May 13 08:24 AM US/Easter

Albert Einstein described belief in God as "childish superstition" and said Jews were not the chosen people, in a letter to be sold in London this week, an auctioneer said Tuesday.

The father of relativity, whose previously known views on religion have been more ambivalent and fuelled much discussion, made the comments in response to a philosopher in 1954.

As a Jew himself, Einstein said he had a great affinity with Jewish people but said they "have no different quality for me than all other people".

"The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish.

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this," he wrote in the letter written on January 3, 1954 to the philosopher Eric Gutkind, cited by The Guardian newspaper.

The German-language letter is being sold Thursday by Bloomsbury Auctions in Mayfair after being in a private collection for more than 50 years, said the auction house's managing director Rupert Powell.

In it, the renowned scientist, who declined an invitation to become Israel's second president, rejected the idea that the Jews are God's chosen people.

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions," he said.

"And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

And he added: "As far as my experience goes, they are no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything 'chosen' about them."

Previously the great scientist's comments on religion -- such as "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind" -- have been the subject of much debate, used notably to back up arguments in favour of faith.

Powell said the letter being sold this week gave a clear reflection of Einstein's real thoughts on the subject. "He's fairly unequivocal as to what he's saying. There's no beating about the bush," he told AFP.

KUWAIT — In a vast, high-ceilinged tent, Ali al-Rashed sounded an anguished note as he delivered the first speech of his campaign for Parliament.

“Kuwait used to be No. 1 in the economy, in politics, in sports, in culture, in everything,” he said, his voice floating out in the warm evening air to hundreds of potential voters seated on white damask-lined chairs. “What happened?”

It is a question many people are asking as this tiny, oil-rich nation of 2.6 million people approaches its latest round of elections. And the unlikely answer being whispered around, both here and in neighboring countries on the Persian Gulf: too much democracy.

In a region where autocracy is the rule, Kuwait is a remarkable exception, with a powerful and truculent elected Parliament that sets the emir’s salary and is the nation’s sole source of legislation. Women gained the right to vote and run for office two years ago, and a popular movement won further electoral changes.

Despite those gains, Kuwait has been overshadowed by its dynamic neighbors — Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar — where economies are booming under absolute monarchies. Efforts to overhaul Kuwait’s sclerotic welfare state have stalled in its fractious and divided Parliament, and scandals led the emir to dissolve the chamber last month for the second time in less than two years, forcing new elections.

All this has left many Kuwaitis deeply disenchanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy in the region and the continuing chaos in Iraq, just to the north — once heralded as the birthplace of a new democratic model — have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself is one Western import that has not lived up to its advertising.

“People say democracy is just slowing us down, and that we’d be better off if we were more like Dubai,” said Waleed al-Sager, 24, who is advising his father’s campaign for Parliament.

Like many Kuwaitis, Mr. Sager quickly distanced himself from that view. But as the May 17 parliamentary elections approach, with near-constant coverage in a dozen new newspapers and on satellite television stations, candidates refer again and again to a “halat ihbaat” — state of frustration. His father, Mohammed al-Sager, a longtime member of Parliament, delivered his own opening campaign speech shortly after Mr. Rashed two weeks ago, and spent much of it urgently reminding his listeners of the need for an elected assembly.

“Some people have called for a permanent dissolution of Parliament,” he said, his face telecast on an enormous screen to a thick overflow crowd outside the tent. “But everywhere in the world — in Africa, in Palestine, in the old Soviet Union — people have turned to elections to solve their problems, not away from them. Whatever problems we have in our Parliament, we must remember that it is much better than no Parliament at all.”

One source of frustration has been the failure to reform Kuwait’s state-controlled economy. After the 2006 elections, many Kuwaitis were hoping for changes to cumbersome government rules that allow land to be allocated for business projects. Instead, the effort was blocked in Parliament. The slow pace of efforts to privatize the national airline and parts of the oil sector has also caused disappointment.

Many Kuwaitis also complain about government neglect of public hospitals and schools. Problems with the power grid caused brownouts last summer.

Although parts of Kuwait City were rebuilt after the Iraqi invasion of 1990, much of it looks faded and tatty, a striking contrast with the gleaming hyper-modernity of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar.

The current political malaise is especially striking because most Kuwaitis take pride in their nation’s relatively democratic traditions. The ruling Sabah family acquired its position not through conquest, but with an agreement among the coastal traders of the region in the mid-18th century. After Kuwait gained independence from the British in 1961, the emir approved a written Constitution that sharply limited his power in relation to Parliament.

“This ruling family is different from any other ruling family in the region,” said Ghanim al-Najjar, a newspaper columnist and professor of political science at Kuwait University. “They are part of the political process, not on top of it.”

