TV

On Family Guy and American Dad
New Yorker

Animated television shows and the economy of the United States have something in common—they both depend on a precious natural resource. But, while the oil the country relies on will run out someday, the fuel that keeps TV cartoons going, natural gas, is endlessly renewable. As long as there are human beings—particularly boys and overgrown boys—around to fart, and make fart jokes, there will be cartoons. Of that you can be sure. This is not at all a criticism of boys or what they turn into; it just happens to be a fact, and a diamond-hard one, that boys aren’t subject to the depredations of the Four Horsemen of Appropriateness—Received Notions About Femininity, Fear of Not Being Perceived as Nice, No Boy Will Ever Want You If You Act / Look / Talk Like That, and Caring Too Much What Other People Think of You. These soul killers, having been loosed on the world by all the manufacturers of pink toys and spaghetti-strap toddlerwear, and sometimes by well-meaning, anxious mothers, come after girls before they even start elementary school and turn them into polite (if sometimes mean) little beings. So it’s easier for boys not to lose sight of the important facts of life: that bathroom humor is hilarious (if you don’t believe me, call an ancient Greek playwright), and that “butt” really is the funniest word in the world. It’s a place from which all manner and degree of embarrassment, shame, and humiliation emanate—a quality it shares with the body parts that are its neighbors down there, though mention should also be made of those parts’ pleasurable aspects, since they, too, provide so much opportunity for comedy. Adults, if they’re honest with themselves, know that this is true, and if they’ve forgotten it they’ll certainly get a reminder when they have children. (There is a series of Japanese children’s books about the bodily functions that children tend to become preoccupied with; the most famous volumes in the series—“Everyone Poops” and “The Gas We Pass: The Story of Farts”—got that way because adults buy them as gag presents for other adults. At least, they do in one family I know.) For better or for worse, though, girls are encouraged to be dignified and selfcontained, and while women play a role in TV animation (voicing characters, writing, and, sometimes, producing), all but one of the high-profile cartoons that have aired since “The Simpsons” débuted, in 1989, were created by men—and watched mostly by teen-age boys. (“Daria,” whose protagonist is a smart, sardonic teen-age girl, was co-created by Susie Lewis Lynn.) Even the three little dynamos in “The Powerpuff Girls” were brought to life by a dude.

Currently, the blue ribbon for pull-my-finger comedy goes to Fox’s “Family Guy,” on the basis of both ribaldry and popularity; it’s the most watched show among teen-age boys and college-age men. It can’t be said—not by me, anyway—that “Family Guy” has surpassed “The Simpsons” in terms of quality and reach, but the show is definitely having a moment in the sun. And it isn’t only a fartfest, of course. It’s also a slapstick sitcom about a middle-class suburban Rhode Island family, headed by Lois and Peter Griffin, she a standard-issue loving housewife who married down and he a hugely fat happy idiot. The show, which was created by Seth MacFarlane, a now thirty-two-year-old graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, débuted in 1999, and didn’t do well in the ratings, though it did last for fifty episodes before it was cancelled, in 2002. Reruns began airing on the Cartoon Network, during the block of programming called “Adult Swim,” which runs late at night six nights a week. “Adult Swim” features three dozen or so shows aimed at post-pubescent viewers, including odd, arty, anime-inspired shows, series that are familiar from their network runs, such as “Futurama,” and ones that throw the history of TV cartoons into a blender and serve up pastiche on wry bread, such as “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,” which brings an old Hanna-Barbera character into a contemporary setting. (Comedy Central has done something similar, but much more wicked, in “Drawn Together,” an animated “reality” show featuring cartoon archetypes—a musclebound superhero, a Betty Boop look-alike, a Pikachu wannabe—living together in a house and displaying the undiscriminating libidos and tiny minds that seem to be prerequisites for most reality shows. It’s filthy, and sometimes it’s even funny.)

