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On that Sumerian love poem

The Oldest Line in the World
By SEBNEM ARSU

ISTANBUL, Feb. 13 — It is as tiny as the sleekest mobile phones that fit in the palm of the hand, but its message is anything but modern. A small tablet in a special display this month in the Istanbul Museum of the Ancient Orient is thought to be the oldest love poem ever found, the words of a lover from more than 4,000 years ago.

The ancient Sumerian tablet was unearthed in the late 1880's in Nippur, a region in what is now Iraq, and had been resting quietly in a modest corner of the museum until it was brought back to the limelight this year by a company that made it part of a Valentine's Day promotion.

The poem sits among Sumerian documents such as a court verdict from 2030 B.C. breaking an engagement, a property sale and documentation of a murder. Despite the tablets' ancient lineage, they had gone relatively unnoticed by most museum visitors until the company provided the money to make it the centerpiece of a special exhibit.

"It must be written by a man desperately in love with the rich princess," guessed Choi Na Kyoung, 27, a tourist from Korea, examining the love poem on clay on a recent day. But she was mistaken.

The tablet in fact contains a daring — and risqué — ballad in which a priestess professes her love for a king, though it is believed that the words are in fact a script for a ceremonial re-creation of a fable by the priestess and the king, Su-Sin. The priestess represents Inanna, the Goddess of Love and Fertility, and the king represents Dumuzi, the God of Shepherds, on the eve of their union.

"Bridegroom, dear to my heart, Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet,'" the first line in the cuneiform tablet reads. '"You have captivated me, let me stand trembling before you; Bridegroom, I would be taken to the bedchamber."

He apparently does. "Bridegroom, you have taken your pleasure of me," the poem continues. "Tell my mother, she will give you delicacies; my father, he will give you gifts."

Turkey is second only to the United States in its collection of Sumerian documents. Muazzez Hilmiye Cig, 93, a retired historian at the museum who is one of only a few people in Turkey who can read the text, said she was fascinated by the way Sumerians perceived love. "They did not have sexual taboos in love," she said. "Instead, they believed that only love and passion could bring them fertility, and therefore praised pleasures."

In the agriculture-based Sumerian community, she said, lovemaking between the king and the priestess would have been seen as a way to ensure the fertility of their crops, and therefore the community's welfare, for another year.

Ms. Cig said she worked with Professor Samuel Noah Kramer in 1951, and that he had identified the tablet, among 74,000 others, during years of studies in the Istanbul museum. Their translation of this tablet also shed light on the Song of Solomon in the Old Testament, she said, because some phrases are similar to poems sung during Sumerian weddings and fertility feasts. "This filled the missing link between religious texts of the different periods," she said.

In today's world, of course, Valentine's Day also combines love with commerce. Bisse, a Turkish shirtmaker known for its support for archeological studies, provided the funds for the special display and promoted the exhibit by giving away replicas of the love poem at its stores.

"We need such financial support," said Dr. Ismail Karamut, director of the museum, adding that he would like to have more financial autonomy, as many European museums do.

As she held the transcription of the poem, Ms. Cig smiled. "After all these years, very little has changed," she said. "There's still jealousy, unfaithfulness and sexuality in affairs of love as in the times of Sumerians. I just wished whoever has written the poem could see how popular the tablet has now become."

"Maybe You're Not What You Eat"

Maybe You're Not What You Eat
By GINA KOLATA

In an early 19th-century best seller, a famous food writer offered a cure for obesity and chronic disease: a low-carbohydrate diet.

The notion that what you eat shapes your medical fate has exerted a strong pull throughout history. And its appeal continues to this day, medical historians and researchers say.

"It's one of the great principles — no, more than principles, canons — of American culture to suggest that what you eat affects your health," says James Morone, a professor of political science at Brown University.

"It's this idea that you control your own destiny and that it's never too late to reinvent yourself," he said. "Vice gets punished and virtue gets rewarded. If you eat or drink or inhale the wrong things you get sick. If not, you get healthy."

That very American canon, he and others say, may in part explain the criticism and disbelief that last week greeted a report that a low-fat diet might not prevent breast cancer, colon cancer or heart disease, after all.

The report, from a huge federal study called the Women's Health Initiative, raises important questions about how much even the most highly motivated people can change their eating habits and whether the relatively small changes that they can make really have a substantial effect on health.

The study, of nearly 49,000 women who were randomly assigned to follow a low-fat diet or not, found that the diet did not make a significant difference in development of the two cancers or heart disease. But there were limitations to the findings: the women assigned to the low-fat diet, despite extensive and expensive counseling, never reached their goal of eating 20 percent fat in the first year —only 31 percent of them got their dietary fat that low. And the study did not examine the effects of different types of fat — a fact that critics say is a weakness at a time when doctors are advising heart patients to reduce saturated fat in the diet, not overall fats.

The researchers also found a slight suggestion that low fat might make a difference in breast cancer but the results were not statistically significant, meaning they may have occurred by chance.

Still the study's results frustrate our primal urge to control our destinies by controlling what we put in our mouths. And when it comes to this urge, it is remarkable how history repeats itself. Over and over again, medical experts and self-styled medical experts have insisted that one diet or another can prevent disease, cure chronic illness and ensure health and longevity. And woe unto those who ignore such dietary precepts.

For example, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, the French 19th-century food writer, insisted that the secret to good health was to avoid carbohydrates. Brillat-Savarin, a lawyer, also knew the response his advice would provoke.

" 'Oh Heavens!' all you readers of both sexes will cry out, 'oh Heavens above!" he wrote in his 1825 book, "The Physiology of Taste." "But what a wretch the Professor is! Here in a single word he forbids us everything we must love, those little white rolls from Limet, and Achard's cakes and those cookies, and a hundred things made with flour and butter, with flour and sugar, with flour and sugar and eggs!"

Brillat-Savarin continued, "He doesn't even leave us potatoes or macaroni! Who would have thought this of a lover of good food who seemed so pleasant?

