Austin, Tex.

WILL STOVALL, a history student in his fifth and final year as an undergraduate at the University of Texas, returned from studying in Mexico last fall determined to go to law school. In service of this goal, he resolved to work harder, which meant he would have little chance to see old friends or to acquire new ones, and that, in turn, seemed to require a very particular kind of domestic arrangement.

“My thinking was that I wouldn’t have time to make a social life, so I needed to have people around,” said Mr. Stovall, who looks as if he has spent much of his life on the verge of hoisting a spinnaker. Instead of renting an apartment, the custom for most seniors, he moved into French House, one of 15 cooperative living facilities run by students on the university’s campus. “People shudder when I say this,” he said, “but a co-op is very much like a frat, without all the fratty people.”

After a fallow period in the 1980’s and much of the 90’s, residential co-ops, where students cook and clean for themselves, have undergone a renaissance at the University of Texas and on other campuses across the country. About 10,000 students are living in co-ops in the United States and Canada, said Jim Jones, former executive director of the North American Students of Cooperation and a historian of trends in communal living. That figure is roughly as high as it was during the two liveliest periods of the co-op movement: the late 1940’s, when cooperative housing emerged as a cost-efficient alternative to dormitory living for returning G.I.’s, and the late 1960’s, when the culture of shared ownership embodied the era’s anti-authoritarian sensibilities.

The current interest in co-ops stems in part from the economic imperative that rising housing costs have wrought. But more than anything else, students suggest, it has grown up in reaction to the alienating aspects of modern campus life, where the increased presence of technology, while enabling certain kinds of connection, has had a hand in limiting others.

In Austin, the sense of social dispersion is especially acute. Fifty thousand students attend the University of Texas, though it has room for fewer than a fifth of them. This means that students seeking rental apartments in the city’s booming real estate market, where a 1,000-square-foot apartment near campus may command $2,000 a month, are often forced to live 20 or 30 miles away, divorced from any semblance of collective life. And dormitories at the university, chief among them Dobie, a glass tower that reaches up into the city skyline like the headquarters of a global bank, are typically likened by students to nursing homes or prisons.

Close to 650 students now live in co-ops at the university, which has one of the oldest and biggest systems in the United States, and the operation is undergoing an expansion. College Houses, one of the two nonprofit bodies that own and oversee co-ops in the area, is developing a $7.8 million building that will accommodate an additional 100 students. The project is set to receive financial assistance from the city of Austin, which, in an unusual move, has made funds available to promote student co-ops as part of a larger affordable-housing initiative.

“I think that I felt lost at U.T.,” said Mr. Stovall, who first lived in a co-op in his sophomore year. “I remember at one point returning to my dorm — which is so big that it’s rumored to have its own area and ZIP codes — and thinking that surely college would get better than this.”

College co-ops, Texas’ among them, began to spring up during the Depression as a means of providing students with low-cost housing. They have typically remained cheaper than dorms, but in recent years, Mr. Jones said, he has seen students choose co-op life even on campuses where the opposite is true.

“It’s not just that people are arriving on big, anonymous campuses, but the homes these kids are coming out of are more isolated,” Mr. Jones said. “One of the problems in American society today is that people don’t eat together anymore. It’s the whole bowling alone thing, and co-ops are one of the few places where people can really come together.”

The simple matter of a shared meal — making it, clearing up — undoubtedly draws students to co-op life, many of whom, particularly at large universities like Texas, envision the alternative as a sandwich eaten alone in a sterile apartment. Even at the university’s larger co-ops, which can accommodate more than 100 students, members eat together every night, the rotating kitchen workers among them spending up to four hours preparing dinner.

At Texas, no matter the size of a co-op, students must contribute four to six hours of cooking, housework or building maintenance a week. Assignments are made at the beginning of each semester when students voice their preferences to a household “labor czar” who works out an elaborate schedule and is responsible for coming down on lax members and implementing a fine of $10 to $15 for every hour of work missed. Students can pay a housemate $10 to do their work for them, but few do because such behavior is considered distasteful and “noncooperative.”

For anyone with a certain idea about the free-ranging spirit of American college life, the taste for bureaucracy and logistics among co-op members can seem staggering. “One of the things that amazed me when I came here,” said Alan Robinson, the general coordinator of College Houses, “was that so many students wanted to impose rules on themselves.”

In addition to a labor czar, each house has various managers and officers, committee and subcommittee delegates, as well as a representative who serves on the board of either College Houses or the Inter-Cooperative Council, the other umbrella organization through which the co-ops here function. In most houses, regular meetings are held to discuss paint colors, parking, guest policy, labor infractions and ways to market co-op life.

“It’s work, it’s a lot,” acknowledged Ana Wolfowicz, a senior living in Pearl Street, a 120-member co-op with its own pool. “But there’s not an R.A. telling me when to turn the lights out, and we decide if we’re going to buy a TV or organic coffee. No one is doing that for us.”

Members can also decide whether the ornery or impertinent among them should be submitted for review. The choice of one condiment brand or another can prompt impassioned debate. Recently, at Pearl Street, there was much discussion over how to handle students who might use drugs. A few weeks ago one member called the police to report the smell of marijuana in a nearby room.

Such an act would have seemed unimaginable 30 years ago on the premises of Pearl Street, easily the most storied building on campus. Originally constructed as a women’s dormitory in 1961, the house, called Mayfair House then, was home to Farrah Fawcett in her undergraduate years. Later it was reinvented as a co-op known as the Ark, where in the late 60’s and the 70’s beer replaced soda in the vending machines. By the 80’s drug habits were so pervasive in the Ark that it was shut down in 1988 because of “anarchy and building destruction,” as the brochure for College Houses puts it.

French House, the co-op where Mr. Stovall lives, is in many ways emblematic of a new ethos in student communal living, one in which social hedonism, commitment to a vegetarian diet and a monolithic political view no longer hold as the predominant conventions. French House is also known as the carnivore’s house; meat is served every evening. Ten of its 20 residents attend the Hill Country Bible Church nearby every Sunday. Dating within the house is discouraged. “The stereotype is that we are hippies and drug addicts,” said Patrick King, an art student and one of Mr. Stovall’s housemates. “We are neither hippies nor drug addicts.”

The new co-op that College Houses is about to build will rise seven stories, with every two floors functioning as a co-op with its own kitchen and the ground floor for mingling. Phillip Reed, a local architect, found inspiration for the building in a giant jungle gym he saw at the Burning Man festival, but the specifics are being dictated by his client: a board of students who have asked for ample outdoor space, common areas and courtyards where they can show movies and watch bands. The building has been designed so that moving through it will enhance sociability, because sociability is the students’ primary concern.

“Students now come to college with a whole set of different expectations,” Mr. Reed said. “They want a double bed, their own bedroom, a walk-in closet” — some of these amenities are available in co-ops, some not — “but what they don’t want is forced isolation.”

Nor, it seems, do they have much interest in the cool palette of modern interior design and the lack of intimacy it implies. One way that co-op members in Austin in 2006 seem similar to their counterparts 30 years ago is their choice of appointment. Batik thrives, so too Che posters, acid wall colors and sofas seemingly rescued from meth labs. To visit the bedrooms in many houses is to think one has stepped into a Tunisian massage parlor.

The co-op by way of Elle Décor apparently has yet to come; on the other hand, graduation is a gateway to a lifetime of beige.

The most authoritative report on the cost of health insurance came out yesterday, and it’s sure to cause some new outrage.

The average cost of a family insurance plan that Americans get through their jobs has risen another 7.7 percent this year, to $11,500, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In only seven years, the cost has doubled, while incomes and company revenue, which pay for health insurance, haven’t risen nearly as much.

These spiraling costs — a phrase that has virtually become a prefix for the words “health care” — are slowly creating a crisis. Many executives have decided that they cannot afford to keep insuring their workers, and the portion of Americans without coverage has jumped 23 percent since 1987.

An industry that once defined the American economy, meanwhile, is sinking in large measure because of the cost of caring for its workers and retirees. For every vehicle that General Motors sells, fully $1,500 of the purchase price goes to pay for medical care. “We must all do more to cut costs,” G.M.’s chief executive, Rick Wagoner, said on Capitol Hill this summer while testifying about health care.

Mr. Wagoner’s argument has become the accepted wisdom about the crisis: the solution lies in restraining costs. Yet it’s wrong. Living in a society that spends a lot of money on medical care creates real problems, but it also has something in common with getting old. It’s better than the alternative.