“Family Guy,” which had never had a consistent time slot when it was on Fox, became a hit on the Cartoon Network, and then it became a hit all over again when it was released on a series of DVDs: the first volume was the best-selling TV series in 2003, and it’s the all-time best-selling DVD of any animated show. In 2004, Fox announced that it was bringing “Family Guy” back; it was the first time that DVD sales had driven a show’s return to the airwaves. Then, to capitalize on the show’s success, MacFarlane was asked to come up with an additional package of three linked episodes that were released on DVD last fall, before airing on TV; if you do the math, you’ll see that you pay much more per episode for this set—and they’re episodes that you can later see for free—than you did for the previous collections. To make a long story short, when it comes to “Family Guy” Fox is rolling in it.

Several characters on the show have become stars—they’re on T-shirts and mugs, and can be bought in ringtone form. There’s Stewie Griffin, the one-year-old baby of the family, whose voice is modelled on Rex Harrison’s in “My Fair Lady”; he’s foppish and maniacal, and creepily pansexual, and he’s always plotting to kill his mother. Brian, the dog (an overfed Mr. Peabody), is the smartest member of the family, though he is a little too fond of Martinis. But describing cartoon characters is a losing business—so much depends on the voices. “Family Guy” is almost like a radio show, and that’s one of its pleasures. (As it happens, MacFarlane himself voices Peter, Stewie, and Brian. His real voice, low and resonant, sounds like Brian’s.)

MacFarlane and his writers deserve every penny they make—except maybe some of the pennies they pocket from their new series, “American Dad!,” a satirical take on the bland family shows of the fifties, when father knew best and mother stayed home, which premièred on Fox last year. Here the dad, Stan Smith, is a C.I.A. agent (and also not all that bright), emotionally vacant, unreflective, and cheerfully overbearing—the personification of America and its actions on the world stage. One problem with “American Dad!” is that it comes on right after “Family Guy,” and the effect is of both too much and not enough of a good thing. The two shows have a lot in common in terms of look and sound and sensibility, and yet “American Dad!,” six years younger than “Family Guy,” seems stale already. Watching a cartoon sendup of American values and establishment attitudes makes us restless now; the comedy is too broad. (The exclamation point in the title virtually announces that.) We want to know what the real lies and the real facts are, and for that we’ve got Jon Stewart.

“Family Guy” is laugh-out-loud, timelessly loopy—it’s a Dadaesque vaudeville turn, often literally. Peter will be talking about something, anything, and all of a sudden the show cuts to a song-and-dance team in straw boaters and red-and-white striped jackets capering in response. And then they’re gone. “Family Guy” takes so much from “The Simpsons” that it’s impossible to count all the ways, though it’s very easy to spot them—the dim-witted dad, the (mostly) sensible housewife, an obsession with TV and celebrity, preening local newscasters, musical production numbers, and on and on. The show’s signature is its constant cutaways to scenes packed with inspired non sequiturs and references to everything that was thought up by Hollywood and Madison Avenue in the past hundred years—from Fatty Arbuckle to the DuMont Network, Mister Rogers, “Laugh-In,” and the Hope-Crosby “Road” pictures. The show pokes fun at every race, color, creed, interest group, and nationality, and throws in physical disabilities, too. In an episode a couple of months ago, Brian got a job at The New Yorker. On his first day, he found out that there were no toilets in the bathrooms; the people who worked there, he was told, didn’t need them, because they didn’t have anuses. Later that day, Brian was fired when the editor discovered that he hadn’t graduated from college. We’re all terribly sorry that Brian had such a bad experience, and we’d like him to know that he can come back anytime. There will always be a toilet here for him.





FILM

The Year in Film by Anthony Lane
New Yorker

If you were out of the country, or out of your mind, for the past year, you may wish to know what you missed. One glance at the titles of the most admired films, and you will wonder what the hell was going on. “Brokeback Mountain,” “Broken Flowers,” “Crash”: that’s an awful lot of breakage. Yes, you might say, but those are fancy pictures. How about the rugged weekend viewers, hauling their good sense to the multiplex? What did they pay to watch? “Wedding Crashers.” Ouch.

There is nothing new, of course, in the promise of fracture. Whether you crash a wedding or an Imperial Starcruiser, movies are the place to do it. This year will mark the seventieth anniversary of “San Francisco,” in which Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy keep body and soul together in the jetsam of an earthquake. After the literal wreckage of 2005, which began with the aftershock of an undersea quake, and whose litany of the homeless stretched from New Orleans to Kashmir, cinematic fantasies of disaster feel more flippant than ever. Yet “San Francisco” is an exercise in American stoicism, and the wryness and proficiency with which its characters respond to chaos remain a defensible dream. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, amid the finger-pointing, lay a tempting thought: If only Spencer Tracy had been in charge.

