack and Ennis had lived in a world where they could simply be together.

That world didn't exist when Jack and Ennis were pitching tents together, but it does now — even in the American West. Today, the tiny and stable percentage of men who are gay are free to live openly, and those who want to settle down and start families can do so without having to deceive some poor, unsuspecting woman.

Straight audiences are watching and loving "Brokeback Mountain" — that's troubling to evangelical Christians who have invested a decade and millions of dollars promoting the notion that gay men can be converted to heterosexuality, or become "ex-gay." It is, they insist, an ex-gay movement, although I've never met a gay man who was moved to join it.

This "movement" demands more from gay men than simply playing straight. Once a man can really pass as ex-gay — once he's got some Dockers, an expired gym membership and a bad haircut — he's supposed to become, in effect, an ex-gay missionary, reaching out to the hostile gay tribes in such inhospitable places as Chelsea and West Hollywood.

What should really trouble evangelicals, however, is this: even if every gay man became ex-gay tomorrow, there still wouldn't be an ex-lesbian tomboy out there for every ex-gay cowboy. Instead, millions of straight women would wake up one morning to discover that they had married a Jack or an Ennis. Restaurant hostesses and receptionists at hair salons would be especially vulnerable.

Sometimes I wonder if evangelicals really believe that gay men can go straight. If they don't think Chad Allen can play straight convincingly for 108 minutes, do they honestly imagine that gay men who aren't actors can play straight for a lifetime? And if anyone reading this believes that gay men can actually become ex-gay men, I have just one question for you: Would you want your daughter to marry one?

Evangelical Christians seem sincere in their desire to help build healthy, lasting marriages. Well, if that's their goal, encouraging gay men to enter into straight marriages is a peculiar strategy. Every straight marriage that includes a gay husband is one Web-browser-history check away from an ugly divorce.

If anything, supporters of traditional marriage should want gay men out of the heterosexual marriage market entirely. And the best way to do that is to see that we're safely married off — to each other, not to your daughters. Let gay actors like Chad Allen only play it straight in the movies.

Dan Savage is the editor of The Stranger, a Seattle newsweekly.

"PEOPLE are experience rich and theory poor," the writer Malcolm Gladwell said recently. "People who are busy doing things — as opposed to people who are busy sitting around, like me, reading and having coffee in coffee shops — don't have opportunities to kind of collect and organize their experiences and make sense of them." [MP3 audio clip.]

Slight, shoeless and sporting the large head of curly hair that's become his trademark, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, was sitting at the kitchen table of his apartment in a West Village town house. In tones at once laid-back and precise, he was discussing his best-selling books: "The Tipping Point" argues that small actions can spark "social epidemics" — a term he gives a positive connotation; and "Blink a paean to intuitive thinking, makes a case for "thin-slicing," paring down our information intake so we can tune out the static and make fast, sound decisions. Gladwell said his goal in those two books was simple: In a culture with too much information and not enough time, he offers "organizing structures" for people's lives.

Readers seem grateful. "Blink" has remained on the best-seller list since it first came out in January 2005, with 1.3 million copies in print in North America. It has also been translated into more than 25 languages. That compares with 1.7 million copies of "The Tipping Point," which was originally published in 2000 but returned to the paperback best-seller list when "Blink" first appeared.

Their success has given Gladwell an active, and extremely lucrative, second career as a public speaker. Much in demand, he is paid in the neighborhood of $40,000 per lecture. He's also on the recommended reading list at many companies and business schools, and has spoken at West Point and the National Institutes of Health, among many other institutions. Last year, Time magazine named him one of its "100 most influential people." Fast Company magazine called Gladwell "a rock star, a spiritual leader, a stud." Stephen Gaghan, the screenwriter of multiple-thread narrative movies like "Traffic" and "Syriana," is developing a movie based on "Blink." That book is also the subject of a clever sendup, "Blank: The Power of Not Actually Thinking at All," by the pseudonymous Noah Tall, which will be out this month.