To understand why, it helps to look back to a time when Americans didn’t worry much about health care costs. In 1950, the country spent less than $100 a year — or $500 in today’s dollars — on the average person’s medical care, compared with almost $6,000 now, notes David M. Cutler, an economist who wrote a wonderful little book in 2004 titled, “Your Money or Your Life.”

Most families in the 1950’s paid their medical bills with ease, but they also didn’t expect much in return. After a century of basic health improvements like indoor plumbing and penicillin, many experts thought that human beings were approaching the limits of longevity. “Modern medicine has little to offer for the prevention or treatment of chronic and degenerative diseases,” the biologist René Dubos wrote in the 1960’s.

But then doctors figured out that high blood pressure and high cholesterol caused heart attacks, and they developed new treatments. Oncologists learned how to attack leukemia, enabling most children who receive a diagnosis of it today to triumph over a disease that was almost inevitably fatal a half-century ago. In the last few years, orphan drugs that combat rare diseases and medical devices like the implantable defibrillator have extended lives. Human longevity still hasn’t hit the wall that was feared 50 years ago.

Instead, a baby born in the United States this year will live to age 78 on average, a decade longer than the average baby born in 1950. People who have already made it to their 40’s can now expect to reach age 80. These gains are probably bigger than the ones the British experienced in the entire millennium leading up to 1800. If you think about this as the return on the investments in medicine, the payoff has been fabulous: Would you prefer spending an extra $5,500 on health care every year — or losing 10 years off your lifespan?

Yet we often imagine that the costs and benefits are unrelated, that we can somehow have 2006 health care at 1950 (or even 1999) prices. We think of health care as if it were gasoline, a product whose price and quality have nothing to do with each other.

There is no question that the American medical system does suffer from a lot of waste, be it insurance industry bureaucracy or expensive procedures that haven’t been proven effective. But the No. 1 cause of the cost increases is still the one you can see at the hospital and in your medicine cabinet — defibrillators, chemotherapy, cholesterol drugs, neonatal care and other treatments that are both expensive and effective.

Not even most forms of preventive care, like keeping diabetes under control, usually save money, despite what many people think. The care itself has some costs, and, more important, patients then live longer than they otherwise would have and rack up medical bills. “When I make this point, people accuse me of wanting people to die earlier. But it’s exactly the opposite,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a researcher at Stanford Medical School, told me. “If these expenditures are keeping people alive, it’s money well spent.”

As Dr. Mark R. Chassin of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York says, “You almost always spend money to gain health.” Of course, the opposite is also true: the best way to reduce health care spending is to reduce health care itself.

Which is exactly what we’re starting to do. The growing number of families without health insurance are, in effect, families who have been kicked off the country’s health care rolls. Many will go without available treatment, will get sicker than they need to get — and will thereby save the rest of us money. They are what now passes for a solution to the health care mess.

The current situation is indeed unsustainable, a point that the conventional wisdom has right. The cost of health insurance can’t keep doubling every seven years, and wasteful spending — the brand-name drugs that are no better than generics, the treatments that haven’t been proved to extend lives or improve health — does need to be reined in.

But far too much of the discussion has been centered on this narrow idea. Somehow, going to the mall to buy clothes has come to be seen as a vaguely patriotic way to keep the economy humming, and taking out a risky mortgage is considered to be an investment in one’s future. But medical care? That’s just a cost.

It’s easy to be against high costs, and it will no doubt be hard to come up with a broad health care solution. But the way to start is by acknowledging that an affluent society should devote an ever-growing share of its resources to the health of its citizens. “We have enough of the basics in life,” Mr. Cutler, the economist and author, points out. “What we really want are the time and the quality of life to enjoy them.”

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

What’s not to like about understanding and empathy? They’re comforting and reassuring. And they’re two things that make patients stick with their treatment, as any psychotherapist worth his or her salt can tell you.

There is one little problem with psychotherapy when it relies on empathy and understanding alone, though: They often aren’t enough to get patients to change, let alone grow.

Recently, I saw a 48-year-old professional single man in consultation who had been in therapy twice a week for six years. After telling me about his chronic depression, he went on to describe his life. “I had a miserable childhood,” he complained. “My father was an alcoholic who shouted all the time. My mother was a nonpresence and my brother checked out on drugs.”

Then I asked him about what he did during his days. He was unemployed and supported in part by the neglectful parents whom he railed against. As is typical of narcissistic patients, he viewed his environment as having failed him and felt that he had not gotten the recognition in life that he deserved.

“What do you hope to accomplish in therapy?” I asked him.

“I just want to feel better and get rid of this depression.”

“Tell me, how do you feel about your current therapist?”

“Oh, she’s terrific. Warm, understanding and always available. But I don’t feel like I’m any better.”

I could already sense trouble. After six years of insight-oriented therapy, this patient had little sense of his own role in his unhappiness or what to do to turn his life around.

Next, I tried something a little more challenging: “I don’t get a sense from what you’ve told me that you feel responsible yourself to do anything to improve your life.”

With this, he sat bolt upright in the chair, crossed his arms and replied icily: “I’ve been working very hard all these years in therapy. You have no right to say that. You hardly know me.”

He had been working very hard all right — to maintain his status as a victim of a troubled history. And this was something he was loath to surrender. He clung to the notion that he was unhappy because he had been mistreated by various figures in his life: his parents, his teachers and disloyal friends, among others.

His therapist had never challenged his stance, but had reinforced it with years of unquestioning empathy and understanding. Sure, he had a difficult childhood, but so have lots of other people who bear their history and carry on with their lives. What he was lacking was any notion that he had any responsibility in shaping his life now.

Then it was his turn to ask a question: “So now you know my story. What kind of treatment do you recommend?”

This was not a time to hold back. I told him that his central problem was not all these collected injuries but his view of himself as someone who was wronged and deserving of special treatment from the world. Nor did he have major depression that required medication; rather, he had chronic dissatisfaction. He’d had five years’ worth of empathy; it was time to grow up, call it a day, and get back to work.

I suggested a brief course of therapy to last no more than six months, with one precondition. He would have to get a job, the best job he could find, to be able to cover his rent and decrease his dependence on his parents. He signed on.

We seem to live in a blame-addicted culture that is perfectly reflected in everything from reality TV to bad psychotherapy. Since nearly everyone has had some adversity or disappointment in life, there is an endless supply of excuses for present unhappiness or just plain bad behavior. It’s easier to whine about the past than take some responsibility to change one’s life.

This is not to say that there aren’t lots of patients who haven’t experienced terrible trauma — sexual, physical, verbal and emotional — for whom empathy and understanding are critical and corrective. Of course there are, but for the majority who were not really traumatized, psychotherapy can become a sterile ritual of self-reflection without responsibility or action.

When I last saw my patient, several months after he finished treatment, he was still working and financially independent.

“I didn’t really like you at first,” he said. “You weren’t nice, but I think you helped me.”

DO you compulsively change lanes when driving? Do you clock yourself when you jog? Do you always have to be right? When colleagues, friends or even your children say someone else’s mistake made them miss a goal, do you accuse them of whining — even if you are the “someone else”?

If you are nodding in self-recognition, chances are that you suffer from alpha male syndrome — or, more accurately, that everyone around you suffers from your alpha male syndrome. If you are reminded of your boss or spouse or child, you are probably suffering from someone else’s intensely competitive streak.

And don’t let the narrow label fool you — women can be as “alpha” as men. Just ask Kate Ludeman, an executive coach and self-described alpha whose book, “Alpha Male Syndrome,’’ written with Eddie Erlandson, her alpha male husband, and published by Harvard Business School Press, will arrive in bookstores next month.

“Female alphas may be disarming and use charm as a tool to get ahead,” she said, “but they have that same need to be in charge.’’

They are also particularly likely to bare their teeth when protecting others. When Ms. Ludeman, 60, was 9 years old, she bit the neighborhood bully so hard that she drew blood — then warned him to leave her friends alone. When she was a bit older, she tried to persuade officials in her Texas town to let poor people attend community events free — and when she failed, she pilfered money from her mom’s purse to buy tickets for the poor herself.

All of which leads into the subsets of alpha behavior. Ms. Ludeman, it seems, is an alpha visionary, someone who brooks little disagreement with his or her goals. Then there are alpha commanders, charismatic types who insist on unflinching loyalty and obedience; alpha strategists, intellectuals who can pull together disparate concepts into a game plan that all around them must follow; and alpha executors, tactical martinets who shine at putting in place the ideas of the strategist or visionary.