In some ways, Kuwait is the most democratic country in the Arab world, aside from Lebanon. There are Arab republics — in Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia — but despite their democratic forms, those countries have generally been more autocratic and repressive than the region’s monarchies. Even in Lebanon, democracy is limited by a sectarian system of power-sharing.

In Kuwait, by contrast, tensions between the majority Sunnis and minority Shiites are minimal. Kuwaitis of all backgrounds mix socially at diwaniyas, the traditional evening gatherings where political and social gossip is shared over tea and coffee. There is some conflict between Islamists and liberals in Parliament, but with no officially recognized political parties, ideology is flexible and shifting.

And while there have been setbacks — the royal family suspended Parliament in the late 1970s and again in the late 1980s — Kuwait has grown steadily more democratic. Two years ago, popular pressure forced a change in the electoral districting law, making it harder to buy votes. Women gained the right to vote and run in elections (though none have won seats). In mid-April, Kuwaiti democrats won yet another battle after the government tried to pass a law restricting public gatherings. There were popular demonstrations against the proposal, and the government backed down.

But those civic freedoms have come alongside signs of real frustration. Despite the world’s fifth largest oil reserves, many Kuwaitis are upset with the absence of business and investment opportunity, at least as compared with other countries nearby.

At a recent campaign rally, Abdul Rahman al-Anjari, a candidate for Parliament, pounded his fist on the lectern as he recited statistics showing that capital outflow and inflow in Kuwait was a small fraction of the numbers in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.

“What does this mean?” Mr. Anjari said, standing in front of a vast banner bearing his name and those of three other candidates who favor privatization. “It means we are losing jobs to other gulf countries, and for no reason!”

It is unlikely that many Kuwaitis would be willing to trade their political rights and freedoms for more economic opportunity. But the notion that democracy is somehow holding Kuwait back is common.

“It’s true, the friction in our politics delays things,” said Kamel Harami, an oil analyst. “The sheik of Abu Dhabi can say, ‘Go build this,’ and it’s done. He doesn’t have me, the press, the TV stations, the Parliament, getting in his way. But what people need to understand is that democracy isn’t the problem; it’s that democracy isn’t being used correctly.”

Some Kuwaitis say the current emir, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmed al-Sabah, has deliberately fostered the idea that Parliament is the root of the country’s problems. When he called for new elections in March, the emir pointedly urged Kuwaitis to elect a Parliament that would help develop the country.

There is an authoritarian wing of the royal family that has long wanted to curtail Parliament’s powers, as happened in the late ’70s and the late ’80s. The royal family, which appoints the executive branch, has also used its influence to support parliamentary candidates from Kuwait’s more tribally oriented “Bedouin” population, because they were more pliant and less interested in political reform. They are also generally less wealthy, and many say the Bedouins (who no longer live in the desert as their ancestors did) are now resisting economic reforms because they believe they would not benefit from them as much as Kuwait’s urban merchant elite would.

But Parliament has its own share of responsibility. Reform legislation on foreign investment and other issues has consistently stalled. Parliament has also set off embarrassing controversies, when members subjected ministers from the non-elected executive branch to public questioning sessions — a practice known in Kuwait as grilling — intended to humiliate or force a resignation. It was a grilling of the defense minister, and the prospect of a similar clash with the prime minister, that appears to have pushed the emir to dissolve Parliament.

Many younger Kuwaitis who took part here in what they called the Orange revolution two years ago, when street demonstrations helped press the government to overhaul the country’s election districting law, now seem cynical. One popular Kuwaiti blog posted a poem lamenting the absence of real change on the political scene, ending with the lines: “Restart does not work / neither does Turn Off / and we can’t leave the country on Stand By.”

Still, as the candidates troop from one diwaniya to the next in search of votes, any sort of retreat from democratic values seems unlikely.

“There are people who want to say, Look at democracy, look at what it causes,’ ” said Nawaf al-Mutairi, a business student. “But we know democracy is our last hope. The problem is just that democracy is incremental.”

In 1945, when Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, Mikhail M. Kozhov began keeping track of what was happening under the surface of Lake Baikal, the ancient Siberian lake that is the deepest and largest body of fresh water on earth.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.

Now Dr. Izmesteva and scientists in the United States have analyzed the data and concluded, to their surprise, that the water in Lake Baikal is rapidly warming. As a result, its highly unusual food web is reorganizing, as warmer water species of plankton become more prevalent. These shifts at the bottom of the food web could have important implications for all of the creatures that live in the lake, they say.

