oliverhannak

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IN MARCH 1986 this newspaper celebrated “The Charm of Nuclear Power” on its cover. The timing wasn't great. The following month, an accident at a reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine spread radioactivity over Europe and despair in the Western world's nuclear industry.

Some countries never lost their enthusiasm for nuclear power. It provides three-quarters of French electricity. Developing countries have continued to build nuclear plants apace. But elsewhere in the West, Chernobyl, along with the accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979, sent the industry into a decline. The public got scared. The regulatory environment tightened, raising costs. Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity, secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money. For two decades neither governments nor bankers wanted to touch it.

Now nuclear power has a second chance. Its revival is most visible in America (see article), where power companies are preparing to flood the Nuclear Regulatory Commission with applications to build new plants. But the tide seems to be turning in other countries, too. Finland is building a reactor. The British government is preparing the way for new planning regulations. In Australia, which has plenty of uranium but no reactors, the prime minister, John Howard, says nuclear power is “inevitable”.

Managed properly, a nuclear revival could be a good thing. But the industry and the governments keen to promote it look like repeating some of the mistakes that gave it a bad name in the first place.

Geopolitics, technology (see article), economics and the environment are all changing in nuclear power's favour. Western governments are concerned that most of the world's oil and gas is in the hands of hostile or shaky governments. Much of the nuclear industry's raw material, uranium, by contrast, is conveniently located in friendly places such as Australia and Canada.

Simpler designs cut maintenance and repair costs. Shut-downs are now far less frequent, so that a typical station in America is now online 90% of the time, up from less than 50% in the 1970s. New “passive safety” features can shut a reactor down in an emergency without the need for human intervention. Handling waste may get easier. America plans to embrace a new approach in which the most radioactive portion of the waste from conventional nuclear power stations is isolated and burned in “fast” reactors.

Technology has thus improved nuclear's economics. So has the squeeze on fossil fuels. Nuclear power stations are hugely expensive to build but very cheap to run. Gas-fired power stations—the bulk of new build in the 1980s and 1990s—are the reverse. Since gas provides the extra power needed when demand rises, the gas price sets the electricity price. Costly gas has therefore made existing nuclear plants tremendously profitable.

The latest boost to nuclear has come from climate change. Nuclear power offers the possibility of large quantities of baseload electricity that is cleaner than coal, more secure than gas and more reliable than wind. And if cars switch from oil to electricity, the demand for power generated from carbon-free sources will increase still further. The industry's image is thus turning from black to green.

Nuclear power's moral makeover has divided its enemies. Some environmentalists retain their antipathy to it, but green gurus such as James Lovelock, Stewart Brand and Patrick Moore have changed their minds and embraced it. Public opinion, confused about how best to save the planet, seems to be coming round. A recent British poll showed 30% of the population against nuclear power, compared with 60% three years ago. An American poll in March this year showed 50% in favour of expanding nuclear power, up from 44% in 2001.

Yet the economics of nuclear still look uncertain. That's partly because its green virtues do not show up in its costs, since fossil-fuel power generation does not pay for the environmental damage it does. But it is also because nuclear combines huge fixed costs with political risk. Companies fear that, after they have invested billions in a plant, the political tide will turn once more and bankrupt them. Investors therefore remain nervous.

How, then, to get new plants built? America's solution is to lard the industry with money. That is the wrong answer.

Nuclear and other clean energy sources do indeed deserve a hand from governments—but through a carbon tax which reflects the benefits of clean energy, not through subsidies to cover political risk. Exposure to public nervousness is a cost of doing business in the nuclear industry, just as exposure to volatile prices is a cost in the gas industry.

It may be that fears of nuclear power are overblown: after all, the UN figure of around 4,000 eventual deaths as a result of the Chernobyl accident is lower than the official annual death-rate in Chinese coal mines. Yet there are good reasons for public concern. Nuclear waste is difficult to dispose of. More civil nuclear technology around the world increases the chance of weapons proliferation. Terrorists could attack plants or steal nuclear fuel. Voters will support nuclear power only if they believe that governments and the nuclear industry are doing their best to limit those risks, and that such risks are small enough to be worth taking in the interests of cheap, clean energy.

One of the reasons why the public turned against nuclear power last time round is that it found itself bailing the industry out. It would be wrong, not just for taxpayers but also for the industry, to set up another lot of cosy deals with governments. The nuclear industry needs to persuade people that it is clean, cheap and safe enough to rely on without a government crutch. If it can't, it doesn't deserve a second chance.

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IN AMERICA a phenomenon might claim to have entered mainstream culture only after it has been satirised on “The Simpsons”. Google has had that honour, and in a telling way. Marge Simpson types her name into Google's search engine and is amazed to get 629,000 results. (“And all this time I thought ‘googling yourself' meant the other thing.”) She then looks up her house on Google Maps, goes to “satellite view” and zooms in. To her horror, she sees Homer lying naked in a hammock outside. “Everyone can see you; get inside,” she yells out of the window, and the fumbling proceeds from there.

And that, in a nutshell, sums up Google today: it dominates the internet and guides people everywhere, such as Marge, to the information they want. But it also increasingly frightens some users by making them feel that their privacy has been intruded upon (though Marge, technically, could not have seen Homer in real time, since Google's satellite pictures are not live). And it is making enemies in its own and adjacent industries. The grand moment of Marge googling herself, for example, was instantly available not only through Fox, the firm that created the animated television show, but also on YouTube, a video site owned by Google, after fans uploaded it in violation of copyright.

Google evokes ambivalent feelings. Some users now keep their photos, blogs, videos, calendars, e-mail, news feeds, maps, contacts, social networks, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and credit-card information—in short, much of their lives—on Google's computers. And Google has plans to add medical records, location-aware services and much else. It may even buy radio spectrum in America so that it can offer all these services over wireless-internet connections.

Google could soon, if it wanted, compile dossiers on specific individuals. This presents “perhaps the most difficult privacy issues in all of human history,” says Edward Felten, a privacy expert at Princeton University. Speaking for many, John Battelle, the author of a book on Google and an early admirer, recently wrote on his blog that “I've found myself more and more wary” of Google “out of some primal, lizard-brain fear of giving too much control of my data to one source.”