" 'What's this I hear?' I exclaim, putting on my severest face, which I do perhaps once a year. 'Very well then; eat! Get fat! Become ugly and thick, and asthmatic, finally die in your own melted grease."

The Frenchman's recipe for good health was only one of many to come. A decade later, the Rev. Sylvester Graham exhorted Americans to eat simple foods like grains and vegetables and to drink water.

Beef and pork, salt and pepper, spices, tea and coffee, alcohol, he advised, all lead to gluttony. Bread should be unleavened, and made with bran to avoid the problem of yeast, which turns sugar into alcohol, he continued. It is also important, he said, to seek out fresh organic fruits and vegetables, grown in soil without fertilizers.

The reward for living right, Graham promised, would be perfect health.

A few decades later came Horace Fletcher, a wealthy American businessman who invented his diet in 1889. He was 40 and in despair: he was fat, his health was failing, he was always tired and he had indigestion. He felt, he said, like "a thing fit but to be thrown on the scrap-heap."

But Fletcher found a method that, he wrote, saved his life: eat only when you are hungry; eat only those foods that your appetite is craving; stop when you are no longer hungry and, the dictum for which he was most famous, chew every morsel of food until there is no more taste to be extracted from it.

Fletcher became known as the Great Masticator, and his followers recited and followed his instructions to chew their food 100 times a minute. Liquids, too, had to be chewed, he insisted. He promised that "Fletcherizing," as it became known, would turn "a pitiable glutton into an intelligent epicurean."

Along with the endless chewing, Fletcher and his supporters also advocated a low-protein diet as a means to health and well-being.

But by 1919, when Fletcher, 68, died of a heart attack, his diet plan was on its way out, supplanted by the next new thing: counting calories. Its champions were two Yale professors, Irving Fisher and Eugene Lyman Fisk, who wrote the best-selling book "How to Live."

"Constant vigilance is necessary, yet it is worthwhile when one considers the inconvenience as well as the menace of obesity," Fisher and Fisk advised their readers.

More recently, of course, the preferred diet, at least for cancer prevention, has been to eat foods low in fat. And that was what led to the Women's Health Initiative, a study financed by the National Institutes of Health comparing low fat to regular diets.

Eight years later, the women who reduced dietary fat had the same rates of colon cancer, breast cancer and heart disease as those whose diets were unchanged.

They also weighed about the same and had no difference in diabetes rates, or in levels of insulin or blood sugar.

It made sense to try the low-fat diet for cancer prevention, said Dr. Elizabeth Nabel, the director of the Women's Health Initiative.

"In the mid- to late 1980's, there was a body of literature that was suggestive that diet might impact the incidence of breast cancer and colorectal cancer," Dr. Nabel said.

For example, studies found that women acquired a higher risk of those cancers if they moved to the United States from countries where incidence of the cancers was low and where diets were low in fat.

And there were animal studies indicating that a high-fat diet could lead to more mammary cancer.

But intriguing as those observations were, there was no direct, rigorous evidence that a low-fat diet was protective.

The Women's Health Initiative study would be the first rigorous test to see if it was. The study investigators decided to follow heart disease rates, as well.

"Think of it," said Dr. Joan McGowan, an osteoporosis expert who is also a project officer for the Women's Health Initiative. "Here was a hypothesis that just a better diet could prevent breast cancer. How attractive was that?"

In the meantime, the notion that fat was bad and that low-fat diets could protect against disease took hold, with scientists promoting it and much of the public believing it. And a low-fat food industry grew apace.

In 2005, according to the NPD Group, which tracks food trends, 75 percent of Americans said they substituted a low-fat or no-fat food for a higher-fat one once a week or more.

So last week, when the study's results, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, showed that the low-fat diets had no effect, the study investigators braced themselves for attacks.

Dr. Jacques Rossouw, the project officer for the Women's Health Initiative, said the researchers knew that some critics would say the women did not reduce the fat in their diets nearly enough. Perhaps a lower-fat diet would have offered some protection against cancer, Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, "what we achieved is probably what was achievable."

Other critics said that the study made a mistake in even aiming for 20 percent of calories as fat. Dietary fat should be even lower, they said, as low as 10 percent.

But Dr. Rossouw said this was unrealistic, because try as they might, people are not able to change their eating habits that much.

"You can't do that," he said. "Forget it. It's impossible."

Critics now are telling the investigators that the study was useless because it focused on total fat in the diet, rather than on saturated fat, which raises cholesterol levels. If the women had focused instead on getting rid of fats like butter, had substituted fats like olive oil and had eaten more fruits and grains, then the study might have shown that the proper diet reduces heart disease risk, they claim.

"Lifestyle goes beyond a modest difference in saturated fat," said Dr. Robert H. Eckel, president of the American Heart Association.

Dr. Rossouw responded, "They're telling us that we chose the wrong kind of fat and that we just didn't know."

But, he said: "We're not stupid. We knew all that stuff."

The investigators, he said, had long debates about whether to ask the women to reduce total fat or just saturated fat.

In the end, they decided to go with total fat because the study was primarily a cancer study and the cancer data were for total fat.

If the women had reduced just their saturated fat, their dietary fat content would probably have been even higher, fueling the critics. And, he said, some animal data indicate that polyunsaturated fat may even increase cancer risk.

"We looked at all possible scenarios," Dr. Rossouw said. But, he said, given the study's disappointing findings, he was not surprised by the critics' responses.

Not everyone is attacking the study. Many scientists applaud its findings and say it is about time that some cherished dietary notions are put to a rigorous test. And some nonscientists are shocked by the reactions of the study's critics.

"Whatever is happening to evidence-based treatment?" Dr. Arthur Yeager, a retired dentist in Edison, N.J., wrote in an e-mail message. "When the facts contravene conventional wisdom, go with the anecdotes?"

