http://www.good.is/GOOD Magazine is about moving things forward, and we're here to celebrate progress wherever we see it come to life. This is the emerging sensibility in our world and that gets us fired up.Sun, 27 May 2012 12:44:26 -0700CakePHPhourly1en-us http://www.good.is/post/the-big-list-of-new-years-resolutions/ http://www.good.is/post/the-big-list-of-new-years-resolutions/

The State of Texas: What I really want to accomplish this year? As a state? Is to literally change my shape! I feel so fat. What I'm going to do is diet and work out until I look more like California: long and lean. But without the earthquakes. And no Schwarzenegger.

Boots the Cat: No more racing across the kitchen, then skidding into the counter. Why do I keep doing that, you know? Do I like the humiliation? Am I kind of seeking it out? Enough already! From now on, I'm sitting perfectly still on this macramé throw, no matter what I think I see fleeing across the linoleum. Wait, wait, shit, I'll be right-damn. Dammit.

Some Fat Guy in Cleveland: I'm going to stop fantasizing that Paris Hilton, on a layover in the Cleveland airport, has a brain seizure, is suddenly attracted to heavy guys, flees into the city, and blunders into my backyard, where she finds me "sunning" myself. Who am I kidding? I mean, what are the odds? My house is so far from the airport.

The Corpse of Al Capone: This year, I hope to come back from the grave and reestablish my "crime empire." No, wait. Actually, the first thing I'm going to do is get cured of the syphilis that killed me. Definitely. Then a milk shake. My throat's been so dry. So: cure for syphilis, milk shake, then the "crime empire" reestablishment thing.

A Jug of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Warehouse, New Jersey: My resolution is to . . . simply disappear. I know I'm making everyone fat. I'm sweet, yes, but it's a cloying sweetness, and just look at all these tubbies! At first it was fun-everyone liked me, no one had yet been crushed by early-onset diabetes, but now… I wish I was just plain old corn again, you know? Softly swaying in a field, hiding clandestine lovers, sheltering wild clusters of crows. God, those were the days.

A Major Television Network: Jesus, I'm so ashamed of myself! I've been remiss. I was blind but now I see: There's a deplorable shortage of shows depicting kinky sexual murders, fetishistic assaults, and sadistic-but-brilliant serial killers. This year, I resolve to address this deficiency, starting with CSI Heaven, in which Satan sneaks into God's kingdom and starts abducting and raping the angels. Then "Saint Francis" figures it out, and murders Satan, using that beaded belt thingie Francis always wears, after which he gives Satan's body a kick and pushes it out of Heaven, and it falls to earth and lands on a prostitute who is actually a man, a man who was once molested by his father's dog, who was actually a nun dressed as a dog, a nun who, when not dressed as a dog, and even sometimes when dressed as a dog, was mad into S&M. Now that's entertainment!

Satan: I resolve to haunt any television executive who has me die in a sitcom. Satan doesn't die! He's already dead! Also, no way could Saint Francis kill me. Have you ever seen that guy? He's a twig.

Saint Francis of Assisi: Oh yeah, bring it on! You might not know this, "Beelzebub," but I'm supported here in heaven by the ghosts of literally every animal who ever died! You want a piece of us? And what kind of fey name is that anyway, "Beelzebub?

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: I will bite you right on the ass, Satan, if you mess with my friend Saint Francis, who once took a big thorn out of my paw.

Satan: All right, all right, no need to get all-

Roger, Dead Former Theologian: Actually, I'm sorry to say, the individual who took the thorn from your paw, Simba? Was, in fact, not Saint Francis, but Saint Jerome-

Androcles: Bullcrap! That was me! I'm the one who did that! Come one, that was definitely me. Simba, look at me, try and remember! I wasn't naked then, didn't have an eternal, luminous body-I was wearing a toga at that time, if you rem-

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: Uh, actually, you know what? Now that I think about it? It was Androcles. Sorry, sorry. Wow, is that ever weird. I think the reason I…can you guys see the resemblance? Doesn't Androcles kind of look like Saint Francis? It's the eyes, the gentleness around the-

Sir Winston Churchill: He does, he really does, I totally see what you mean-

Satan: You turds are all show and no go.

Saint Francis of Assisi: Oh really? We'll see about that. Go, Simba, go! Take Satan out! Bite him right on his cocky red ass!

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: Come, all ye beasts of the field, let us show Satan our considerable power!

Various Dead Beasts of the Field: Okay!

God: Wow, nice job, Simba and the other beasts of the field! Jeez, I should have thought of that eons ago! I have a feeling that, without that jerk Satan around, 2007 may be our best year ever!

George Saunders: Let's hope so, and Happy New Year!]]>

The State of Texas: What I really want to accomplish this year? As a state? Is to literally change my shape! I feel so fat. What I'm going to do is diet and work out until I look more like California: long and lean. But without the earthquakes. And no Schwarzenegger.

Boots the Cat: No more racing across the kitchen, then skidding into the counter. Why do I keep doing that, you know? Do I like the humiliation? Am I kind of seeking it out? Enough already! From now on, I'm sitting perfectly still on this macramé throw, no matter what I think I see fleeing across the linoleum. Wait, wait, shit, I'll be right-damn. Dammit.

Some Fat Guy in Cleveland: I'm going to stop fantasizing that Paris Hilton, on a layover in the Cleveland airport, has a brain seizure, is suddenly attracted to heavy guys, flees into the city, and blunders into my backyard, where she finds me "sunning" myself. Who am I kidding? I mean, what are the odds? My house is so far from the airport.

The Corpse of Al Capone: This year, I hope to come back from the grave and reestablish my "crime empire." No, wait. Actually, the first thing I'm going to do is get cured of the syphilis that killed me. Definitely. Then a milk shake. My throat's been so dry. So: cure for syphilis, milk shake, then the "crime empire" reestablishment thing.

A Jug of High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Warehouse, New Jersey: My resolution is to . . . simply disappear. I know I'm making everyone fat. I'm sweet, yes, but it's a cloying sweetness, and just look at all these tubbies! At first it was fun-everyone liked me, no one had yet been crushed by early-onset diabetes, but now… I wish I was just plain old corn again, you know? Softly swaying in a field, hiding clandestine lovers, sheltering wild clusters of crows. God, those were the days.

