Editorial: Mr. de Blasio’s New Appointments

Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio has made it clear that he plans to break with many of the policies promulgated by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Among other things, Mr. de Blasio has recognized the importance of choosing seasoned public servants to run the nation's largest city government. He continued that pattern this week when he filled two more crucial positions.

In selecting Zachary Carter, the former judge and United States attorney, as corporation counsel, the mayor-elect tapped someone with a long history at the top levels of the justice system. Mr. Carter has served as a criminal court judge and as a federal magistrate. But he is best known for his record during the 1990s as the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York. He successfully prosecuted many high-profile cases, including the one against Jordan Belfort, the stock trader known as the Wolf of Wall Street, and the case against the New York City police officers who brutally assaulted Abner Louima.

As the city's top lawyer, Mr. Carter's role should be to give the new mayor prudent legal advice, even when it is not what he wishes to hear. He must break with the strategy of the outgoing counsel, Michael Cardozo, who has often employed abusive, win-at-all-cost strategies in policy disputes where the city was clearly wrong. Mr. de Blasio has already said that, under Mr. Carter, the city will reverse course on two such disputes. It will withdraw its appeal of a federal court ruling that found racial discrimination in the tactics underlying the New York Police Department's stop-and-frisk program. And it will settle the damage suit brought by the five men who were wrongly convicted in the Central Park jogger rape case.

To lead the nation's largest public school system, Mr. de Blasio chose Carmen Fariña, a respected educator who worked for decades in the city's schools — as a teacher, principal, superintendent and as deputy chancellor under Mayor Bloomberg — before retiring in 2006. There is no doubting her credentials for the job.

Ms. Fariña is known as a firm leader with a conciliatory temperament that has allowed her to build consensus around otherwise traumatic changes like those involving school closings. That should help dispel the ill will that has persisted between the Bloomberg administration and many local communities over the last decade or so.

With Ms. Fariña in place as chancellor, Mr. de Blasio should now flesh out education policies that have existed only as campaign slogans. Ms. Fariña understands that the tests given in schools are primarily required by state and federal law. However, she can deal with concerns about excessive test preparation by telling schools to prepare students through rich, effective lessons rather than by drilling them in empty exercises.

The chancellor faces other daunting challenges, including installation of the Common Core learning standards, the ambitious set of academic goals that have been adopted by all but a handful of states. She must implement a teacher evaluation and professional development system to help teachers master a new approach to learning. And she must help Mr. de Blasio through contract negotiations with the United Federation of Teachers, which represents 40 percent of the city's work force.

One of the most important issues has to do with teachers whose positions are eliminated for budgetary or other reasons. Historically, those teachers could move to other schools, bumping junior teachers out of their jobs even if the receiving school did not want them. That changed in 2005, when the receiving schools were given the right to approve transfers. The change has produced a large and costly reserve pool. The city should resist the temptation to roll back the 2005 provision and begin to again force teachers into schools. It should imitate other cities that remove reserve teachers through buyouts, early retirement, layoffs or unpaid leave.

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Contributing Op-Ed Writer: Haunted by a Disappearance

IT was 30 years ago this New Year's Eve that Sam Todd left a party in Soho to get some air. He would not be seen again.

Sam Todd was a divinity student at Yale, a young man, like many, "giddy with their own futures." On New Year's Eve, 1983-4, he attended a party at 271 Mulberry Street with a group of recent graduates from Vassar. He was 24. One of his friends, Heather Dune Macadam, described Todd that night, as he "twirled like a young colt, laughing and eating up the energy of the night until he was so dizzy he had to leave me on the dance floor to spin alone while he went outside for a breath of air." At 3 a.m. he left the party without his coat.

I was living uptown that year, across the street from a vacant lot, trying to be a writer. We were the same age, Sam Todd and I. The New York papers were full of the story of his disappearance. Fliers were posted; homeless shelters were searched. Rivers were dragged. Weeks went by, then months. Eventually there was nothing more to say about his story, other than the unbearable sadness of never knowing its ending.

The story haunted me, however. I'd wake from dreams in which Todd was knocking on my door. Come on, he'd say. Everybody's waiting. He made it sound as if oblivion was an exotic gift, given only to a rarefied few.

Occasionally, I'd mention the case to my friends; their initial response was curiosity, followed by a vague discomfort. "Why are you so obsessed with this guy?" asked one friend. "You don't even know him!"

But of course I knew him. The world is full of people who wonder what it might be like to vanish without a trace and begin life anew, under a new name, under a new personality, even — as was the case with me — under a new gender. Who among us, besides those without imagination, has never dreamed of escaping his or her own history?

For that's what I imagined Sam Todd had done. In my fantasy, he was no victim of foul play or amnesia. In my heart, he had struck out for a place where no one knew him, like Gauguin boarding a steamer for the Marquesas. How hard could it be, I wondered? To head out like Huck Finn into "the Territory ahead of the rest," a place where you could become, at last, the author of your own life?

I got my answer three years later. In May of 1987, I loaded up my Volkswagen and started driving north from Baltimore, where I'd been teaching a class at Johns Hopkins. I wound up in Nova Scotia, on Cape Breton Island. I wasn't certain what was going to happen next, other than that I was going to find a way to end this transgender business once and for all.

One night, I dressed in drag and looked in a motel room mirror in Dingwall, N.S. Why shouldn't I settle down here, I thought, and start life over as a woman? I could get a job working on a lobster boat. Then I lay on my back and sobbed.  No one would ever believe I knew anything about lobsters. 

The next day I climbed a mountain and, near the summit, stood by a cliff overlooking the sea. A fierce wind blew in from the Atlantic, and I asked myself — is this what you came here to do?

Then the wind blew me backward and I landed on some moss and looked up at the blue sky. Something in my heart — or perhaps something from on high — whispered to me, "You're going to be all right."

And so I headed home. A week later, in New York, I went to a party and met the woman who became the love of my life, a woman who, some years later, would help me begin my life anew, not as a person without history, but as a woman whose great curse instead became her greatest gift. On the cusp of middle age, to my great surprise, I, too, became, like the young Sam Todd, a person giddy with my own future.

I still think about Sam Todd and his family and his friends every New Year, about the profound loss they must feel, even now, about the man they loved. I think about them searching the city on New Year's Day 1984, as the magnitude of their loss first became clear, their hearts broken. There are thousands of Sam Todds who go missing every year, people whose loved ones are left with a story that has no resolution.

On New Year's Day each year, my wife and children and a large, raucous group of friends climb French Mountain near Belgrade, Me. We stand at the summit together and eat oranges and sing. Our children make angels in the snow. There is a sharp drop-off at the summit, and we frequently have to shout at our dogs to keep them from going off the edge.

As I stand there, I think about the gift of life, how wondrous and fragile. I think about the wind that blew me back from the precipice in Nova Scotia, and the voice that whispered, "You're going to be all right." Now and again, I wonder to whom that voice belonged. It might have been the voice of Christ; it might have been my father's ghost; it might have been the shadow of the woman I eventually became. You can take your pick.

As for me, I sometimes think the voice belonged to Sam Todd, whom I never knew, and whom I still mourn, as if he were my brother.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is the author of 13 books and national co-chairwoman of GLAAD.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Sidney Awards, Part 2

I tell college students that by the time they sit down at the keyboard to write their essays, they should be at least 80 percent done. That's because "writing" is mostly gathering and structuring ideas.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

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For what it's worth, I structure geographically. I organize my notes into different piles on the rug in my living room. Each pile represents a different paragraph in my column. The piles can stretch on for 10 feet to 16 feet, even for a mere 806-word newspaper piece. When "writing," I just pick up a pile, synthesize the notes into a paragraph, set them aside and move on to the next pile. If the piece isn't working, I don't try to repair; I start from scratch with the same topic but an entirely new structure.

The longtime New Yorker writer John McPhee wonderfully described his process in an essay just called "Structure." For one long article, McPhee organized his notecards on a 32-square-foot piece of plywood. He also describes the common tension between chronology and theme (my advice: go with chronology). His structures are brilliant, but they far too complex for most of us. The key thing is he lets you see how a really fine writer thinks about the core problem of writing, which takes place before the actual writing.

Kevin Kelly set off a big debate with a piece in Wired called "Better Than Human: Why Robots Will — And Must — Take Our Jobs." He asserted that robots will soon be performing 70 percent of existing human jobs. They will do the driving, evaluate CAT scans, even write newspaper articles. We will all have our personal bot to get coffee. There's already an existing robot named Baxter, who is deliciously easy to train: "To train the bot you simply grab its arms and guide them in the correct motions and sequence. It's a kind of 'watch me do this' routine. Baxter learns the procedure and then repeats it. Any worker is capable of this show-and-tell."