As Ms. Ludeman sees it, Donald Trump and Carleton S. Fiorina, Hewlett-Packard’s former chief executive, are classic alpha commanders, while Larry Lucchino, president of the Boston Red Sox, is a typical alpha strategist. Ms. Ludeman regards Michael S. Dell, the computer company’s chairman, as an exemplar of an alpha visionary, and Kevin B. Rollins, Dell’s chief executive, as the consummate alpha executor.

All different types of alphas, with their competitive charge and generally brilliant minds, can do wonders for companies’ bottom lines. But while “working or living with an alpha can be exhilarating,” Ms. Ludeman said, it “is certainly a challenge.”

As a young girl, Helen Kay Ludeman — she adopted the name Kate much later — seemed more likely to channel her alpha energy into solving equations than working with people. She grew up in Cotulla, Tex., the oldest of three children. Her father sold Western clothing; her mother stayed home. Helen Kay always loved math and science and remembers turning potato starch into doll clothes and burning broken toys to compare the colors of the flames from the different plastics.

Still, she never gave much thought to a career. “When you were a girl in rural Texas, your goal was to marry a guy with a career,’’ she said. “To me, being smart felt like a handicap.”

Her parents had college degrees, though, and encouraged her to get one. So she studied engineering at what is now Texas Tech University. She took a basic psychology course in her senior year and fell in love with the field.

In 1967, she got her bachelor’s degree in engineering; in 1969, she married Albert Hall, a fellow Texas Tech student who had joined the Navy. Not long after, he was sent to Vietnam, and Ms. Ludeman went along. (She persuaded the Control Data Corporation, the supercomputer pioneer, to hire her to do some research in Asia.) When they returned 18 months later, Ms. Ludeman went back to school.

By 1971, she had a master’s degree in psychology, as well as her only child, Catherine, who is now 34 (“and definitely an alpha,’’ Ms. Ludeman said). Ms. Ludeman chafed at being a stay-at-home mom. So she persuaded a television station in Dallas to let her do a how-to segment on anything from playing with clay to cooking. The show was a success; the marriage fell apart. Ms. Ludeman went to San Francisco, Catherine in tow, and earned a doctorate in psychology at what is now Saybrook Graduate School.

She embarked on a series of human resources jobs. Each time, she found that her favorite task was helping executives tame impatience and anger — or, as she put it, “humanizing the jerks.” In 1988, she founded Worth Ethic, an executive coaching firm. Eleven years later, at a psychology conference, she met Eddie Erlandson, a vascular surgeon. They married on Feb. 2, 2002.

“That’s 02/02/02,’’ Ms. Ludeman said. “I never did lose my fascination with numbers.”

She never lost her fascination with taming alphas, either. And over lunch at HeartBeat, a restaurant in the W Hotel at Lexington Avenue and 50th Street in Manhattan, she offered some advice on how to stay sane if you are stuck in alpha territory.

• Decide which type of alpha you are dealing with. Then tailor your proposals to his or her predilections. Say you want to hold an event in an expensive hotel. If you need an O.K. from a visionary, describe how the event would look and the results it would bring. Woo a strategist with data about costs and the easy logistics of getting people there. An executor needs to know everything about setting up the event. A commander will respond best to a passionate plea. “But if he digs in his heels, you’ll probably have to go over his head or give up,’’ Ms. Ludeman said.

• Never ask alphas to defend their positions. Instead, ask them to explain them. “Show curiosity,’’ Ms. Ludeman said. “Ask how he arrived at a certain solution or idea.’’ While explaining, he may spot flaws in his logic himself. Even if he doesn’t, “the explanation will give you insight into how he thinks,” she said. A corollary: Stress whatever meager things you do agree with in your alpha boss’s orders. “When alphas think you understand their goals, they may entertain alternate ways of reaching them,’’ she said.

• Sprinkle superfluous, even erroneous, nuggets into your own presentations, and thank the alpha when he or she spots the mistakes. That way, the alpha won’t have to scuttle your project in order to feel in control.

• Err on the side of too much detail. Non-alpha bosses might like employees who say, “Trust me, I’ll take care of it.” Alpha bosses, particularly alpha executors, want to know how. “They want details,’’ Ms. Ludeman said. “Otherwise, they’ll watch you and worry.”

• Don’t confuse an alpha’s arrogance with total self-confidence. Alphas may think they are smarter than everyone else, but they have an inner critic that keeps telling them that they can do still better. They are too smart to be gulled by flagrant flattery, but they respond well to specific praise. “Whenever you can, point out when they did something smart, or kept you from doing something stupid,’’ Ms. Ludeman said.

• Don’t ever complain to alphas. They see it as weakness. Instead, ask for help. “Tell them you need advice on how to deal with a difficult colleague, or on how to meet an impossible deadline,’’ she said.

• Go over an alpha’s head if you must, but be prepared to grovel soon after. If you are sure you are right about something but cannot get your alpha boss to budge, take it up to the next level. Then apologize profusely to your boss for having challenged his or her authority. “Your alpha boss will never see you as an equal, and that can work in your favor,’’ Ms. Ludeman said. “A nonalpha boss would never forgive you, but the alpha will just be pleased you’ve seen the error of your ways.”

• Don’t assume that your battles with alphas are confined to work. If you are living with an alpha, be prepared to fight a lot — particularly if you are an alpha, too. “Best to take frequent time-outs for anger to subside,’’ Ms. Ludeman said. If you are raising alpha children, orders won’t work as well as letting them learn from their mistakes. If they refuse to clean up their rooms, let them live in squalor until they cannot stand it any longer.

Lately, my father has been angry. Seventy-nine, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, a lifelong dues-paying member of three labor unions and now a collector of Social Security, my father, temperamentally a gentle person, is often filled with rage. The news does this to him, not so much the stories of tsunamis or hurricanes or any instances of environmental malice that lawyers call “acts of God.” No, acts of God fill my godless, liberal father with melancholy, if not sorrow, over the inequity of the world, whereas it is the iniquity of the world, what you might call “acts of man,” that are, these days, driving him to distraction. My father’s solution to such furies, dependable as the daily newspaper, to the anger that sets upon him when he learns of the latest folly in the corridors of power, is to turn to the op-ed pages. For our purposes here, it hardly matters who is writing, though, naturally, he has his favorites. What matters to him is that every day, in those well-reasoned column inches, he finds a mirror for his rage.

Whereas, over the same period, his son has managed not to be angry, not in the least. Thirty-seven, a veteran of nothing, a subscription-paying reader of two magazines, a person whose Social Security pay-in, so far, is a sad little sum, I am, just as often as my father is furious, filled with mirth. Yes, I am aware of the disasters of the world, and they affect me no less deeply than they do him. What’s more, my father and I are of one mind about the inveterate folly, craven hypocrisy, unchecked greed, rampant abuse of office, ugly abuse of trust, vile abuse of language and galloping display of ignorance that has become a daily standard. And yes, I should admit that when I happen to think about such matters — when, say, my father phones me to chew over some morsel of maddening news — I find myself overtaken by a most unpleasant feeling. I imagine it is not unlike what must be suffered by a man who returns home after a long day’s work to find, in his absence, that his lovely house has been looted. And whereas my father, standing, as it were, at the front door of that plundered house, has come to find temporary shelter nearby, in reason — the arguments marshaled by those whose views he shares — I have found no relief in such reading, which lately I have forgone.

In its stead, though, I have found a way not to be angry at all.

I have taken shelter in the ridiculous.

Imagine, for example, another warm morning in August 2005. The national atmosphere that summer was humid with talk of intelligent design, the evangelical putsch — in Pennsylvania, in Kansas, in America — to see pseudoscience imparted to our keen young scholars in place of the theory of evolution. My father, I knew, would be calling on such a day (and did) to rail thereupon. “Did you read Paul Krugman?” my father asked.

“Of course,” I replied, “I did not read Paul Krugman.”

What did I read? A newspaper I keep bookmarked on my computer browser and which, among many destinations, I visit every morning. Here, in part, is what it read:

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New “Intelligent Falling” Theory

Aug. 17, 2005 | Issue 41.33

Kansas City, KS — As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center for Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held “theory of gravity” is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.

“Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, ‘God’ if you will, is pushing them down,” said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture and physics from Oral Roberts University.

Should N.S.A. satellite footage surface of me reading the above report — which appeared in The Onion: America’s Finest News Source — you would witness me nodding with pleasure, shaking with delight and laughing aloud (or, more accurately, snorting un-self-consciously). Why is this man snorting? I am doing so with relief, saved, as I was, from having to endure another reasonable argument in unreasonable times. This is, after all, a country where anyone is free to believe that the fingerprints of the Creator, however small, are discernible on even the tiniest microorganism (just as I am free to hold my sober conviction that chocolate rainbows pave the way to a heaven made of fudge). And yet, to my uncaffeinated morning self, intelligent design seemed as brusque a turn of the American evangelical screw as I had encountered — a crude, anticonstitutional crack at marrying church to state. It was just too ridiculous! How ridiculous was it? Pretty perfectly on par, I’d have to say, with the refutation, along evangelical lines, of gravity.