A Major Television Network: Jesus, I'm so ashamed of myself! I've been remiss. I was blind but now I see: There's a deplorable shortage of shows depicting kinky sexual murders, fetishistic assaults, and sadistic-but-brilliant serial killers. This year, I resolve to address this deficiency, starting with CSI Heaven, in which Satan sneaks into God's kingdom and starts abducting and raping the angels. Then "Saint Francis" figures it out, and murders Satan, using that beaded belt thingie Francis always wears, after which he gives Satan's body a kick and pushes it out of Heaven, and it falls to earth and lands on a prostitute who is actually a man, a man who was once molested by his father's dog, who was actually a nun dressed as a dog, a nun who, when not dressed as a dog, and even sometimes when dressed as a dog, was mad into S&M. Now that's entertainment!

Satan: I resolve to haunt any television executive who has me die in a sitcom. Satan doesn't die! He's already dead! Also, no way could Saint Francis kill me. Have you ever seen that guy? He's a twig.

Saint Francis of Assisi: Oh yeah, bring it on! You might not know this, "Beelzebub," but I'm supported here in heaven by the ghosts of literally every animal who ever died! You want a piece of us? And what kind of fey name is that anyway, "Beelzebub?

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: I will bite you right on the ass, Satan, if you mess with my friend Saint Francis, who once took a big thorn out of my paw.

Satan: All right, all right, no need to get all-

Roger, Dead Former Theologian: Actually, I'm sorry to say, the individual who took the thorn from your paw, Simba? Was, in fact, not Saint Francis, but Saint Jerome-

Androcles: Bullcrap! That was me! I'm the one who did that! Come one, that was definitely me. Simba, look at me, try and remember! I wasn't naked then, didn't have an eternal, luminous body-I was wearing a toga at that time, if you rem-

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: Uh, actually, you know what? Now that I think about it? It was Androcles. Sorry, sorry. Wow, is that ever weird. I think the reason I…can you guys see the resemblance? Doesn't Androcles kind of look like Saint Francis? It's the eyes, the gentleness around the-

Sir Winston Churchill: He does, he really does, I totally see what you mean-

Satan: You turds are all show and no go.

Saint Francis of Assisi: Oh really? We'll see about that. Go, Simba, go! Take Satan out! Bite him right on his cocky red ass!

Simba, Huge Dead Lion: Come, all ye beasts of the field, let us show Satan our considerable power!

Various Dead Beasts of the Field: Okay!

God: Wow, nice job, Simba and the other beasts of the field! Jeez, I should have thought of that eons ago! I have a feeling that, without that jerk Satan around, 2007 may be our best year ever!

George Saunders: Let's hope so, and Happy New Year!]]> George Saunders Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:44:09 PST http://www.good.is/post/mirror-mirror/ http://www.good.is/post/mirror-mirror/

A beautiful young woman visited a cosmetic surgeon, wanting him to perform a breast lift and reduction. The procedure she desired was less invasive than the traditional method-the incision encircles the areola rather than running from there down to where breast meets ribcage-but also more complicated, intended for a subset of patients more problematically endowed than she. The surgeon declined her request and advised her not to pursue the surgery. Her breasts were close to perfect. Thirteen other surgeons apparently agreed, also refusing to operate.

The 15th surgeon she visited said yes "and ruined her," one of the first 14 surgeons told me. "I still hear about her. She's never recovered. Her life is over."

The brilliance of this story-and I'm not at all questioning its veracity; I've heard others like it-is how it carves two birds with one scalpel. From it we learn that (1) there are butcher-surgeons out there and (2) there are unhinged patients, too. While I believe the doctor told me this story out of caveat emptor goodwill, it's actually the second implication that lingers. Because it's just such reports of the Unhinged Subject-the sad, desperate ones; those suffering from body dysmorphic disorder; the Michael Jacksons and Jocelyn Wildensteins (the New York socialite who has allegedly spent millions on countless surgeries, with the result of looking almost feline)-which in part have helped cosmetic surgery's popularity.

That's no typo: I mean "helped," not "hurt." As long as supermarket tabloids publish images of the latest iteration of characters like Michael and The Bride of Wildenstein, the rest of us can mollify ourselves. Hey, we're not that pathetic, we'd never pursue that level of transmogrative grotesquery, so what's wrong with the occasional nip or tuck? Each skin peel and cheek implant that Michael gets-pardon; allegedly gets-thrusts him so much further into Freaksville that we're bound to separate the world into Us and Them. And because of the stunning advances the last decade has seen in cosmetic-surgery techniques, instruments, and medicines, Us and Them no longer means Those Who Don't and Those Who Do but rather Those Who Sort of Like Themselves and Those Who Privately Loathe Themselves.

With such a broadening pool of patients, though-from 1997 to 2005, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), cosmetic procedures in this country increased by 444 percent, to 11.5 million-how does the surgeon tell, from just an initial consult, who's an Us and who's a Them? How can he tell which patient will translate into a "Doc, you changed my life!" holiday card, and which a malpractice suit? (Virtually every top surgeon, insists one, has been the subject of at least one suit.) For their part, prospective patients, if diligent, have ample guidance-checking out board certification, membership in reputable national organizations, word of mouth-when trying to distinguish the mostly good surgeons from the bad ("the guy down the street," as several surgeons routinely label the amoral butcher who expresses no qualms about doing anything to anyone). The doctor, though, often relies solely on intuition, from cues picked up in a brief conversation, to determine a patient's psychological soundness. But is that a reliable system? The staggering number of hours top surgeons put into sharpening their technical skills notwithstanding, there's no accurate measure for judging people and their real needs. And while admittedly it's in their interest to steer clear of patients they suspect can't ever be satisfied, there is also the incentive in place to now and then embrace an obsessive, whose patronage may result in a vigorous ongoing business relationship. Cosmetic surgery, more than any medical specialty, brings together doctor and patient speaking different languages. The cosmetic surgeon-"a psychiatrist with a scalpel," as one doctor charitably characterized it-is first and last a technician, trying to determine if the desired procedure can be done, and done well. The patient, meanwhile, wants to know if she or he will look-and hence feel-better. Yes, they're both ostensibly concerned with aesthetics, but in the same way the federal government is ostensibly concerned with a balanced budget.