No wonder Hollywood has turned to old John Carpenter films. He was one of the last directors to trade repeatedly in underreaction, that most precious of screen commodities. In his glory days, he made wiry thrillers like “Assault on Precinct 13” (1976), which closed with this exchange between a cop and a prisoner:

“You’re pretty fancy, Wilson.” “I have moments.” Both that film and “The Fog” have been remade in the past year, neither to any purpose; producers, in their lavish innocence, seem to believe that cool, like Christmas leftovers, can be reheated ad infinitum. Still, one understands their plight. CGI has encouraged cinema to hit levels of bombast that even Cecil B. De Mille, dozing in his boudoir, would have considered a touch de trop, and if we worshipped Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, that is because he seemed elfishly underwhelmed by the very spectacle that was wowing the rest of us. Hence the crushing comedown of this year’s “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s crusader epic, in which Bloom wore the air not of a militant knight but of a worried boy who badly needed to pee.

In its dicing with political prejudices that it dimly knew to be important and its fatal inability to relax, “Kingdom of Heaven” was a workable median for the movies of 2005. From the unarguable tripe of “Alexander” and “The Phantom of the Opera,” at the back end of last year, through the torn families of “Proof” and “Cinderella Man,” to the furrowed indecision of “Munich,” there has been a marked reluctance to breeze through any setup. Movies come loaded these days, more like a cart than a gun. The forthright Bill Murray of “Ghostbusters” (“This chick is toast”) was anesthetized into the Bill Murray of “Broken Flowers,” cast as an unfeasible Don Juan in search of former belles, and urged to sit perfectly still in a tracksuit, with the lights turned down, until we saw in him our common nullity. Even “Brokeback Mountain,” for all its delicacy, felt obliged to add a couple of chunky scenes, not in Annie Proulx’s original tale, in which Jack rebuked his father-in-law, and Ennis chewed out a pair of apelike bikers. As he stood there, with Fourth of July fireworks flaring behind him, I thought, O.K., we get the point—gay men can be strong Americans, too.

The box-office returns for 2005 are not yet complete. “King Kong” is still slugging it out with “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” and my money is on Tilda Swinton to beat the crap out of the primate. Other slots have already been filled, by such masterworks as “Star Wars Episode III: The Revenge of the Sith,” “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” “War of the Worlds,” “Batman Begins,” and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” All their plots depend on a fear of the unknown (or, if you are Brad Pitt, a fear of Angelina Jolie), and yet their creators’ deepest fear is that we might not know in advance what the unknown consists of. That is why most of the highearners are either sequels or remakes—born, in other words, with brand recognition intact. We must not kid ourselves that the market leaders of old sought to frolic with the avant-garde; the most successful movie half a century ago was Disney’s “Lady and the Tramp,” and a decade before that it was “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” with Bing Crosby in a dog collar. Nevertheless, today’s contrast between the mayhem onscreen and the splintered nerves of the industry behind it feels freshly ominous. The studios, hunting for templates, trust nothing but a proven winner, however ropy it was in the first place, and they dread to think that we, in turn, might dare to take new characters on trust.

A while ago, I spoke with a class of film students. Each of them, smart and keen, sketched out for me the bones of a screenplay that he or she was writing. Two things rapidly became clear. First, there was not a speck of comedy in sight. These kids were not just serious about their work; they could conceive only of characters who were serious about their lives. Second, when I suggested that those characters might be slipped, unheralded, into the action I was gently corrected, not by the students but by their teacher. “We don’t do that here,” he said. I knew, courtesy of Hamlet, that there’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, but it now appears that the sparrow will request a cut of the DVD sales and a backstory the size of “Moby-Dick.”