That comedic turn, that comedic tone — a smart blend of parody and hyperbole and mockery — provided, that day, a remedy for my rage: it got channeled smoothly into ridicule. And that channel — a broadband of joco-serious rebuke — has been eating up the major part of my personal market share. As much as caffeine has become a matutinal necessity, a means of brokering, yet again, an uneasy truce with daylight, the kind of laughter — a well-aimed dart — induced by the larky bulletin above has become a no less necessary stimulant. How I hunger for that knowing tone! Like our little friend the lab rat at his lever — all a-jitter from another marching-powder marathon — I have acquired a taste for an addictive brand of fun.

Which means, of course, that I’m in luck: for that tone has been resonating through every echelon of American culture, a shift affecting and informing every storytelling medium, whether factual or fictional. The Onion, of course, is only where my day gets cooking. Other browser bookmarks send me to half a dozen sites where I hope to extract similarly intemperate snorts. The best of these, for sure, I forward along to friends — fellow traffickers in yuks — who, young and old, unfailingly send me links found during their own morning frolics. These I follow no less intrepidly than Theseus did Ariadne’s thread, leading me, once again, out of my labyrinth of rage to that happier place: YouTube. There, with a dependability that would make a demographer pump his fist and an advertiser lose his shirt, I watch segments from “The Daily Show” and its spinoff, “The Colbert Report” (programs that, funnily enough, poached The Onion’s top writers). In such shows, then, I find that tone — so knowing, so over it, so smart, so asinine. And given the choice, these days, between a smartass and, well, a dumb ass, even the Academy Awards, that most treacle-toned of evenings, picked this year’s host from that clever category.

And picking the smartass, it seems, is what we’ve been doing, across the televised board. We’ve been tuning in to “The Simpsons” (in its 18th season, the longest-running sitcom in television history), which pokes tirelessly away at the idea of the American family, not to say America. We’ve been turning on “South Park” (in its 10th season, the longest-running sitcom in cable-television history), with its bile-tongued children probing every asininity (and which made a successful trip to the big screen in “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut”). We’ve been ordering in “Chappelle’s Show” (the top-selling DVD of a television series in, well. . .DVD history), with its now-embittered impresario, who, erewhile, was acid-tongued as he chewed up (and out) another cracker, whistling all the way. We’ve been showing up at “The Office,” in branches on either side of the Atlantic, each of which, with regionally adjusted inflections, paws away at its constricting white collar (not to say its creator’s later “Extras” — another kind of office, a celebrity waiting room with sexier furniture). Like the soulless producer in the Coen brothers’ “Barton Fink,” our Hollywood executives have been courting the equivalent of That Barton Fink Feeling: that ubiquitous tone — so “young,” so “hip,” so “edgy.” Like the lava lamp of yore, it has been tucked into the hot corner of every room, whether “Da Ali G Show,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” “Boondocks,” “American Dad!,” “King of the Hill,” “The Thick of It” or, on the big screen, the no less knowing “Dawns” — and Shaun — “of the Dead,” “American Dreamz” and “Thank You for Smoking.”

But if we were to think that that tone — so sarcastic, so ironic, so sardonic — were trapped within entertainments trundled onto screens, we would be wrong. It has pervaded literary fiction for decades, from Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” to Philip Roth’s “Our Gang” to David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest.” No surprise, then, that it should feature in the work of our most heralded young authors of the past year, whether Gary Shteyngart’s unbridled “Absurdistan,” Colson Whitehead’s mocking “Apex Hides the Hurt,” Marisha Pessl’s madcap “Special Topics in Calamity Physics,” not to mention books by our more seasoned storytellers — “In Persuasion Nation,” by George Saunders; “The Diviners,” by Rick Moody; “Little Children,” by Tom Perotta; and “A Changed Man,” by Francine Prose.

All of these varied entertainments — human emanations on the Web, on television, at the movies and between hardcovers (whatever their differences in ambition, conception and achievement) — are attuned to the ridiculous in modern life. They are all, in other words, satirical: they revel in, and trade on, knowingness. And if we seem to be enjoying a sort of golden age of the satirical, that invites the question How successfully does satire serve our culture? That there is so much might seem proof of its expediency. After all, what could be wrong with a mode of expression that orients a critical, comical eye to flaws in the contemporary weave? And yet, you might wonder, as well, whether a culture can have too much of that knowing tone and, if so, just what that “too much” might mean.

The ancient Romans provide the beginnings of an answer, in large measure because that’s where satire has its beginnings. Just as Americans like to claim jazz as “our art form,” the Romans claimed satire as theirs. Gaius Lucilius (second century B.C.) was the first satirist, a writer vocal about the negative virtues of his fellow citizens — mostly the tendency to imitate their Greek neighbors in everything. As boastful as a modern-day rapper, Lucilius pointed to himself as the original Roman — not some Helleno-wannabe — as much because of what he lampooned (things Greek) as the fact that he lampooned at all. I am Roman, his writings say, hear me mock. And indeed, it was how such criticism was delivered that made satire different — and differently effective — from, say, a sermon. “A cultivated wit,” wrote Horace, a later Roman satirist, “one that badgers less, can persuade all the more. Artful ridicule can address contentious issues more competently and vigorously than can severity alone.” Sounding like the always-fulminating Lewis Black of “The Daily Show,” Rome’s Juvenal tells us: “It is harder not to write satire. For who could endure this monstrous city, however callous at heart, and swallow his wrath?. . .Today, every vice has reached its ruinous zenith. So, satirist, hoist your sails.” The idiot wind, blowing every time Rome’s hypocrites moved their mouths, drove her satirists, in their artful way, to bluster back, setting a course pursued by writers living in turbulent eras ever since.

When, in 1729, the Tory politician Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) published his satirical “A Modest Proposal” — which, in the straight-faced language of a sermon, advocated solving the problem of poverty by selling Irish children as meat — his mode was perfectly ironic. Swift did not wish to see his countrymen’s children ground into shepherd’s pies. Rather, he wanted to level an attack on political opponents who were devouring the Irish people. Swift, then, was approaching a troubling question upside down and intimating a sarcastic answer. (As such, Stephen Colbert, in parodying Bill O’Reilly’s extreme rhetoric, is fully Swiftian: “The Colbert Report” works to convince us of the opposite of its host’s every misguided opinion.) For Swift’s part, he believed that satire was a way of “prompting men of genius and virtue to mend the world as far as they are able.” His fellow Augustan Alexander Pope wrote, “When truth or virtue an affront endures, the affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours.” And although satire could not be a remedy in and of itself, it was doing a good deal, Pope assured, when it could “deter, if not reform.”

Indeed, this elegant, not to say defiant, means of addressing “affronts” to truth has proved a liberating mode of expression for authors across the ages, from Chaucer to Cervantes to Voltaire. Most comprehensible of all, perhaps, is the attraction that so insubordinate a brand of comedy, a very free kind of speech, held for writers in a country formed through insubordination — our own. Prerevolutionary America was rife with satirical pamphleteers, and even Benjamin Franklin, in his “Rules by Which a Great Empire May Be Reduced to a Small One,” lampooned the misadministration of the colonies. And yet, when readers today experience the best satires of our past, editorial points that once took center stage now shuffle toward the wings. Whether in the rueful parody of Mark Twain’s “War Prayer” (“It was a time of great and exalting excitement”), the wicked ironies of Ambrose Bierce’s “Devil’s Dictionary” (“Conversation, n. A fair for the display of the minor mental commodities, each exhibitor being too intent upon the arrangement of his own wares to observe those of his neighbor”) or even the mordant sarcasm of Dorothy Parker’s “Comment” —

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Roumania.

— we are responding, not so much to the underlying “point” each author makes as to the virtuosity of its execution, the satirist’s fine ear for language, the pleasurable spectacle of seeing words used originally, used well. Yes, as it happens, Parker, Bierce and Twain are making timeless points: love, often unlovely; conversation, frequently dull; war, not exalting. No one, though, would needlepoint these revelations onto pillows — they’re old news. In the hands of an adept satirist, however, the old news satire brings becomes a special report. It reads, in part, that human civilization is not so wonderful: look, satire testifies, at the latest, artless shenanigans we’ve gotten ourselves into. But the report also shows that human civilization can be wonderful: look, satire says, at how artful we can be.