Google itself has been genuinely taken aback by such sentiments. The Silicon Valley company, which trumpeted its corporate motto, “Don't be evil”, before its stockmarket listing in 2004, considers itself a force for good in the world, even in defiance of commercial logic. Its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt, its chief executive, have said explicitly and repeatedly that their biggest motivation is not to maximise profits but to improve the world.

Such talk can make outsiders wince. Book and newspaper publishers, media companies such as Viacom, businesses which depend on Google's search rankings and a lengthening queue of others are tired of moralising sermons. Some feel their own livelihoods are threatened and are suing Google. Even some employees (called “Googlers”) or former employees (“Xooglers”) are cynical. Google is “arrogant” because it feels “invincible”, says a Xoogler who left to run a start-up firm. The internal attitude towards customers, rivals and partners is “you can't stop us” and “we will crush you”, he says. That “kinder, gentler” image is “mythology” and, he reckons, Google gets away with it only because of its impressively high share price.

That share price has quintupled since 2004, making Google worth $160 billion. The company has not yet had its tenth birthday. Yet Piper Jaffray, an investment bank, expects it to have revenues of $16 billion and profits of $4.3 billion this year. With so much money pouring in sceptics say it is easy to ignore shareholders and talk about doing good instead of doing well. But what happens when earnings fall short of Wall Street expectations or some other disaster strikes? Yahoo! and other rivals have gone through such crises and been humbled. Google has not.

Google's success still comes from one main source: the small text ads placed next to its search results and on other web pages. The advertisers pay only when consumers click on those ads. “All that money comes 50 cents at a time,” says Hal Varian, Google's chief economist. For this success to continue, several things need to happen.

First, Google's share of web searches must remain stable. Thanks to its brand, this looks manageable. Google's share has steadily increased over the years. It was about 64% in America in July, according to Hitwise. That is almost three times the volume of its nearest rival, Yahoo!. In parts of Europe, India and Latin America, Google's share is even higher. Only in South Korea, Japan, China, Russia and the Czech Republic does it trail local incumbents.

Second, Google must maintain or improve the efficiency with which it puts ads next to searches. And here its dominance is most impressive. In a recent analysis by Alan Rimm-Kaufman, a marketing consultant, it took a whopping 73% of the budgets of companies that advertise on search engines (versus 21% and 6%, respectively, for Yahoo! and Microsoft). It charged more for each click, thanks to its bigger network of advertisers and more competitive online auctions. And it had far higher “click-through rates”, because it made these ads more relevant and useful, so that web users click on them more often.

Perhaps most tellingly, advertisers do better with Google. Mr Rimm-Kaufman found that Google's ads “converted” more often into actual sales, which tended to be larger than those originating from Yahoo! or Microsoft. This is astonishing, given that Yahoo! has just spent a year on an all-out effort, codenamed Panama, to close precisely these gaps.

But even lucrative “pay-per-click” has limits, so Google is moving into other areas. It is trying (pending an antitrust inquiry) to buy DoubleClick, a firm that specialises in the other big online-advertising market, so-called “branded” display or banner ads (for which each view, rather than each click, is charged for). And Google now brokers ads on traditional radio stations, television channels and in newspapers of the dead-tree sort.

Sceptics point out that with each such expansion, Google reduces its profit margins, because it must share more of the revenues with others. If a web surfer clicks on a text ad placed by Google on a third-party blog, for instance, Google must share the revenue with the blogger. If Google places ads in newspapers or on radio stations, it must share the revenues with the publisher or broadcaster.

Yet Google does not look at it that way. Its costs are mostly fixed, so any incremental revenue is profit. It makes good sense for Google to push into television and other markets, says Mr Varian. Even if Google gets only one cent for each viewer (compared with an average of 50 cents for each click on the web), that cent carries no variable cost and is thus pure profit.

The machinery that represents the fixed costs is Google's secret sauce. Google has built, in effect, the world's largest supercomputer. It consists of vast clusters of servers, spread out in enormous datacentres around the world. The details are Google's best-guarded secret. But the result, explains Bill Coughran, a top engineer at Google, is to provide a “cloud” of computing power that is flexible enough “automatically to move load around between datacentres”. If, for example, there is unexpected demand for Gmail, Google's e-mail service, the system instantly allocates more processors and storage to it, without the need for human intervention.

This infrastructure means that Google can launch any new service at negligible cost or risk. If it fails, fine; if it succeeds, the cloud makes room for it. Thus Google can redefine its goals almost on a whim. Its official strategy recently became “search, ads, and apps”—the addition being the apps (ie, software applications). Sure enough, after a string of acquisitions, Google now offers a complete alternative to Microsoft's entrenched Office suite of programs, all accessible through any web browser. A new technology, called Google Gears, will make these applications usable even when there is no internet connection. And Google is hawking these applications not only to consumers but also to companies. Ultimately it does so because, thanks to its supercomputer, it can.

With Google's cashflow and infrastructure, the freedom to do anything it fancies gives rise to constant rumours. Often, these are outrageous. It used to be conventional wisdom that Google would build cheap personal computers for poor countries. This turned out to be nonsense, because Google does not want to make hardware. Now there is talk of a “Gphone” handset. This is also unlikely because Google is more interested in software and services, and does not want to alienate allies in the handset industry—including Apple, which shares board directors with Google and uses Google software on its iPhone.

Sometimes the rumours are both outrageous and true. Google is experimenting with new ways of bringing broadband connections to consumers, by blanketing parts of Silicon Valley with Wi-Fi networks. It is planning to enter an auction for valuable radio spectrum in America, and thinking of radically new business models to make money from wireless data and voice networks, perhaps a free service supported by ads.

Beyond its attempts to expand into new markets, the big question is how Google will respond if its stunning success is interrupted. “It's axiomatic that companies eventually have crises,” says Mr Schmidt. And history suggests that “tech companies that are dominant have trouble from within, not from competitors.” In Google's case, he says, “I worry about the scaling of the company.” Google has been hiring “Nooglers” (new Googlers) at a breathtaking rate. In June 2004 it had 2,292 staff; this June the number had reached 13,786.