The problem, some medical scientists said, is that many people — researchers included — get so wedded to their beliefs about diet and disease that they will not accept rigorous evidence that contradicts it.

"Now it's almost a political sort of thing," said Dr. Jules Hirsch, physician in chief emeritus at Rockefeller University. "We're all supposed to be lean and eat certain things."

And so the notion of a healthful diet, he said, has become more than just a question for scientific inquiry.

"It is woven into cultural notions of ourselves and our behavior," he said. "This is the burden you get going into a discussion, and this is why we get so shocked by this evidence."

The truth, said Dr. David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist at Massachusetts General Hospital, is that while the Western diet and lifestyle are clearly important risk factors for chronic disease, tweaking diet in one way or another — a bit less fat or a few more vegetables — may not, based on studies like the Women's Health Initiative, have major effects on health. "We should limit strong advice to where randomized trials have proven a benefit of lifestyle modification," Dr. Altshuler wrote in an e-mail message.

Still, he said, he understands the appeal of dietary prescriptions.

The promise of achieving better health through diet can be so alluring that even scientists and statisticians who know all about clinical trial data say they sometimes find themselves suspending disbelief when it comes to diet and disease.

"I fall for it, too," says Brad Efron, a Stanford statistician. "I really don't believe in the low-fat thing, but I find myself doing it anyway."

On the importance of science and science news

Someday the Sun Will Go Out and the World Will End (but Don't Tell Anyone)
By DENNIS OVERBYE

I've always been proud of my irrelevance.

When I raised my hand to speak at our weekly meetings here in the science department, my colleagues could be sure they would hear something weird about time travel or adventures in the fifth dimension. Something to take them far from the daily grind. Enough to taunt the mind, but not enough to attract the attention of bloggers, editors, politicians and others who keep track of important world affairs.

So imagine my surprise to find the origin of the universe suddenly at the white hot center of national politics. Last week my colleague Andrew Revkin reported that a 24-year-old NASA political appointee with no scientific background, George C. Deutsch, had told a designer working on a NASA Web project that the Big Bang was "not proven fact; it is opinion," and thus the word "theory" should be used with every mention of Big Bang.

It was not NASA's place, he said in an e-mail message, to make a declaration about the origin of the universe "that discounts intelligent design by a creator."

In a different example of spinning science news last month, NASA headquarters removed a reference to the future death of the sun from a press release about the discovery of comet dust around a distant star known as a white dwarf. A white dwarf, a shrunken dense cinder about the size of earth, is how our own sun is fated to spend eternity, astronomers say, about five billion years from now, once it has burned its fuel.

"We are seeing the ghost of a star that was once a lot like our sun," said Marc Kuchner of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In a statement that was edited out of the final news release he went on to say, "I cringed when I saw the data because it probably reflects the grim but very distant future of our own planets and solar system."

An e-mail message from Erica Hupp at NASA headquarters to the authors of the original release at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said, "NASA is not in the habit of frightening the public with doom and gloom scenarios."

Never mind that the death of the sun has been a staple of astronomy textbooks for 50 years.

Dean Acosta, NASA's deputy assistant administrator for public affairs, said the editing of Dr. Kuchner's comments was part of the normal "give and take" involved in producing a press release. "There was not one political person involved at all," he said.

Personally, I can't get enough of gloom- and-doom scenarios. I'm enchanted by the recent discovery, buttressed by observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, that an antigravitational force known as dark energy might suck all galaxies out of the observable universe in a few hundred billion years and even rip apart atoms and space. But I never dreamed that I might be frightening the adults.

What's next? Will future presidential candidates debate the ontological status of Schrödinger's cat? That's the cat that, according to the uncertainty principle of quantum physics, is both alive and dead until we observe it.

Apparently science does matter.

Dreading the prospect that they too may be dragged into the culture wars, astronomers have watched from the sidelines in recent years as creationists in Kansas and Pennsylvania challenged the teaching of evolution in classrooms. Never mind that the Big Bang has been officially accepted by the Roman Catholic Church for half a century. The notion of a 14-billion-year-old cosmos doesn't fit if you believe the Bible says the world is 6,000 years old.

And indeed there have been sporadic outbreaks, as evidenced by the bumper stickers and signs you see in some parts of the country: "Big Bang? You've got to be kidding — God."

When the Kansas school board removed evolution from the science curriculum back in 1999, they also removed the Big Bang.

In a way, the critics have a point. The Big Bang is indeed only a theory, albeit a theory that covers the history of creation as seamlessly as could be expected from the first fraction of a second of time until today. To call an idea "a theory" is to accord it high status in the world of science. To pass the bar, a theory must make testable predictions — that stars eventually blow out or that your computer will boot up.

Sometimes those predictions can be, well, a little disconcerting. When you're talking about the birth or death of the universe, a little denial goes a long way.

That science news is sometimes managed as carefully as political news may not come as a surprise to most adults. After all, the agencies that pay for most scientific research in this country have billion-dollar budgets that they have to justify to the White House and the Congress. It helps to have newspaper clippings attesting to your advancement of the president's vision.

It's enough to make you feel sorry for NASA, whose very charter mandates high visibility for both its triumphs and its flops, but which has officers recently requiring headquarters approval before consenting to interviews with the likes of me.

The recent peek behind the curtains of this bureaucracy has been both depressing and exciting. So they are paying attention after all.

They should be paying attention, but I'm not looking forward to having to include more politicians and bureaucrats in my rounds of the ever-expanding, multi-dimensional universe (or universes).

I'll do it, but, lacking the gene for street smarts, I fear being played like a two-bit banjo. I'm even happy to go star-gazing with Dick Cheney, if duty so calls, but only if he agrees to disarm and I can wear a helmet.

On driving and walking and health

Time to Get Out, for the Body and the Mind
By JANE E. BRODY

After spending a weekend in the country, my grandson Stefan, then 5, remarked: "The good thing about the country is you can go pee-pee outside. The bad thing about the country is you have to drive everywhere."