"We're not taking care of a functional disorder or removing cancer," says Dr. Cap Lesesne, a top Park Avenue surgeon. "We're operating on perception."

At the initial consult, the surgeon often asks some version of, "What don't you like about yourself?"-the recurring salvo asked of potential patients by the plastic surgeons on the popular TV show Nip/Tuck. But even though the question seems nonpartisan, surgeons are still, well, surgeons. ("What's the difference between God and a surgeon?" the wife of one of the Nip/Tuck surgeons quizzed a friend. "God doesn't think he's a surgeon.") So doctors have been known to volunteer an opinion or two-even though it's elective surgery, and even though no one asked. "One surgeon I went to about my naturally hooded eyessaid I needed my upper and lower eyes done, and an upper and lower browlift, too," said Jan (not her name), who writes about beauty for a national women's magazine.

Quote:

Some of us are too narcissistic even to consider cosmetic surgery; some of us are so insecure that if we did pursue it we'd never be happy with the result.

"Then, on his own, he said the bump in my nose was quite bulby. I'd always thought my nose was my best feature. But ever since he-someone who's essentially a sculptor-said that, I've never looked in the mirror and not thought something was wrong with it."

Once upon a time, not just anyone could seek out a face-modifying operation; you had to earn it by, say, getting mangled-a nose nearly sliced off in a duel, perhaps, or an ear bitten off by a dog. (Without anesthesia and sterilization, which only began to be mastered during the mid-19th century, surgery, especially on the face and head, was dangerous and horrifically painful.) Plastic surgery is documented in Egypt 5,000 years ago (the treatment of mandibular and nasal fractures), then more extensively in India 2,500 years later (the beginning of reconstructive surgery and skin-grafting), and its goal for centuries was basically the same as that of all medicine: restore function. Form was not the concern. There was a burst of surgical techniques for solely aesthetic purposes-repairing a syphilitic's rotted nose, for instance-in the mid-19th century, and their practice was considered downright immoral. "Physical appearance represented one's inner character, so attempts to transform it were heretical," says Victoria Pitts-Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She is the author of the upcoming Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. Into the early 20th century, Americans and Europeans frowned on the use of surgery for cosmetic purposes.

Then came plastic surgery's Great Shift: The Great War.

During World War I, with thousands of soldiers suffering facial wounds, the culture began to accept the necessity for cosmetic surgery. Suddenly "plastic surgeons achieved a prestige they hadn't known before," says Pitts-Taylor, and the abundance of all those damaged faces "allowed them to improve their skills considerably."

After the war, though cosmetic surgery was still derided for its unique place in medicine-its stated goal was not to correct physical pathologies but to deal "with purely external characters for which the only guidance is the patient's whims," as the major Italian text on rhinoplastic surgery put it 75 years ago-a second shift occurred, again expanding the pool of possible candidates. Surgeons, channeling Freud and Adler, referenced then hot-button notions like "inferiority complex" and argued that having "some kind of ugliness or stigma caused shame, and to refigure that ugliness would ameliorate the problem," says Pitts-Taylor. And that's more or less where we remained for decades-through the cookie-cutter ski-jump noses, the silicone and then saline breast implants, the self-flagellating plastic-surgery jokes by Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers-until the face of cosmetic surgery changed profoundly once again, thanks to "the most recent development": in this case, the quick fix.

The last decade has seen a huge rise in nonsurgical procedures-Botox to paralyze muscles into serenity; collagen, Restylane, fat, and other injectables to plump up the face (after decades of surgeons cutting away, believing in addition by subtraction, they finally figured out that plumpness was also a hallmark of youth); lasers to resurface skin and eliminate wrinkles, splotches, and other imperfections. In 2005, more than 80 percent of U.S. cosmetic procedures were nonsurgical. Meantime, surgeries have become more subtle (mini-facelift, micro-lipo, endoscopic browlift), resulting in smaller scars. Recovery time has diminished, as has price, as has stigma. TV can't seem to air enough shows on the power of blade-aided transformation (Nip/Tuck, Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Dr. 90210, I Want a Famous Face, etc.).

Today, the field of candidates has expanded because a new kind of person considers cosmetic surgery. No longer are you stuck with a large nose, with basset-hound jowls, with deformity. On a wide scale, cosmetic surgeons are now regularly called to fix not what is abnormal but to reshape what's normal; a growing portion of surgeries are devoted not to ameliorating stigma but to enhancing what was already attractive.

"Now, when the patient walks into the surgeon's, she's not necessarily admitting there's something wrong with her," says Pitts-Taylor, who sees in this culture shift a persuasive, marketable narrative for an entire not-yet-even-that-saggy generation. She suggests that the normal-ization of cosmetic surgery is made more complete-even morally justifiable-because the surgical establishment, as well as its prime audience, has deftly appropriated what Pitts-Taylor labels the language of liberal feminism, an indulgence, something "I do for myself."

The elevation of form to where it nearly rivals function is increasingly evinced in how some other specialists operate. "Twenty, thirty years ago, cancer surgeons basically just hacked out the problem area," says Dr. Jason Cohen, a Los Angeles-based surgical oncologist. "Now, the clear margins we require [around the cancer] are far smaller than they used to be. Part of that is due to advances in chemo and radiation, and research showing you can have lesser margins without compromising success. But part of it is also due to patients knowing more what they want to look like. I'll do a smaller margin around the face than I will around the abdominal wall, because down there there's more skin and I can move it up." Although Dr. Cohen often closes the incision himself, some patients prefer a plastic surgeon. "There'll be a little negotiating between us, like two lawyers trying fine. It's another thing to bring in that picture and say, 'I want to look like Jennifer Aniston.'"

Quote:

Who's to say-yet-that a Botox shot every few months, with some lipo thrown in every other year, doesn't have as much to do with basic up-keep and Darwinian imperative as it does with vanity?