Its ability to get all these people has been a competitive weapon, since Google can afford to hire talent pre-emptively, making it unavailable to Microsoft and Yahoo!. Google tends to win talent wars because its brand is sexier and its perks are fantastically lavish. Googlers commute on discreet shuttle buses (equipped with wireless broadband and running on biodiesel, naturally) to and from the head office, or “Googleplex”, which is a photogenic playground of lava lamps, volleyball courts, swimming pools, free and good restaurants, massage rooms and so forth.

Yet for some on the inside, it can look different. One former executive, now suing Google over her treatment, says that the firm's personnel department is “collapsing” and that “absolute chaos” reigns. When she was hired, nobody knew when or where she was supposed to work, and the balloons that all Nooglers get delivered to their desks ended up God knows where. She started receiving detailed e-mails “enforcing” Google's outward informality by reminding her that high heels and jewellery were inappropriate. Before the corporate ski trip, it was explained that “if you wear fur, they will kill you.”

Google is a paradise only for some, she argues. Employees who predate the IPO resemble aristocracy. Engineers get the most kudos, people with other functions decidedly less so. Bright kids just out of college tend to love it, because the Googleplex in effect replaces their university campus—with a dating scene, a laundry service and no reason to leave at weekends. Older Googlers with families tend to like it less, because “everybody, even young mums, works seven days a week.”

Another Xoogler, who held a senior position, says that by trying to create a “Utopia” of untrammelled creativity, Google ended up with “dystopia”. As is its wont, Google has composed a rigorous algorithmic approach to hiring, based on grade-point averages, college rankings and endless logic puzzles on whiteboards. This “genetic engineering of their workforce,” he says, means that “everybody there is a rocket scientist, so everybody is also insecure” and the back-stabbing and politics are reminiscent of an average university's English department.

Then there is the question of what all these people are supposed to do. “We kind of like the chaos,” says Laszlo Bock, the personnel boss. “Creativity comes out of people bumping into each other and not knowing where to go.” The most famous expression of this is the “20% time”. In theory, all Googlers, down to receptionists, can spend one-fifth of their time exploring any new idea. Good stuff has indeed come out of this, including Google News, Gmail, and even those commuter shuttles and their Wi-Fi systems. But it is not clear that the company as a whole is more innovative as a result, as it claims. It still has only one proven revenue source and most big innovations, such as YouTube, Google Earth and the productivity applications, have come through acquisitions.

In practice, the 20% time works out to be 120% time, says another Xoogler, “since nobody really gets around to those projects for all their other work.” The chances of ideas being executed, he adds, “are basically zero.” What happens to the many Googlers whose ideas are rejected? Once their share options are fully vested they consider leaving. The same phenomenon changed Microsoft in the 1980s, when allegedly T-shirts popped up saying FYIFV (“Fuck you, I'm fully vested”). Already some are going to even “cooler” start-ups, such as Facebook or Twitter.

This week George Reyes, Google's finance chief, said he would retire. At 53, he is a multi-millionaire. Mr Reyes has maintained the company's policy of not providing guidance to Wall Street on future earnings, although his comments on growth prospects have moved its share price.

Besides the slow risk of calcification that comes with growth, there is also the risk that Nooglers will dilute Google's un-evil values. Worse, Google might inadvertently pick up a rogue employee, as the late Barings Bank notoriously did with Nick Leeson. Indeed, Google is fast becoming something like a bank, but one that keeps information rather than money. This applies equally to its rivals, but Google is accumulating treasure fastest. Peter Fleischer, Google's privacy boss, argues that the risk of a malicious or negligent employee leaking or compromising the data, and thus the privacy of users, is minimal because only a “tiny” number of engineers have access to the databases and everything they do is recorded.

But the privacy problem is much subtler than that. As Google compiles more information about individuals, it faces numerous trade-offs. At one extreme it could use a person's search history and advertising responses in combination with, say, his location and the itinerary in his calendar, to serve increasingly useful and welcome search results and ads. This would also allow Google to make money from its many new services. But it could scare users away. As a warning, Privacy International, a human-rights watchdog in London, has berated Google, charging that its attitude to privacy “at its most blatant is hostile, and at its most benign is ambivalent”.

At the other extreme, Google could decide not to make money from some services—in effect, to provide them as a public benefit—and to destroy data about its users. This would make its services less useful but also less intrusive and dangerous.

In reality, the balance must be struck somewhere in between. Messrs Schmidt, Page and Brin have had many meetings on the subject and have made several changes in recent months. First, says Mr Fleischer, Google has committed itself to “anonymising” the search logs on its servers after 18 months—roughly as banks cross out parts of a credit-card number, say. This would mean that search histories cannot be traced to any specific computer. Second, Google says that the bits of software called “cookies”, which store individual preferences on users' own computers, will expire every two years.

Not everybody is impressed. The server logs will still exist for 18 months. And the cookies of “active” users will be automatically renewed upon expiry. This includes everybody who searches on Google, which in effect means most internet users. Then there is the matter of all that other information, such as e-mail and documents, that users might keep in Google's “cloud”. Mr Schmidt points out that such users by definition “opt in”, since they log in. They can opt out at any time.

As things stand today, Google has little to worry about. Most users continue to google with carefree abandon. The company faces lawsuits, but those are more of a nuisance than a threat. It dominates its rivals in the areas that matter, the server cloud is ready for new tasks and the cash keeps flowing. In such a situation, anybody can claim to be holier than money. The test comes when the good times end. At that point, shareholders will demand trade-offs in their favour and consumers might stop believing that Google only ever means well.

Left, a dress from the Versace Spring/Summer '07 collection, which retailed for $1,685 when it was offered by Neiman Marcus this spring. On the right from Bebe, which sells their most expensive comparable dress for about $130. Forever 21 also sold a similar dress later in the summer.

Buyers from the nation’s leading department stores will sift through the work of hundreds of designers as another Fashion Week begins today in New York, seeking the looks that shoppers will want to wear next spring. Seema Anand will be looking for the ones they want right now.