Matt Labash took several sledgehammers to the Twitter culture in a Weekly Standard piece called "The Twidiocracy." Labash acknowledges that some tweets can be witty. For example, @GSElevator writes: "If you can only be good at one thing, be good at lying. ... Because if you're good at lying, you're good at everything."

And Labash will never persuade most of us to actually give up Twitter.

But he is rollicking in his assault. One of his sources describes Twitter this way: "It's the constant mirror in front of your face. The only problem is that it's not just you and the mirror. You're waiting for the mirror to tell you what it thinks. The more you check for a response, the more habituated you become to craving one. It's pathetic, because at the end of the day, a Twitter user is asking, 'Am I really here, and do you love me?' "

Steven M. Teles had a mind-altering essay in National Affairs called "Kludgeocracy in America." While we've been having a huge debate about the size of government, the real problem, he writes, is that the growing complexity of government has made it incoherent. The Social Security system was simple. But now we have a maze of saving mechanisms — 401(k)'s, I.R.A.'s, 529 plans and on and on. Health insurance is now so complicated that only 14 percent of beneficiaries could answer basic questions about deductibles and co-pays.

This complexity stymies rational thinking, imposes huge compliance costs, and aids special interests who are capable of manipulating the intricacies. One of the reasons we have such complex structures, Teles argues, is that Americans dislike government philosophically, but like government programs operationally. Rather than supporting straightforward government programs, they support programs in which public action is hidden behind a morass of tax preferences, obscure regulations and intricate litigation.

Scott Stossel is already getting a lot of attention for his book excerpt "Surviving Anxiety" in The Atlantic, but it is hard not to give it a Sidney. Stossel suffers from a wide range of phobias, "to name a few: enclosed spaces (claustrophobia); heights (acrophobia); fainting (asthenophobia); being trapped far from home (a species of agoraphobia); germs (bacillophobia); cheese (turophobia); flying (aerophobia); vomiting (emetophobia); and, naturally, vomiting while flying (aeronausiphobia)."

But he is extremely high-functioning and now edits The Atlantic. How many people are genial and supercompetent on the surface while a cataclysmically intense world churns just inside their skulls?

Finally, and this is totally bending the rules, but I can't resist honoring Douglas Coupland's "Notes on 21st Century Relationships" in FT Magazine. He cites survey data suggesting that the average person falls in love 2.5 times in a lifetime; and that some psychologists believe that human beings are only capable of five or six loves in a lifetime. One lesson is, don't use them up too quickly.

Discuss.

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Editorial: Cull of the Wild

In eastern Long Island, especially in and around the town of East Hampton, the privet hedges, gentle dunes and white-seashell paths present a vision of a natural world tamed and tailored to the high aesthetic standards of the finest fashion and home-décor magazines. It's a bit of English countryside, but with bigger cars.

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Yet even here, wild nature is not fully subdued. For evidence, one can visit the area's auto body shops and doctor's offices to see what happens when too many whitetail deer occupy too small a human-dominated habitat. Suburban deer in huge numbers have denuded farm fields and garden plots, caused thousands of car collisions and contributed to the spread of Lyme disease, a debilitating illness borne by ticks that live on deer. Years of mounting agricultural losses and the threat to human health and safety have finally led East Enders to drastic measures — to cull the deer with hired marksmen.

With help from East Hampton Town and East Hampton Village and other communities, the Long Island Farm Bureau is enlisting wildlife-control officials at the Department of Agriculture to kill about 2,000 to 3,000 deer this winter. The slaughter is to begin in February, after hunting season ends, and last a few weeks. Marksmen in elevated stands plan to lure deer to baited stations, firing downward to minimize danger. They may also use traps.

Deer fanciers have sued to block the hunt, calling it barbaric, but they should acknowledge that other things are deplorable, too, like emaciated deer from overabundant herds, and humans sickened by Lyme disease. The predators that would control this situation are gone, and unless Long Islanders want to live with wolves, coyotes, bears and mountain lions, they will have to assume responsibility for their place atop the food chain. Nonlethal solutions, like deer contraception, are expensive, slow and unreliable. "When a population is this far out of balance," says Allen Gosser of the Agriculture Department, referring to deer, "you need a cull before you can implement other measures," like birth control.

For deer, suburbia is a 24-hour salad bar. Shooting them is naturally unnerving to people who hate that the American way of solving problems so often involves guns. But other, more palatable solutions have failed.

Yes, Long Islanders should plant deer-resistant gardens and put up high fences and install lights to keep deer off the roads and keep checking their ankles and shins for deer ticks. But in a confined island space overrun with deer, a targeted, professional cull to get these animals finally under control — and to supply large amounts of venison for the poor — seems like a reasonable option to help resolve a great unnatural imbalance.

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Editorial: The Facts About Benghazi

An exhaustive investigation by The Times goes a long way toward resolving any nagging doubts about what precipitated the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, last year that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

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The report by David Kirkpatrick, The Times's Cairo bureau chief, and his team turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or another international terrorist group had any role in the assault, as Republicans have insisted without proof for more than a year. The report concluded that the attack was led by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO's air power and other support during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and that it was fueled, in large part, by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

In a rational world, that would settle the dispute over Benghazi, which has further poisoned the poisonous political discourse in Washington and kept Republicans and Democrats from working cooperatively on myriad challenges, including how best to help Libyans stabilize their country and build a democracy. But Republicans long ago abandoned common sense and good judgment in pursuit of conspiracy-mongering and an obsessive effort to discredit President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who may run for president in 2016.

On the Sunday talk shows, Representatives Mike Rogers and Darrell Issa, two Republicans who are some of the administration's most relentless critics of this issue, dismissed The Times's investigation and continued to press their own version of reality on Benghazi.

Mr. Issa talked of an administration "cover-up." Mr. Rogers, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who has called Benghazi a "preplanned, organized terrorist event," said his panel's findings that Al Qaeda was involved was based on an examination of 4,000 classified cables. If Mr. Rogers has evidence of a direct Al Qaeda role, he should make it public. Otherwise, The Times's investigation, including extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack, stands as the authoritative narrative.

While the report debunks Republican allegations, it also illuminates the difficulties in understanding fast-moving events in the Middle East and in parsing groups that one moment may be allied with the West and in another, turn adversarial. Americans are often careless with the term "Al Qaeda," which strictly speaking means the core extremist group, founded by Osama bin Laden, that is based in Pakistan and bent on global jihad.

Republicans, Democrats and others often conflate purely local extremist groups, or regional affiliates, with Al Qaeda's international network. That prevents understanding the motivations of each group, making each seem like a direct, immediate threat to the United States and thus confusing decision-making.

The report is a reminder that the Benghazi tragedy represents a gross intelligence failure, something that has largely been overlooked in the public debate. A team of at least 20 people from the Central Intelligence Agency, including highly skilled commandos, was operating out of an unmarked compound about a half-mile southeast of the American mission when the attack occurred. Yet, despite the C.I.A. presence and Ambassador Stevens's expertise on Libya, "there was little understanding of militias in Benghazi and the threat they posed to U.S. interests," a State Department investigation found. The C.I.A. supposedly did its own review. It has not been made public, so there is no way to know if the agency learned any lessons.

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Room for Debate: When Bacteria Can No Longer Be Stopped

Introduction

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, via Associated Press This lethal type of bacteria has become resistant to nearly all antibiotics.

The greatest medical miracle of the 20th century may become useless in the 21st century. Bacterial resistance to antibiotics, seen almost as soon as the medications were developed, has become a serious problem.

Government efforts to limit the extensive use of antibiotics by meat producers have been called inadequate. And hospitals have become a major source of antibiotic-resistant infections.

How we can avoid a future in which antibiotics are no longer useful?

Read the Discussion »

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Editorial: Mr. de Blasio Picks His Speaker

We know who is about to become New York City's most powerful elected official. The second most powerful — the City Council speaker — won't be chosen until Jan. 8. But it is likely to be Melissa Mark-Viverito, of East Harlem, not least because Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio appears to have engineered a deal guaranteeing her the job.