One of the biggest impediments to patient satisfaction is TV's unrealistic portrayal of how cosmetic surgeries go. "TV and print make certain procedures seem low risk and they're not," says Dr. Lesesne. "Women come in wanting ribs removed for a better shape, thinking it's an easy procedure. But it's not so low risk." He cites bariatric surgery-"stomach stapling"-as another procedure potentially more complicated than credulous patients may realize.

"Some patients think you can do surgery without a scar," says Dr. Michelle Copeland, a New York plastic surgeon. "Or they don't understand that there's still a recovery period, even if it's shorter than it used to be."

Who might raise a "red flag" about the kind of patient they'll be after surgery? Topping the list, according to many surgeons, are those who want something fixed or enhanced because someone else wants it-for example, the many women who come in for breast implants that their boyfriends or husbands are pushing for. Another indicator of trouble may be especially difficult behavior in the weeks and days leading to the operation (calling the office frequently, questioning everything from when to pay the bill to stopping certain medications, repeatedly changing one's mind about the scale of the operation).

Then again, given that this all concerns the complicated, often inscrutable subject of Beauty, maybe none of the above applies. "I believe it's a myth that Michael Jackson is a plastic surgery victim," says Dr. Lesesne. "If he'd been unhappy with his face and wanted to reverse it, he could have, to an extent. He never did. We may think it looks bad. I don't believe he does."

Does our ease with, and frenzy for, cosmetic surgery have less to do with pursuing the beauty ideal and more with pragmatism and convenience? If all these advances contribute to better results, less scarring, and faster healing, why the hell not do it?

"We've never lived as long as we're living now," says Dr. Copeland. Who's to say-yet-that a Botox shot every few months, with some lipo thrown in every other year, doesn't have as much to do with basic upkeep and Darwinian imperative as it does with vanity?

"I can go to the gym all I want, and I do-I'm a size zero-but I can't reverse all the sun damage from having played so much golf, tennis, running, skiing," says Ann, 48, a public relations executive who is thoroughly unneurotic (though Ann is not her real name) about the blepharoplasty (eyelid lift) and mid-facelift she has undergone in the last two years. "People were looking at me like, 'Oh my god, you have this cute little body,' but I'm seeing the sun damage. Plus my eyelids are heavy and I wear contacts, and it was getting to be more of a problem. My son said I looked as if I was always stoned."

We have the technology. Just do it.

There is no formal code of ethics or guide for judgment for those who perform cosmetic procedures, and it's a particularly fragmented professional discipline, since it doesn't have to be a surgeon trying to make you look better. You can get Botox at a spa. Surgical practitioners needn't be board-certified, or specialize, in that surgery-so, for example, an ear, nose, and throat doctor can potentially do breast implants; oral surgeons, facelifts; hand surgeons, body tucks; osteopaths, threadlifts (also known as "lunchtime facelifts"); ophthalmologists, eyebrow lifts, and so on. That's not to say that these practitioners are necessarily less competent at what they do, but they have likely trained far less, and been subject to far less oversight, than board-certified plastic surgeons. (It might be noted that any competent surgeon spends a fair amount of his or her time fixing surgeries botched by other practitioners.)

Whether these procedures can be said to have a positive effect on their patients is also hard to measure. On one hand, there are the numerous thank-you notes and return visits by satisfied customers. Then again, one study of obese women showed that the weight "lost" via liposuction did not lead to the health benefits delivered if the weight had been lost through exercise and improved diet; another study showed that almost half of all lipo patients gained weight again. Nor can return business be trumpeted as an irrefutable sign of satisfaction, as one might in almost any other business; the patient might just be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (though some question just how widespread the disorder is, if it exists at all). Recent studies show that women who've had breast implants are approximately three times more likely to commit suicide than those who haven't.

Should surgeons screen their patients? Surely, doctors would be appalled at the idea, as would surgical candidates. For many doctors, the decision to proceed is based on a chat with the consult; on a feel. A minorityof doctors give written questionnaires, with queries such as Do you use antidepressants? Have you had cosmetic surgery before? Were you happy with it? Interestingly, Pitts-Taylor interviewed numerous surgeons nationwide and found that New York-based surgeons tended to think that a Yes to the antidepressant question was insufficient grounds to disqualify the patient-Who in Manhattan isn't taking them?-whereas surgeons in the South did think the use of anti-depressants raised a red flag.

Surely the best, neatest solution to all this was offered by a friend, a brain surgeon, who says, only partly facetiously, that he would like to pioneer the field of cosmetic neurosurgery. "I'll go in and manipulate the brain so that the patient thinks she looks better than she does," he says.

Hey, you know what? That is one gorgeous scar.]]>

A beautiful young woman visited a cosmetic surgeon, wanting him to perform a breast lift and reduction. The procedure she desired was less invasive than the traditional method-the incision encircles the areola rather than running from there down to where breast meets ribcage-but also more complicated, intended for a subset of patients more problematically endowed than she. The surgeon declined her request and advised her not to pursue the surgery. Her breasts were close to perfect. Thirteen other surgeons apparently agreed, also refusing to operate.

The 15th surgeon she visited said yes "and ruined her," one of the first 14 surgeons told me. "I still hear about her. She's never recovered. Her life is over."

The brilliance of this story-and I'm not at all questioning its veracity; I've heard others like it-is how it carves two birds with one scalpel. From it we learn that (1) there are butcher-surgeons out there and (2) there are unhinged patients, too. While I believe the doctor told me this story out of caveat emptor goodwill, it's actually the second implication that lingers. Because it's just such reports of the Unhinged Subject-the sad, desperate ones; those suffering from body dysmorphic disorder; the Michael Jacksons and Jocelyn Wildensteins (the New York socialite who has allegedly spent millions on countless surgeries, with the result of looking almost feline)-which in part have helped cosmetic surgery's popularity.

That's no typo: I mean "helped," not "hurt." As long as supermarket tabloids publish images of the latest iteration of characters like Michael and The Bride of Wildenstein, the rest of us can mollify ourselves. Hey, we're not that pathetic, we'd never pursue that level of transmogrative grotesquery, so what's wrong with the occasional nip or tuck? Each skin peel and cheek implant that Michael gets-pardon; allegedly gets-thrusts him so much further into Freaksville that we're bound to separate the world into Us and Them. And because of the stunning advances the last decade has seen in cosmetic-surgery techniques, instruments, and medicines, Us and Them no longer means Those Who Don't and Those Who Do but rather Those Who Sort of Like Themselves and Those Who Privately Loathe Themselves.