Ms. Anand, who will be following the catwalk shows through photographs posted instantly on the Web, is a designer few would recognize, even though she has dressed more people than most of the famous designers exhibiting a few blocks from her garment district studio, under the tents in Bryant Park.

“If I see something on Style.com, all I have to do is e-mail the picture to my factory and say, ‘I want something similar, or a silhouette made just like this,’ ” Ms. Anand said. The factory, in Jaipur, India, can deliver stores a knockoff months before the designer version.

Ms. Anand compared a gold sequined tunic she created with a nearly identical one by the designer Tory Burch. Bloomingdale’s had asked her to make several hundred of the dresses for its private label Aqua, she said.

The Tory Burch dress sells for $750; Ms. Anand’s is $260.

Ms. Anand’s company, Simonia Fashions, is one of hundreds that make less expensive clothes inspired by other designers’ runway looks, for trendy stores like Forever 21 and retail behemoths like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s.

A debate is raging in the American fashion industry over such designs. Copying, which has always existed in fashion, has become so pervasive in the Internet era it is now the No. 1 priority of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, which is lobbying Congress to extend copyright protection to clothing. Nine senators introduced a bill last month to support the designers. An expert working with the designers’ trade group estimates that knockoffs represent a minimum of 5 percent of the $181 billion American apparel market.

Outlawing them is certainly an uphill battle, since many shoppers see nothing wrong with knockoffs, especially as prices for designer goods skyrocket. Critics of the designers’ group even argue that copies are good for fashion because they encourage designers to continuously invent new wares to stay ahead.

Designers say that is pre-Internet thinking.

“For me, this is not simply about copying,” said Anna Sui, one of more than 20 designers who have filed lawsuits against Forever 21, one of the country’s fastest-growing clothing chains, for selling what they claim are copies of their apparel. “The issue is also timing. These copies are hitting the market before the original versions do.”

The designers seek to outlaw clothing that looks very similar to their originals but is sold under someone else’s label. They want to extend laws that already ban counterfeit handbags and sunglasses with designer logos, which reportedly account for as much as $12 billion of sales. A reliable estimate of knockoffs cannot be determined because designers and retailers disagree on which clothes are copies and which are merely “inspired” by a trend, a normal part of the fashion food chain.

Ms. Anand agreed to offer a rare look at a side of fashion that exists parallel to Seventh Avenue’s celebrity designers, though all but unknown to the public. Interviews with executives at a number of companies that specialize in designing for the private labels of department stores and other chains reveal a highly competitive network of factories, which use the latest technology to reproduce designer looks with the impunity and speed of Robin Hood. Their copies do not violate existing law.

“This is the requirement of the market,” Ms. Anand said. “If a buyer tells us, ‘This is what I need,’ we’ll make it for them. This is our business.”

Her mother, Shashi Anand, founded their company, Simonia Fashions, in 1980, five years after she moved to New York from New Delhi. Shashi Anand has won awards for her success as an Asian businesswoman, including one presented in 1998 by Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose pictures are framed on her office wall.

The company, with 10 employees in the showroom, has sales of $20 million, about 80 percent of which is for clothes sold under the private labels of stores like Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s, and for specialty chains like Forever 21, Rampage and Urban Outfitters. They also design their own line, Blue Plate.

Most of their designs are original, or partly inspired by market trends, the women said; but some look like direct copies, and some of those are made at the specific request of retailers.

At the factory in Jaipur the company contracts with 2,000 workers who specialize in pattern making, design and tailoring, and are equipped with computer programs that approximate the design of a garment from a Web image without the need to pull apart the seams.

The factory can return finished samples within 14 days. Sometimes the results are awful, “and sometimes it looks so great you’re just shocked,” Ms. Anand said. “They’ve done a better job than the designer.”

The spring collections shown this week will not arrive in stores until February, typical of the decades-old industry cycle developed when Fashion Week was a trade event. But now that the news media and the Internet disseminate runway looks instantly, fashion followers are primed to seek them out earlier. Ms. Anand’s factory can deliver her version of runway styles to stores four to six weeks after an order.

Ms. Burch, who will show her collection on Sept. 11, said she was aware that her designs had been singled out by copiers. In March, she filed a lawsuit against several stores, including the Strawberry chain, for selling ballerina flats with an insignia she thought was too close to hers. As for the sequined dress Ms. Anand made for Bloomingdale’s, similar to one of Ms. Burch’s, Frank Doroff, a senior executive vice president of the store, said he was unaware of the order.

“It is our policy not to knock off existing resources,” he said, noting that Bloomingdale’s carries the Tory Burch collection. “Does it happen sometimes? I assume it does, but that is not the way we like to do business.”

The cut or details of a garment cannot be copyrighted under existing law, although logos and original prints can be protected. Anna Sui’s suit against Forever 21, which has 400 stores and sales estimated at more than $1 billion, claims it has infringed against her prints on 26 occasions.

“It seems to be their business model to find things that are popular in the marketplace by other designers and copy them,” said Marya Lenn Yee, a lawyer for Ms. Sui.

A spokeswoman for Forever 21, Meghan Bryan, had no comment on the lawsuit. “In working with our enormous vendor base, regularly buying items from hundreds of vendors, it is extremely difficult to be certain of the origin of each item, on each and every occasion,” she said in an e-mail message.

Of several shoppers polled outside a Forever 21 branch in Herald Square in Manhattan recently, none said that knowing a design was copied would stop them from buying it.

“Some people don’t want to spend $300 on a pair of jeans just because of the name,” said Siovhan McGearey, 16, from London. “They may look nice, but why pay $300 when you can go down the street to Forever 21 and get jeans that are $30 that look exactly the same?”

Designers counter that if the knockoffs continue unabated, their businesses will be in jeopardy.

Ms. Anand maintained that her reproductions of designer styles have been changed enough that they do not violate a designer’s intellectual property. “We don’t copy anything,” she said. “We tweak it. We get inspired before we create it.”

She sees her work meeting the needs of the vast majority of consumers who cannot afford designer prices. “Especially the younger girls do not have so much money,” Ms. Anand said, “but they want to wear fashionable clothes.”

“They want to look fabulous,” she said. “It’s their right to look fabulous.”