Satire, then, signals both the sickness and health of a society in equal measure: it showcases the vigor of the satirist and the debility of the satiree. As such, we might conclude, in America, that its abundance suggests a normal balance of destructive yin and creative yang, a human need to view the most vexing frailties of a culture through the liberating prism of lampoon.

An episode of “South Park” from last year, “Best Friends Forever,” was shown on the eve of Terri Schiavo’s final day, inspired by the grim battle among family members. Their private tragedy, we know well, became a series of loggerheaded squabbles in which efforts to reach consensus on what we mean by “human life” rapidly devolved. The creators of “South Park” addressed this rhetorical erosion with no small insight and freakish speed. (Like all their episodes, this one was produced in less than a week.) Kenny, the accident-prone child, is killed by an ice cream truck while playing his Sony PSP — the portable game console that, last year, was the grail of children everywhere. At the reading of Kenny’s will, Cartman, the obese, morally repugnant child who, on another episode, ate the parents of a kid he disliked, is left the PSP. Alas for Cartman, Kenny, dead for almost 24 hours, is belatedly revived. Now on a feeding tube and, as his doctor explains, in “a persistive vegetative state. . .like a tomato,” Kenny is, by law, alive. Kenny’s possessions, therefore, revert to him. As Cartman goes to the Colorado Supreme Court to seek the removal of Kenny’s feeding tube (so he can get the PSP), Kenny’s more altruistic friends, Kyle and Stan, court the media: “We’ll make everyone in the country know that they’re killing Kenny.”

The national uproar that ensued on this cartoon was, in temper, not a great deal more cartoonish than the one that was playing out that evening in Schiavo’s real America. The episode, however distorted by crudity, mirrored the polarizing rage of our citizenry, recalling nothing so much as Ambrose Bierce’s satirical definition of conversation. The genius of “South Park,” scatologically over the top though it tends to be (Oprah, this season, was kidnapped at gunpoint by her vagina), is how it nonetheless manages, with glee, to go after everyone, artfully sketching our society’s inability to make sense of itself, to itself.

Another target that our satirists have been skewering is our confusion about the responsibility that corporations, governments or, indeed, parents, have to tell the truth. Released in the spring of 2005, “Thank You for Smoking” (adapted from Christopher Buckley’s very funny novel) featured the charismatic tobacco-industry lobbyist Nick Naylor, a villain with a hero’s face and a salesman’s mouth. As one senator puts it, “The man shills. . .for a living,” a profession about which Nick’s son is curious. Joey, 12, understands that his father makes arguments on behalf of corporations, but given that the corporation in question manufactures death, he wonders what happens when his father’s arguments are wrong:

NICK: Joey, I’m never wrong.

JOEY: But you can’t always be right.

NICK: Well, if it’s your job to be right, then you’re never wrong.

JOEY: But what if you are wrong?

NICK: O.K. Let’s say that you’re defending chocolate, and I’m defending vanilla. Now, if I were to say to you, “Vanilla is the best flavor ice cream,” you’d say. . .

JOEY: No, chocolate is.

NICK: Exactly. But you can’t win that argument. So, I’ll ask you, “So you think chocolate is the end all and be all of ice cream, do you?”

JOEY: It’s the best ice cream. I wouldn’t order any other.

NICK: Oh, so it’s all chocolate for you, is it?

JOEY: Yes, chocolate is all I need.

NICK: Well, I need more than chocolate. And for that matter, I need more than vanilla. I believe that we need freedom, and choice when it comes to our ice cream, and that, Joey Naylor, that is the definition of liberty.

JOEY: But that’s not what we’re talking about.

NICK: Ah. But that’s what I’m talking about.

JOEY: But. . .you didn’t prove that vanilla’s the best.

NICK: I didn’t have to. I proved that you’re wrong, and if you’re wrong, I’m right.

JOEY: But you still didn’t convince me.

NICK: I’m not after you. I’m after them.

Nick’s “them” are the people beyond the table where they sit, the wider world he would have believe that smoking is an expression of freedom. For Nick, “liberty” is merely rhetorical: it is, as he says, what he’s “talking about.” He doesn’t mean a word of it: he only means to win. The truth is not his — or, we are to understand, perhaps no longer our — business.

The business of scoring this frustratingly debased game of contemporary conversation has been the main focus of “The Daily Show.” Stewart et al. have built careers as liberal foils to conservative talk radio. Where the Limbaughosphere thrives on a muscular, hectoring rhetoric, the mode of “The Daily Show” has been a lampooning of such bullying. Although “The Daily Show” can revel in the same kind of posturing, even if the stance is far more liberal, the best of its work is restrained in the Horatian manner. The show’s “artful ridicule” is at its most scrupulous when attentive to, critical of and vocal about abuses of language. When James Frey, author of the fraudulent memoir “A Million Little Pieces,” was being torn apart by an array of talking heads indignant over his distortions, Stewart offered a deadpan summation that spoke to the perfervid journalistic outrage. Pundits were upset with Frey, Stewart explained, “because he misled us. . .into a book we had no business getting into.” Armed with scrupulous syntax alone, Stewart ironically evoked two infamies that rhymed with Frey’s: the claim that the Bush administration had misled us into war and the observation that the media, so severe in its judgments of Frey’s lie-world, had remained less dogged before the administration’s possible untruths.

This is artful indeed, but a high point both for “The Daily Show” and contemporary satire more generally came shortly after The New Yorker published Seymour Hersh’s 2004 exposé, “Torture at Abu Ghraib.” There was genuine shock, both here and abroad, that a prison taken from a dictator who had used it to torture Iraqi dissidents had in turn served as a forum for the torture of Iraqis by their American “liberators.” Much of our high-flown rhetoric, billowing grandly over Operation Iraqi Freedom, collapsed on the mast. The irony — uncomplicatedly galling — seemed obvious enough, but its precise grade was measured nowhere more finely than in an exchange between Stewart and Rob Corddry, a player who has since departed. As Corddry explained to Stewart, his voice that of a schoolteacher instructing an uncommonly simple-minded child:

Jon, there’s no question what took place in that prison was horrible, but the Arab world has to realize that the U.S. shouldn’t be judged on the actions of a. . .well, that we shouldn’t be judged on actions. It’s our principles that matter; our inspiring, abstract notions. Remember, Jon, just because torturing prisoners is something we did doesn’t mean it’s something we would do.

This is not, as it is sometimes called, “fake news”; rather, blunt satire. Co-opting the patronizing, abstraction-rich rhetoric of the administration of which “The Daily Show” has often been critical, Corddry shined a bright light on an empty set of bromides. All too clearly, words can prove seductive — but only to a point: the point where such seductions become fundamentally ridiculous.

Of recent examples of American satire, though, most remarkable may be Stephen Colbert’s appearance this spring at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. For anyone familiar with Colbert’s lampoonery on “The Daily Show,” not to say his rise to headlining “The Colbert Report,” it was something to see him following in the footsteps of Cedric the Entertainer, Jay Leno and Drew Carey — comedians who most recently tummled at the pleasure of the president. Whatever your tastes, we can agree that they are creatures of the mainstream. Whereas Colbert is nothing if not a critic of that mainstream, one traveling its trashy wake. Consider, then, his straight-faced, pseudoconservative patter, as he expressed, that night, his parodic support of a president sitting a few feet away:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound — with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Or how he “defended” the administration’s apparently chaotic profile:

Everybody asks for personnel changes. So, the White House has personnel changes. And then you write, “Oh, they’re just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.” First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

And how he reproached the “liberal press that’s destroying America” for its lack of professionalism:

Let’s review the rules. Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions. He’s the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know — fiction!

To go by the media swirl that followed, Colbert’s speech that night represents in our culture a culmination of what satire does well or, rather, cannot but do: when it bends to kiss a hand, it bites. Such Lucilian ferocity drew the intended attention. By a great many journalists, Colbert’s “antics” were deemed abusive, discourteous, tasteless. And yet, by a great many citizens, Colbert’s appearance was a moment of hallelujah: he made many people — most poignantly the press — uncomfortable. Colbert stood in their midst, yes, but stood apart, just as the first Roman satirists stood apart, initially from things Greek and then from the corruption that flooded the mainstream. Whatever its latest stance, satire always finds its footing high above the polluted river of a culture, a vantage point from which it taunts. From Juvenal to Swift, from Franklin to Twain: each stood above his era’s lies and, from such a lofty perspective, named the truths of his time.