With such a broadening pool of patients, though-from 1997 to 2005, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS), cosmetic procedures in this country increased by 444 percent, to 11.5 million-how does the surgeon tell, from just an initial consult, who's an Us and who's a Them? How can he tell which patient will translate into a "Doc, you changed my life!" holiday card, and which a malpractice suit? (Virtually every top surgeon, insists one, has been the subject of at least one suit.) For their part, prospective patients, if diligent, have ample guidance-checking out board certification, membership in reputable national organizations, word of mouth-when trying to distinguish the mostly good surgeons from the bad ("the guy down the street," as several surgeons routinely label the amoral butcher who expresses no qualms about doing anything to anyone). The doctor, though, often relies solely on intuition, from cues picked up in a brief conversation, to determine a patient's psychological soundness. But is that a reliable system? The staggering number of hours top surgeons put into sharpening their technical skills notwithstanding, there's no accurate measure for judging people and their real needs. And while admittedly it's in their interest to steer clear of patients they suspect can't ever be satisfied, there is also the incentive in place to now and then embrace an obsessive, whose patronage may result in a vigorous ongoing business relationship. Cosmetic surgery, more than any medical specialty, brings together doctor and patient speaking different languages. The cosmetic surgeon-"a psychiatrist with a scalpel," as one doctor charitably characterized it-is first and last a technician, trying to determine if the desired procedure can be done, and done well. The patient, meanwhile, wants to know if she or he will look-and hence feel-better. Yes, they're both ostensibly concerned with aesthetics, but in the same way the federal government is ostensibly concerned with a balanced budget.

"We're not taking care of a functional disorder or removing cancer," says Dr. Cap Lesesne, a top Park Avenue surgeon. "We're operating on perception."

At the initial consult, the surgeon often asks some version of, "What don't you like about yourself?"-the recurring salvo asked of potential patients by the plastic surgeons on the popular TV show Nip/Tuck. But even though the question seems nonpartisan, surgeons are still, well, surgeons. ("What's the difference between God and a surgeon?" the wife of one of the Nip/Tuck surgeons quizzed a friend. "God doesn't think he's a surgeon.") So doctors have been known to volunteer an opinion or two-even though it's elective surgery, and even though no one asked. "One surgeon I went to about my naturally hooded eyessaid I needed my upper and lower eyes done, and an upper and lower browlift, too," said Jan (not her name), who writes about beauty for a national women's magazine.

Quote:

Some of us are too narcissistic even to consider cosmetic surgery; some of us are so insecure that if we did pursue it we'd never be happy with the result.

"Then, on his own, he said the bump in my nose was quite bulby. I'd always thought my nose was my best feature. But ever since he-someone who's essentially a sculptor-said that, I've never looked in the mirror and not thought something was wrong with it."

Once upon a time, not just anyone could seek out a face-modifying operation; you had to earn it by, say, getting mangled-a nose nearly sliced off in a duel, perhaps, or an ear bitten off by a dog. (Without anesthesia and sterilization, which only began to be mastered during the mid-19th century, surgery, especially on the face and head, was dangerous and horrifically painful.) Plastic surgery is documented in Egypt 5,000 years ago (the treatment of mandibular and nasal fractures), then more extensively in India 2,500 years later (the beginning of reconstructive surgery and skin-grafting), and its goal for centuries was basically the same as that of all medicine: restore function. Form was not the concern. There was a burst of surgical techniques for solely aesthetic purposes-repairing a syphilitic's rotted nose, for instance-in the mid-19th century, and their practice was considered downright immoral. "Physical appearance represented one's inner character, so attempts to transform it were heretical," says Victoria Pitts-Taylor, an associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She is the author of the upcoming Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. Into the early 20th century, Americans and Europeans frowned on the use of surgery for cosmetic purposes.

Then came plastic surgery's Great Shift: The Great War.

During World War I, with thousands of soldiers suffering facial wounds, the culture began to accept the necessity for cosmetic surgery. Suddenly "plastic surgeons achieved a prestige they hadn't known before," says Pitts-Taylor, and the abundance of all those damaged faces "allowed them to improve their skills considerably."

After the war, though cosmetic surgery was still derided for its unique place in medicine-its stated goal was not to correct physical pathologies but to deal "with purely external characters for which the only guidance is the patient's whims," as the major Italian text on rhinoplastic surgery put it 75 years ago-a second shift occurred, again expanding the pool of possible candidates. Surgeons, channeling Freud and Adler, referenced then hot-button notions like "inferiority complex" and argued that having "some kind of ugliness or stigma caused shame, and to refigure that ugliness would ameliorate the problem," says Pitts-Taylor. And that's more or less where we remained for decades-through the cookie-cutter ski-jump noses, the silicone and then saline breast implants, the self-flagellating plastic-surgery jokes by Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers-until the face of cosmetic surgery changed profoundly once again, thanks to "the most recent development": in this case, the quick fix.

The last decade has seen a huge rise in nonsurgical procedures-Botox to paralyze muscles into serenity; collagen, Restylane, fat, and other injectables to plump up the face (after decades of surgeons cutting away, believing in addition by subtraction, they finally figured out that plumpness was also a hallmark of youth); lasers to resurface skin and eliminate wrinkles, splotches, and other imperfections. In 2005, more than 80 percent of U.S. cosmetic procedures were nonsurgical. Meantime, surgeries have become more subtle (mini-facelift, micro-lipo, endoscopic browlift), resulting in smaller scars. Recovery time has diminished, as has price, as has stigma. TV can't seem to air enough shows on the power of blade-aided transformation (Nip/Tuck, Extreme Makeover, The Swan, Dr. 90210, I Want a Famous Face, etc.).

Today, the field of candidates has expanded because a new kind of person considers cosmetic surgery. No longer are you stuck with a large nose, with basset-hound jowls, with deformity. On a wide scale, cosmetic surgeons are now regularly called to fix not what is abnormal but to reshape what's normal; a growing portion of surgeries are devoted not to ameliorating stigma but to enhancing what was already attractive.