Spoken like a true city boy, born and bred, who with his twin brother, Tomas, is used to getting from place to place on foot, on scooter, on bicycle, on a bus or train, but rarely in a car. But in the country, as in most suburbs of the United States, it's "get in the car" to go to the grocery store, the drugstore, the playground, the soccer field, the Y, even to the house next door.

"Kids today are better at running a software program than running a mile," said Mark Dessauer, communications director of Active Living by Design. "They have stronger thumbs than legs." Active Living is a national program to promote increased activity among people of all ages.

Thanks to the post-World War II building boom, driven by a surge in car ownership, the need for housing for returning G.I.'s and government-subsidized road building, America spread out and systematically programmed itself into a motor-driven sedentary society that is now taking a serious toll on the nation's health.

A 1995 study by the Transportation Department of found that children's nonmotorized trips to school had declined 40 percent in the previous 20 years and that adults' trips on foot dropped 42 percent in that same period. One-quarter of all trips are a mile or shorter, yet three-fourths of them are made by car. Not surprising, the number of vehicle miles traveled rose 250 percent from 1960 to 1997. With an increasing focus on roads to accommodate sprawl, sidewalks and protected crossings were often forgotten so that even people willing to walk could not do so safely.

Restoring Person Power

One major result of this failure to use "person power" is that children and adults today are fatter than ever. Diabetes rates are soaring, and an increase in hypertension and heart disease cannot be far behind. Furthermore, mounting evidence suggests that a sedentary life is bad for emotional and cognitive well-being. Then there is the pollution from motor vehicles and the stress associated with long and congested commutes that take an additional toll on health.

Currently, just a minority of Americans achieve the minimum recommended amount of physical activity — 30 minutes a day at least 5 days a week — and 60 percent get no exercise.

Impediments include lack of time (especially when hours a day are spent commuting), unsafe neighborhoods and, perhaps most important of all, no convenient and enticing place to be active.

Congress has not helped matters. Several years ago, it voted to increase financing for highways but against more money for bike lanes.

It is time to make changes, in what planners call the "built environment," to give more people the opportunity to become physically active and remain so. "It's not just a question of health. It's also quality of life," Mr. Dessauer said. "Can I walk to the store, bike to the park, see my neighbors out on the street?"

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is underwriting the $15.5 million active-living program in 25 communities to test the widely held belief that making the built environment friendlier to pedestrians and cyclists will encourage more people to become active and increase activity among those now less-than-optimally active.

Each of the 25 communities (of the 963 that applied) has received a five-year grant of $200,000 to create partnerships of programs, promotions, policy changes and physical projects like sidewalks, bike lanes and racks, speed bumps and striped crossings aimed at making the community safer and more accessible to those willing to use their feet.

The philosophy is that a holistic approach, not just education, is needed to change people's behavior. One such project is under way at the site of Denver's old Stapleton Airport that will eventually be five town centers with 30,000 residents, 35,000 jobs and 2 square miles of city parks.

The 1,500 residents of the first finished neighborhood can walk to two parks; a swimming pool; an elementary school; and a town center with a grocery store, drugstore and restaurants, as well as bus service. The sidewalks, narrow streets, parkways and greenways are links to 150 miles of Denver trails.

Chapel Hill, N.C., the base of Active Living by Design, is another test case. There, a mile from the University of North Carolina, a community called Carolina North is being developed.

A combination of homes, stores, parks and playgrounds will result in a "mixed-use community of pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods well connected to Chapel Hill's network of sidewalks and bus routes," the planners say.

In still another project in the South Bronx, a part of the Sheridan Expressway will become a greenway where people can walk, bike and plant gardens. "We're not anticar; we're pro-choice," Mr. Dessauer said. "People should have the option to walk and bike, as well as drive."

Even without the support of a major foundation, communities and individuals can do much to promote healthful activities among their fellow residents. Mr. Dessauer suggested supporting bond measures to establish or extend trails where people can walk and bike. When new housing developments are proposed, zoning requirements should include building sidewalks and safe play areas. Cluster housing, leaving a large community-accessible area in the middle, is a concept gaining acceptance in many areas.

Making Your Next Move

When moving to a new home, consider whether the neighborhood has sidewalks and how close the home is to shopping, schools, parks or exercise centers. Can children walk or bike to school? Is there a trail or park or playground nearby where you or your children can run around and play and get the 30 minutes a day of moderately intense activity that can preserve health?

Is the neighborhood safe and accessible for older adults who may not have cars or may be too old to drive?

If possible, support programs like Rails to Trails, which establishes walking and biking trails all over the country on unused railroad tracks. These trails, found in many urban, suburban and rural areas, often pass through some of the most beautiful countryside.

Encourage transportation authorities to establish bike paths, install traffic lights, create pedestrian islands and hatched crossings and close neighborhood boulevards to traffic on weekends.

Get children involved in fostering active programs, perhaps through fund-raising (though, please, not selling candy), selling raffles or distributing fliers. If possible, volunteer to be a parent chaperon from time to time so that children can be taken to activity areas beyond the school and become better acquainted with what's available in the neighborhood.

The bottom line? Being healthy is not just a matter of avoiding illness. It also means feeling strong and vibrant, able to walk up stairs, carry a child or bag of groceries and otherwise perform life's activities without becoming breathless or exhausted, no matter what your age.

Money was spent to prove that the number of people who have already downloaded a song influences how many people will download it in the future. This is science. (There's more)

In Music, Others' Tastes May Help Shape Your Own
By BENEDICT CAREY

Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, classical or baroque, early Los Lobos or late: Taste in music seems a deeply personal matter, guided by a person's unique internal compass. But two new studies suggest that social considerations influence not only the music people buy but the recordings they call their favorites.

In one experiment, social scientists at Columbia University simulated an online music marketplace that included 14,341 participants recruited from teenage interest Internet sites. The researchers provided half the group with a list of obscure rock songs and encouraged them to listen and download the ones they liked.