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Ms. Mark-Viverito's victory was sealed by intense behind-the-scenes lobbying by Mr. de Blasio, after which she declared herself "humbled" by the honor. The mayoral meddling in Council business was unsurprising but unseemly, especially from someone who used to accuse Speaker Christine Quinn of being too close to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

But that was then. Now we're about to get a speaker with an enormous debt to the mayor, leading a legislative body that is supposed to be an independent counterweight to the executive. Ms. Mark-Viverito's defenders don't see a separation-of-powers problem. They also note that the old way of selecting speakers involved powerful party leaders in the boroughs anointing a choice, for the purpose of doling out committee chairmanships and pork.

Ms. Mark-Viverito, who was an early and enthusiastic de Blasio supporter, insists that she will be independent and fearless. She points to the ambitious list of reforms that her Progressive Caucus has proposed, including changing Council rules on member-item spending and overhauling the City Charter to improve transparency in budgeting.

Those are excellent ideas, and she should pursue them. But the best benchmark for independence will be how she reacts when some ally — this mayor, let's say — offers terrible ideas and misguided policies. We'll see. Meanwhile, there are 50 others in the Council who need to remember that electing a speaker is their decision, not any party boss's or mayor's. It is their institution whose role and reputation they are bound to protect.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Breast Cancer Screenings: What We Still Don’t Know

HANOVER, N.H. — A COUPLE of months ago, JAMA Internal Medicine, a journal of the American Medical Association, published the findings of a brief online survey of middle-aged Americans.Most had previously been screened for either breast or prostate cancer. But the study found that about half said they would not choose to start screening if the test resulted in more than one overtreated person per one cancer death averted.

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Wow. That implies that millions of Americans might choose not to be screened if they knew the whole story — that overtreatment is typically more common than avoiding a cancer death.

Is the survey right? Honestly, I have no idea. Different surveys get different answers. According to surveys, most of us hate Obamacare. But a number of us like the Affordable Care Act (another name for the same thing). And most of us like the bulk of the individual components of the law. How you ask the question matters.

Similarly, how Americans feel about screening is obviously related to what they are told about screening. Most of the time they get a simple message: It's the most important thing they can do to stay healthy. Occasionally, they may hear just the opposite: It's dangerous. The truth is, it's neither.

Instead, it's a close call. Different people in the same situation can rationally make different choices. But first, patients need some quantification of the benefits and harms.

In a study to be published Monday, Dec. 30 in JAMA Internal Medicine, a colleague and I attempt to provide that data for women making the choice about screening mammography. Let's be clear at the outset: There is a lot of uncertainty — and professional disagreement — about what the data are. So we provide a range of estimates, from optimistic to pessimistic.

There is no doubt that screening mammography in the United States leads to a lot of false alarms. Among a thousand 50-year-old American women screened annually for a decade, how many will have at least one false alarm? Our estimate ranges from 490 to 670. The data come from the mammographers themselves — the Breast Cancer Surveillance Consortium — and reflect radiologists who deliver low and high rates of false alarms (those in the 25th and 75th percentiles).

A screening program that falsely alarms about half the population is outrageous. To be sure, many women are quickly reassured by a second test that their breast is normal. But others — while told they don't have cancer — are told that their breast is somehow abnormal, that they have dysplasia or atypia, that they are at "high risk." Whether you blame the doctors or the system or the malpractice lawyers, it's a problem that needs to be fixed.

Then there is the problem of overdiagnosis: the detection of a "cancer" that was not destined to ever cause problems. Overdiagnosis is what leads to overtreatment. A decade ago doctors debated whether this problem existed in breast cancer. Now the debate is about how often it occurs.

In a pamphlet to help women decide about mammography screening in Britain, the National Health Service now explicitly tells women that their chance of overdiagnosis is about three times higher than their chance of avoiding a breast-cancer death. I can't tell you if that is the right estimate; since most everyone who receives a diagnosis of "cancer" is treated, overdiagnosis is rarely observed directly, so it is notoriously difficult to quantify. But I can tell you it's in the ballpark. Our optimistic/pessimistic finding is this: Among a thousand 50-year-old American women screened annually for a decade, 3 to 14 will be overdiagnosed and overtreated.

What about the benefit? Among those thousand women, 3.2 to 0.3 will avoid a breast-cancer death. If you don't like decimals, call it 3 to 0.

The optimistic estimate reflects the most favorable result of the nine most comprehensive randomized trials of breast cancer screening. But these trials were initiated 20 to 50 years ago. Whether their results are still relevant is a question. Because of substantial improvements in breast cancer treatment, many cancers that would have been deadly 20 years ago now no longer are. The better we are able to treat cancer, the less important it is find it early; in other words, there are fewer deaths for screening to help avoid. This is what is reflected in the pessimistic estimate. One study comparing regions with similar populations and health care systems, but different screening policies (like Sweden versus Norway and Northern Ireland versus the Republic of Ireland), found that breast cancer death rates had declined at similar rates, regardless of when mass screening was adopted.

So put it all together. Among a thousand 50-year-old American women screened annually for a decade, 3.2 to 0.3 will avoid a breast cancer death, 490 to 670 will have at least one false alarm and 3 to 14 will be overdiagnosed and treated needlessly. That may help some women choose whether to be screened or not. But it's still not very precise, and it doesn't answer the fundamental question: Now that treatment is so much better, how much benefit does screening actually provide? What we need is a clinical trial in the current treatment era.

Two randomized trials could begin to answer the central question of mammography interpretation: How hard should the radiologist look? Women who view mammography favorably might be willing to be screened under either the current approach or a high-threshold approach — meaning their radiologist would ignore small, likely harmless abnormalities found on a mammogram.Those who view it less favorably might choose that high-threshold approach (knowing that the harms of false alarms and overdiagnosis would be minimized) or forgo mammography completely.

Putting the two trials together, we could finally learn what level of screening minimizes false alarms and overdiagnosis while saving the most lives. Most experts would say that it's never going to happen. It would cost too much, take too long and need too many subjects.

Maybe they are right. But maybe not. Sure, it would cost millions of dollars. But that's chicken feed compared with the billions of dollars we spend on breast cancer screening every year. Sure, it would take 10 to 15 years. But it would help our daughters know more. Sure, it would take tens of thousands of women to participate. But maybe they would want to be part of the effort to help sort out the morass surrounding what is one of the most common medical interventions done to American women.

You never know, until you ask.

None of this should dissuade women from seeking a diagnosis when they develop a new breast lump (that's a form of early diagnosis we all agree on) or from seeking treatment for a diagnosed breast cancer (better treatment, not early detection, is the real success story in breast cancer). The uncertainties are about screening. Women who want to reduce those uncertainties will have to participate in trials.

H. Gilbert Welch is a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and an author of "Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health."

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Editorial: Uncle Sam’s Sweatshops

The American government has pushed retailers like Walmart and Gap to demand better working conditions at factories in the developing world that make their merchandise. But it turns out that the government, which buys more than $1.5 billion of clothes from overseas factories, does not follow its own advice.

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Factories in Bangladesh, Haiti, Cambodia and elsewhere that make uniforms for federal workers often violate basic labor standards, according to a report in The Times by Ian Urbina. (Most American military uniforms are made in the United States.) One Cambodian factory that makes clothes sold on Army and Air Force bases has employed children as young as 15. A factory in Bangladesh that makes uniforms for the General Services Administration beats workers to keep them in line.

These conditions are common in poor countries where local and national governments are too weak or corrupt to enforce their own labor laws. That is why it's important that retailers and American government agencies inspect and monitor factories to make sure they are not buying from businesses that exploit workers or put them in harm's way. A building collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than 1,100 workers in April drove that message home to many clothes companies. More than 120 Western retailers have since agreed to seek better conditions.

Administration officials say they understand the importance of this issue; a presidential executive order last year tightened rules against using factories that employ forced labor. But many government agencies that use middlemen exercise little or no oversight over the factories that are used. And stores that sell more than $1 billion in clothes on military bases every year outsource factory inspections to private retailers that have done a poor job of monitoring suppliers.

The government must do better. Federal agencies can start by disclosing the names of all factories they use; Congress could then order an investigation of the labor violations in those facilities. Next, agencies should jointly develop a code of conduct for overseas factories as well as an inspection regimen. Washington might also consider joining the retailers who have agreed to improve building safety in Bangladesh. In these and other ways, the federal government would improve the lives of millions of workers and set an example for the private sector to follow.

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Restart the Presses!

It's been another up and mostly down year for print media and the dwindling number of professionals (writers, editors, paper mill owners, singing-dancing newsies) who still care about nonvirtual publishing.