Eric Striffler for The New York Times

WITH A LITTLE HELP Selin Semaan and Josh Weiselberg enlisted friends in designing his parents' summer house.

NORTH HAVEN, N.Y.

A FAMILIAR story: The parents of a young, hungry architect plan to build a house, and the young, hungry architect gets the job, a first major commission. But this time there’s a twist: the architect’s architect friends are all along for the ride.

Design schools are competitive places, pitting student against student as each vies for validation from the instructors. It is not uncommon to find one’s classmates hiding their models, locking up their drawings or otherwise treating their desks like some private Skunk Works.

There seems to have been a very different ethic at the Rhode Island School of Design, the well-regarded institution in Providence known as RISD (pronounced as RIZZ-dee), at least in the classes of 2001 and 2002.

Those years produced Josh Weiselberg and Selin Semaan, partners in life and work, and nearly a dozen of their friends whose art and design now complete Mr. Weiselberg’s parents’ sophisticated new house outside Sag Harbor. But before they could steer their clients toward art, furniture, light fixtures or even juice glasses designed by their talented coterie, Mr. Weiselberg and Ms. Semaan had to land the job.

Their future clients had other ideas. “They were about to go to a developer and buy a plan from a magazine,” Mr. Weiselberg, 28, said of his parents, Jane and Jack, who decided in 2003 to build a replacement for their old summer house nearby. “Being fresh out of school, I thought that was unacceptable.”

“Basically, we weren’t being considered for the job,” Ms. Semaan, 29, clarified. So the couple, who do business as TBD Design Studio (“We’re not married but we are incorporated,” Mr. Weiselberg said), started in on their own with no mandate, quietly preparing a design while, on a second front, they worked to open the elder Weiselbergs’ minds to the inevitability of an intrafamilial collaboration. A trip was made to the house Charles Gwathmey, then 27, built for his own parents in Amagansett, N.Y., in 1965. But the resistance continued. “They were like, ‘It’s just a stupid house,’ ” Mr. Weiselberg said. “They didn’t understand how much fun we’d have making this stupid house.”

After a final all-nighter in April 2003, the striving architects invited their future clients, their marks, to their East Village walkup for a formal presentation. “We had all the materials that RISD prepared us to have,” Mr. Weiselberg said, and they needed every drawing, rendering and model in the quiver. Mrs. Weiselberg was clear that she wanted an ivy-ready stone cottage with a pitched roof; her son and his partner were offering a different vision.

Technology, training and attrition carried the day. “He showed us a computer-generated view of the house and he put grass in front of it,” Mrs. Weiselberg said recently, standing in the open kitchen of her son’s recently realized dream. “We were awed. We didn’t know what to say. So we said O.K.”

“It wasn’t that they liked it,” the younger Mr. Weiselberg said, but that they “realized that they weren’t going to be able to move ahead without us, that we weren’t going to stop designing.”

So with the caveat that they not quit their day jobs — Ms. Semaan at Obra Architects, Mr. Weiselberg as a journeyman moving between progressive New York firms like Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis and the Architecture Research Office — the commission was granted and a fee agreed to, grudgingly.

“They never wanted to admit they were paying us,” Ms. Semaan said. “Probably because they never wanted to admit they had hired us.”

The Weiselberg parents remained anxious about their choice, particularly about abandoning their pitched-roof-and-stone expectations for TBD’s contemporary taste. After ground was broken in November 2005, Weiselberg father and son visited the site. “The look on his face was utter fear,” Josh Weiselberg said. “He saw concrete. He saw a hole. All he knew was that he was getting a grill on the screened porch and a pot filler above the stove.” It wasn’t until another visit, when the walls were framed in, that Jack Weiselberg realized he was getting a lot more from his son. “We went back when the sheathing was up and he could feel it,” the younger Mr. Weiselberg continued. “I started hearing things like, ‘Modern is the only way to go!’ ”

The move away from traditionalism opened the way for the rest of the RISD posse to contribute their talents. Andrew Hughes (class of 2001) produced the four hand-blown glass pendants that light the kitchen island. “I’ve known Josh’s parents almost as long as I’ve known Josh,” he said from his studio in Long Island City, Queens. “I knew they would be tough clients. But for what I do, my friends’ parents are important people.” A kitchen cabinet is stocked with dozens of his glasses.

Max Wang, Marcel Madsen and John Buckley (also class of 2001) of the Metropolitan Produce Corporation in Brooklyn designed a custom walnut slab table for the dining room, with two flitches connected by steel sutures. They also created an ash coffee table for the living room, described by Mr. Buckley as a “sliding grid of blocks,” and another, very much like it but made of Homasote, for the more relaxed family room upstairs. “The walls were down and there was a lot of cross-referencing between people,” he said of his time at RISD. “The atmosphere fostered working friendships.”

RISD is all over the walls, too. A painting by Alex Dodge (2001) — “The Hidden Power of Everyday Things #4,” an on-the-bottom-of-the-swimming-pool view that brings to mind Ben Braddock’s sulking plunge in “The Graduate” — hangs on the dining room side of the massive steel-sheathed hearth that anchors the main public spaces. It was purchased through the Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is run by Rob Hult and Sam Wilson (both RISD 2001) and Ingrid Bromberg Kennedy. The gallery also supplied an acrylic-on-wood piece by Pali Kasi (RISD 2000) for the wall above the giant orange sectional in the family room.

The largest artwork in the house, a series of intricate drawings composed of tiny capital letters that coalesce, from afar, into a copse of bare tree trunks, is by an interloper: Gustavo Bonevardi, an architect who was one of the creators of the “Tribute in Light” memorial at the World Trade Center site, as well as Mr. Weiselberg’s first employer. The piece, called “Other Forests,” commands a full double-height wall of the living room. In a note to this reporter Mr. Weiselberg wrote: “Gustavo has been a great friend, even though he didn’t go to RISD.”