The appeal of such a mode of discourse to any vice-blighted age is understandable: it provides another means to editorial ends. And yet, more than merely editorializing, it also demonstrates a capacity for better behavior in human beings — our creativity, our subtlety, our panache. That so many people are responding to satire in the public square, and, indeed, that so much satire is thriving at a center usually held by more anodyne entertainments, suggests our hunger for the better — the better articulated, the better said, the better thought, the better done.

At the outset, I said I had taken shelter in the ridiculous. Upon reflection, the ridiculous may not be the most well shielded of retreats. Can you take shelter in the ridiculous if everywhere becomes ridiculous? For the tools of satire, the sharp knives of sarcasm and the pointy shivs of irony and the toy hammer of lampoon are being wielded with widespread enthusiasm, and not merely by cunning builders of satirical speeches and stories. Rather, they are being lent to us all, to enable every possible construction. Did you hear, for example, the news conference President Bush gave in Germany over the summer? “I’m looking forward to the feast you’re going to have tonight,” he said to the German chancellor in a moment of folksy charm, “and I understand that I may have the honor of slicing the pig.” This drew laughs, and when his remarks wound down, the president repeated, “I’m looking forward to that pig tonight.” This before fielding the following from a reporter:

“Does it concern you,” the man asked, stuttering, “that the Beirut airport has been bombed, and do you see a risk of triggering a wider war? And on Iran, they’ve so far refused to respond. Is it now past the deadline, or do they still have more time to respond?”

“I thought,” Bush replied, “you were going to ask about the pig.”

Try to ignore, if you can, the image of the carcass of a pig, Bush poised, knife in hand, ready to carve. Consider instead that when asked on an international stage about real carnage — about spreading violence in the Middle East, about a constellation of worries suggesting a world at the brink of war — the president’s reply did not take the questioner’s inquiry seriously but, rather, sarcastically. His rhetoric sounded less like that of a steward of state — one addressing serious matters with sobriety — than that of a smartass. And this was not Juvenal’s sarcasm, or Twain’s, or even Colbert’s: it was not elegantly tuned to a point nor artfully part of a formal design. It was, instead, almost perfectly inappropriate and, of course, not unindicative of the president’s normal rhetorical mode. For it is not, I think, as is so often said, that the president is as much inarticulate as he is too clearly articulate, in a way: his tone, consistently condescending, betrays his sense of being, like a satirist, above those he calls down to. And that tone — carelessly sarcastic, thoughtlessly ironic, indiscriminately sardonic — that is the very one you now find everywhere. Bush is us; Bush is me: his is the same sarcasm I employ when I tell my father, once again, that of course I didn’t read today’s op-ed.

It makes me wonder what happens when the language of argument and the language of ridicule become the same, when the address of a potentate is voiced no more soberly than the goofings of some rube. Perhaps that leveling of language merely passes, the rhetorical registers recalibrated by nothing so much as an unfolding of the days. Or perhaps there’s another way of putting it, one voiced by President Bush himself. After Colbert, after Germany, just before Labor Day, there was yet another news conference, one that found the president asking the press corps — who so lately protested their mistreatment at satirical hands — how long they were to be stationed in a temporary briefing room across from their typical quarters. “The decision will be made by commanders on the ground,” cracked one. “There’s no timetable,” went another. “What do you think this is,” quipped the president, “the correspondents’ dinner or something?”

That, it seems to me, is an excellent question.

Wyatt Mason received this year’s National Magazine Award for Reviews and Criticism. He is a contributing editor of Harper’s Magazine.

Patti Kilroy, newly arrived at New York University from Miami, and her roommate, Bliss Baek, already suspected they would get along, even before arriving on campus.

Ms. Kilroy, a violin major, posted some funny pictures of herself on Facebook, a networking Web site used by many students, along with her favorite music joke. (So a C, an E flat and a G walk into a bar and the bartender says, “You know I don’t serve minors.’’ So the E flat walks out and the C and G split a fifth.’’)

Ms. Baek, a chemistry major from New York, had studied enough piano to get the joke, and liked the image of Ms. Kilroy that she got from Facebook.

It used to be that the first contact with a new roommate came in a letter, a phone call, an e-mail message, but many students now meet online, checking one another out on Facebook. But while all that information can help pave the students’ path to friendship, it can be too much for parents who might see the roommate’s photos of wild partying, hints of drug use, or blunt statements about sexual preferences.

Given the proliferation of “helicopter parents,’’ hovering and ready to swoop down and rescue their children, it was perhaps inevitable that this year’s assignments of roommates prompted a stream of complaints to university housing offices, asking for a change of roommate because of something posted on Facebook.

“We sent out roommate assignments in August, at 4:30 in the afternoon, and at 7:30 the next morning, we had a call from a mother who was extremely upset about her daughter’s roommate’s Facebook, which had a fairly graphic description of her approach to sexual activity,’’ said Alan Levy, director of housing public affairs at the University of Michigan.

“This is the first year we’re getting these Facebook calls, asking for roommate changes. Parents tend to not be connected with Facebook culture, and there can be something very off-putting about the way many young people represent themselves.’’

Almost always, he and other housing officials at colleges across the country say, it is the parents and not the students, who are upset enough to call. And almost always, they say, colleges refuse to make a change.

“We tell parents that we look to students to give the roommate relationship a good-faith effort to work out, based on a real relationship, not what they’ve seen on Facebook,’’ Mr. Levy said.

Katie Callow-Wright, director of undergraduate student housing at the University of Chicago, said, “People come to conclusions based on this very one-dimensional persona, which may be a fantasy. We tell them they need to have some human interaction before they reach a conclusion. We don’t make changes before the third week of classes.’’

Sexual orientation, drinking, drugs and tattoos seem to prompt the most parental complaints to colleges. But there are all kinds of issues: N.Y.U. housing officials had a call from a parent unhappy about a roommate’s makeup and black clothes, which to them signified a Goth lifestyle.

Dartmouth officials heard from religious parents who thought their daughter would not be a good match with a roommate whose Facebook said she liked vampire movies and found vampires sexy.

Parents have asked for a change of roommates because something on Facebook made them think the roommate would be too religious, too depressed, too sexually active, too foreign, too fond of alcohol, too interested in rap or heavy metal, too almost anything.

At the University of Washington, said Joanna Olson, the students services manager, there was a call from a parent who would not even say just what it was that bothered her, only that it was something on Facebook.

“We went on Facebook, checked it out, and it seems to be a sexual-orientation issue, nothing really shocking,’’ Ms. Olson said.

Whatever the university, and whatever the complaint, the response is almost always the same: First, stress that college is a time for interacting with different kinds of people; second, try to talk to the student; third, remind the family that roommates need not be best friends; fourth, explain that Facebook may not present an accurate image; fifth, go over campus resources for dealing with roommate problems; and sixth, invoke the freeze period before roommate changes will be granted.

“We probably had about 20 Facebook-related calls about roommates this year,’’ said Jennifer Adams, assistant dean at Colgate University. “Often, the freaking out comes down to lifestyle issues, or different taste in music or clothing or the arts, and if you ask enough questions, it’s about a fear that they won’t have anything in common. We certainly have parents who call and say they’re concerned that the roommate seems to have an incredibly active social life. And we had parents who were worried that the roommate’s Facebook had a lot of references to the Bible.’’

Often, the complaining parents have never looked at their own child’s Facebook entry, college officials said, and would be taken aback to find what their child has posted.

“Sometimes, when a parent calls, we have taken it on ourselves to look up their own child’s Facebook, and often, there’s stuff posted that I would think the parents didn’t know about, that they might wonder about,’ said Rachel Class-Giguere, director of undergraduate housing at Dartmouth.

Mr. Levy, at Michigan, had that experience with the mother who called the morning after getting her daughter’s roommate assignment. “We looked at Facebook, and found that the one whose mom called had a Facebook that talked about drinking and could easily make the other family go, ‘Hmm,’ ’’ he said.

IF there is a single quality that separates those in their late teens and early 20’s from previous generations of young people, it is a willingness bordering on compulsion to broadcast the details of their private lives to the general public.

Through MySpace, personal blogs, YouTube and the like, this generation has seemed to view the notion of personal privacy as a quaint anachronism. Details that those of less enlightened generations might have viewed as embarrassing — who you slept with last night, how many drinks you had before getting sick in your friend’s car, the petty reason you had dropped a friend or been fired from a job — are instead signature elements of one’s personal brand. To reveal, it has seemed, is to be.

But alas, it turns out that even among the MySpace generation, there is such a thing as too much information.

That threshold was reached, unexpectedly, earlier this week when the social networking site Facebook unveiled what was to be its killer app. In the past, to keep up with the doings of friends, Facebook members had to make some sort of effort — by visiting the friend’s Web page from time to time, or actually sending an e-mail or instant message to ask how things were going.