Although Dr. Kozhov is famous among scientists who study lakes — his 1961 book “Lake Baikal and Its Life” is considered a classic — the new report is “the international debut of the Kozhov family’s legacy of research,” Stephanie E. Hampton of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail message.

She led the work along with Dr. Izmesteva who, like her mother and grandfather before her, is a professor at the university and a researcher at the biological field station it established in Bolshie Koty in 1918. Their findings are being reported this month in the journal Global Change Biology.

Like others who have seen the data, Dr. Hampton said in an interview that she was in awe of the people who had collected it. “Even in the spring, summer and fall, this is tough,” she said. “In the winter to go out a mile and a half on the ice and break through it to take water samples, in a year-round effort for 60 years, is pretty amazing to me. Every time I think about it I am humbled.”

Marianne V. Moore, an ecologist at Wellesley College and another researcher on the project, said she learned about the data in 2001 when she took students in her class, “Baikal and the Soul of Siberia,” to the lake. Dr. Izmesteva spoke to the group and showed a few slides, which the translator said had been drawn from a 60-year record. “I thought he had made a mistake,” Dr. Moore recalled. “So I basically ignored it.”

When she returned with another class two years later and another scientist mentioned the data, “my jaw dropped to the floor,” she said. “I realized this is just extraordinary.”

She got in touch with Dr. Hamilton, who is an expert in the analysis of complex ecological field data, particularly the use of statistical techniques to discern real trends in the messy ups and downs of nature. The center in Santa Barbara financed the collaboration.

Baikal is a place of unusual biodiversity, with many species found nowhere else. Among them are giant shrimp, bright green sponges that grow in shallow water forests and the Baikal seal, the world’s only exclusively freshwater seal. In 1996, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or Unesco, designated the lake a World Heritage Site.

Although it is known that warming is more intense at high latitudes, as in the Baikal area, and that water is warming in other major lakes, including Lake Tahoe in Nevada and Lake Tanganyika in central Africa, many scientists had thought that Lake Baikal’s enormous volume and unusual water circulation patterns would buffer the effects of global warming.

Instead, the researchers report, surface waters in Lake Baikal are warming quickly, on average by about 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit every decade. At a depth of about 75 feet, the increase is about 0.2 degrees per decade, they say, enough to jeopardize species “unable to adapt evolutionarily or behaviorally.”

Over the last 137 years, the researchers say, the ice-free season has lengthened by more than two weeks, primarily because ice forms later in the year. The database, including data on chlorophyll that the family started collecting in 1979, suggest that the “growing season” for plankton and algae has lengthened in the lake. Chlorophyll levels have tripled since measurement began, the researchers said.

Ordinarily, the researchers said in their report, this increased plant growth would be accompanied by decreases in water clarity, but that is not what the data show at Lake Baikal. This finding, they said, “highlights the importance of establishing monitoring for ‘early warming’ before a need for monitoring may be perceived visually.”

Now, Dr. Hampton said, she and other researchers are examining how the Kozhov family’s data fit with records of ecological phenomena elsewhere. So far, she said, “the data correlate well.”

“You could not make up something like this.” she added.

Dr. Moore said Dr. Kozhov died in 1968 and his daughter Olga died in 2000. The family persisted in their work through years of political, economic and social turmoil, especially the collapse of the Soviet Union after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 when, Dr. Moore said, “funds for the program just dried up.”

Today, she said, Dr. Izmesteva and her colleagues pay for their work in part with fees they earn by consulting or doing environmental impact assessments.

“They sustain the program any way they can,” Dr. Moore said.

By Robert D. McFadden

Pope John Paul II waved as he arrived at Newark International Airport on Oct. 4, 1995.

In a gray drizzle, John Paul II came down the jetliner steps with care, limping but still iron-willed at 75, and stood on a red carpet on the tarmac at Newark International Airport. He did not bend to kiss the ground, a gesture he reserved for his first visits to a country — and this was his fourth to America.

The burdens of 17 years as pope were obvious. The mountaineer’s shoulders were bent, and the big Slavic face was lined with the years. A hand trembled with Parkinson’s disease. But the man who had cried out for humanity at Auschwitz and Hiroshima, who had begged for peace in Ireland and roared for justice in Poland, still had miles to go.

He beamed and made the Sign of the Cross with the fluid gestures of a parish priest. He shook hands with President Clinton and waded into a throng of senators, governors, cardinals, bishops and 800 other dignitaries sheltering under clumps of black umbrellas.

It was Oct. 4, 1995, the start of his final four-day visit to the New York area, and a heavy schedule of Masses, conferences and appearances lay ahead. But he seemed in no hurry. Along a fence on his way to the car, he stopped to greet Sister Miriam Anne Evanoff and her schoolchildren from Jersey City. He reached across to touch them.