“Everyone says we’re a mafia,” said Piet Houtenbos (RISD 2001), a friend and classmate of Mr. Weiselberg’s beginning in the second grade at Manhattan’s Ethical Culture school and continuing through high school at Fieldston and design school in Providence. “We don’t mean to be a mafia, but I guess we are.” His well-known line of bamboo furniture for Modernlink is represented in his friend’s parents’ house, and he is the impresario behind the RISD cabal’s regular Friday night meetings at Fanelli’s bar in SoHo. He also supplied about 15 oil lamps, made from the casings of real hand grenades, for use in the adjacent pool house. “Josh just called and said, ‘Bring over some grenades!’ ” he said. “If you need stuff, and your friends do it, and they’re pretty cool, why not?”

At the end of a tour, the architects, their clients and this reporter find themselves in that pool house, which, from a position on its long couch, frames perfectly an oblique view back to the main house across the water. There is a long conversation about the house’s complex Lutron light control system, parents ribbing son. Parents don’t think they’ll ever figure it out. “I take the remote control and I can sit here and light it up in different ways,” son says, elated.

Asked about his work, Jack Weiselberg said he is “the chairman of a small, research-driven stock brokerage.”

“You could describe us as a small, research-driven architecture firm,” Josh Weiselberg replied.

Asked about the experience of having his son design his house, Jack Weiselberg said: “Am I glad I did it? Absolutely. Would I sell it? Absolutely.” Selin Semaan smiled. Josh Weiselberg blanched.

“I’d have to sign off on it too,” his mother interjected. “And I’m not.”

EPA

A DECADE or so ago, thinkers and pundits were fond of discussing the emerging threat of cyber attacks as a matter of international affairs. The growing reliance of advanced economies on the internet, and the increasing use of the internet by governments and armies, seemed to offer vulnerability along with riches and convenience. The scare of the “Y2K bug” seemed to highlight the danger, at least until it became obvious that the bug was of no threat to anyone.

Now, despite preoccupation with more old-fashioned sorts of terrorism and war, is there, again, reason to fret about the cyber sort? Revelations this year that hackers successfully broke into Pentagon computers, followed by off-the-record confirmation by officials speaking to the Financial Times this week that the assailants were connected to China’s army, have brought the issue back to the fore. Reports suggest that the online intruders were probably engaged in espionage, downloading information. The ability to spy is threatening enough. But hackers may also discern vulnerabilities in computer systems and inflict damage. One fear is that hackers who peeked into the American government’s networks could possibly, one day, work out how to shut them down, at least for a time.

The Pentagon is presumably better able to protect itself against cyber attacks than most. Other targets have been shown to be more vulnerable. The potential impact of cyber-vandalism became obvious this year when Russian hackers unleashed the biggest-ever international cyber-assault on tiny Estonia, after the Baltic country caused offence by re-burying a Russian soldier from the second world war. “Denial of service” attacks, when huge numbers of visitors overwhelm public websites, crippled Estonian government computers. Some breathlessly called it the first direct Russian attack on a NATO member.

The Russian government claimed in that incident that the hackers were incensed ordinary Russians. But some experts said they saw Kremlin footprints. In the current Chinese case the script has been repeated; some at the Pentagon say they can pin the attacks on the People’s Liberation Army. Germany’s government has protested to China’s rulers, saying it too was once hacked by the PLA. Other governments, such as the British one, say that cyber-attacks are increasingly common problems. China, too, says it has been a victim of cyber-assault, and that it takes the issue seriously. In all likelihood—as with the more traditional spying of the cold war days—many countries are attempting some sort of cyber-attacks, while condemning others who do it.

Some of the more effective cyber snoops and vandals may not be government employees. Rather, as pirates would once loot on behalf of particular governments, a few of today’s more effective hackers may be freelancers acting perhaps with tacit official approval. But governments are also developing capability themselves. A Pentagon report this year on China’s military forces said baldly that the country was developing tactics to achieve “electromagnetic dominance” early in a conflict. It added that, while China had not developed a formal doctrine of electronic warfare, it had begun to consider offensive cyber-attacks within its operational exercises.

Cyber-attacks present an attractive option to America’s foes, as a form of guerrilla or asymmetrical warfare. In 2002 the Pentagon ran a war-game with the evocative title “Digital Pearl Harbour”. In it, simulated attacks showed only temporary and limited effect (for example shutting down some electricity supplies). But this week’s revelation may show that America has underestimated its Chinese rival.

The legal world has always been slow to keep up with technology, and the international law of cybercrime is no exception. The first international legal instrument on the subject was the Council of Europe’s Convention on Cybercrime. It requires members to pass appropriate laws against cybercrime—including unauthorised access and network disruption, as well as computer-aided traditional crimes like money-laundering and child pornography. It also mandates a certain level of law-enforcement to prevent laxer jurisdictions from becoming cybercrime havens. But its reach is limited. It came into force in 2004 among just six Council of Europe members; others have since joined, including America at the start of this year. No other non-member of the Council of Europe has joined. This means that the Chinese shenanigans, whatever they were, continue to exist in a legal netherworld.

The original R-110 Travelall of 1953-54.

THE question of exactly which automaker created the muscle car or just what company gave birth to the minivan may never be answered satisfactorily. The origins of the sport utility vehicle seem to be more certain, however.

In 1953, International Harvester, a manufacturer better known for its farm tractors and commercial trucks, introduced the Travelall, a truck-based passenger wagon. True, the Chevrolet Suburban had a similar layout (and a name that dates to the 1930s), but the Suburban didn’t acquire four-wheel drive, a hallmark of the S.U.V. category, until 1960; the Travelall was available with four-wheel drive by 1956.

Dodge’s Town Wagon wasn’t offered with four-wheel drive until 1957. Willys, Kaiser and later American Motors sold civilian versions of the Army jeep, but these spartan vehicles were hardly the forebears of the modern soccer-mom S.U.V.

International’s head start was little help in the long run. By the time S.U.V.’s became must-have accessories for suburban families, the company had decided to focus its efforts on commercial vehicles and was long gone from the consumer market. Chevy, Dodge and Jeep still sell utility vehicles, of course, and have earned tidy profits from the category that International defined.