The teenagers received no other information and did not know who else was participating. The songs were a sampling from a Web site where many virtually unknown bands post their own music.

By tallying song downloads, the investigators produced a rough rating of the songs' quality.

When the other half of the teenagers browsed the same songs, they saw, alongside the titles, the number of previous downloads for each song by other members of their group. And they tended to download at least some of the songs previously chosen, resulting in a top 25 chart significantly different from that of the original group.

By running several simulations of this experiment, the researchers showed that song popularity was not at all predictable when people could see what their peers were doing. Good quality songs tended to do better than poorer ones, but not always: a song called "Lockdown" by 52Metro ranked first in one simulation and 40th out of 48 in another.

"A small group of people making decisions at the beginning had a large influence" on how the songs were ultimately ranked, said Duncan Watts, who, along with Matthew Salganik and Peter Sheridan Dodds, reported the findings in the journal Science.

With little else to guide their choices, people often look to others for cues; curiosity, perhaps along with an urge to affiliate with the group creates a kind of cascade effect in favor of the songs first chosen, Dr. Watts said.

In another report, to be published in Psychological Science, psychologists found that people used musical taste as social currency, to read others' personalities and to reveal their own. The researchers paired off 60 students who did not know one another and instructed them to get acquainted via Internet bulletin boards over a period of six weeks.

The students could talk about whatever they wanted, and music was by far the most popular topic, outpacing movies and sports and all other topics five of the six weeks.

To help determine how music taste is related to personality, the psychologists then had a group of 74 students compile a list of their top 10 albums or CD's. One young man's list included the Miles Davis album "Kind of Blue," and Sonic Youth's "NYC Ghosts and Flowers," as well as John Coltrane recordings; another student's list was all country albums; a third's was dominated by hip-hop, with Lil' Bow Wow the top selection.

After listening to the top 10 compilations, eight judges — also students — rated their peers on standard personality profiles. These ratings were remarkably accurate, when compared with the psychologists' own profiles of the 74 participants.

"They did significantly better on some measures than people do when they see pictures or short films of strangers" in similar studies, Peter Rentfrow of Cambridge University in England said in a telephone interview. Samuel Gosling of the University of Texas was a co-author.

The top 10 lists were particularly good in revealing the authors' taste for variety, intellectual appetite for abstract ideas and willingness to experiment with alternative points of view, a quality psychologists call openness. And a high volume of lyrics in a person's list seemed to roughly reflect sociability, or extroversion, Dr. Rentfrow said.

The top 10 lists revealed little, however, about people's levels of conscientiousness — how neat, responsible and organized they were. "This makes some sense," Dr. Rentfrow said. "You can tell more about these kinds of qualities by looking at a picture."

"At religious universities, disputes over faith and academic freedom"

At Religious Universities, Disputes Over Faith and Academic Freedom
By NEELA BANERJEE

A gay film festival opened at the University of Notre Dame last week with a sold-out showing of "Brokeback Mountain." On Valentine's Day, Notre Dame students staged a production of "The Vagina Monologues."

Though the events have been held for the past few years, it may have been their last time on campus. In speeches and interviews recently, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame's new president, has said that staging the events on campus implies an endorsement of values that conflict with Roman Catholicism.

The film festival had to change its name, and "The Vagina Monologues" was performed in a classroom, not a theater, by a group that was not allowed to sell tickets to raise money for women's groups as it once had.

"Precisely because academic freedom is such a sacred value, we must be clear about its appropriate limits," Father Jenkins said last month in a speech before faculty members and students. "I do not believe that freedom of expression has absolute priority in every circumstance."

The controversies at Notre Dame are the latest and most high profile among disputes at many other religiously affiliated universities about how to promote open inquiry and critical thinking while adhering to the tenets of a given faith. Tensions seem most acute at some Catholic and Baptist universities, in large part because student bodies and faculties have grown more diverse and secular over the years, some theologians and historians said.

For instance, The Catholic University of America in Washington and Providence College in Rhode Island, among others, have sent productions of "The Vagina Monologues" off campus, and four other Catholic colleges have canceled the performances. The Georgia Baptist Convention voted late last year to break with Mercer University in Macon, Ga., in part because the school permitted a gay rights group to operate on campus.

For many, the disputes at Notre Dame arise from different ideas about what it means to be Catholic. Those who oppose the events say they contradict the church's core teachings on human sexuality. Others contend that prohibiting events runs counter to a Catholic intellectual tradition of open-mindedness.

"The Catholic Church in many respects is a multicultural place," said Ed Manier, a professor of philosophy, a graduate of Notre Dame and a Catholic. "Practicing Catholics do not hold exactly the same beliefs about how the faith needs to be translated into the public sector, matters of law or even into issues as serious as moral development of children."

Founded largely by religious orders, Catholic universities were originally meant to educate Catholic immigrants and to train workers for Catholic institutions like hospitals and schools. The struggle to balance academic freedom and adherence to church teachings began in earnest after the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, as many Catholic universities opened further to the secular world and sought to become top-tier schools by hiring more lay faculty members and broadening curriculums.

In 1967, a group of Catholic university presidents, led by the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, issued the Land-of-Lakes Statement, which said a university could not thrive without institutional autonomy and academic freedom, an idea still disputed by some Catholics.

"There was a real effort to beef up the academic respectability of universities," said Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a watchdog group. "Our view is that that went too far, and Catholic colleges strayed from Catholic teaching."

Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind., has 12,000 students, about 85 percent of them Catholic. Compared with other prestigious Catholic universities like Georgetown University and Boston College, Notre Dame has the reputation of being largely more conservative on thorny social issues, including sexuality, students and faculty members said.