“Praised be Jesus Christ,” the nun said, her eyes glistening with tears as she offered the traditional Polish greeting.

“Forever, Amen,” the pope responded in his native tongue.

Myron Maslowyca, 13, tried his family’s Ukrainian: “Glory be to Jesus Christ.”

“Glory, forever,” the pope said softly, in Ukrainian.

It was one of those touching, spontaneous moments of human contact that, even after all these years, people remember when they think of John Paul.

The pope was welcomed by President Clinton in Newark.

Security agents and advance planners try to arrange papal trips down to the last detail, fixing routes, timing events, limiting potentially dangerous contacts with the public, trying to prevent the kind of violence in which John Paul was shot in St. Peter’s Square in 1981.

But the truth is that elaborate plans are often flawed, and that the pope’s spontaneous moments — the small asides and intuitive reactions to strangers — often leave the most lasting impressions, those glimpses into the personality behind the public face and the studied pronouncements.

On John Paul’s last visit to the city 13 years ago, what most people saw was just a tiny gold-and-white figure on a distant altar during the Masses he celebrated for biblical multitudes on the Great Lawn in Central Park, at Aqueduct Race Track in Queens and at Giants Stadium in the New Jersey Meadowlands.

But a more revealing episode, for thousands who witnessed it, was the pope’s moment of impulse outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral on his last day in town, when he emerged after reciting the Rosary and, instead of stepping into his Popemobile and riding away, he decided to take a stroll around the block.

“He’s walking! He’s walking!” someone cried.

And the crowd of more than 6,000, which had hoped for no more than a fleeting glimpse from behind the barricades, suddenly roared and surged after him. A few people actually touched the pontiff before scrambling police officers and Secret Service agents caught up and formed a protective ring around him. John Paul was unruffled and it was all harmless.

But it was not unusual for John Paul. People everywhere found his presence intensely physical. In his visits to 129 nations on 104 trips abroad, he often made protocol chiefs wince and horrified security officers. Not content to wave from a passing limousine, he would jump out and plunge into the crowds, hugging strangers, kissing babies, singing, smiling, winking, reaching out to touch and bless people.

On his first papal trip to his Polish homeland — a journey that defied the Communist government — his presence dominated life for nine days, drawing workers away from jobs to outdoor Masses attended by throngs that stretched across hillsides. He sang hymns and folk songs with his people, clasped old friends in headlocks and talked to coal miners, housewives, college students and teenagers in blue jeans.

John Paul leaving St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue after offering Mass on Oct. 7, 1995. 

Throughout his 26-year papal reign, John Paul was theologically conservative — many would say intransigent — but almost from the start it was clear that he was not to be a traditional pope, ascetic and remote behind the high walls and elaborate ceremonies of the Vatican.

Here was a different kind of pope: deftly politic, schooled in confrontation, a physically expressive man of wit, daring and energy who had seen war and sweeping political changes in the world, a showman of the television-and-jet age who would captivate much of humanity by sheer force of personality.

He had been a poet and playwright, an author of books and articles, a philosopher, a debater, an actor, a factory worker, a professor of social ethics and a linguist skilled in a dozen languages. He had been an athlete and outdoorsman most of his life — a soccer player, backpacker, camper and boater who loved to ski, swim and climb mountains. And he looked it: a rugged, ruddy-faced man with a bullish neck, pastry-maker hands and the legs of a long-distance runner. He moved gracefully until age began to interfere.

Ultimately, John Paul, who died in April 2005, helped end the cold war, contributed to the defeat of European Communism, made ecumenical gestures to Jews, Orthodox Christians and other faiths and reshaped his church with a vision of combative, disciplined Catholicism.

His successor, Pope Benedict XVI, despite almost three years on the Throne of St. Peter, is largely unknown to New Yorkers and even to many American Catholics. He turns 81 on Wednesday, has been abroad six times as pope and has made no deep impression on people around the world. Experts who know him as the German-born former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, John Paul’s arch-conservative Vatican defender of the faith, say he is scholarly and tough beneath a mild exterior.

This week, as Benedict visits America for five days, including three in the New York area, crowds are expected to line his routes, attend his Masses, follow his movements on television and hear him address the United Nations. He is to meet President Bush at the White House, visit ground zero and St. Patrick’s Cathedral and celebrate Mass at Yankee Stadium. He is also to meet with Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and members of other faiths, as well as Catholic leaders, seminarians and parishioners.

Impressions of Benedict may come primarily from what he has to say — much of which he has said before — opposition to the war in Iraq, regrets over the priest sexual-abuse scandals, praise for American religious toleration and rejection of secularism and changes in church teaching on birth control, priestly celibacy, the ordination of women, homosexuality and other issues that trouble American Catholics.