Now producing buses, large trucks and diesel engines under the Navistar name, International traces its roots to the invention of the reaper by Cyrus McCormick in 1831. In 1907, the company began production of the Auto Buggy, a versatile passenger car with a removable back seat that let it serve double duty as a pickup. Before long, it was producing the Auto Wagon from the same basic structure, complete with a bed that could haul an 800-pound load.

International’s century of truck making is chronicled in a colorful tribute published in June, “Milestones in the Company That Helped Build America” (Graphic Arts Center Publishing, $60). Historic photographs and reproductions of advertisements illustrate the company’s close ties to the farm economy and its contributions to the country’s growth; by 1910 International was the fourth-largest company in America by the value of its assets.

Farm implements and work trucks of all sizes and shapes helped International to prosper. A wide range of specially bodied vehicles, from armored cars to gasoline tankers, were built on International chassis. Mainstream pickups delivered industry’s goods, and one of its school buses became an icon of popular culture as the psychedelic Furthur bus of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters.

But taking the reputation for ruggedness to a new market of private buyers was another challenge altogether. With advertising that emphasized four-wheel-drive practicality, International wisely initiated a marketing campaign directed at suburban families rather than at farmers or tradesmen. Unfortunately, the timing wasn’t ideal.

Al Ries, chairman of a marketing strategy firm and a prolific author of business books, has said that “strategy and timing are the Himalayas of marketing; everything else is the Catskills.” International’s rugged Travelall — and later the Scout — may have been capable of tackling the Himalayas, but from a timing standpoint, they never left the Catskills.

Even if its timing was off, International’s strategy was prescient. Travelall marketing campaigns often featured women; later ads pictured preppy couples loading their Travelall with furniture at a New England antiques shop.

According to Dee Kapur, president of the International Truck Group at Navistar, no one is really sure how or why the Travelall was approved for production. Although it seems incredible today, there was no market research or shopping-mall focus groups, just a hunch that a need might exist.

According to Mr. Kapur, International Harvester thought that it could hit on a winning formula by infusing the DNA of its rugged commercial trucks into a passenger vehicle. And in fact, the Travelall started out as a modified R-Series commercial panel truck with side windows and a new tailgate design. It sold moderately well and was on the market from 1953 until 1975. Its only major restyling took place in 1969.

Roughly comparable in size to today’s Suburban, the first Travelalls were two-door models. In 1957-61, they had a third door on the passenger side; later, all Travelalls came with four doors. Ansel Adams used one to travel the United States, often photographing his magnificent landscapes from a custom-built platform on the roof.

Collectors seem to prefer the vintage look of the first series, but it is unusual to see Internationals of any kind at collector car auctions.

Charles Kuhn, a Chicago classic-car dealer, said that was a result of rather low survivorship. “Most probably lived long, hard lives in the hands of tradesmen and outdoors types and were just used up well before there was any thought about collectibility,” he said.

Still, Mr. Kuhn said that a restored Travelall is truly a usable collector vehicle that makes a much different statement about the owner than a new Grand Cherokee or Explorer.

The Travelall was followed by the smaller Scout in 1961. The Scout came only with two doors in various hardtop and soft-top configurations. In size and concept, it was similar to the Ford Bronco II of two decades later. But according to Mr. Kapur, everything was built to a more rugged standard, as would be expected from a company building commercial trucks.

If a vehicle is a reflection of the owner’s personality, then Chris Chelios is the archetypal Scout owner. Mr. Chelios — a defenseman for the Detroit Red Wings and a durable veteran of 24 N.H.L. seasons — has owned seven Scouts. He currently has two, one of which stays at his off-season home in California.

Mr. Chelios enjoys their tough and trouble-free nature. “I can leave them sitting for a long time, and they always start right up,” he said. “The one in California hasn’t had its top up in 12 years. Their design makes them better-looking when the top is down.”

Mr. Chelios said that finding parts was not an issue. Although Navistar no longer supplies them, various specialists have filled the void.

According to Mr. Kapur, International’s dealer network, and a recession, were responsible for the company’s decision to leave the passenger vehicle market. Scouts and Travelalls were sold alongside commercial trucks through International Harvester’s dealers. Most were in rural areas rather than in the urban and suburban markets that International sought to crack.

In addition to its large trucks, Navistar today sells the XT series of gargantuan pickups for extra-heavy-duty service. These could provide the platform for a supersize S.U.V.

Mr. Kapur said that it was not impossible that Navistar might return to claim part of the market it pioneered. “If we do, it will certainly be something different and worthy of our heritage in the truck industry.”

International Harvester’s departure from the consumer truck market in 1980 came years before vehicles like the Ford Explorer and Jeep Grand Cherokee changed the suburban landscape. Had it been able to hold out a while longer, International, a company with a real heritage and a history in rugged commercial trucks, would probably still be a player in an S.U.V. market successfully populated by such unlikely truck makers as Porsche and BMW.

VANITY OR ART A Dior show in Paris in February. New York Fashion Week begins on Tuesday.

DEPENDING on who is doing the talking, fashion is bourgeois, girly, unfeminist, conformist, elitist, frivolous, anti-intellectual and a cultural stepchild barely worth the attention paid to even the most minor arts.

With Fashion Week beginning in New York on Tuesday — the start of a twice-yearly, monthlong cycle of designer presentations on two continents and in four cities that will showcase hundreds of individual designers — it is worth asking why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride.

“Everyone” is not here intended to imply the deeply initiated, those pixie-dust people for whom the shape of a dress or the cut of a sleeve is a major event. There is certainly a place for those types, whether they are cuckoos like the late fashion editor Diana Vreeland (who once wrote, “I’m told it’s not in good taste to wear blackamoors anymore, but I think I’ll revive them”), or extravagant mythomaniacs like John Galliano, the Dior designer — who plays a pirate one season, a gypsy the next — or even the young celebrity brand pimps who would probably be offering paparazzi a lot more gratuitous crotch shots if designers didn’t provide them with free clothes.

No, everyone means the rest of us, those who scorn fashion outright and those who don’t but who nevertheless have the uneasy sense that this compelling world of surfaces and self-presentation is unworthy of regard.