"Now, when the patient walks into the surgeon's, she's not necessarily admitting there's something wrong with her," says Pitts-Taylor, who sees in this culture shift a persuasive, marketable narrative for an entire not-yet-even-that-saggy generation. She suggests that the normal-ization of cosmetic surgery is made more complete-even morally justifiable-because the surgical establishment, as well as its prime audience, has deftly appropriated what Pitts-Taylor labels the language of liberal feminism, an indulgence, something "I do for myself."

The elevation of form to where it nearly rivals function is increasingly evinced in how some other specialists operate. "Twenty, thirty years ago, cancer surgeons basically just hacked out the problem area," says Dr. Jason Cohen, a Los Angeles-based surgical oncologist. "Now, the clear margins we require [around the cancer] are far smaller than they used to be. Part of that is due to advances in chemo and radiation, and research showing you can have lesser margins without compromising success. But part of it is also due to patients knowing more what they want to look like. I'll do a smaller margin around the face than I will around the abdominal wall, because down there there's more skin and I can move it up." Although Dr. Cohen often closes the incision himself, some patients prefer a plastic surgeon. "There'll be a little negotiating between us, like two lawyers trying fine. It's another thing to bring in that picture and say, 'I want to look like Jennifer Aniston.'"

Quote:

Who's to say-yet-that a Botox shot every few months, with some lipo thrown in every other year, doesn't have as much to do with basic up-keep and Darwinian imperative as it does with vanity?

One of the biggest impediments to patient satisfaction is TV's unrealistic portrayal of how cosmetic surgeries go. "TV and print make certain procedures seem low risk and they're not," says Dr. Lesesne. "Women come in wanting ribs removed for a better shape, thinking it's an easy procedure. But it's not so low risk." He cites bariatric surgery-"stomach stapling"-as another procedure potentially more complicated than credulous patients may realize.

"Some patients think you can do surgery without a scar," says Dr. Michelle Copeland, a New York plastic surgeon. "Or they don't understand that there's still a recovery period, even if it's shorter than it used to be."

Who might raise a "red flag" about the kind of patient they'll be after surgery? Topping the list, according to many surgeons, are those who want something fixed or enhanced because someone else wants it-for example, the many women who come in for breast implants that their boyfriends or husbands are pushing for. Another indicator of trouble may be especially difficult behavior in the weeks and days leading to the operation (calling the office frequently, questioning everything from when to pay the bill to stopping certain medications, repeatedly changing one's mind about the scale of the operation).

Then again, given that this all concerns the complicated, often inscrutable subject of Beauty, maybe none of the above applies. "I believe it's a myth that Michael Jackson is a plastic surgery victim," says Dr. Lesesne. "If he'd been unhappy with his face and wanted to reverse it, he could have, to an extent. He never did. We may think it looks bad. I don't believe he does."

Does our ease with, and frenzy for, cosmetic surgery have less to do with pursuing the beauty ideal and more with pragmatism and convenience? If all these advances contribute to better results, less scarring, and faster healing, why the hell not do it?

"We've never lived as long as we're living now," says Dr. Copeland. Who's to say-yet-that a Botox shot every few months, with some lipo thrown in every other year, doesn't have as much to do with basic upkeep and Darwinian imperative as it does with vanity?

"I can go to the gym all I want, and I do-I'm a size zero-but I can't reverse all the sun damage from having played so much golf, tennis, running, skiing," says Ann, 48, a public relations executive who is thoroughly unneurotic (though Ann is not her real name) about the blepharoplasty (eyelid lift) and mid-facelift she has undergone in the last two years. "People were looking at me like, 'Oh my god, you have this cute little body,' but I'm seeing the sun damage. Plus my eyelids are heavy and I wear contacts, and it was getting to be more of a problem. My son said I looked as if I was always stoned."

We have the technology. Just do it.

There is no formal code of ethics or guide for judgment for those who perform cosmetic procedures, and it's a particularly fragmented professional discipline, since it doesn't have to be a surgeon trying to make you look better. You can get Botox at a spa. Surgical practitioners needn't be board-certified, or specialize, in that surgery-so, for example, an ear, nose, and throat doctor can potentially do breast implants; oral surgeons, facelifts; hand surgeons, body tucks; osteopaths, threadlifts (also known as "lunchtime facelifts"); ophthalmologists, eyebrow lifts, and so on. That's not to say that these practitioners are necessarily less competent at what they do, but they have likely trained far less, and been subject to far less oversight, than board-certified plastic surgeons. (It might be noted that any competent surgeon spends a fair amount of his or her time fixing surgeries botched by other practitioners.)

Whether these procedures can be said to have a positive effect on their patients is also hard to measure. On one hand, there are the numerous thank-you notes and return visits by satisfied customers. Then again, one study of obese women showed that the weight "lost" via liposuction did not lead to the health benefits delivered if the weight had been lost through exercise and improved diet; another study showed that almost half of all lipo patients gained weight again. Nor can return business be trumpeted as an irrefutable sign of satisfaction, as one might in almost any other business; the patient might just be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (though some question just how widespread the disorder is, if it exists at all). Recent studies show that women who've had breast implants are approximately three times more likely to commit suicide than those who haven't.

Should surgeons screen their patients? Surely, doctors would be appalled at the idea, as would surgical candidates. For many doctors, the decision to proceed is based on a chat with the consult; on a feel. A minorityof doctors give written questionnaires, with queries such as Do you use antidepressants? Have you had cosmetic surgery before? Were you happy with it? Interestingly, Pitts-Taylor interviewed numerous surgeons nationwide and found that New York-based surgeons tended to think that a Yes to the antidepressant question was insufficient grounds to disqualify the patient-Who in Manhattan isn't taking them?-whereas surgeons in the South did think the use of anti-depressants raised a red flag.

Surely the best, neatest solution to all this was offered by a friend, a brain surgeon, who says, only partly facetiously, that he would like to pioneer the field of cosmetic neurosurgery. "I'll go in and manipulate the brain so that the patient thinks she looks better than she does," he says.