In the last three to four years, the university has received "scores of complaints" about the play and the film festival, said Dennis K. Brown, a spokesman. This year, the Queer Film Festival changed its name to Gay and Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, Spectatorships. Mr. Brown said Father Jenkins did not call for the change. Liam Dacey, a recent graduate who founded the festival three years ago, said the university insisted because the old title was deemed celebratory of homosexuality.

The university prohibited "The Vagina Monologues" from fund-raising after it collected $15,000 last year for groups that fight violence against women. The university said the play was an academic event and, as such, was not allowed to raise money. The play's proponents said that the fund-raising was halted because anti-abortion activists complained that the groups involved had given money to support abortion.

Father Jenkins was traveling and answered questions by e-mail. Mr. Brown said the president hoped to articulate his plan for balancing the university's religious and academic missions by the end of the spring semester and that it would include a decision about the sponsorship of the play and the festival.

Father Jenkins has heard from critics on both sides. This month, Bishop John M. D'Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, called for the university to cancel the play. A new group, United for Free Speech, is asking faculty members and students to sign a petition requesting that the university maintain its openness in sponsoring academic endeavors. It has 3,000 signatures, said Kaitlyn Redfield, 21, an organizer.

The central question is whether the school's sponsorship of the film festival and the play, and similar events, amounts to an endorsement of values at odds with Catholic teaching. Father Jenkins commended "The Vagina Monologues" for trying to reduce violence against women. But he objected to the work's "graphic descriptions" of various sexual experiences.

In his speech last month he said. "These portrayals stand apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the view that human sexuality finds its proper expression in the committed relationship of marriage between a man and a woman that is open to the gift of procreation."

Faculty members whose classes explore sexuality and gender worry that their work might be limited because of the subjects they broach, Professor Manier said. "Sponsorship isn't the same as endorsement," he added. "Sponsorship means an idea can be discussed and performance can be discussed."

Some students said that the understanding of academic freedom at a Catholic university should be different from that at a secular university. "We have our own measures of what's good and what's right," said Nicholas Matich, 22, the politics editor of The Irish Rover, a conservative student newspaper. " 'The Vagina Monologues' is performed everywhere else in the academic world. It doesn't mean Notre Dame should do it, too."

Catholic universities do not move in lockstep on controversial issues, and much depends on campus culture, said Michael J. James, executive vice president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Of the 612 American colleges that are staging the play from Feb. 1 to March 8, 35 are Catholic universities, one more than last year, according to V-Day, an anti-violence organization affiliated with the play.

"There are people who say that the play has no place on a Catholic campus," the Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans, wrote last year in a statement sanctioning the play. "To exclude the play from a Catholic campus is to say either that these women are wrong or that their experience has nothing important to say to us. I would argue that these are voices that a Catholic university must listen to if we are to understand human experience and if we are to be faithful to the one who welcomed all men and women."

Catholic teachings seem to allow divergence on complicated issues like human sexuality. In the last decade, the number of gay and lesbian groups at colleges, including religious ones, has risen steadily, according to gay rights and academic groups. Notre Dame does not have an officially sanctioned group for gay and lesbian students. Many other Catholic institutions do, including 24 of the 28 members of the Association of Jesuit Universities and Colleges, an increase from a decade ago, said the Rev. Charles L. Currie, the association president.

Watching the controversy unfold at Notre Dame is Father Hesburgh, who, though long retired, retains a campus office. He said Father Jenkins's effort to define what Notre Dame stood for was important. But in an interview, Father Hesburgh also said a modern university had to face the crucial issues of the times.

"I think the real test of a great university," he said, "is that you are fair to the opposition and that you get their point of view out there. You engage them. You want to get students' minds working. You don't want mindless Catholics. You want intelligent, successful Catholics."

On this year's Mardi Gras

In Mardi Gras, a City Learns to Party Again
By DAN BARRY

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 18 — Trumpets sounded, drums pounded and the feet of a city marched in place, tapping an anticipatory beat on asphalt. Someone gave the noontime signal for a parade to move forward, and it did: exuberant, silly, gaudy, giddy, diminished, defiant.

It could have been just another parade, even just another Mardi Gras parade. But Saturday's train of floats and marching bands — five parades that seemed to blend into one — was the joyous first step of this year's Mardi Gras season in New Orleans, and the first since Hurricane Katrina altered the physical and psychic landscape here nearly six months ago. Every tossed string of beads, every flipped plastic coin carried the weight of added meaning.

While this city tradition of celebration continued, things looked and felt different. The crowds were far thinner than usual, and not because the chilly day had the gray cast of a fish's belly. No more than 200,000 residents have returned to what had been a city of 465,000, and those who ventured to the parade route were joined by only a scattering of tourists. A sense of absence, though gradually lifting, still lingered.

"There's just not as many people in New Orleans anymore," Karen Giorlando said as she kept an eye on her nephew and niece, 8 and 5, whose home in the Lakeview neighborhood was flooded. "Now the parade's all about the kids. They're all stressed. They needed this."

Another example of the differences came with the first club to wheel its garish floats into view: the Krewe of Pontchartrain, as in Lake Pontchartrain, whose waters burst through levees to flood the city.

The krewe's members stood on the floats and tossed out plush toys shaped like grouper, a fish plentiful in the lake. People along St. Charles Avenue ignored the reminders of last year's deluge, calling out for the toys and receiving them with gratitude.

Following the Krewe of Pontchartrain was the Mystic Krewe of Shangri-La, whose founder and longtime captain, Mary Katherine Tusa, stood majestically on the first float, wearing a mask and a huge headdress of red feathers. Her krewe reflected both the damage done by the hurricane and the determination borne of it.

Ms. Tusa said her krewe usually had 26 floats; this year, it had 9. It also usually has 500 members participating; this year, it is 160, because so many members lived in Gentilly, the Ninth Ward and other neighborhoods devastated by the storm.

"They're all displaced, they're all over the place," she said. "I was against riding. I didn't think it was appropriate."

But Ms. Tusa said she gradually had a change of heart. "If this will help this city, come hell or high water, then I'm for the ride," she said. Moments later she was tossing beads with a silly but regal flair.