“There is this suggestion that fashion is not an art form or a cultural form, but a form of vanity and consumerism,” said Elaine Showalter, the feminist literary critic and a professor emeritus at Princeton. And those, Ms. Showalter added, are dimensions of culture that “intelligent and serious” people are expected to scorn.

Particularly in academia, where bodies are just carts for hauling around brains, the thrill and social play and complex masquerade of fashion is “very much denigrated,” Ms. Showalter said. “The academic uniform has some variations,” she said, “but basically is intended to make you look like you’re not paying attention to fashion, and not vain, and not interested in it, God forbid.”

When Valerie Steele, the director of the museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, declared an interest at Yale graduate school in pursuing the history of fashion, colleagues were horror-struck. “I was amazed at how much hostility was directed at me,” Ms. Steele said. “The intellectuals thought it was unspeakable, despicable, everything but vain and sinful,” she added. She might as well have joined a satanic cult.

And that, substantially, is how a person still is looked at who happens to mention in serious company an interest in reading, say, Vogue.

“I hate it,” Miuccia Prada once remarked to me about fashion, in a conversation during which we mutually confessed to unease at being compelled by a subject so patently superficial.

“Of course, I love it also,” Ms. Prada added, and her reason said a lot about why fashion is a subject no one should be ashamed to take seriously. “Even when people don’t have anything,” Ms. Prada said, “they have their bodies and their clothes.”

They have their identities, that is, assembled during the profound daily ritual of clothing oneself; they have, as Colette once remarked, their civilizing masks. And yet, despite its potential as a tool for analyzing culture, history, politics and creative expression; as a form of descriptive shorthand used through all of written history (including the Vedas, the Bible and the Koran); as a social delight, fashion is just as often used as a weapon, a club wielded by those who forget that we are saying something about ourselves every time we get dressed — not infrequently things that fail to convey the whole truth.

Why else was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign moved to attack the fashion critic of The Washington Post for attempting to read the candidate’s clothes? The editorial blitz that followed Senator Clinton’s outraged response to some blameless observations about a slight show of cleavage on the Senate floor was instructive, as was Mrs. Clinton’s summoning up of feminist cant about the sexism of focusing on what a woman wears to the exclusion of her ideas.

But clothes are ideas; to use a fashionism — Hello! Scholars like the art historian Anne Hollander have spent decades laying out the way that costume serves to billboard the self. One would have thought that few people understand this truth as well as the woman occasionally known as Hairband Hillary, who, after all, assiduously recast her image from that of demure and wifely second-banana to power-suited policy wonk, dressed to go forth and lead the free world.

Politicians are far from the only people who act as though the concerns of fashion are beneath consideration. When the Italian film legend Michelangelo Antonioni died recently, film critics and obituary writers went into raptures about his classic “L’Avventura,” a movie few people outside of cinema studies classes are likely, at this point, to have seen. Some remarked that the Antonioni of that early film had already begun losing his edge by the time he detoured into films like “Blowup,” whose plot revolves around the fashion world.

Never mind that “L’Avventura” is a sharply stylish movie and that in Antonioni’s hands wardrobe does the work dialogue would for more talk-prone directors. Absent plot, clothes are used by Antonioni to frame the mood of upper-class anomie and to make graphically his distaste for the Italian neorealists, who all seemed to have costumed their movies using the same set of Anna Magnani’s hand-me-downs.

Like most Italians then and now, Antonioni had a sympathy for the role clothes play in human theater. And while “Blowup” is set in a fashion (or “mod”) milieu, it is less about fashion, really, than about an accidentally photographed murder and the instability of what is seen and known. Even 40 years on, the film’s surfaces remain so stylishly assured and so cool they automatically arouse intellectual suspicion. Trusting in appearances, Antonioni always seemed to suggest, may be a losing proposition.

But investing in them, as Ms. Steele said, can be far worse.

“In our deeply Puritan culture, to care about appearance is like trying to be better than you really are, morally wrong,” she said.

It is to be driven by the dictates of desires and not needs. And yet the appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined. Luxury, and not necessity, may be the true mother of invention, as the writer Henry Petroski observed. This proposition is an easier sell when the luxury in question is an iPhone, and not a Balenciaga handbag, but the same principles hold.

In places like Silicon Valley the quest for newer and better stuff results in technology patents, a clear measure of economic robustness. Fashion innovations may be harder to patent or track, but it seems obvious that huge sectors of the New York City economy would churn to a halt if all the Project Runway types suddenly stopped migrating here in the belief that the world could be changed by the sort of innovation inherent in how a garment is cut.

“Fashion is so easy to hate,” said Elizabeth Currid, a professor at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development and the author of “The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City” (Princeton University Press).

“Cultural industries like fashion are sometimes seen as something only the skinny girls in high school think about,” said Ms. Currid — and less often as a fascinating field for cultural study and also the bill-payers keeping thousands of seamstresses, cutters, pattern makers, truckers, real estate brokers and publicity hacks employed.

Analyzing Bureau of Labor statistics, Ms. Currid arrived at the not-altogether-startling conclusion that the densest concentration of fashion designers in the United States is in New York. A glance at the roster of foreign designers showing at New York Fashion Week, Sept. 4 through 12 — Russia, Turkey, India and Brazil are represented — suggests a good reason for that.

“Even if, on some level, fashion is fantasy, the concentration of events that go into producing it and the resulting social spillover,” as Ms. Currid said, can result in a huge cumulative economic advantage for a city. While the seasonal shows in the tents in Bryant Park, with their enforced passivity and aura of feminine spectatorship, lend themselves to derision, enforcing the sense that all those fops and dandies and flibbertigibbets, all the socialite geishas and second-rate celebrities and editorial priestesses are little more than idlers and dupes, big business goes on. Odds are that the same journals whose critics score easy points off fashion are economically propped up by the life-support provided by advertising for dresses and bags and shoes.

One of the most startling findings of her research, Ms. Currid said, was how powerful something as superficial, girly, bourgeois, unfeminist, conformist, elitist and frivolous as fashion can be in creating the intangible allure that attracts money, talent, beauty and enterprise to cities.

“How does one place make itself different from another in a world where there’s a Starbucks on every corner?” she asked. “People have to believe that this is the place to be.” Fashion has that effect.