Security will be the tightest ever, the authorities say, with backpacks banned, spectators searched and audiences vetted at every venue. And Benedict will travel in an enclosed Popemobile, limiting chance encounters with people. His visit thus may be a sequel, but in the cautious age of terrorism, impressions of the pope — especially the emotional connections many felt toward John Paul — may be limited.

About 130,000 people gathered on the Great Lawn in Central Park for a papal Mass.

PRINCETON, N.J.

For better or worse, it’s all here.

The used CD of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” already marked down to $1.99 and the five-LP set of Wagner’s “Lohengrin” for $5. That beloved dub (a more heavily produced version of reggae, if that helps) CD by Sly and Robbie and the ancient Big Mama Thornton album with the quietly eloquent title, “Jail.”

There’s plenty of contemporary rap, metal, Goth and hip-hop; DVDs, laser discs, computer games and Blu-rays. But the main appeal of the Princeton Record Exchange is vinyl for all conceivable tastes and then some. The original 3-D album cover of the Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” “Cha Cha with Tito Puente at Grossinger’s.” “Brigitte Bardot Sings.” “Hi-Fi Zither.” “The Supremes Sing Rodgers and Hart.”

You can find the Crests, the Clovers, the Aquatones and all the rest somewhere in the 150,000 or so titles scattered around the atmospheric time capsule that Barry Weisfeld started in 1980.

Which makes one wonder, given the supposed broadband pace of change and cultural extinction, what to make of the grungy bustle of Mr. Weisfeld’s place. Of course, we’re more likely to honor things when they’re long past their prime — witness Bob Dylan’s honorary Pulitzer Prize this week, and Martin Scorsese’s homage to the Stones, “Shine a Light.” Still, the lesson of Mr. Weisfeld’s store seems to be that if you’re going to be a dinosaur, be a serious dinosaur.

“A lot of people who come here are obsessed,” said Mr. Weisfeld, a resolutely low-tech guy wearing an incongruous orange Yahoo! cap. “I’ll give you an example. One year, we got a very bizarre collection, world music, international music, whatever you call it, very unusual stuff. We let our customers know, and we sold 500 of the 1,000 in three days. They’re not people looking for Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ or something by Billy Joel.”

The Princeton Record Exchange isn’t the last of the hard-core independents, but it’s definitely part of a dwindling breed. Mr. Weisfeld, 54, got his start, after graduating from the University of Hartford in 1975, on the road, selling LPs at 27 campuses, from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire south to American University in Washington. He slept in his Chevy van and showered at the school gyms before they had morphed into high-security, high-end health emporiums.

He knew he could do that for only so long. He almost opened a shop in Hicksville, on Long Island, then picked Princeton, figuring it was halfway between New York and Philadelphia, had a downtown that people walked around and plenty of students, his prime clientele. Princeton students today are more likely to download music than riffle through stacks of it at a store, and the main drag of Nassau Street these days is filled mostly with pricey boutiques and cafes and upscale chains like Panera Bread and Ralph Lauren, not funky alternative music or bookstores.

But over the years, the Princeton Record Exchange gained a following of local customers and obsessives from near and far — Gene, who plays for a symphony orchestra in Ohio and drives over every few months; Ralph, who owns about 20,000 classical vocal records and takes the train from New Haven once a month. The customers the other night were a varied lot: Chris Roff, a very serious 12-year-old who likes everything but country; Molly Levine and Jessica Hundley, 20-somethings who were friends from high school and looking for modern rock; Chris Gibson, a 43-year-old pharmaceutical salesman from Pittsburgh whose shopping cart was populated by Bill Evans, Warren Zevon and Steely Dan.

Amazingly, the current, appealingly ratty, location, situated just off Nassau on South Tulane Street and decorated in early-dorm room with dorky posters, wood-plank ceiling, gray linoleum and an emaciated gray carpet, is considered a huge improvement from earlier days. That’s also said to be true for the behavior of Mr. Weisfeld’s 20 employees, who pride themselves, like the characters in Nick Hornby’s novel “High Fidelity,” on having way too much knowledge of useless musical trivia. “They don’t roll their eyes anymore,” said Matthew Hersh, 31, a Princeton native and longtime shopper. “They used to be holier than thou. They might still be, but they don’t show it as much.”

In fact, “High Fidelity,” which was made into a movie starring John Cusack, is sort of PREX’s evil twin and bête noire, the obvious reference point for a place full of obscure music, peopled by a virtually all-male staff of music wonks who can debate the fine points of the Lehigh Valley punk scene. But Jon Lambert, the general manager, says the comparison goes only so far. “That store was always empty,” he noted. “How did it stay in business? You can’t really keep a place like this going if people spend all their time sitting around making lists of their 10 favorite ’60s records about doughnuts and dogs.”