It is this want of resolution—of the will to believe that a movie, like a poem, can deliver a person or a predicament straight into our hands—that leads to a bummer like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Tim Burton decided to burden Mr. Wonka with a miserable childhood and a package of flashbacks; since when did a Roald Dahl hero or villain need to be explained? Burton is a dreamy and inventive fellow, so why does he think we’re so dumb? Stranger by far was David Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence,” in which Viggo Mortensen, after a heroic defense of his small-town diner against robbers, winds up on the TV news, and thus finds his misty, murderous past creeping back at him, like smoke under a door. The movie was all backstory: tense and tormenting while it was hinted at, but slackening into silliness, complete with puffed-up gangsters, once it was fleshed out. Nothing in the second half of the movie told you as much as the terrifying grace of Mortensen’s gunplay in the diner. Reactions speak louder than words.

So, what were the highlights of 2005, and what hopes can we summon for a year in which the densest streams of ticker tape will float for “X-Men 3”? Well, we got Ralph Fiennes starring in, and surpassing, “The Constant Gardener”; we got Philip Seymour Hoffman doing the same with “Capote”; and, above all, we got Kevin Pollak’s impersonation of Christopher Walken in “The Aristocrats,” which I would describe as hair-raising if Walken had ever been hair-lowered. The most rackety fun I had all year came in the first twenty minutes of “Wedding Crashers,” which demonstrated that Vince Vaughn is either a genius or an escaped lunatic who should not be approached without a stun gun, yet even that farce declined into soulful whimsy, as did “Hitch.” I did laugh at the end of “The Revenge of the Sith,” but that was from pure relief, much as the people of Stalingrad gave a bitter, mirthless grin when the siege was finally lifted.

As for complete films, the one that struck me most forcefully was a German-Turkish production, “Head On.” The year before that, my favorite was Russian (“The Return”). In 2003, it was Swedish (“Lilya 4-Ever”). In 2002, it was Mexican (“Y Tu Mamá También”). In 2001, it was Swedish again (“Together”). In 1999, it was French (“The Dreamlife of Angels”). This is not as I would wish. America is a formidable machine for moviemaking, with all the fuel it needs, but the kinds of story that it now chooses to tell of itself, and the appetite for such nourishment—the taste for mass public shows, that is, rather than unhypnotic home entertainment, which you can snap out of when you need a beer—may be shrinking beyond recall. The last year in which our wits and our senses alike could feed on homegrown products, thanks to such disparate dramas as “Gladiator” and “Wonder Boys,” was 2000; before that, there were delights from Richard Linklater, with “Dazed and Confused” and “Before Sunrise”; from Wes Anderson, with “Rushmore”; from Bryan Singer, with “The Usual Suspects”; and from Curtis Hanson, with “L.A. Confidential.” All of the above were amused, grown-up entertainments made by men who weren’t trying too hard. One hopes that Hanson’s “In Her Shoes,” of last year, was a soft-soled blip, and that order and toughness will be swiftly restored to his work. If 2006 is going to yank American movies out of the rut, we need something pretty fancy from Hanson and his peers. We need moments.

COOKING

The Way We Eat: Which Came First?
By DANIEL PATTERSON
NY Times

A seasoned chef goes back to basics, starting with the perfect breakfast.Cooks are by nature creatures of habit, especially when it comes to eating. For the many years that I have been a chef, breakfast has been a cup of coffee early in the morning, which kept me going until around noon. By that point, I was hungry enough to eat cardboard, to which the staff meal often bore an uncanny resemblance. Lunch was usually wolfed down while standing in the dish room or huddled in a stairwell. It was not a glamorous existence. When I was given a temporary reprieve from the daily routines of restaurant kitchens early last year, I decided to try acting like a civilized person and eat a proper breakfast.

At first I made scrambled eggs and toast every morning, but that was before Alexandra, my fiancée, had me throw away our Teflon pan. An environmental lawyer, she cited the lawsuits, fines and nasty press that DuPont has incurred in connection with its nonstick pans. "DuPont claims its cookware is perfectly safe," she said with the practiced disdain of her profession, "but if the fumes can kill birds when the pans are overheated, then it's probably not good for us either." This from a woman whose dinner conversation often swerves into apocalyptic territory, like the high mercury levels in tuna or how perchlorate from rocket fuel has shown up in organic greens in California.