Gladwell has become an all-out international phenomenon — and has helped create a highly contagious hybrid genre of nonfiction, one that takes a nonthreatening and counterintuitive look at pop culture and the mysteries of the everyday. In the past year, several other books in the Gladwell vein have appeared. They include the best-selling "Freakonomics," a breezy collection of case studies by Steven Levitt, an economist at the University of Chicago, and the journalist Stephen Dubner (the pair write an occasional "Freakonomics" column for The Times Magazine); "The Wisdom of Crowds," a business book for thinking people in which the New Yorker writer James Surowiecki argues that groups are collectively smarter and more innovative than individuals; and "Everything Bad Is Good for You," Steven Johnson's case that pop culture is becoming increasingly sophisticated.

But Gladwell has a far wider audience than these other authors. With a writerly verve and strong narrative powers, he leavens serious social science research with zany characters and pithy, easily digestible anecdotes. Gladwell selects his anecdotes from a wide range of sources — the military, business, food, music, romance — and diverse locales, a tactic that broadens his books' appeal.

In "The Tipping Point," he discusses everything from the drop in crime in New York in the early 1990's to the retro return of Hush Puppies, the rise of the Aeron chair in the dot-com era, and how "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" became a best seller through its popularity in small reading groups. His point is that social epidemics can spread with the right context and the pull of certain influential people: "connectors," in touch with different groups of people; "mavens," experts in one area; and "salesmen," who can win customers over.

Similarly, in "Blink," he introduces a range of case studies and experts, including art historians who can tell within seconds that a statue is a fake and a psychologist who can predict whether a couple will get divorced after observing them for only a few minutes. His message is that we should trust first impressions — except when we shouldn't. Gladwell, who is multiracial, said he became interested in first impressions when he grew his hair into an Afro and then was repeatedly pulled over for speeding, and stopped once by the police looking for a rapist with similar hair. In an era of increased specialization and niche thinking, Gladwell himself is the ultimate "connector," bridging disparate universes: the New York literary world and corporate America; liberal and conservative; men and women; high and low.

Without slackening his reporting or losing his New Yorker-writer street cred, Gladwell has risen to the top of the A-list in the vast subculture of gurus brought in to penetrate the isolation chamber of the boardroom, to speak truth to power and tell executives what it's really like in the outside world. Or at least in the West Village.

He's long cultivated the persona of the outsider. Gladwell, 42 though he looks younger, was born in England and grew up in rural Canada. His English father taught mathematics at the University of Waterloo, and his Jamaican mother is a psychotherapist. Gladwell studied history at the University of Toronto and wanted to go into advertising, but said he couldn't find a job and became a journalist instead. After a stint at The American Spectator, a conservative political magazine, he joined The Washington Post in 1987. He covered business and science, and spent three years as New York bureau chief before Tina Brown, then editor of The New Yorker, hired him in 1996.

Gladwell, a self-described "right-winger" as a kid — he had a poster of Ronald Reagan on his wall during college — notes that his politics have changed over the years. When he was growing up, Canada was "essentially a socialist country" so "being a conservative was the kind of fun, radical thing to do," he said. "You couldn't outflank the orthodoxy on the left the way that people traditionally did when they wanted to be rebels. There was only room on the right." Now, he plays the flip side: "I hate to be this reductive, but an awful lot of my ideology, it's just Canadian. Canadians like small, modest things, right? We don't believe in boasting. We think the world is basically a good place. We're pretty optimistic. We think we ought to take care of each other," he said. "And it so happens that to be a Canadian in America is to seem quite radical." [MP3 audio clip.]