Hey, you know what? That is one gorgeous scar.]]> Andrew Postman Mon, 11 Dec 2006 14:17:19 PST http://www.good.is/post/sleeping-with-strangers/ http://www.good.is/post/sleeping-with-strangers/

Wearing only boxer shorts and sandals, a tall man steps onto the landing of an apartment in the outer Plateau Mont-Royal, a working-class neighborhood in Montreal. It's an early August morning, the streets are just beginning to stir, and the young man-a traveler from Germany who arrived late last night-slips a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, scratches his head, and surveys the traffic humming along the wide lanes of Rue St. Denis. It's his first glimpse of the city in daylight, and from where he stands, he can see row upon row of tidy brick apartment buildings with winding metal staircases that curve up two or three flights, tentacles of steel that gleam pink in the sun.

Behind him, through the open door, backpacks crowd the hallway, empty beer cans litter the countertops, and in each bedroom, on almost every square inch of floor, are mattresses. He's staying with the "Collective," a loose-knit band of travelers, many of them computer programmers, who've gathered from around the world to sleep side-by-side in this small two-bedroom rental where they administer CouchSurfing-a website that connects travelers with a free place to stay. Here, their numbers differ from day to day, with as few as five and many as 20, and they come from all over: Poland, Mexico, New Jersey. A mathematics Ph.D. student from Belgium, an Iraq War vet from Arizona, a hairdresser from New York. As some leave, others arrive with plans to stay for a day or a week or a month.

On this morning, one of the first to wake is a pretty 27-year-old Finnish woman who landed here a few days ago, having quit her job as a programmer in Helsinki. With her blonde hair pulled back in a loose bun and her cheeks flushed from sleep, she shuffles into the computer room and stations herself before a bank of flickering monitors. Others wander in every five or 10 minutes. A young man with disheveled hair drops into a sofa chair grumbling about the late-night exertions of a couple in the bunk above him. A woman in sweatpants walks into the room clutching a yogurt in one hand and a Monster energy drink in another. "Breakfast of Champions," she says, with a wan smile.

She, too, is part of the Collective, the true believers within the CouchSurfing community-the converts, the hard-core fans of the wanderlust life who've used the site to travel to all corners of the globe. The programmers among them have come to Montreal to help expand the site, tweaking the design, adding features and new search methods. The roles of the others are less clear. Some are just passing through town (Montreal has 2,000 CouchSurfers, more than any other city in the world), others have come to help but lack programming skills, so they're the ones who run errands and field phone calls and carry out brainstorming sessions about the "future of human connection." And they cook. At one point in July, with 20 people crashing there, the kitchen was staffed around the clock.

A rumor begins to circle among them: "The site's down." This seems at first like a mistake. How can the site be down? The Finn begins tapping on the keyboards of different computers, to no avail. The voices in the room grow increasingly anxious. "There must be a bug." "Can anyone get on?" The yogurt girl begins to pace nervously. The German strolls into the room, still in boxers. "There's definitely a bug." A question is ventured: Do we wake Casey? The question gathers urgency as a flood of emails descends on the apartment, emails from Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney, emails from distraught CouchSurfers who have suddenly been frozen from their world.

Where is Casey? A search ensues, into the bedrooms, down to the front steps, back upstairs to knock on the door of the one bathroom. Casey cannot be found. After awhile it doesn't matter anyway-they find the glitch, the site is restored, the crisis averted. But all this time Casey was here. The leader of this band of vagabonds, 28-year-old Casey Fenton, is lying prostrate on a futon on the back porch wearing a black blindfold cinched tight to block out the sun. One arm falls across his freckled face and tussled red hair and the other dangles off the futon, his fingers inches from an ashtray. Despite the commotion, despite the blare of traffic in the distance, Fenton, with only a thin blanket to cover his bare shoulders, is sound asleep. Of all the places to crash-the mattresses, the bunk beds, the cushions tossed on the floor-Fenton, the creator of the CouchSurfing universe, has claimed the apartment's only couch.



The rise of online social networks is by now a familiar story, one that has so far been told in numbers-and the numbers are staggering. Five hundred thousand people create a profile on MySpace every week, an audience for which Rupert Murdoch was willing to pay $580 million in July of 2005. Company executives at Facebook are reportedly seeking $1 billion in acquisition talks. YouTube, purchased by Google in October for $1.65 billion, has over 13 million users. These numbers are not unique to the U.S. In Britain, the social network Bebo is now the sixth most popular website, with over 25 million users. In South Korea, the network CyWorld has, in five years, attracted nearly a third of the country to its site, and nearly 90 percent of the nation's teenagers.

All this seems like a positive step toward the "great and gathering conversation" predicted a decade ago by internet sage John Perry Barlow. Social networks like CouchSurfing have suddenly enabled millions of people with common interests to find one another. But in the rhapsodizing over such sites, in all the talk about Web 2.0 and a new evolution of the internet, it's peculiar that comparatively little is being said about whom we're actually talking to online, and to what effect.

To Danah Boyd, a graduate fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and social media researcher at Yahoo!, what transpires on popular networks like MySpace is less about joining a global conversation than it is about replicating the social network you already have. "This is not about meeting strangers," she says. "You go to MySpace to talk to your friends and to find out the gossip of the day." Profile pages on sites like MySpace and Facebook are filled with the kind of inside jokes and cliquish comments that might once have given you shivers of alienation in the middle-school cafeteria.

What this suggests is that the utopian promise of internet networking-the ability to leap across the previously inviolable social boundaries of school or town or country or culture-is far from being met. With the exception of dating sites and the libidinous (and admittedly odd) "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist, we're not really finding new people to connect with; we're talking to the people we already know. And so the conversation, though it may be growing, is still smaller than we might have imagined.

Casey Fenton wants to change this. He founded CouchSurfing in 2004 to connect travelers with places to crash-not in hostels, but in people's homes, a notion that many no doubt find bizarre. Unlike other online networks, CouchSurfing allows its users to find one another online in order to meet and host each other offline. That alone is something of a radical concept (it's easy to imagine the collective panic of loved ones everywhere: "You're going to stay with strangers?"). But there is a deeper purpose behind the site, says Fenton. Fenton calls himself, only half in jest, a scientist of human connection. His mission is to transform people's lives. "We want to create memorable, intense experiences," he says, "to put the right people together in the right situation at the right time. This isn't just about a place to crash."