There were the customary newsroom layoffs, budget parings, revenue shrinkages. The venerable Boston Globe and Washington Post were each sold to billionaires, the papers' futures, whether as first-rate news sources or playthings, yet to be determined. New York magazine announced that it would scale back to publication every two weeks; The Onion ceased print publication altogether. One of the year's few bright spots: Newsweek's brave but seemingly quixotic decision to return to print in 2014. Yes, it could work, many observers thought, and maybe Tiny Tim will live to see another Christmas!

Is such cynicism justified? The thinking here is that if vinyl records, straight razors, slow food and absinthe cocktails can all mount comebacks, there is no reason print can't as well. The keys are marketing, perception and, frankly, snob appeal, plus a few minor tweaks....

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Contributing Op-Ed Writer: When Demons Are Real

Godong/Universal Images Group, via Getty Images

Worshipers at an evangelical church in Togo in 2011.

SOME months ago, on a warm Friday evening in Accra, Ghana, I found myself in an all-night prayer session with a charismatic evangelical church. All-night prayer has become wildly popular in the city, somewhat to the distress of those who object to the late-night noise, which rivals that of an American frat party.

But the people who attend love them, because the long stretch of time allows them to pray more intensely than a mere two-hour Sunday morning service will allow. On this Friday night, the focus of our prayers was a story in the Book of Acts.

The Apostle Paul, arriving at an island on his journey to share the Gospel, picked up some brushwood for a fire, and a startled viper within it leapt out and bit his hand.  When the islanders saw the snake hanging from his hand, they thought that he would die. But Paul shook the viper off and lived. The pastor applied the Scripture to our lives: "Say it out loud!" he shouted. "Every viper sticking to my hands, my marriage, my career, my destiny, I shake it off. I shake it off!" The 200 people around me jumped up and down and shook their hands with fury, hurling invisible and metaphorical vipers into the air.

To be in Africa is to encounter a God different from that of a charismatic church in the United States. People say that the boundary between the supernatural and the natural is thinner there. Certainly religion is everywhere — churches and church billboards seem to be on every street — and atheists are few. American evangelicals often say that faith is more intense in Africa. There is something to this. Compared with Ghanaian charismatic Christianity, American Christianity can seem like soggy toast.

It is not just the intensity that seems different. In these churches, prayer is warfare. The new charismatic Christian churches in Accra imagine a world swarming with evil forces that attack your body, your family and your means of earning a living.

J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, a professor at Trinity Theological Seminary in Legon, Ghana, argues that these churches have spread so rapidly because African traditional religion envisions a world dense with dark spirits from which people must protect themselves, and these new churches take this evil seriously in a way that many earlier missionizing Christianities did not. Indeed, I have been at a Christian service in Accra with thousands of people shouting: "The witches will die! They will die! Die! Die!" With the pastor roaring, "This is a war zone!"

While this feels very different from soft-toned American evangelical Christianity, which emphasizes God's loving mercy rather than God's judgment, spiritual warfare is deeply embedded in the evangelical tradition. The post-1960s charismatic revival in the United States, sometimes called "Third Wave" Christianity (classical Pentecostalism was the first wave and charismatic Catholicism the second), introduced the idea that all Christians interact with supernatural forces daily. That included demons.

In fact, I found American books on dealing with demons in all the bookstores of the African charismatic churches I visited. In one church where I stood looking at the shelf of demon manuals, a helpful clerk leaned over to fish one off for me. She chose an American one. "Here," she said as she handed me Larry Huch's "Free at Last," "this one is good."

In many American evangelical churches, people will tell you that demons are real, but they do not treat them as particularly salient. Demons don't come up in Sunday morning sermons, and for the most part people don't pray about demonic oppression. Their encounters with supernatural evil were like the ghost stories I heard at summer camp: more exciting than terrifying. One man told me of an angel who'd protected him by driving off the devil: "When I turned completely around, just right there, the woman, the vehicle, the lights shining, they were gone. They were gone. But in my brake lights, I saw the guy running over that hill."

But not always. A 2012 poll found that 57 percent of Americans believed in demonic possession. It's unlikely to be entertainment for all of them.

One way to think about demons (if you happen not to believe in supernatural evil) is that they are a way of representing human hatred, rage and failure — the stuff we all set out to exorcize in our New Year's resolutions. The anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, who grew up in Sri Lanka, got a Ph.D. from the University of Washington and, eventually, a job at Princeton, once remarked that all humans deal with demons. (He was quoting Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" — "In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden.") The only question, he said, was whether the demons were located in the mind, where Freud placed them, or in the world. It is possible that identifying your envy as external and alien makes it easier to quell.

But it is also true that an external agent gives you something — and often, someone — to identify as nonhuman. In West Africa, witches are people, and sometimes, other people kill them or drive them from their homes. In an April poll conducted by Public Policy Polling, over one in 10 Americans were confident that Barack Obama was the Antichrist — and the Antichrist is, as it happens, associated with war in the Middle East. If those people think that demons are real, they don't mean that Obama is misguided, confused or mistaken. They mean that he is real, inhuman evil.

That is a terrifying thought.

T. M. Luhrmann is contributing opinion writer, a professor of anthropology at Stanford and the author of "When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God."

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Op-Ed Columnist: Confessions of a Columnist

IN ancient Sanskrit, the word "pundit" meant "wise man" or "religious sage." In modern English, it means "often wrong, rarely accountable." There are ways that those of us who scribble about politics can avoid living down to that reputation — by keeping our predictions vague (it worked for Nostradamus), by sticking to sure things (I told you Herman Cain wouldn't be elected president), or by deploying weasel words like "it's possible that ..." at every opportunity. But time, chance and fallibility eventually make false prophets of us all.

Still, where wisdom fails, self-criticism is useful. For the last four years, David Weigel, a political writer for the online magazine Slate, has subjected himself to a "pundit audit," looking back on his worst predictions and explaining what went wrong. It's a good idea, and so I'm stealing it this week and highlighting my three biggest analytic errors of 2013 before the year is shown the door.

1. In Boehner I trusted. I kicked off last January with a column hailing John Boehner, the much-maligned speaker of the House, as an "American hero" who deserved more credit than he was getting for averting shutdowns, debt-ceiling debacles and a fiscal cliff-jump in 2011 and 2012. Looking ahead to another round of budget battles, I suggested Americans should be grateful that "the speaker who prevented dysfunction from producing disaster last time is around to try again."

Technically that column didn't make any predictions, but it radiated an optimism that turned out to be unwarranted. The speaker did try again, but this time he failed, first getting roundly outmaneuvered by Ted Cruz and then accepting an awesomely self-destructive shutdown in the hopes that it would break his party's fever.

There are things to be said in Boehner's defense, and still-worse scenarios that his acceptance of the shutdown may have helped avoid. But he still presided over an epic debacle, which would have defined the year in politics if the Obamacare rollout hadn't come along to save Republicans from themselves. A year ago, I expected the speaker to avoid that kind of disaster. I was wrong.

2. I underestimated Pope Francis — or misread the media. In columns pegged to Pope Benedict's unexpected retirement and Jorge Mario Bergoglio's elevation to the papacy, I made two claims: first, that a new "Catholic moment" in American life could "only be made by Americans themselves," and second, that the new pope's "evocative name" and "humble posture" wouldn't be sufficient to repair the church's image absent concrete steps to extend accountability for the sex-abuse scandal to the upper reaches of the hierarchy.

Given the subsequent media fascination with Francis, my attempt to minimize the papacy's importance in American religious life may have been somewhat premature. More important, I was entirely wrong about the Vatican's image being inextricably tied to the legacy of the sex-abuse crisis. To date, the new pope has done much less than the underappreciated Benedict on that front, but nobody in the Western press seems to care: even as American bishops continue to mishandle abuse cases, Francis's blend of charisma, asceticism and inclusivity have been sufficient to reverse a decade of bad press for Catholicism.

In a way, I'm grateful to have been wrong, since the message and mission of the church deserve as much attention as the continuing blindness of some bishops. But that blindness still needs to be addressed, and it's troubling, and telling, that the media would give a more liberal-seeming pope a pass on an issue they hammered his predecessor on at every opportunity. And if I'd been just a little more cynical about these things, I probably would have seen it coming.

3. I made too much of the Syria debate. When it looked as if the White House might lose a vote authorizing a bombing campaign against Bashar al-Assad, I argued that a congressional defeat would "basically finish off" President Obama "as a credible actor on the world stage," putting us on "a long, hard, dangerous road to January 2017."