Facebook’s new feature, a news “feed,” does that heavy lifting for you. The program monitors the activity on its members’ pages — a change in one’s relationship status, the addition of a new person to one’s friends list, the listing of a new favorite song or interest — and sends that information to everyone in your circle in a constantly updating news ticker. Imagine a device that monitors the social marketplace the way a blinking Bloomberg terminal tracks incremental changes in the bond market and you’ll get the idea.

But within hours of the new feature’s debut, thousands of Facebook members had organized behind a desperate, angry plea: Make it stop.

“You pretty much are being tracked with every movement you make on Facebook,” said Emily Bean, a pharmacy major and Facebook user at Ohio Northern University who signed an anti-Facebook petition on Tuesday, when the new feature made its debut. “It’s like someone peeking in on my conversations. People now know exactly when you became friends with somebody. When you hook up with somebody is now documented. Before it took some extra effort.”

While much of the anger was directed specifically at Facebook and its chief executive and co-founder, the 22-year-old Harvard graduate Mark Zuckerberg, some of the site’s users saw the episode in a broader context.

“Because our generation has been so obsessed with putting themselves up on the Internet and obsessed with celebrity, we didn’t realize how much of our personal information we were putting out there,” said Tim Mullowney, a 22-year-old aspiring actor in Brooklyn and a Facebook user. “This really shows you how much is out there. You don’t see it until you get it served on a platter to you.”

Mr. Mullowney said the Facebook episode had opened his eyes to a surprising conclusion: “I don’t need to know every little detail of everyone’s life.”

Mr. Zuckerberg could be forgiven for not anticipating the limits of his users’ desire for transparency. Since founding Facebook two and a half years ago, he has watched the site grow to more than nine million users, most in high school and college, on its power to help its users stay in contact with their friends.

Those who study social networking sites say that users’ comfort with revealing intimate details about themselves comes in part from a perception that in the din of life online, there is a kind of privacy through anonymity.

Similarly, a couple might feel comfortable having an intimate conversation at a crowded restaurant, for example, on the assumption that even though strangers could potentially tune in, none would care to. The new Facebook feature, though, was the equivalent of broadcasting that conversation over the public address system.

“The issue isn’t transparency but scope,” said Clay Shirky, who teaches in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. “People are willing to be transparent to friends, as long as they are in control. Facebook violated both of those conditions.”

One perhaps unintended consequence of the Facebook feeds was that it allowed users to see when their friends were joining the rapidly growing anti-Facebook movement. In less than a day, the protest movement had fully galvanized, and had migrated offline as well. Marah Paley, a 17-year-old first-year student at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was in the middle of sorority bid week when the news hit.

“That’s all anyone talks about on campus actually,” she said. “My day was totally messed up because of the new Facebook.”

It hasn’t taken very long for Mr. Zuckerberg to respond. Only a day after the feature was launched and he was inundated by protests, he acknowledged the outcry on his Facebook blog.

He wrote: “Calm down. Breathe. We hear you.”

“A lot of this was a lot of confusion,” Mr. Zuckerberg said Friday. “We did a pretty bad job of communicating what we were actually doing with the information. In the absence of information a lot of times people assume bad things.”

Mr. Zuckerberg and his programmers spent two days working on a fix, and stayed up until 5 a.m. Friday on the project. At 2:48 a.m., Mr. Zuckerberg published a contrite “open letter” on his blog, which he sent to all Facebook users.

“We really messed this one up,” he began.

“This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested,” he added. “Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.”

The solution was a page of privacy options that allow Facebook members to opt out of the feed feature, or to shield specific bits of their lives from public broadcast.

“In general the more control you can give people the better,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “If you give people control over everything they do, you’ll never put them in a situation that’s uncomfortable.”

The options were made available to users on Friday morning, and time will tell if they placate the mob. But in the meantime, Ms. Paley said she and her friends had come to a realization about their online lives.

“Translucent is good,” she said. “Not transparent.”

Palm Desert, Calif.

IN late May, for those of us who teach, the summer stretches out like the great expanse of freedom it was in grammar school. Ah, the days on the beach! The books we will read! The adventures we will have!

But before hunkering down to months of leisurely lolling around a pool slathered in S.P.F. 80, we need to take care of a few things: see what got buried in the e-mail pile over the course of the year, write a few letters of recommendation, and finally get to those book reviews we agreed to do. A few leftover dissertation chapters. The syllabuses and book orders for next year’s classes. Then those scholarly articles we were snookered into writing when the deadlines were far, far in the future — deadlines that now, magically, are receding into the past. My God, did I really tell someone I would write an article called “Teaching Claude McKay”? Before we know it, the summer is eaten up, we’re still behind on our e-mail, and the fall semester looms.

On paper, the academic life looks great. As many as 15 weeks off in the summer, four in the winter, one in the spring, and then, usually, only three days a week on campus the rest of the time. Anybody who tells you this wasn’t part of the lure of a job in higher education is lying. But one finds out right away in graduate school that in fact the typical professor logs an average of 60 hours a week, and the more successful professors work even more — including not just 14-hour days during the school year, but 10-hour days in the summer as well.

Why, then, does there continue to be a glut of fresh Ph.D.’s? It isn’t the pay scale, which, with a few lucky exceptions, offers the lowest years-of-education-to-income ratio possible. It isn’t really the work itself, either. Yes, teaching and research are rewarding, but we face as much drudgery as in any professional job. Once you’ve read 10,000 freshman essays, you’ve read them all.

But we academics do have something few others possess in this postindustrial world: control over our own time. All the surveys point to this as the most common factor in job satisfaction. The jobs in which decisions are made and the pace set by machines provide the least satisfaction, while those, like mine, that foster at least the illusion of control provide the most.

Left to our own devices, we seldom organize our time with 8-to-5 discipline. The pre-industrial world of agricultural and artisan labor was structured by what the historian E. P. Thompson calls “alternate bouts of intense labor and of idleness wherever men were in control of their working lives.” Agricultural work was seasonal, interrupted by rain, forced into hyperactivity by the threat of rain, and determined by other uncontrollable natural processes. The force of long cultural habit ensured that the change from such discontinuous tasks to the regimented labor of the factory never went particularly smoothly.

In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers could never be counted on to do a straight shift’s work. They would “come down to the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars,” he complained to The New York Herald, “and then go to a beer saloon and play pinochle or some other game.” The workers would return when they pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then revisit the saloon, all told “working probably two or three hours a day.” Cigar makers in Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their right to leave the shop at any time without their foreman’s permission.

In this the cigar workers were typical. American manufacturing laborers came and left for the day at different times. “Monday,” one manufacturer complained, was always “given up to debauchery,” and on Saturdays, brewery wagons came right to the factory, encouraging workers to celebrate payday. Daily breaks for “dramming” were common, with workers coming and going from the work place as they pleased. Their workdays were often, by 20th-century standards, riddled with breaks for meals, snacks, wine, brandy and reading the newspaper aloud to fellow workers.

An owner of a New Jersey iron mill made these notations in his diary over the course of a single week:

“All hands drunk.”

“Jacob Ventling hunting.”

“Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach.”

“Peter Cox very drunk.”

“Edward Rutter off a-drinking.”

At the shipyards, too, workers stopped their labor at irregular intervals and drank heavily. One ship’s carpenter in the mid-19th century described an almost hourly round of breaks for cakes, candy and whiskey, while some of his co-workers “sailed out pretty regularly 10 times a day on the average” to the “convenient grog-shops.” Management attempts to stop such midday drinking breaks routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots. During much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-control than there were about pay or working hours.

I was recently offered a non-teaching job that would have almost doubled my salary, but which would have required me to report to an office in standard 8-to-5 fashion. I turned it down, and for a moment I felt like the circus worker in the joke: he follows the elephant with a shovel, and when offered another job responds, “What, and give up show business?”

Really, though, I’m more like Jacob Ventling and Edward Rutter. I don’t go out 10 times a day for a dram of rum, but I could. And in fact, maybe I will. Next summer.

Tom Lutz is the author of “Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America.”

DUNDALK, Md. — At first, Michael Walton, starting at community college here, was sure that there was some mistake. Having done so well in high school in West Virginia that he graduated a year and a half early, how could he need remedial math?

Eighteen and temperamental, Mickey, as everyone calls him, hounded the dean, insisting that she take another look at his placement exam. The dean stood firm. Mr. Walton’s anger grew. He took the exam a second time. Same result.

“I flipped out big time,’’ Mr. Walton said.