Mr. Lambert said he wondered for years when the bottom would fall out and the store would finally be washed away by the wonders of the digital age. But last year, Mr. Weisfeld signed a new 10-year lease. Mr. Lambert figures that in the end, people may like downloads, but they also like to browse, appreciate something tangible, like the weird cult-like atmospherics of a store full of like-minded obsessives. Lots of things change, but not everything does.

“It’s a cold, sterile world on the Internet, and people get an experience here you can’t get online,” he said. “If there are five stores left standing, I think we can be one of them.”

The Monty Hall Problem has struck again, and this time it’s not merely embarrassing mathematicians. If the calculations of a Yale economist are correct, there’s a sneaky logical fallacy in some of the most famous experiments in psychology.

Viktor Koen

Play The Monty Hall Problem

Dr. Chen provides a more detailed explanation of his research at TierneyLab. Join the discussion.

The Monty Hall Problem

 

The economist, M. Keith Chen, has challenged research into cognitive dissonance, including the 1956 experiment that first identified a remarkable ability of people to rationalize their choices. Dr. Chen says that choice rationalization could still turn out to be a real phenomenon, but he maintains that there’s a fatal flaw in the classic 1956 experiment and hundreds of similar ones. He says researchers have fallen for a version of what mathematicians call the Monty Hall Problem, in honor of the host of the old television show, “Let’s Make a Deal.”

Here’s how Monty’s deal works, in the math problem, anyway. (On the real show it was a bit messier.) He shows you three closed doors, with a car behind one and a goat behind each of the others. If you open the one with the car, you win it. You start by picking a door, but before it’s opened Monty will always open another door to reveal a goat. Then he’ll let you open either remaining door.

Suppose you start by picking Door 1, and Monty opens Door 3 to reveal a goat. Now what should you do? Stick with Door 1 or switch to Door 2?

Before I tell you the answer, I have a request. No matter how convinced you are of my idiocy, do not immediately fire off an angry letter. In 1991, when some mathematicians got publicly tripped up by this problem, I investigated it by playing the game with Monty Hall himself at his home in Beverly Hills, but even that evidence wasn’t enough to prevent a deluge of letters demanding a correction.

Before you write, at least try a few rounds of the game, which you can do by playing an online version of the game. Play enough rounds and the best strategy will become clear: You should switch doors.

This answer goes against our intuition that, with two unopened doors left, the odds are 50-50 that the car is behind one of them. But when you stick with Door 1, you’ll win only if your original choice was correct, which happens only 1 in 3 times on average. If you switch, you’ll win whenever your original choice was wrong, which happens 2 out of 3 times.

Now, for anyone still reading instead of playing the Monty Hall game, let me try to explain what this has to do with cognitive dissonance.

For half a century, experimenters have been using what’s called the free-choice paradigm to test our tendency to rationalize decisions. This tendency has been reported hundreds of times and detected even in animals. Last year I wrote a column about an experiment at Yale involving monkeys and M&Ms.

The Yale psychologists first measured monkeys’ preferences by observing how quickly each monkey sought out different colors of M&Ms. After identifying three colors preferred about equally by a monkey — say, red, blue and green — the researchers gave the monkey a choice between two of them.

If the monkey chose, say, red over blue, it was next given a choice between blue and green. Nearly two-thirds of the time it rejected blue in favor of green, which seemed to jibe with the theory of choice rationalization: Once we reject something, we tell ourselves we never liked it anyway (and thereby spare ourselves the painfully dissonant thought that we made the wrong choice).

But Dr. Chen says that the monkey’s distaste for blue can be completely explained with statistics alone. He says the psychologists wrongly assumed that the monkey began by valuing all three colors equally.

Its relative preferences might have been so slight that they were indiscernible during the preliminary phase of the experiment, Dr. Chen says, but there must have been some tiny differences among its tastes for red, blue and green — some hierarchy of preferences.

If so, then the monkey’s choice of red over blue wasn’t arbitrary. Like Monty Hall’s choice of which door to open to reveal a goat, the monkey’s choice of red over blue discloses information that changes the odds. If you work out the permutations (see illustration), you find that when a monkey favors red over blue, there’s a two-thirds chance that it also started off with a preference for green over blue — which would explain why the monkeys chose green two-thirds of the time in the Yale experiment, Dr. Chen says.