On his Web site, Gladwell offers an apologia pro vita sua: "If I could vote (and I can't because I'm Canadian) I would vote Democrat. I am pro-choice and in favor of gay marriage. I believe in God. I think the war in Iraq is a terrible mistake. I am a big believer in free trade. I think, on balance, taxes in America — particularly for rich people — ought to be higher, not lower. I think smoking is a terrible problem and that cigarette manufacturers ought to be subjected to every possible social and political sanction. But I think that filing product liability lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers is absurd. I am opposed to the death penalty. I hate S.U.V.'s. I think many C.E.O.'s are overpaid. I think there is too much sex and violence on television."

While his views may be conventionally liberal, Gladwell takes an unconventional tack in reporting. Omnivorous in his interests and brilliantly attuned to every level of today's conversation, Gladwell is one of the most inventive journalists now writing. In articles on everything from personality tests to ketchup, he doesn't offer a sweeping theory, but rather a counterintuitive way of looking at things.

When Time magazine and other media outlets declared an attention-deficit hyperactivity epidemic in America, Gladwell argued that people were no more distracted than they'd ever been, but that Ritalin had replaced nicotine as a socially acceptable focusing stimulant. While others were vilifying the pharmaceutical companies over the cost of prescription drugs, Gladwell's New Yorker article on the topic mapped out a broader codependency. "It is only by the most spectacular feat of cynicism that our political system's moral negligence has become the fault of the pharmaceutical industry," he wrote. And in an article on intelligence reform published when the country was in a furor over the failings leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, Gladwell proposed that free-market-style competition between the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. might actually be good for intelligence gathering. Lately he's been investigating racial profiling. At first, "I had a reasonably benign attitude toward it. I felt that under certain circumstances it was justifiable — like looking for terrorists. But now I think that's wrong," he said. "I think it's never justifiable. And not on ethical grounds but on pragmatic grounds. I just don't think it works."

For all their resonance and success, Gladwell's books have also been criticized, most often for demonstrating, or encouraging, lazy thinking. In a scathing review in The New Republic, the judge and author Richard Posner found "Blink" full of banalities and contradictions, "written like a book intended for people who do not read books." Some social scientists have also been unimpressed. "I think what he leaves people with is not that scientists are doing some interesting work, but that Malcolm Gladwell has a couple of good ideas," said Thomas Schelling, who shared last year's Nobel in economic science and did pioneering research on the "tipping point," a formulation that originally referred to the point at which white families would leave a neighborhood after black families began moving in.

Translating academic work for a popular audience is "very explicitly" his mission, Gladwell said, though it might not be what readers take away from his books. He said he owed "enormous debts" to academia. [MP3 audio clip.] In an endnote in "The Tipping Point," Gladwell cited Schelling's "Micromotives and Macrobehavior" (1978). In "Blink," he cited "Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious" (2002), a lucid, readable book by the noted psychologist Timothy Wilson, which he called "a real inspiration" and one of his favorite books.

Gladwell has had the most pronounced impact in corporate culture. His "mavens" and "connectors" have become a working vocabulary for marketers desperate to reach consumers though calculated word-of-mouth campaigns. In 2004, he helped Simmons Market Research create consumer surveys based on "The Tipping Point." (He resigned after questions were raised about a conflict of interest with his New Yorker journalism.)

Gladwell, who rose to prominence during the dot-com boom, when the economy became the big story, rhapsodizes about things that intellectuals often dismiss but most people living on earth have to contend with every day. Advertising, for instance. In many ways, his work is reminiscent of that of Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and father of modern public relations, whose 1928 book, "Propaganda," made a positive case for manipulating public opinion through advertising as the operative arm of psychology. "I get genuine delight from ads, if they're clever," Gladwell said. "The idea that you can tell a story in 30 seconds is amazing." He finds the business world "rarefied and fascinating," and said running a company was "just about as interesting a challenge as there is out there."

Small wonder, then, that business executives invite him to speak: he's entranced by their world, and they by his attentiveness and aura. He has spoken at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, among many other companies. He's one of nine people invited to address the World Business Forum, a conference for executives, next fall, where he's expected to share the stage at Radio City Music Hall with Rudolph Giuliani; Jack Welch, the former chief executive of General Electric; and Colin Powell, who Gladwell believes may be a distant cousin on his mother's side.