This prediction was overtaken by events when Vladimir Putin offered the White House a face-saving way out. But even though the fateful vote never took place, my apocalyptic tone was unwarranted and overwrought. Not that the Syria debate wasn't bad for the administration's credibility. But in hindsight I'm not sure a lost vote would have made the damage that much worse.

One of the bad habits of pundits is to perpetually look for Grand Turning Points, moments after which Nothing Is the Same, to impose an artificial order on the messiness of political reality. Such moments sometimes do exist: the botched Obamacare rollout, for instance, still feels like a potentially crucial inflection point for the president's domestic credibility. But where the White House's foreign policy is concerned, the Syria resolution debate looks smaller the further it recedes, and I made more of it than it deserved.

Here endeth the self-criticism. Happy almost-New Year, and here's to an infallible 2014.

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Editorial: When the Mentally Ill Own Guns

Lawmakers who refuse to support effective gun safety measures often prefer to talk about better screening of the mentally ill to identify deranged would-be perpetrators before they can carry out mass shootings. This is, of course, a political dodge. Even in the handful of states where law enforcement agencies are trying to confiscate the guns of unstable individuals, state and federal laws too often enable the mentally ill to reclaim their guns as a right under the Second Amendment.

This lethal thicket was starkly mapped by The Times in a recent report showing how people who brandish guns, threaten family and neighbors and even admit to mental illness are able to get around the police. This is due in part to rigid legal requirements for a documented history of involuntary hospital commitment or other court actions that go well beyond the threatening incidents that are reported to law enforcement.

In Connecticut, which has gun confiscation laws that were tightened after the Newtown school massacre, an angry man who was off his medications for paranoid schizophrenia threatened to shoot his mother and the police if they confiscated his weapons. The police managed to seize his 18 rifles and shotguns and seven high-capacity magazines. But the man expects to reclaim his arsenal in April, asserting he is back on his medications and has had no further police incidents (although he told Michael Luo and Mike McIntire of The Times that he has experienced paranormal activities).

Similar cases from other states and cities show that seriously troubled individuals are able to reclaim their weapons, despite serious concerns about the threat to public safety. "There is no common-sense middle ground to protect the public," a law enforcement adviser in Ohio warned.

Most mentally ill persons are not violent, though The Times's analysis of 180 confiscation cases in Connecticut (dealing with people posing an imminent risk of injury to themselves or others) found that close to 40 percent of those cases involved people with serious mental illness. The common denominator in gun violence, however, is not deranged individuals; it is the easy access to assault rifles and other high-powered weapons afforded all Americans. A few determined states are attempting to deal with this issue, but real solutions must involve federal legislation and national standards, which are nowhere in sight.

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Editorial | Notebook: Wolf Haters

The federal government removed the gray wolf from the endangered list in the Northern Rocky Mountains in 2011, essentially leaving wolves' fates in the hands of state fish-and-game departments, hunters and ranchers. The predictable happened: hunting resumed, and the wolf population fell. In states like Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, an age-old antipathy to wolves flourishes, unchecked. 

Tom Vezo/Minden Pictures, via Corbis

A wolf in Idaho, one of the states where wolf hunts have resumed.

In Idaho, two recent developments have alarmed those who want to protect wolves and see them not as vermin, but as predators necessary for a healthy ecosystem.

First was the hiring, by the Idaho Department of Fish and Game, of a hunter to travel into federal wilderness to eliminate two wolf packs. The reason: wolves kill elk, and humans want to hunt elk. Normally the agency would just rely on hunters to kill the wolves, but because the area where these packs roam — in the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness — is remote, the agency decided it would be more efficient to bring in a hired gun. A photo last week in The Idaho Statesman showed the hunter, Gus Thoreson, astride a horse, with three pack mules, looking like a modern-day Jeremiah Johnson.

Advocates for wolves are angry at the United States Forest Service for giving a state agency free rein to practice predator eradication on protected federal land — meaning, of course, our land — without public comment or review and in apparent violation of well-established wilderness-management regulations and policies. They point out, too, that it's not clear how many wolves are there for Mr. Thoreson to wipe out, and little evidence that wolves in that area have done any damage to elk herds or livestock.

The other example of wolf-animus will be on display this weekend outside Salmon, Idaho, at a Coyote and Wolf Derby sponsored by a group called Idaho for Wildlife. A not-too-subtle poster for the event shows a wolf with its head in the cross hairs of a rifle scope and announces $2,000 in prizes to defend "our hunting heritage" against "radical animal-rights groups." Organizers say they want to raise awareness of the potential risk to humans from a tapeworm that wolves — as well as elks and dogs — can carry. State officials say there are no known cases of people contracting tapeworm from wolves.

Environmentalists sought a court order to block the event, saying the Forest Service violated federal law and failed to follow its own procedures in allowing the killing contest. But a judge on Friday said it could proceed. The derby's ugly depiction of wolves as diseased predators is a throwback to the bad old days when wolves, like coyotes, were vilified and bounty-hunted nearly to extinction.

It's a sad coincidence that this weekend is also the 40th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act, which was signed into law on Dec. 28, 1973. That act sought to enshrine sound science and wise ecosystem management over heedless slaughter and vengeful predation. Idaho is showing what a mistake it was to lift the shield from wolves too soon.

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Editorial | Notebook: The Elected Bullies

There is a certain personality type in politics that the public has come to know all too well. The politician, invariably male, rises to power with a gaudy indifference to manners and derision for all that came before. He is sarcastic and loves to lecture, sneers at special pleaders and whiners, and his caustic energy persuades fed-up voters that he is the one who can finally take a cattle prod to a fat and unresponsive government.

Once in office, however, he begins using that prod more against political enemies than problems of state, wielding his powers to punish critics, skeptics and those of questionable loyalty, while lavishly rewarding supporters. The brashness that seemed fresh and appealing in a debate loses its charm when it becomes the vengeful voice of a city or state, and voters then regret their choice. At least until the next charismatic bully comes along.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is the most current example. As Kate Zernike of The Times reported last week, he has had aides deliver obscenities to a union official who criticized him on the radio. His administration removed the police protection for one state senator (and former governor) after the senator was seen as too dilatory in approving the governor's nominees. When a Rutgers political scientist serving on the redistricting commission chose a plan favored by Democrats, Mr. Christie defunded two of his programs at the state university. And his associates have recently been accused of deliberately creating traffic jams in Fort Lee, N.J., in an act of vengeance against the city's mayor.

But the archetype goes back many years, as anyone who dared criticize Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in the mid-1990s remembers. I saw it happen repeatedly as City Hall bureau chief for The Times during that period: Mr. Giuliani cut off city money to some immigrant-aid groups and directed it to groups that supported him politically. Then he used the Department of Investigation to go after city employees who might have leaked news of those cuts. He was forced to pay $5 million to Housing Works, an AIDS activist group known for its high-decibel criticism of his administration, after spitefully cutting off its city contracts. He kicked two judges off the criminal court who were appointed by his Democratic predecessors, and put someone on who had close ties to his allies. And his budget director, Joseph Lhota, tried to pressure city bond underwriters not to buy tickets to the annual fund-raising dinner of the Citizens Budget Commission, a civic fixture that was often critical of Mr. Giuliani's budgets, as it has been of budgets in virtually every mayoral administration.

The personality type is by no means restricted to Republicans. Former Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York demonstrated similar tendencies, harassing and insulting Republican critics, believing he could get away with anything until hubris helped lead to his fall.

These tactics invariably come to light, and they always have the same effect: exposing a once-powerful politician as petty, defensive and weak.

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Editorial: Singapore’s Angry Migrant Workers

Frustration among Singapore's unappreciated and underpaid migrant workers has been building in recent years as their numbers have grown faster than the country can accommodate them. Tensions boiled over earlier this month, after a 33-year-old Indian migrant worker was killed by a bus in the Little India neighborhood. A crowd of fellow workers from South Asia gathered at the scene. Their anger quickly escalated, with some 400 people pelting stones, attacking emergency responders and setting fire to vehicles. It was the worst riot to hit Singapore, one of the world's most orderly countries, since 1969.

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Singapore's government has denied that its treatment of migrant workers has anything to do with the riot. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong characterized the riot as "an isolated incident caused by an unruly mob." Hundreds of foreign workers were rounded up and questioned; 25 face charges punishable by up to seven years' imprisonment and caning. Two hundred migrant workers were issued advisories against any future disruptive conduct.

Singapore has one of the world's highest standards of living, but its population is shrinking and aging. To fuel economic growth, transient imported labor has risen dramatically over recent years. The proportion of non-Singaporeans in Singapore rose from 14 percent in 1990 to 36 percent in 2010. Many Singaporeans are alarmed by the rapid increase of low-paid migrant workers, which has widened social divides and strained the small country's transportation and housing capacities.