Does his critique make sense? Some psychologists who have seen his working paper answer with a qualified yes. “I worked out the math myself and was surprised to find that he was absolutely right,” says Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard. “He has essentially applied the Monty Hall Problem to an experimental procedure in psychology, and the result is both instructive and counter-intuitive.”

Dr. Gilbert, however, says that he has yet to be persuaded that this same flaw exists in all experiments using the free-choice paradigm, and he remains confident that the overall theory of cognitive dissonance is solid. That view is shared by Laurie R. Santos, one of the Yale psychologists who did the monkey experiment.

“Keith nicely points out an important problem with the baseline that we’ve used in our first study of cognitive dissonance, but it doesn’t apply to several new methods we’ve used that reveal the same level of dissonance in both monkeys and children,” Dr. Santos says. “I doubt that his critique will be all that influential for the field of cognitive dissonance more broadly.”

Dr. Chen remains convinced it’s a broad problem. He acknowledges that other forms of cognitive-dissonance effects have been demonstrated in different kinds of experiments, but he says the hundreds of choice-rationalization experiments since 1956 are flawed.

Even when the experimenters use more elaborate methods of measuring preferences — like asking a subject to rate items on a scale before choosing between two similarly-ranked items — Dr. Chen says the results are still suspect because researchers haven’t recognized that the choice during the experiment changes the odds. (For more of Dr. Chen’s explanation, see TierneyLab.)

“I don’t know that there’s clean evidence that merely being asked to choose between two objects will make you devalue what you didn’t choose,” Dr. Chen says. “I wouldn’t be completely surprised if this effect exists, but I’ve never seen it measured correctly. The whole literature suffers from this basic problem of acting as if Monty’s choice means nothing.”

PERHAPS it was the “Iron my shirt!” hecklers. Or maybe it was Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, the object of those hecklers, having to defend her likability. Or the resonance of her proxy, Amy Poehler, being shut out in the “Saturday Night Live” spoofs of the Democratic debates. Or last week, the spectacle of yet another male politician admitting he had betrayed his wife, while she stood clubbed beside him — and male commentators talked about his patronizing of prostitutes as a “victimless crime.”

It’s not quite an “angry woman” moment, or more pointedly, an “angry white woman” moment, to borrow a label that has attached derogatorily or proudly to white men, black men and black women at various times. But the politics of the last few months have certainly opened a spigot on the question of where exactly society stands on gender matters. Weren’t we in what some people have long called a postfeminist era, when we thought the big battles were over, or at least that the combatants had reached some accommodation? And wasn’t the younger generation less hung up on the stereotypes and issues of the sort Mrs. Clinton taps into among older women?

Not so fast. No matter how historic the prospect of electing a woman or black man as president this year, if the rising volume of chatter in the news and entertainment media is any measure, women are doing a little re-tallying.

It’s hardly that all women are on the same side — there were plenty of women making the points men were about prostitution after Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York resigned following the news that he had paid perhaps tens of thousands of dollars for sex. But there seemed to be a starker split between men’s and women’s reactions to the scandal. And women who for a long time felt they were on opposite sides of a generational divide on gender issues were finding things in common.

“It’s a little bit like the Anita Hill moment, when all of a sudden everybody is talking about something that probably always goes on, and there really is a fundamental difference in who the men and the women identify with,” said Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and the author of several books on the ways men and women communicate.

Suzanne B. Goldberg, a law professor at Columbia and director of its sexuality and gender law clinic, called the current climate “a perfect storm.”

“Before Spitzer, there had been a great focus on women as presidential candidates and women as voters,” she said. “Now we add to that women as political spouses.”

“I’m not such a Mars-Venus person but this is one of those moments where gender is at least a partial explanation, it affects how people hear campaign rhetoric, how people see political downfalls,” Ms. Goldberg said. “Even people who were unwilling to see it before are more likely to acknowledge the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes.”

At one extreme there was the bald outrage of Geraldine Ferraro, who complained that Barack Obama would not have come as far as he had if he were a white man or a woman of any race — comments that led her to resign from the Clinton campaign last week. Ms. Ferraro tripped right into the race minefield in her big rush to make her point about the gender minefield. But all along, many women who fought the first wave of battles for gender equality have seen a bias against Mrs. Clinton — which helps explain why older women form the core of her support.

Younger women, for their part, are starting to have what Ms. Goldberg calls “the aha moment” — even if it doesn’t put them in Mrs. Clinton’s column, as some of the welter of commentary last week found.

“Like lots of other twentysomething women, I’ve been an unswerving Obama girl from the get-go,” wrote Noreen Malone on The XX Factor, the Slate magazine blog written by women. “Oddly enough it’s taken Spitzergate — not Hillary’s tears, not her scolding — to make me less dismissive of the feminist ‘obligation’ to vote for a woman.”