"I'm simply there to explain my ideas," he said of his public speaking. But he also delivers what he calls "homilies," drawing on his books to urge companies to provide better training and create fertile environments for innovation. Gladwell's 2002 New Yorker takedown of McKinsey & Company, the consulting firm then much in the news for its involvement with Enron, ended with a zinger: "They were there looking for people who had the talent to think outside the box. It never occurred to them that, if everyone had to think outside the box, maybe it was the box that needed fixing."

Business audiences eat it up. "Thank you for a fantastic speech," someone identified only as the chief executive of a health insurance company wrote in a letter reprinted on the Web site of the Leigh Bureau, which organizes Gladwell's speaking engagements. Moreover, the executive wrote, one colleague, "not faint of heart — indicated that you brought her to tears with the message about how valuable each and every individual is. With a polarized political situation, that's a refreshing message!"

And that is because beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for which there's always a market. "I'm by nature an optimist. I can't remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as despairing," he said. "I don't believe in character. I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people's behavior."

Thus, he concludes "The Tipping Point" with the hopeful assertion that "what must underlie successful epidemics, in the end, is a bedrock belief that change is possible, that people can radically transform their behavior or beliefs in the face of the right kind of impetus." In "Blink," Gladwell argues that we pay too much attention to "grand themes" and too little to "fleeting moments." "Making sense of ourselves and our behavior requires that we acknowledge there can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis," he writes.

Although pitched as descriptive, Gladwell's books are essentially prescriptive. Trust your instincts! You too may be (or can become) a connector, maven or salesman! Gladwell's dazzling arguments ultimately offer reassurance. Indeed, he seems a contemporary incarnation of a recurring figure in the American experience, one who comes with encouraging news: You can make a difference, you have the capacity to change. Gladwell may be the Dale Carnegie, or perhaps the Norman Vincent Peale, of the iPod generation. But where Carnegie in his 1936 book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People," instructed readers how to understand their customers and flatter people into liking them, and Peale in his 1952 "Power of Positive Thinking" offered watered-down Christian palliatives, Gladwell offers optimism through demystification: to understand how things work is to have control over them.

Or if you can't understand the complexities of today's world, you may still be able to make profitable use of them. Of all the people he's profiled for the New Yorker, Gladwell said he most identified with Nassim Taleb, who ran a hedge fund that traded on rare events, like disasters. Taleb was "doing something about the possibility of disaster as opposed to simply turning a blind eye to it," Gladwell said in our conversation. And that, too, is part of the secret of Gladwell's success: pragmatism over ideology, optimism over pessimism, colorful human-interest anecdotes over gray shades of data. "To be someone who does not believe in the power of the situation is to be a defeatist about the world," he said. "And that I can't abide."

Rachel Donadio is a writer and editor at the Book Review.

The huddled masses in Max Barry's hilarious new novel, "Company," can be found crammed inside the Seattle corporate headquarters of Zephyr Holdings. What does Zephyr Holdings hold? Nothing. What is its office building like? "It is a building designed by committee," Mr. Barry explains. "All they have been able to agree on is that it should be rectangular, have windows, and not fall over."

On Page 7 of his latest fever dream about big business (after the wild fabulist escapades of "Syrup" and "Jennifer Government"), Mr. Barry underscores his credentials as both satirist and saboteur. He presents a one-paragraph Mission Statement that is a marvel. He has put real words ("consolidate," "profitable," "strategic") on the page. You can see them. But they have been perfectly arranged to flummox the brain. The paragraph is a perfect specimen of corporate-speak: impressive to gaze upon, totally impossible to read.