It is very difficult to win a dispute with someone who argues for a living, and I soon found myself trudging off to the recycling area of our apartment building, pan in hand. My breakfast goal of finding something relatively tasty, fast and easy to clean up was temporarily stymied. Attempts at making scrambled eggs in a regular sauté pan led to crusty egg proteins stuck to the cooking surface, no matter how much fat I used. Eggs fried in a cast-iron pan spattered everywhere - not to mention that fried eggs without bacon just didn't seem right, and nor did bacon as a daily staple. Soft-boiled eggs were far too irritating to peel before coffee, and even the thought of dry, mealy, hard-boiled eggs made me cringe. If I wanted eggs for breakfast, it seemed, I was going to have to poach them.

I started with eggs poached free-form - that is, not in a mold - which I drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with fine sea salt and pepper. The combination of the just-set white and the runny yolk mingling with the oil was pleasurable, but after making them every morning for months, I wanted something more.

Then one day, when Alexandra was away on business, I had an idea for a new way to cook eggs - probably not new to the world, but new to me. It was a little humbling. After more than 20 years of cooking in restaurants, I had clearly failed to master basic egg cookery. I took a moment to ponder this, but then my curiosity got the better of me: what would happen, I wondered, if I beat the eggs before putting them in the water? I expected that they would act much as the intact eggs did and bind quickly, but I did not expect them to set into the lightest, most delicate scrambled eggs imaginable. I became so excited that I immediately reverted to my old ways, eating them standing up in the kitchen.

This method requires a degree of blind faith. After all, pouring cold liquid into hot liquid promises to yield little more than murky yellow water. Following a lot of trial and error, I came to a few basic steps that lead to perfect eggs every time.

The most important factor is using only the thick whites and the yolk. At first I could get this technique to work only with very fresh farmer's-market eggs, whose viscous whites are high in protein (the main bonding agent). As eggs age, the thick part of the white erodes, and the thin, watery part increases, which is why fresh eggs (less than one week old) are best for eating, and older ones are better suited for meringues. This flummoxed me until a quick e-mail message to my friend Harold McGee, the food scientist and author of "On Food and Cooking," solved the problem. He discovered that using supermarket eggs is just fine if you start by cracking each one into a slotted spoon (or sieve) and let the thin white drain away, then work with the remaining thick white and yolk.

Next, beat the eggs with a fork, but don't add salt. (The grains of salt will tear the structure of the eggs, causing them to disintegrate on contact with the water.) Let a covered pot filled with about four inches of water come to a low boil over moderate heat, then remove the cover, add a little salt and stir the water in a clockwise motion. After you've created a mini-whirlpool, gently pour the eggs into the moving liquid, which will allow them to set suspended in the water rather than sink to the bottom of the pot, where they would stick.

Have a strainer ready in the sink. It's helpful to line it with cheesecloth, but I have a hard time strongly advocating something I never do myself. After saying a quick prayer and adding the eggs, cover the pot and count to 20. Almost instantly the eggs will change from translucent to opaque and float to the surface in gossamer ribbons. This all happens very quickly, and by the time you lift the lid, they should be completely cooked.

Tilt the pot over the strainer while holding back the eggs with a spoon, and pour off most of the water. A few bits may escape, but the strainer will catch them. When the rest of the water has drained, gently slide the eggs into the strainer and let them sit there for a minute while you get bowls or remove bread from the toaster. Scoop some eggs into each bowl, season with salt and pepper and drizzle with vibrant green olive oil or melted butter. They're terrific when lightly dusted with smoked paprika or a flavorful chili powder like piment d'Espelette, and they also clean up nicely for Sunday brunch with a spoonful of crème fraîche and a dollop of caviar.

With just a few months to spare before the opening of my new restaurant, I finally perfected the basics - boiling water and cooking eggs. I hope there's still time to work on my roast chicken.



Poached Scrambled Eggs

4 large eggs
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil (optional)
Fine sea salt
Freshly ground black pepper.

1. Crack each egg into a medium-mesh sieve (or narrow-slotted spoon), letting the thin white drain away. Transfer the remaining yolk and white to a small bowl. Beat the eggs vigorously with a fork for 20 seconds.