Migrant laborers are paid as little as 2 Singapore dollars, or $1.60, per hour. Few speak fluent English, the country's working language, and most live in crowded dormitories away from residential areas. They typically are at the mercy of employers, owe high debt to hiring agents and have few means of expressing grievances. Last year, 200 Bangladeshi workers protested unpaid wages and Chinese bus drivers refused to report to work to protest salaries lower than their Singaporean and Malay counterparts.

The government hopes to increase the overall population from 5.4 million to 6.9 million by 2030. Because the birthrate of Singaporeans is below replacement levels and permanent residency is tightly controlled, the bulk of the increase will have to come from temporary migration, further skewing the ratio of transient workers to citizens. Many Singaporeans are lukewarm to the idea.

Casting the riot in Little India as an isolated law-and-order problem does not address Singapore's larger demographic problem. If Singapore is to preserve its high standard of living, it must ensure that the millions of transient workers who contribute so much to the economy are not marginalized and abused.

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Op-Ed Columnist: Greeting the New Year

This is the season of lists: roundups and recaps, forecasts and resolutions.

What was the biggest story of the year? Snowden.

The best movie? "12 Years a Slave."

The splashiest pop culture moment? Twerk, Miley!

Will the health care rollout roll over the president's second-term agenda? Who'll win in 2016? Who are the people to watch? Can Pope Francis top his 2013 cool points?

We resolve to go back to the gym and lose a few pounds, to pay off that credit card debt and up our savings, and to tell that overbearing boss to "chill out!"

I must say that as corny as it all is, I'm always entertained by it. In fact, "entertained" may be too mild a word. I'm enthralled by it, mostly because I connect with the more profound undercurrent of the moment: the idea of marking endings and beginnings, the ideas of commemoration and anticipation.

For that reason, the new year has always been my favorite time of the year.

When I was growing up, we had our own rural, Southern ways to mark it. Some folks spent New Year's Eve at watch night church services, singing and praying and testifying. My brothers and I spent ours in front of the television waiting for the ball to drop in Times Square. Then, as the clock struck midnight and folks on television kissed and cheered and celebrated in a blizzard of confetti, we stepped outside to listen as old men blasted shotguns into the perfect darkness of the Louisiana night sky. Finally, we ate black-eyed peas (for good luck) and cooked greens (for good fortune). As the saying went, "Eat poor on New Year's, and eat fat the rest of the year." Things didn't always work out that way, but hope was always heavy in the bowls of those old spoons.

To me, New Year's was always a time of lightness and optimism in a world full of darkness. Anything could be, no matter what had been.

I never really made resolutions when I was young. But the older I've gotten, the more I've felt that resolutions are necessary, as much for the forced articulation of goals as for the setting of them.

So this year, these are my resolutions:

1. To stop treating politicians like sports stars, political parties like teams and our national debate like sport.

Politics is not a game. There are real lives hanging in the balance of the decisions made — or not made — by those in power. Often, those with the most to lose as a result of a poor policy move are the most vulnerable and most marginalized. Those folks need a voice, and I will endeavor to be that voice.

2. To force politicians to remember, with as much force and fervor as my pen can muster, that they are servants, not rulers.

A democracy is a government by the people, for the people. Politicians too often bend in the presence of power. They believe that it is they who possess power, rather than the people who elected them. And power and money are kissing cousins; you will rarely find one not cozied up to the other. Money is corruptive, and power addictive. Together they work against the greater good. That cannot stand.

3. To remember that justice is a natural aching of human morality.

In the core of most people is an overwhelming desire to see others treated fairly and dealt with honestly. That is not a party-line impulse but a universal one. I will do my best to highlight that basic quality. For instance, I believe that there will come a time when we will all look back at the brouhaha over same-sex marriage in disbelief and disgrace, and ask: Why was that even a debate?

4. To focus more fully on the power and beauty of the human spirit.

Regardless of their politics, the vast majority of the people I meet, when they can speak and listen and act of their own accord and not in concert with a group, are good, decent and caring people. Most work hard or want to. They love their families and like their neighbors. They will give until it hurts. They fall down, but they bounce back. They are just real people, struggling to get a bit and get by, and hoping to share a laugh and a hug with an honest heart or two along the way. That is no small observation and not one of little consequence. I believe that I can write more about those traits.

Those are my resolutions, ones I will strive to keep, ones I'll reflect on even if I fall short. What are yours?

Happy New Year.

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Editorial: Despair at Guantánamo

In April, when a hunger strike by detainees at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, was in its third month, Pentagon officials agreed with defense lawyers that the underlying cause was a growing despair among prisoners who have been in detention for a decade with no hope of getting out. The protest, which at its height involved 106 of the 166 prisoners there this summer, served to put the Guantánamo issue back on the radar in Washington.

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The National Defense Authorization Act for 2014, signed on Thursday by President Obama, includes a long-sought provision easing the Pentagon's ability to transfer to countries other than the United States detainees rated as low threats. Mr. Obama, who has wavered on his early vows to shut down the prison, praised Congress for this change, though he stressed that the prison remained a blight on the nation's reputation.

The improved transfer policy helps, but a petty policy change at the prison this month shows how perverse the situation has become. The military says it will no longer report the number of prisoners on hunger strike, according to a report in the Miami Herald. A spokesman for the facility said the military "will not further their protests by reporting the numbers to the public." The numbers of detainees being force-fed by prison authorities, which dropped into the teens in recent months, offered the world a window into the prison, which has been shrouded in secrecy even though its motto is "safe, humane, legal, transparent detention."

Eighty-six of the remaining prisoners — more than half — were designated three years ago for transfer to another country, provided that security concerns could be satisfied. Yet the transfer plan was left adrift in the face of political combat. Even if the new defense bill spurs progress in reducing the detainee population, the delivery of credible justice for those at the Guantánamo prison camp is far from complete.

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Editorial: This Week, Mass Surveillance Wins

Has the National Security Agency's mass collection of Americans' phone records actually helped to prevent terrorist attacks?

No, according to the 300-page report issued this month by a panel of legal and intelligence experts appointed by President Obama.

Yet in a ruling issued on Friday, Judge William Pauley III of the Federal District Court in Manhattan came to the opposite conclusion. "The effectiveness of bulk telephony metadata collection cannot be seriously disputed," Judge Pauley wrote in a deeply troubling decision dismissing a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union that challenged the constitutionality of the N.S.A.'s bulk data collection program.

The ruling, which repeatedly defers to the government's benign characterization of its own surveillance programs, demonstrates once more the importance of fixing the law at its source, rather than waiting for further interpretations by higher courts.

Judge Pauley's opinion largely disregards the concerns central to the presidential panel's report and the ruling on Dec. 16 by a federal district judge in Washington, Richard Leon, who found that the agency's program was "significantly likely" to be unconstitutional.

The government's claim that the program is constitutional rests on a 1979 Supreme Court case, Smith v. Maryland, which held that a robbery suspect had no expectation of privacy — and no Fourth Amendment protection — in the telephone numbers he dialed. Judge Leon found the Smith decision to be inapplicable to a daily, indiscriminate sweep of hundreds of millions of phone records. Judge Pauley, however, said its logic still applied.

Judge Pauley's opinion is perplexing in its near-total acceptance of the claim by the government that it almost always acts in accordance with the law and quickly self-corrects when it does not. For example, Judge Pauley said the N.S.A.'s director, Gen. Keith Alexander, was being "crystal clear" when he responded to charges that the agency was mining data from phone calls by saying: "We're not authorized to do it. We aren't doing it."

That shows an alarming lack of skepticism, particularly in light of the testimony of James Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, who falsely told the Senate Intelligence Committee in March that the N.S.A. was not collecting any type of data at all on hundreds of millions of Americans.

It is also incorrect to say, as Judge Pauley does, that there is "no evidence" that the government has used the phone data for anything other than terrorism investigations. An inspector general's report in September revealed at least a dozen instances in which government employees used the databases for personal purposes.

The presidential panel made many good recommendations to reform both the surveillance law and the intelligence court that rules on government surveillance requests. Congress and Mr. Obama should adopt as many of these as possible. Court rulings will not suffice to rein in an agency that continues to take advantage of the law's vague and malleable standards.