In a book dedicated to Hewlett-Packard, which once made the silly, silly mistake of employing Mr. Barry, the secrets and lies of corporate culture are explored with sharp, absurdist precision. Joseph Heller did it better, but not by much. Mr. Barry, an Australian writer with a mad gleam and a college education in marketing, invents a rats' nest of warring departments and scheming, back-biting employees, all manipulated by a Senior Management staff of exceptional ruthlessness.

"If Senior Management was ever made up of selfless individuals who put teamwork ahead of self-interest — and this is a big if," Mr. Barry writes, "they were long ago torn to pieces." Into this fray comes handsome, idealistic Stephen Jones, a newcomer of such clonelike perfection that some Zephyr cynics wonder whether he has a navel. This much is certain: Jones has a mouth, and it asks too many questions. For instance, Jones wonders why his salary has been hidden within the budget for office expenses ("I'm copy paper?) just because he arrived in the midst of a hiring freeze. And he begins to wonder why Zephyr, though a hive of activity, seems to have no real customers and no real work to do.

A third of the way into "Company," Mr. Barry unveils a surprise: this satirical novel also has an element of science fiction. It mustn't be spoiled here. But the place is alive with trickery, and its employees' already borderline personalities are at risk. As the book says of one Zephyr worker: "If Elizabeth's brain was a person, it would have scars, tattoos, and be missing one eye. If you saw it coming, you would cross the street." Gathering his readers around a figurative campfire, Mr. Barry explains what work used to be like. "There are stories — legends, really — of the 'steady job,' " he writes. "Old-timers gather graduates around the flickering light of a computer monitor and tell stories of how the company used to be, back when a job was for life, not just for the business cycle." But in the book's funhouse-mirror world, flexibility is the new ideal. "Flexible jobs allow employees to share in the company's ups and downs; well, not so much the ups," Mr. Barry writes. Desperate Zephyr workers do their best to keep up with the parsimonious atmosphere. "Every day we identify new ways to lower expenses," a colleague explains to Jones. "Just yesterday, we boarded up our office windows."

"Company" is Mr. Barry's breakout book. It's also his most conventional. In "Syrup" he took on the Coca-Cola Company (nothing else he writes is quite as sidesplitting as his disclaimers of malicious intent) and made wicked fun of hot young marketing types, the ones who favor quirky names. He himself test-drove the name Maxx Barry, though nobody got the joke. "Jennifer Government" was also convolutedly clever, but it worked hard to achieve its anarchic spirit.

In "Company" the characters are more breezily conceived. This is not to say that the author's world has lost its warped mystique, just that he has made it more — yes — marketable. "Being John Malkovich" is one of his favorite films, and its influence is felt when "Company," both psychically and literally, lands in the limbo between elevator floors. Mr. Barry has sometimes been compared to Chuck Palahniuk for his rebellious bravado, but he has much more in common with Charlie Kaufman, the screenwriter with such an easy affinity for the Orwellian surreal.

"Company" eventually faces the problem inherent to paranoid fantasy: once the secrets are revealed, what happens next? Mr. Barry is far better equipped to zap Zephyr than to make it a more positive, productive, life-affirming place. He perfectly understands the company's problems. ("If Senior Management captained a ship, it would take twice as long to reach its destination and have been completely rebuilt en route.") But he is less astute about Zephyr's merits, possibly because there aren't any.

The closest he comes to humanizing Zephyr is to make Jones fall reflexively for Mr. Barry's favorite type of female character, this time named Eve: a cool, selfish, elusive beauty. "She shouldn't be here," a co-worker confides to Jones. "Her ideal job would be giving lethal injections in San Quentin."

Occasionally, "Company" is flimsy: its central conceit, about a stolen doughnut that occasions much pouting and sniping (and is seen on the book's cover), isn't worth the attention it's given. And some of the corporate types at Zephyr are slightly generic. But Mr. Barry is a deft and focused satirist, and his sense of business ethics is right on the money. "I just want to know that we treat our employees properly," Jones insists. "That we, you know, care about them."

"Honestly?" he is told by one of the real powers at Zephyr. "We don't."