2. Set a medium saucepan filled with 4 inches of water over moderate heat. Put a strainer in the sink. When the water is at a low boil, add a few large pinches of salt, then stir in a clockwise direction to create a whirlpool. Pour the eggs into the moving water, cover the pot and count to 20.

3. Turn off the heat and uncover the pot. The eggs should be floating on the surface in ribbons. While holding back the eggs with a spoon, pour off most of the water over the strainer. Gently slide the eggs into the strainer and press them lightly to expel any excess liquid.

4. Scoop the eggs into bowls, drizzle with olive oil if desired and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper. (Variations: Serve with butter; smoked paprika; piment d'Espelette; or a spoonful of crème fraîche and a dollop of caviar.) Serves 2.

HOODWINKED?: FREAKONOMICS
NY Times
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

Information Asymmetries: Our book "Freakonomics" includes a chapter titled "How Is the Ku Klux Klan Like a Group of Real-Estate Agents?" This chapter was our effort to bring to life the economic concept known as information asymmetry, a state wherein one party to a transaction has better information than another party. It is probably obvious that real-estate agents typically have better information than their clients. The Klan story was perhaps less obvious. We argued that the Klan's secrecy - its rituals, made-up language, passwords and so on - formed an information asymmetry that furthered its aim of terrorizing blacks and others.

But the Klan was not the hero of our story. The hero was a man named Stetson Kennedy, a white Floridian from an old-line family who from an early age sought to assail racial and social injustices. Out of all of his crusades - for unionism, voting rights and numberless other causes - Kennedy is best known for taking on the Klan in the 1940's. In his book "The Klan Unmasked" (originally published in 1954 as "I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan"), Kennedy describes how he adopted a false identity to infiltrate the Klan's main chapter in Atlanta, was chosen to serve as a "klavalier" (a Klan strong-arm man) and repeatedly found himself at the center of astonishing events, all the while courting great personal risk.

What did Kennedy do with all the secret Klan information he gathered? He disseminated it like mad: to state prosecutors, to human rights groups and even to broadcasters like Drew Pearson and the producers of the "Superman" radio show, who publicly aired the Klan's heretofore hidden workings. Kennedy took an information asymmetry and dumped it on its head. And in doing so, we wrote, he played a significant role in quashing the renaissance of the Klan in postwar America.

Kennedy has been duly celebrated for his activism: his friend Woody Guthrie once wrote a song about him, and a Stetson Kennedy Day was recently declared in St. John's County, Fla., where Kennedy, 89, still lives. That is where we interviewed him nearly two years ago; our account of his amazing true story was based on those interviews, "The Klan Unmasked" and a small mountain of history books and newspaper articles. But is Kennedy's story as true as it is amazing?

That was the disturbing question that began to haunt another Florida author, Ben Green, who in 1992 began writing a book about Harry T. Moore, a black civil rights advocate who was murdered in 1951. For a time, Stetson Kennedy was a collaborator on the book. Although Green was only tangentially interested in Kennedy's Klan infiltration - it wasn't central to the Moore story - he eventually checked out Kennedy's voluminous archives, held in libraries in New York and Atlanta.

These papers charted the extraordinarily colorful life of a man who had been, among other things, a poet, a folklorist, a muckraking journalist and a union activist. But Green was dismayed to find that the story told in Kennedy's own papers seemed to be quite different from what Kennedy wrote in "The Klan Unmasked."

In "The Klan Unmasked," Kennedy posed as an encyclopedia salesman named John S. Perkins who, in one of his first undercover maneuvers, visits the former governor of Georgia - a reputed Klan sympathizer - and ingratiates himself by offering to distribute some hate literature. A document in Kennedy's archives, however, suggests that Kennedy had indeed met the ex-governor, but not in any undercover capacity. Rather, he had interviewed him for a book he was writing - nor did this document mention any hate literature.

A close examination of Kennedy's archives seems to reveal a recurrent theme: legitimate interviews that he conducted with Klan leaders and sympathizers would reappear in "The Klan Unmasked" in different contexts and with different facts. In a similar vein, the archives offer evidence that Kennedy covered public Klan events as a reporter but then recast them in his book as undercover exploits. Kennedy had also amassed a great deal of literature about the Klan and other hate groups that he joined, but his own archives suggest that he joined most of these groups by mail.