It reminded her of a depressing bit of wisdom passed on by a friend’s father: “The most powerful people in the world are old white men and pretty young women.”

“During my supposedly post-feminist lifetime, the women who’ve created the biggest stir are the young women who’ve ruined the careers of powerful old men,” she wrote. “I’m not saying I’m for Hillary now, and I’m not saying that Hillary’s history with sexual peccadilloes is uncomplicated, but it certainly makes me appreciate the fact that she’s learned other ways of manipulating power.”

A year ago, it all seemed so different. If the nation wasn’t quite gender-blind, still, a woman stood poised to become president, didn’t she? So unskeptical were women about that possibility that lots of them felt they did not have to vote for “the woman candidate”; it was the ultimate feminist decision to find Mr. Obama the better candidate — or John Edwards or any of the other men running, although it was Mr. Obama who seemed to transcend the identity politics that many young women in particular found tiresome and anachronistic.

But it has proved harder to move the country beyond stereotypes. In an essay she wrote last fall for the new book “30 Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers,” the Nation columnist Katha Pollitt declared that the “sulfurous emanations” about Mrs. Clinton made her want to write a check to her campaign, knock on doors, vote for her twice — even though she’d probably choose another candidate on policy grounds. “The hysterical insults flung at Hillary Clinton are just a franker, crazier version of the everyday insults — shrill, strident, angry, ranting, unattractive — that are flung at any vaguely liberal mildly feminist woman who shows a bit of spirit and independence,” she wrote, “who puts herself out in the public realm, who doesn’t fumble and look up coyly from underneath her hair and give her declarative sentences the cadence of a question.”

“Every woman I know who calls herself a feminist, or is even just doing well, especially in a field in which men also contend,” Ms. Pollitt wrote, “deals with some version of this.”

The bridge from Ms. Pollitt’s generation to its successors was apparent last month in an e-mail message a friend of Chelsea Clinton’s sent around. Attached was an article by the early and unreconstructed feminist Robin Morgan that detailed in full-throated outrage the bias against Mrs. Clinton, and women. Chelsea herself apparently appended a note saying that while she did not agree entirely with Ms. Morgan’s point, she was starting to understand what older women were complaining about. “I confess that I did not entirely ‘get it’ until not only guys stood up and shouted, ‘iron my shirts’ but the media reacted with amusement, not outrage,” the note attributed to Ms. Clinton said.

Writing about the e-mail message on Slate, Emily Bazelon asked, “Even if we don’t agree with all of what Morgan has to say, either because we just don’t or because we’re not of her generation, should the reception to Hillary’s candidacy radicalize us? Or is this just all too unhinged?” The group of women on her e-mail list, she said, “were split.”

A contest between a woman and an African-American raises the inevitable question about whether it is harder to overcome racial bias than gender bias. Few claim to know the answer, and many argue it’s too hard to tease out the ways each plays a role. But some also argue that the media is not as quick to recognize misogyny as it is to recognize racism. “The media is on eggshells about race, but has blinders on about sex and gender stereotyping,” said Ms. Goldberg of Columbia.

Kate Michelman, a former president of Naral Pro-Choice America, who is an adviser to Mr. Obama, said in an interview that “racism has risen to a level of social consciousness that sexism has not.”

Of course, it was comedy that crystallized the moment. “Saturday Night Live” mocked reporters falling faint over Mr. Obama (Sample debate question: “Are you mad at me?”) and cutting off Mrs. Clinton for being that irritating bore talking about health care again. Meanwhile, on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central last week, Samantha Bee played the role of the philandering wife, standing behind a podium contritely acknowledging her offense while her husband stood behind her with the downcast eyes so familiar from Silda Wall Spitzer and the political wives who had come before. It was, of course, preposterous — and not just because Ms. Bee’s husband was wearing pearls.

The Spitzer scandal seemed to stoke particular outrage among women. On Slate, Hanna Rosin wrote of her “Ashley Dupré” moment — referring to the name Mr. Spitzer’s prostitute uses. “I read her story and the old ’70s feminist in me (admittedly a tiny presence) rears up.”

Ms. Rosin was a child in the ’70s, but Ms. Michelman, a veteran of that feminist era, saw something in last week’s scandal too. “I was upset with Bill Clinton but there’s something about this one that has gotten to me more,” she said. “Maybe because Spitzer has carved out for himself these high ethical standards.” And, of course, many women fighting sex trafficking considered him an ally, since that was one of his causes as a prosecutor.

But Ms. Michelman is not changing her vote: “I do think women are angry, but anger doesn’t get us very far. It’s a motivator, but it’s not enough.”