Because he had no trouble balancing his checkbook, he took himself for a math wiz. But he could barely remember the Pythagorean theorem and had trouble applying sine, cosine and tangent to figure out angles on the geometry questions.

Mr. Walton is not unusual. As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

Though higher education is now a near-universal aspiration, researchers suggest that close to half the students who enter college need remedial courses.

The shortfalls persist despite high-profile efforts by public universities to crack down on ill-prepared students.

Since the City University of New York, the largest urban public university, barred students who need remediation from attending its four-year colleges in 1999, others have followed with similar steps.

California State set an ambitious goal to cut the proportion of unprepared freshmen to 10 percent by 2007, largely by testing them as high school juniors and having them make up for deficiencies in the 12th grade.

Cal State appears nowhere close to its goal. In reading alone, nearly half the high school juniors appear unprepared for college-level work.

Aside from New York City’s higher education system, at least 12 states explicitly bar state universities from providing remedial courses or take other steps like deferred admissions to steer students needing helping toward technical or community colleges.

Some students who need to catch up attend two- and four-year institutions simultaneously.

The efforts, educators say, have not cut back on the thousands of students who lack basic skills. Instead, the colleges have clustered those students in community colleges, where their chances of succeeding are low and where taxpayers pay a second time to bring them up to college level.

The phenomenon has educators struggling with fundamental questions about access to education, standards and equal opportunity.

Michael W. Kirst, a Stanford professor who was a co-author of a report on the gap between aspirations and college attainment, said that 73 percent of students entering community colleges hoped to earn four-year degrees, but that only 22 percent had done so after six years.

“You can get into school,” Professor Kirst said. “That’s not a problem. But you can’t succeed.’’

Nearly half the 14.7 million undergraduates at two- and four-year institutions never receive degrees. The deficiencies turn up not just in math, science and engineering, areas in which a growing chorus warns of difficulties in the face of global competition, but also in the basics of reading and writing.

According to scores on the 2006 ACT college entrance exam, 21 percent of students applying to four-year institutions are ready for college-level work in all four areas tested, reading, writing, math and biology.

For many students, the outlook does not improve after college. The Pew Charitable Trusts recently found that three-quarters of community college graduates were not literate enough to handle everyday tasks like comparing viewpoints in newspaper editorials or calculating the cost of food items per ounce.

The unyielding statistics showcase a deep disconnection between what high school teachers think that their students need to know and what professors, even at two-year colleges, expect them to know.

At Cal State, the system admits only students with at least a B average in high school. Nevertheless, 37 percent of the incoming class last year needed remedial math, and 45 percent needed remedial English.

“Students are still shocked when they’re told they need developmental courses,’’ said Donna McKusik, the senior director of developmental, or remedial, education at the Community College of Baltimore County. “They think they graduated from a high school, they should be ready for college.’’

Across the nation, federal and state education officials are pressing for a K-16 vision of education that runs from kindergarten through college graduation. Such an approach, they say, would help high schools better prepare students for college.

In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush appointed a Board of Regents to oversee education at all public institutions, from elementary through bachelor’s programs. At Cal State, professors are advising 12th-grade teachers on preparing students to succeed in college.

Starting at a Deficit

As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college’s interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover.

“They’ve listened in class, taken notes and taken the test off of that,’’ Dr. Starr said.

Though remedial needs are high, Dr. Starr said, the courses offer something invaluable, the chance to overcome basic deficiencies in reading, writing or math.

“You have to figure the cost to society on the other side if you don’t educate these students,’’ he said.

Most of the students expect the transition to community college to be seamless. But the first, and sometimes last, stop for many are remedial math classes.

“It’s the math that’s killing us,’’ Dr. McKusik said.

The sheer numbers of enrollees like Mr. Walton who have to take make-up math is overwhelming, with 8,000 last year among the nearly 30,000 degree-seeking students systemwide. Not all those students come directly from high school. Many have taken off a few years and may have forgotten what they learned, Dr. McKusik said.

More than one in four remedial students work on elementary and middle school arithmetic. Math is where students often lose confidence and give up.

“It brings up a lot of emotional stuff for them,’’ Dr. McKusik said.

She told of 20 students who had just burst into tears on receiving their math entrance exam scores and walked out on college. Mr. Walton remembers a fellow student who failed to hand in a math assignment for the fourth time in the last week of class and learned that he would fail. The student lunged toward the professor and said, “I’ll kill you.”

“You can say whatever you want, but this really isn’t helping your grade,” the professor replied, Mr. Walton said.

The student stormed out the door with a final expletive, leaving the professor shaken.

Fear of Appearing Ignorant

The biggest challenge, professors say, is trying to engage students, to persuade them that ideas matter. Dr. McKusik suspects that behind the apathy is a fear of appearing ignorant.

“Everything in society is geared to celebrate, to value, the winner,” she said. “These are students who haven’t been at the top. They won’t show themselves as vulnerable at all.’’

With most students having commitments to jobs and families, community colleges typically offer little in the way of a social life or school spirit. So they need to find ways to reach their less traditional audience.

“That’s why we’re trying to use pop culture in the classroom, to get their attention,’’ said Betsy Gooden, an English teacher who, in a remedial reading class one day last spring, tried to coax students to discuss a television documentary.

Two or three students in a class of 10 women carried most of the discussion, which seemed more like Ricky Lake than Lit 101, with students reacting to the film almost exclusively in terms of their personal experiences.

They covered love, sex and cheating boyfriends. Before the class was over, two women disclosed that they had been raped. About half the students said nothing at all.

Karen Olson, a history professor, and David Truscello, who teaches English, are trying another common strategy, mixing remedial work with other subjects. They are co-teachers of a course that combines African-American history with composition.

Professor Olson says teachers should stop making “unrealistic assignments’’ like chapters from “600-page textbooks’’ and should meet students at their level, raising abilities by degrees.

In her class, she assigns more manageable readings and carves up the load, so no student is responsible for doing it all.

“It’s not like they’re living four years in a dorm,’’ Professor Truscello said.

Most are working, sometimes at more than one job.

“That impinges on everything,’’ he added. “I have students who take two buses to come to school. It’s amazing that they do it.’’

Solutions and Successes

Another part of the solution at community colleges is in Student Success Centers. They are actually tutoring centers. Dundalk’s is opens 63 hours a week.

Along a wall is a rack of handouts explaining points of grammar that might have last been explicitly taught in middle school, a measure of the immense ground to be made up. One covers comparative adjectives, explaining “more” vs. “most” or “smarter” vs. “smartest.” Another discusses using pronouns and verb tenses.

At one table, Kirn Shahzadi, 20, once an A student at Parkville High School, was being tutored a few hours before her final in remedial algebra. In addition to math, Ms. Shahzadi needed remedial courses in reading and one in helping with basic skills like note taking, researching and organizing schedules. By the second week of that course, she said, half the students had dropped out.

Still, the school has winners who make it through and feel that they have to fit into the changing workplace.

Mr. Walton said careers like his father’s as a welder for a major construction company were now harder to find. His father rose to foreman, putting Mr. Walton’s older brother through Johns Hopkins University.

Mr. Walton, who married soon after high school, put himself through the Baltimore community college working as a security guard at $7.80 an hour. He has had shoplifters pull knives on him and spray him with Mace, he said.

His salary covered the utilities and phone bills, and left his wife, an administrative assistant at Johns Hopkins, to pay the mortgage. He added that at times he suspected that she had felt more like a caretaker than a wife, and he worried for their future.

“I know she’s sick and tired of taking care of me,’’ he said in May. “It’s rip-your-hair-out-at-night difficult.’’

But Mr. Walton made it through that remedial math class four years ago, ultimately praising the dean for standing firm. In June, he crossed a stage to receive an associate’s degree in computer science. Next year, he plans to earn another degree in, of all things, math.

He said he would like to earn a full bachelor’s, but hesitates.

“I’m scared to death of going to college,’’ he said. “I’ll be up to my eyeballs in debt.’’

This summer he sent his résumé even to employers demanding bachelor’s degrees and several years’ experience, hoping that his enthusiasm would compensate where credentials fell short. He sought positions that included tuition breaks for employees.

His strategy paid off with two offers, one in data entry at the community college here, a job he held on work study before graduating, and another as a technician repairing copying machines. Mr. Walton went for the second.

It offers benefits, tuition reimbursement and a salary of $22,850 a year, with extra money toward buying a new car every few years.

“I feel a little bit more — I don’t want to say confident — but maybe worthy,’’ Mr. Walton said. “Now, I feel like I’m all that, and a bag of chips.’’