So did Kennedy personally infiltrate the Klan in Atlanta, as portrayed in "The Klan Unmasked"? In his archives are a series of memos that were submitted to the Anti-Defamation League, one of several civil rights groups to which Kennedy reported. Some of the memos were written by him; others were written by a man identified as John Brown, a union worker and former Klan official who had changed his ways and offered to infiltrate the Klan. "This worker is joining the Klan for me," Kennedy wrote in one memo in early 1946. "I am certain that he can be relied on."

In Kennedy's subsequent memos - indeed, in hundreds of pages of Kennedy's various correspondence from the era - he matter-of-factly attributed some of his most powerful Klan information to John Brown: one of the memos he declared "a report from my informant inside the Klan on the meeting of Atlanta Klan No. 1 on August 12 and Atlanta Klan No. 297 on August 15." As John Brown fed inside information to Kennedy, Kennedy would then relay it to groups like the A.D.L., as well as to prosecutors and journalists. It wasn't until he wrote "The Klan Unmasked," several years later, that Kennedy placed himself, Zelig-like, at the center of all the action.

Ben Green, despite months spent immersed in Kennedy's archives, could not identify the man once known as John Brown. Green did manage to interview Dan Duke, a former state prosecutor who, as rendered in "The Klan Unmasked," worked closely with Kennedy. Duke agreed that Kennedy "got inside of some [Klan] meetings" but openly disputed Kennedy's dramatized account of their relationship. "None of that happened," he told Green. In 1999, when Green finally published his Harry T. Moore book, "Before His Time," it contained a footnote labeling "The Klan Unmasked" "a novelization."

Green is not the only person to have concluded that Kennedy has bent the truth. Jim Clark, who teaches history at the University of Central Florida, says that Kennedy "built a national reputation on many things that didn't happen." Meredith Babb, director of the University Press of Florida, which has published four of Kennedy's books, now calls Kennedy "an entrepreneurial folklorist." But except for Green's footnote, they all kept quiet until the retelling of Kennedy's exploits in "Freakonomics" produced a new round of attention. Why? "It would be like killing Santa Claus," Green says. "To me, the saddest part of this story is that what he actually did wasn't enough for him, and he has felt compelled to make up, embellish or take credit for things he didn't do."

When presented with documents from his own archives and asked outright, several weeks ago over lunch near his Florida home, if "The Klan Unmasked" was "somewhat conflated or fictionalized," Kennedy said no. "There may have been a bit of dialogue that was not as I remembered it," he answered. "But beyond that, no." When pressed, Kennedy did concede that "in some cases I took the reports and actions of this other guy and incorporated them into one narrative." As it turns out, Kennedy has made such an admission at least once before. Peggy Bulger, director of the American Folklife Center in the Library of Congress, wrote a 1992 dissertation called "Stetson Kennedy: Applied Folklore and Cultural Advocacy," based in part on extensive interviews with her subject. In an endnote, Bulger writes that "Kennedy combined his personal experiences undercover with the narratives provided by John Brown in writing 'I Rode With the Ku Klux Klan' in 1954."

We weren't very happy, of course, to learn that a story we included in "Freakonomics" was built on such shaky foundations - especially since the book is devoted to upending conventional wisdoms rather than reinforcing them, and concerning Stetson Kennedy, the most conventional wisdom of all is his reputation as a Klan infiltrator.

There is also the fact that in our work we make a point of depending less on anecdote in favor of data, the idea being that numbers tend to lie less baldly than people do. But the story of Stetson Kennedy was one long series of anecdotes - which, no matter how many times they were cited over the decades, were nearly all generated by the same self-interested source.

Perhaps Kennedy's long life of fighting the good fight are all that matter. Perhaps, to borrow Peggy Bulger's phraseology, a goal of "cultural advocacy" calls for the use of "applied folklore" rather than the sort of forthrightness that should be more typical of history or journalism. One thing that does remain true is that Kennedy was certainly a master of information asymmetry. Until, that is, the data caught up with him.



PAINTING


Henri, Robert
Cumulus Clouds, East River
1901-02
Oil on canvas
63.5 x 80.6 cm (25 x 31 3/4 in.)
Private collection