Few celebrations have caused as much communal doubt and self-examination as this year's Mardi Gras. Is it proper to revel in life when so many have died? Should the city's focus stray from rebuilding for trinkets, beads and silliness?

In the end, the answer became clear, even obvious, to most: Mardi Gras must continue. People reasoned that the local economy desperately needed the help that an extended street party would bring — as much as $1 billion in previous years — and that cultural traditions should be embraced. The city needs to laugh again, to dance again.

In addition, Mardi Gras shows the world that New Orleans is still New Orleans. Since the first celebration in 1857, the festivities have been canceled or severely curtailed 13 times, usually by wars or strikes, but the city refused to grant Hurricane Katrina the distinction of causing the 14th interruption.

Arthur Hardy, the publisher of an annual Mardi Gras guide, said he was being inundated with requests for comments by reporters and television crews from around the world. "We've never had this kind of coverage," Mr. Hardy said. "It's a real opportunity for the rest of the city to show itself."

He even suggested the news angle: "We're very much a tale of two cities. The message is, We're on our way back, but we still have a ways to go."

Just how far the city has to go was demonstrated by its hat-in-hand struggle to cover some of the costs of the revelry. Mardi Gras is a celebration by the people; they organize the clubs, or krewes, and pay for the floats and baubles. But the government still has to pay the police and sanitation costs — and this year, the city is all but broke.

City officials hired a company to attract sponsors, figuring that businesses with lucrative disaster-relief contracts would happily underwrite some of the expense. The effort elicited exactly one sponsor: Glad Products, which gave an unspecified six-figure donation and a gift of 100,000 garbage bags.

On Thursday, just two days before the first official parades, the City Council voted unanimously to spend $2.7 million on police overtime and other city services. It did not, however, indicate where exactly it would find that $2.7 million.

The city had little choice. Parades were planned, and people would still cry out for plastic doubloons hardly worth the expense of breath. Stores would still sell the king cake, in which an infant-like figure baked into it requires a warning: "Caution: Non-Edible Baby Figure Inside This Cake!"

But no one pretends that things are normal here, or that this is just another Mardi Gras. Parade routes have been shortened, the number of parade days cut. Tourism officials say that Mardi Gras usually attracts as many as 1.2 million visitors a year. This year they expect 700,000 at most, although they will not have a precise figure until the largest parades roll in the busy final days of Carnival, which concludes on Fat Tuesday, Feb. 28.

Today's modest parades, though, finally gave residents license to be silly — about the absence of people, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the crazed rhythms of life.

"We don't care if anybody else comes," shouted Diana Sanchez, 53, of the city's West Bank. "We're here for Mardi Gras."

Beside her was a smiling Pat Neie, 68, who one might argue had little to smile about. Her house on the West Bank was flooded, and she is living in a government trailer. "And it leaks," Ms. Neie said, keeping her smile.

Soon Ms. Sanchez, Ms. Neie and thousands of others were cheering, hooting and begging for trinkets as the parades of the krewes of Pontchartrain, Shangri-La, Pygmalion, Pegasus and Sparta rolled up Napoleon Avenue, turned right at the shuttered Copeland's of New Orleans restaurant and continued down St. Charles, along a route that still bears scars from the hurricane.

Leading the way was a band that included students from three different high schools: St. Mary's, flooded out; St. Augustine, flooded out; and Xavier Prep, spared. They combined their talents and marched as the MAX Band.

Men, women and children dressed in colorful tunics and conical hats leaned from floats and tossed strings of beads onto the streets. They twirled through the air and clattered onto the ground or into outstretched hands.

Most of the floats had gentle themes, like "God Bless New Orleans." A few, though, were sassier. One float bearing the likeness of Neptune read: "FEMA, God of the Sea — The One That's in Our Living Room."

The parades shuffled down St. Charles, where the storm-damaged power lines for the famous streetcars will not be ready until at least December. Krewe members hollered and waved as they passed restored homes and restaurants with "Now Hiring" signs and the Williams Super Market, once an emblem of devastation, now under renovation.

The route said: A lot of work remains for this city with no money. But the parades said: Yes, but this is Mardi Gras. Grab yourself some beads.

On Gimbels

Only the Store Is Gone
By DAVID K. RANDALL

WHEN the first apartments in the tower at 125 West 31st Street open next year, some younger residents will have to be forgiven for asking the meaning of the word painted on the building next door.

After all, Gimbels closed nearly a generation ago.

Though Gimbels, a former department store giant, once put up a plucky fight with Macy's, its higher-class rival down the street, the only physical remnant is a long, narrow sign painted on the side of 119 West 31st Street. The top part of the G is missing, removed by some forgotten renovation, but in other respects the sign has been touched only by the hands of time. White block letters one story tall scroll down the side of the building against a green background, just as they did on Sept. 27, 1986, the day when Gimbels closed. The sign marked the store's old warehouse, located between 31st and 32nd Streets.

While the sign is the only material evidence of the store's 76 years in Manhattan, Gimbels is living a new life in that peculiar New York lexicon of things that no longer exist. The Gimbels of "Would Macy's tell Gimbels?," a once-common phrase dismissing the notion that competitors would share business information, has gone the way of the wall of Wall Street, the canal of Canal Street and The New York Herald of Herald Square, surviving only in the popular imagination.

Brooklyn to Macy's Manhattan, Gimbels was beloved by many in its day but never mustered the sophistication and charm of its slightly more upscale neighbor on the other side of 34th Street. Rarely was the store mentioned without reference to its rival, and many New Yorkers always had trouble distinguishing between the two.

The two retail giants were fused in the mind by location, competition and the original movie version of "Miracle on 34th Street," in which the kindly Macy's Santa tells a mother that she can find a pair of roller skates (sold out at his store) at Gimbels.