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Editorial: Summer Camp That Makes a Difference

Yancy Rivera's son Brian, 11, is autistic and painfully shy. Summers used to be the worst time, with Brian out of school and spending his days watching TV. So Ms. Rivera, a single mother who works in a Lower East Side pharmacy to support him and his older brother, began searching three years ago for a summer day camp.

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The first camp Brian attended terrified him; he lasted three days. A colleague told Ms. Rivera about Henry Street Settlement, a social service agency that provides dozens of programs, including Camp Henry, a summer camp just two blocks from the pharmacy. Staff members were friendly and seemed equipped to handle kids like Brian. They said they would work with him one on one.

After his first day at Camp Henry, Brian told his mom, "It's different." After the second day, he said, "It's not so bad." And after the third day, he gave the camp a thumbs up. Brian went to the camp in 2011 and 2012. But this past summer, Ms. Rivera couldn't afford the $500 fee. The camp turned to the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies, an organization supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, which paid the fee. Ms. Rivera and Brian were both delighted.

"I used to dread summers," Ms. Rivera said. But finding the right camp for Brian has been a huge relief — and very rewarding. Last summer, he learned to ride a bike.

Donations to The Times's Neediest Cases Fund go to seven charities: Brooklyn Community Services; Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York; Catholic Charities Brooklyn and Queens; the Children's Aid Society; the Community Service Society of New York; the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies; and the UJA-Federation of New York. To help, please send a check to: The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund, 4 Chase Metrotech Center, 7th Floor East, Lockbox 5193, Brooklyn, N.Y. 11245. Or call (800) 381-0075 and use a credit card. You may also donate at www.nytneediestcases.com.

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Editorial: Risky Nationalism in Japan

On Thursday, one year after coming to power, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe visited Yasukuni, the controversial Shinto shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including war criminals from World War II. China and South Korea swiftly criticized the move, as did the United States. Mr. Abe's visit will worsen Japan's already tense relations with China and South Korea, which see the shrine as a symbol of imperial Japan's wars of aggression and colonialism. The United States Embassy said America was "disappointed that Japan's leadership has taken an action that will exacerbate tensions with Japan's neighbors."

The question is why Mr. Abe decided to visit Yasukuni now. It had been seven years since a Japanese prime minister visited the shrine, a recognition at the highest levels that the site is symbolically repugnant to China and South Korea and that such a visit is detrimental to relations with them. Japan's relations with those two nations are worse now than during the mid-2000s. Both Chinese and South Korean leaders have refused to meet with Mr. Abe since he became prime minister in 2012 (his first stint as prime minister was 2006-7), in part because of issues over territory in the East China Sea and Korean comfort women, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.

Paradoxically, it is Chinese and South Korean pressure on these fronts that has allowed Mr. Abe to think a visit to Yasukuni is a good idea. China's belligerent moves in the past year over Japanese-administered islets has convinced the Japanese public that there is a Chinese military threat. This issue has given Mr. Abe cover to ignore all the signals from China and to pursue his goal of transforming the Japanese military from one that is strictly for territorial defense to one that can go to war anywhere. The visit to Yasukuni is part of that agenda.

South Korea's continuing and sharp criticism of Japan's grudging stance on the comfort women issue and the refusal by President Park Geun-hye to meet Mr. Abe to discuss the issue have sown distrust of South Korea among Japanese citizens, nearly half of whom, polls say, also see South Korea as a military threat. Such views among voters have effectively given Mr. Abe license to act without regard to the reactions in Beijing and Seoul.

The three major national newspapers — Yomiuri, Asahi and Mainichi — have been editorializing against a prime ministerial visit to Yasukuni, especially in the year since Mr. Abe took office. And more important for Mr. Abe and his nationalist supporters, Emperor Akihito has refused to visit Yasukuni, as did Emperor Hirohito before him.

Mr. Abe's ultimate goal is to rewrite Japan's pacifist Constitution, written by Americans during the postwar occupation, which restricts the right to go to war. Here, too, Emperor Akihito disapproves, though he has no political power under the Constitution. A few days before Mr. Abe visited Yasukuni, the emperor, in comments marking his 80th birthday, expressed his "deep appreciation" toward those who wrote the post-1945 constitution in order to preserve the "precious values of peace and democracy."

So, if history is the problem, Chinese and South Korean leaders will find allies in Tokyo, and they should meet Mr. Abe to confront, to negotiate and to resolve these issues. Their refusal to meet will only give Mr. Abe license to do what he wants. Japan's military adventures are only possible with American support; the United States needs to make it clear that Mr. Abe's agenda is not in the region's interest. Surely what is needed in Asia is trust among states, and his actions undermine that trust.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Fear Economy

More than a million unemployed Americans are about to get the cruelest of Christmas "gifts." They're about to have their unemployment benefits cut off. You see, Republicans in Congress insist that if you haven't found a job after months of searching, it must be because you aren't trying hard enough. So you need an extra incentive in the form of sheer desperation.

As a result, the plight of the unemployed, already terrible, is about to get even worse. Obviously those who have jobs are much better off. Yet the continuing weakness of the labor market takes a toll on them, too. So let's talk a bit about the plight of the employed.

Some people would have you believe that employment relations are just like any other market transaction; workers have something to sell, employers want to buy what they offer, and they simply make a deal. But anyone who has ever held a job in the real world — or, for that matter, seen a Dilbert cartoon — knows that it's not like that.

The fact is that employment generally involves a power relationship: you have a boss, who tells you what to do, and if you refuse, you may be fired. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. If employers value their workers, they won't make unreasonable demands. But it's not a simple transaction. There's a country music classic titled "Take This Job and Shove It." There isn't and won't be a song titled "Take This Consumer Durable and Shove It."

So employment is a power relationship, and high unemployment has greatly weakened workers' already weak position in that relationship.

We can actually quantify that weakness by looking at the quits rate — the percentage of workers voluntarily leaving their jobs (as opposed to being fired) each month. Obviously, there are many reasons a worker might want to leave his or her job. Quitting is, however, a risk; unless a worker already has a new job lined up, he or she doesn't know how long it will take to find a new job, and how that job will compare with the old one.

And the risk of quitting is much greater when unemployment is high, and there are many more people seeking jobs than there are job openings. As a result, you would expect to see the quits rate rise during booms, fall during slumps — and, indeed, it does. Quits plunged during the 2007-9 recession, and they have only partially rebounded, reflecting the weakness and inadequacy of our economic recovery.

Now think about what this means for workers' bargaining power. When the economy is strong, workers are empowered. They can leave if they're unhappy with the way they're being treated and know that they can quickly find a new job if they are let go. When the economy is weak, however, workers have a very weak hand, and employers are in a position to work them harder, pay them less, or both.

Is there any evidence that this is happening? And how. The economic recovery has, as I said, been weak and inadequate, but all the burden of that weakness is being borne by workers. Corporate profits plunged during the financial crisis, but quickly bounced back, and they continued to soar. Indeed, at this point, after-tax profits are more than 60 percent higher than they were in 2007, before the recession began. We don't know how much of this profit surge can be explained by the fear factor — the ability to squeeze workers who know that they have no place to go. But it must be at least part of the explanation. In fact, it's possible (although by no means certain) that corporate interests are actually doing better in a somewhat depressed economy than they would if we had full employment.

What's more, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to suggest that this reality helps explain why our political system has turned its backs on the unemployed. No, I don't believe that there's a secret cabal of C.E.O.'s plotting to keep the economy weak. But I do think that a major reason why reducing unemployment isn't a political priority is that the economy may be lousy for workers, but corporate America is doing just fine.

And once you understand this, you also understand why it's so important to change those priorities.

There's been a somewhat strange debate among progressives lately, with some arguing that populism and condemnations of inequality are a diversion, that full employment should instead be the top priority. As some leading progressive economists have pointed out, however, full employment is itself a populist issue: weak labor markets are a main reason workers are losing ground, and the excessive power of corporations and the wealthy is a main reason we aren't doing anything about jobs.

Too many Americans currently live in a climate of economic fear. There are many steps that we can take to end that state of affairs, but the most important is to put jobs back on the agenda.

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Editorial: New Victories for Marriage Equality

With every new court ruling or legislative enactment or popular vote affirming Americans' fundamental right to marry, the arguments against same-sex marriage sound increasingly desperate and hollow.

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Those arguments were dealt multiple blows in the past few days, first last Friday when a federal district judge in Utah invalidated the state's constitutional amendment and laws prohibiting marriage between anyone other than a woman and a man. The suit had been brought by three lesbian and gay couples, but Judge Robert Shelby's ruling immediately allowed same-sex couples to marry statewide, and by Christmas Day about 700 had.