Its competitor had a parade, but Gimbels had something else: a bargain basement, the first of its kind in New York. And though the store's prices were low, the advertisements did not stint on hyperbole. When the nation's first ballpoint pens went on sale at Gimbels on Oct. 29, 1945, the store ran circulars promoting what was described as "a fantastic, atomic era, miraculous pen." And preceding the slogans of countless used-car dealers, the store boasted, "Nobody but nobody undersells Gimbels."

When Gimbels closed, some business analysts saw the event as marking the end of retail marketed to the middle class, and wondered if 34th Street had a future in retail. It did, of course; the street is still home to Macy's, and the Manhattan Mall set up shop in the former Gimbels building, but a visitor to the street today would also pass a Jack's 99-cent store and street hawkers booming, "Everything you want is five bucks!"

And though high schoolers reading Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel "Gravity's Rainbow" may be left scratching their heads at the book's references to the store — "Your closet could make Norma Shearer's look like the wastebasket in Gimbels basement" — memories are surprisingly long.

The director Jon Favreau concluded that the Gimbels name was worth $5,000, which he paid to Mark and Beth Gimbel of Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the current owners of the trademark, for its use in the 2003 holiday film "Elf." Like the old Penn Station and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Gimbels had become another paramour in the New York love affair with what it has left behind.

On two different religious colleges, one Jewish and one Christian, which share a campus.

Hebrew and Christian Schools in Massachusetts Share Space and an Interfaith Vision
By KATIE ZEZIMA

NEWTON, Mass., Feb. 17 — It all started eight years ago as a sketch on a napkin.

David Gordis, president of Hebrew College, a center for transdenominational Jewish education then located in Brookline, was having lunch with Rodney Peterson, president of the Boston Theological Institute, a consortium of local Christian schools, and casually mentioned that the college was outgrowing its space.

Dr. Peterson said the Andover Newton Theological Seminary, which houses the theological institute here, was looking to sell surplus land on its hilltop campus. He scribbled a picture on a napkin of what the two schools would look like as neighbors. The following day, the deal was on its way to being done, and Hebrew College opened here in 2001.

That vision, one of intense collaboration and interfaith exploration, faltered at first. The institutions opened an interreligious center, but the partnership was weak.

That changed in 2004, when Nick Carter became the president of Andover Newton, a nondenominational Christian college of 400 students. Mr. Carter, after speaking with Dr. Gordis, realized they were focused on creating a generation of spiritual leaders for whom crossing religious borders would be essential. Now the colleges share courses, Seders, Sunday church services and lectures, as well as location.

Students created a group, Journeys on the Hill, which sets up a year's worth of programs and lectures based on the Mishnah, six books that codify Jewish law found in the Torah. Hebrew College's rabbinical school focuses its teachings on a different Mishnah each year. Students at both colleges are encouraged to attend each others' services and take one of several classes that are team-taught by a professor from each institution.

"This conveys the sense that reaching out to the other is not responding to a threat or a problem, but that interrelation with others is a source of enrichment that expands us rather than threatens," Dr. Gordis said.

Curtis Freeman, a professor of religion at the Duke Divinity School, said he did not know of other institutions that had such a close proximity and collaboration. He said the idea of a partnership would probably not have been broached if one of the colleges were evangelical or Orthodox.

"I think there's much more of an interfaith inclination among mainline Protestants than evangelical Protestants," Professor Freeman said. "But the fact of the matter is it's a wonderful thing for Jews and Christians to be in a conversation together."

Students and faculty members said they had not only learned about another religion, but had also forged a deeper connection with their own faith by re-examining basic religious tenets.

For Chaim Koritzinsky, that meant reflecting on the meaning of Passover, which he spoke about with Andover Newton students during a communal Seder.

Exploring Christianity through conversations has enabled him to hear personal, not theologized, accounts of Christianity, Mr. Koritzinsky said, and has allowed him to grapple with Christian and Jewish traditions.

Mr. Koritzinsky said he struggled with the notion of God being a divine presence in his life and the notion of spontaneous prayer. He said that interacting with Christians, who speak of the divine and impulsively pray much more freely than Jews, had inspired him to reflect on those concepts in his life, and would help him convey them to others as a rabbi.

"The more questions you get asked, the more you end up going inside yourself and saying, What do I actually see about this?" he said.

Talking about things like anti-Semitism, Jesus, the public role of deities and Israel has been difficult and painful at times, many at the colleges said, but has forced students and faculty members to consider another viewpoint.

Greg Mobley, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Andover Newton, said the collaboration allowed him to explore with a class why a tone of anti-Judaism emerged in early Christianity. Dr. Mobley said he found that he was very defensive when the subject was broached, and that he ended up talking more about "the problems in Christianity than the beauty of it."

Working with Jewish scholars and students has made him see it as a byproduct of "two groups who had so much in common but who were desperately needing to find their own identity," Dr. Mobley said.

He now teaches a course on the story of Isaac in the Jewish and Christian traditions with Rabbi Or Rose. On a recent Thursday night, students sat in Hevrutah, a Jewish method of discussing text in small groups, and analyzed the practice of child sacrifice in ancient Hebrew tradition and others.

It was, in fact, a thread that ran through a number of Biblical passages, Dr. Mobley said.

"Given some of the dark origins of Jewish and Christian practices," he said, "how does that make us feel about where our traditions came from? Do we prefer to keep the cellar door locked, or do we occasionally reopen it and examine?"

Michael Dinh-Cohen, a rabbinical student, said he felt fortunate to be asked to push those boundaries.

"I'm at a rabbinical school that is so open about exploration that we can look at questions about the development of Judaism in concert with its sister religion," he said. "We let it challenge us and push our understanding beyond any narrow perspectives we may have had."

Edie Crary Howe, 59, a former lawyer who is studying for a master's in divinity at Andover Newton, said she had learned to bridge differences through commonalities. "We're both children of Abraham and children of Noah," Ms. Howe said. "While we have our differences, we need not be so rancorous."