On Monday, another federal district judge, Timothy Black, ruled that Ohio, which also does not permit same-sex marriage, must recognize such marriages performed in other states.

Judge Shelby relied largely on the reasoning of United States v. Windsor, the Supreme Court's decision in June that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act. He ruled that Utah's Constitution and laws, which "demean the dignity" of same-sex couples "for no rational reason," violated the United States Constitution's guarantees of due process and equal protection. The United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit declined to stay the ruling, and the state plans to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.

In the meantime, Judge Shelby has laid out a thoughtful and methodical defense of the constitutionality of same-sex marriage. He allowed that marriage laws are generally left to the states, but he explained that individual rights must trump states' rights where the two conflict. Citing the Supreme Court's 1967 decision striking down laws against interracial marriage, Judge Shelby wrote that the Constitution "protects an individual's ability to make deeply personal choices about love and family free from government interference."

In response to the plaintiffs' complaint, Utah failed to present any rational connection between its laws and a legitimate governmental purpose. During a hearing earlier this month, Judge Shelby repeatedly pressed the state's lawyers to explain how, as they contended, permitting same-sex marriages would undermine the incentive for opposite-sex couples to marry and have children. Their response: "We just simply don't know." Of course, it "defies reason," as the judge wrote, that same-sex marriages would affect opposite-sex marriages one way or another.

Arguments like these are nothing more than the fading recitation of long-ingrained prejudices. The defenders of "traditional" marriage are losing — and much faster than anyone might have predicted even last summer.

Anyone, that is, besides Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the court's most reliable votes against equal rights for gays and lesbians. In his angry dissent from the landmark 2003 decision striking down anti-sodomy laws, Justice Scalia asked: If states may no longer pass laws that express moral disapproval of homosexual conduct, "what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage" to same-sex couples? In a similarly hostile dissent in the Windsor case, he predicted that the court's logic would soon lead to the invalidation of state laws banning same-sex marriage. So far, Justice Scalia has largely been proved right.

If Utah's appeal is heard by the Supreme Court, the court should extend its repeated invocation of the equal dignity of gays and lesbians and strike down all bans on same-sex marriage.

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Editorial: South Sudan’s Imperiled Future

Two years after South Sudan declared independence from Sudan, political tensions between President Salva Kiir and Riek Machar, the former vice president, have erupted into violence, raising the possibility of civil war and ethnic cleansing.

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Some 50,000 civilians are seeking protection at United Nations bases across South Sudan. The United Nations Security Council voted on Tuesday to nearly double its peacekeeping force in that country to 12,500 troops and now must make sure that those reinforcements arrive as soon as possible.

There is fault on both sides. Mr. Kiir's initial accusation that Mr. Machar, a rival and critic of the Kiir government, was plotting a coup against him likely was overblown. The violence has its roots in a longstanding political rivalry, ethnic tensions and the fact that in July, Mr. Kiir, who comes from the Dinka tribe, fired Mr. Machar, who is a Nuer. Since then, Mr. Machar has allied himself with other rebel groups and has refused to negotiate unless his political allies are freed from detention.

The leader of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in South Sudan, Hilde Johnson, said on Thursday that "well over a thousand" people have been killed in 11 days of fighting.

Fears of a broader blood bath are growing, as are concerns that the country will unravel; that production at South Sudan-based oil fields, which are crucial to the economies of both Sudan and South Sudan, will be interrupted; and the fighting will draw in neighboring countries. On Thursday, rebels loyal to Mr. Machar captured some oil wells in oil-rich Unity State.

The United States, which played a major role in South Sudan's birth as an independent state, has a special responsibility to mediate a political solution. In a message last week, Susan Rice, President Obama's national security adviser and an Africa expert who has long worked on issues connected to Sudan, urged leaders on all sides to renounce violence and engage in peaceful dialogue. She also warned that if Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar insist on using force and mass violence, "the United States will have no choice but to withdraw our traditional, robust support."

On Monday, South Sudan's government threatened a major offensive to retake strategic towns seized by the rebels. But Donald Booth, the special United States envoy, met with Mr. Kiir, and afterward he said that Mr. Kiir was ready to begin talks to end the crisis. The fighting has already spread to half the country's 10 states.

The United States, European partners, and leaders of Kenya and Ethiopia who arrived in the capital of Juba on Thursday should be pressing for negotiations and make clear that South Sudan's leaders will face sanctions if they drag their fragile country into another senseless war.

Sudan and South Sudan fought a civil war that killed more than two million people before a peace deal was reached in 2005. It is unfathomable that having achieved independence from Khartoum, Mr. Kiir and Mr. Machar would again risk their country's future by waging a conflict in which all sides will surely lose.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Sidney Awards, Part 1

The highly prestigious Sidney Awards go out to some of the best magazine essays of the year. This year, many of these essays probed the intersection between science and the humanities. Links to all can be found on the online edition of this column.

Josh Haner/The New York Times

David Brooks

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For example, over the summer and fall, two intellectual heavyweights, Steven Pinker and Leon Wieseltier, went toe-to-toe in The New Republic over the proper role of science in modern thought. Pinker took the expansive view, arguing that, despite what some blinkered humanities professors argue, science gives us insight into nearly everything. For example, Pinker argues that science has demonstrated that "the belief systems of all the world's traditional religions and cultures — their theories of the origins of life, humans and societies — are factually mistaken."

Instead, science has given us a different value system: "The facts of science, by exposing the absence of purpose in the laws governing the universe, force us to take responsibility for the welfare of ourselves, our species and our planet. For the same reason, they undercut any moral or political system based on mystical forces."

Wieseltier counters that few believers take Scripture literally. They interpret. Meanwhile, science simply can't explain many of the most important things. Imagine a scientific explanation of a beautiful painting, based, say, on a chemical analysis of the paint. "Such an analysis will explain everything except what most needs explaining: the quality of beauty that is the reason for our contemplation of the painting." The scientists deny the differences between the realms of human existence and simplify reality by imposing their methods even where they can't apply.

Caitrin Nicol had an absorbing essay in The New Atlantis called "Do Elephants Have Souls?" Nicol quotes testimony from those who study elephant behavior. Here's one elephant greeting a 51-year-old newcomer to her sanctuary:

"Everyone watched in joy and amazement as Tarra and Shirley intertwined trunks and made 'purring' noises at each other. Shirley very deliberately showed Tarra each injury she had sustained at the circus, and Tarra then gently moved her trunk over each injured part."

Nicol not only asks whether this behavior suggests that elephants do have souls, she also illuminates what a soul is. The word is hard to define for many these days, but, Nicol notes, "when we talk about it, we all mean more or less the same thing: what it means for someone to bare it, for music to have it, for eyes to be the window to it, for it to be uplifted or depraved."

Larissa MacFarquhar had a brilliant profile in The New Yorker of Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer programmer and Internet activist who hanged himself early this year.

Swartz lived much of his life outside the normal structures. He was too brilliant for his high school, so his parents let him drop out and take college courses or study on his own. He thought the students at Stanford were shallow, so he didn't go back after his freshman year.

He began writing big books or starting great projects, but he usually didn't finish them. He had dreams of saving the world, but fuzzier notions of the specific avenues by which he might do it.

On the one hand, he seems to have been the victim of the formless freedom of the Internet life. On the other, he did have intellectual daring and a fierce independence. MacFarquhar tells the story as befits the subject, with email and text-message-type comments from Swartz and his friends propelling the piece along. "Even among my closest friends, I still feel like something of an imposition," Swartz wrote, "and ... the slightest hint that I'm correct sends me scurrying back into my hole."

Don Peck looked at how companies assess potential hires in an essay in The Atlantic called "They're Watching You at Work."

Peck demonstrates something that most of us already sense: that job interviews are a lousy way to evaluate potential hires. Interviewers at big banks, law firms and consultancies tend to prefer people with the same leisure interests — golf, squash, whatever. In one study at Xerox, previous work experience had no bearing on future productivity.

Now researchers are using data to try again to make a science out of hiring. They watch how potential hires play computer games to see who is good at task-switching, who possesses the magical combination: a strict work ethic but a loose capacity for "mind wandering." Peck concludes that this greater reliance on cognitive patterns and game playing may have an egalitarian effect. It won't matter if you went to Harvard or Yale. The new analytics sometimes lead to employees who didn't even go to college. The question is do these analytics reliably predict behavior? Is the study of human behavior essentially like the study of nonhuman natural behavior — or is there a ghost in the machine?

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