I met Fenton for the first time a year ago, when CouchSurfing was still in its relative infancy, with 20,000 members (it now has more than 125,000, and at its current rate of growth could reach a half million in a year). Word of the website was just beginning to spread, and about Fenton there was only rumor and conjecture. Fellow CouchSurfers seemed to revere him as a kind of furtive cult hero: a gypsy king of wanderers. Before our rendezvous at a side-street bar in San Francisco's Mission district, I imagined him as a bohemian savant, wild-eyed and bedraggled. But he arrived in a button-down shirt and blue jeans, clean-shaven, carrying a notebook with the word "Life" etched on the cover. From across the room, the bartender gave his youthful face a long, appraising look. Smiling, Fenton dipped his slight frame into a corner booth. It was late afternoon and the bar was quiet. Still, it was hard to hear him; he speaks in a surprisingly faint voice, but his gestures have an excitable energy. He shifts a lot. The story of CouchSurfing, he said, began six years ago.

Fenton, then 22, was already harried, a software programmer in New Hampshire working 100-hour weeks for a headhunting dot-com he himself had founded. He was struggling to keep the company afloat, and spending endless hours staring into a monitor, programming code. Eager for a break, and with only a weekend to spare, he found a cheap last-minute ticket to Iceland. The flight left in four days. Fenton didn't know a soul in Reykjavik. "I tried to imagine myself there," he said. "What am I going to do in Iceland? I pictured myself walking down freezing streets, alone. I didn't want the empty feeling of staying in a hotel or hostel, but I was a shy person and I didn't know how to connect with people." So he did what any reasonably competent, ethically flexible programmer might do: he hacked into the University of Iceland student directory and spammed 1,500 students. "Basically I said, 'I'm coming on Friday. I want to see the real Iceland. Will you show me your country?'" He received more than 50 replies. Fenton spent one of the best weekends of his life gallivanting through Reykjavik, sleeping in someone's garage, staying up late into the half-light of the arctic night, and making friends that he has kept to this day.

For a shy kid from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, raised by hippies in a cabin a mile from the nearest road, it was as if the world had, in three days, laid bare its secrets. "I got back on the plane on Monday morning and said to myself, 'I need to travel like this all the time.'" When the flight landed in Boston five hours later, Fenton had already begun to conceive of CouchSurfing. The next four years would take him to other jobs, and to Alaska, where he got involved in state politics-he managed internet strategy for Tony Knowles's unsuccessful 2004 senate campaign-but throughout that time he always held on to the idea of the site, programming lines of code while riding on campaign buses. Finally, in January of 2004, while Fenton was living in Juneau, CouchSurfing went live.



That same month, 3,500 miles to the south, Jim Stone, presently the world's foremost CouchSurfer, had an epiphany. He says this as we rumble down the boulevards of Montreal in his silver Nissan pickup. Stone, 29, an affable, broad-shouldered Texan, has been staying with the Collective for over a month, serving as a kind of right-hand man to Fenton (they became friends through the site). He's not a computer programmer but he helps with errands and makes money for himself on the side by taking on small Craigslist moving jobs with his truck. As he hunches over the steering wheel, searching street signs for a road that doesn't seem to exist, he describes the moment, two years ago, when his life changed.

Stone was then living in Denton, a college town in north Texas, stuck in a sales job he hated. "All my friends had left," he says. "I was getting apathetic. I could see another five years going by just the same way. I remember checking my mail one day, and the postmark on the letters was the same day I had graduated two years earlier. Two years gone, just like that. And I freaked out."

He quit his job, packed his belongings, and split town, staying first with his father in west Texas. When he discovered CouchSurfing a month later, he signed on as the 99th member. He has since become, by all accounts, its most well-traveled participant. In the two years since he left Texas he has stayed in over 120 homes throughout Europe, New Zealand, the east coast of Australia, and most of the United States. He has "CouchSurfed" with a former soap opera star in Paris and with a couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in Denmark. He has lived for weeks with an Italian family in a villa outside of Naples. Like other members of the Collective, Stone seems to travel in bursts, stopping somewhere long enough to save a little money and then stretching it for as long as he can on the road. Four months in Europe cost him $3,000, a number he now shakes his head at. "I could do it for a lot less today," he says.

Stone pulls the truck back onto the highway, having given up on finding the street he's looking for. He sighs and shoves his bangs away from his eyes, exasperated by the traffic. I ask him what he's learned in all of his wandering (his business card actually reads "Vagabond"), and we drive along in silence as he ponders an answer. "I let the people choose my destination," he says at last. "That's what I've learned. I'll travel to some small little town in Austria that I've never heard of if I find someone who sounds interesting living there." Stone says that the intimacy of staying with strangers has changed him.

This narrative of transformation is common among CouchSurfers. I've heard variations on it from a dozen different people. It seems to go like this: Being welcomed into someone's home, perhaps the most private place in which to meet, creates instant, deep connection and lasting friendship. In having to tell our own story to others, over and over again, we come to realize certain truths about ourselves. If we are shy, we begin to talk more. If we are brash, we begin to listen. And by witnessing other lives, we open to possibilities that we were once blind to. Alex Goodman, 23, a member of the Collective who, as it happens, is also a sociologist studying the group, said this: "If I were 16 and in search of answers for how to live my life, I wouldn't go to a rabbi or a priest or a Buddhist monk. I'd try to find a way to systematically evaluate the experiences of everyone around me, to see what has worked and what hasn't, what makes for a good, happy, worthwhile life and what doesn't. Information technology and the emergence of social networks are making this possible."



The reach of CouchSurfing, after only two years of operation, is impressive. There are people, at this moment, offering their homes through the site in Iran and Turkey, in Malaysia and Venezuela and Nepal. The site has enabled a kind of spontaneous, footloose exploration of the world, and the numbers speak to this: 40,000 homes visited, 17,000 cities represented, 125,000 members participating, and several thousand more joining each week. It brings to mind the vision that Jack Kerouac heralded a half-century ago in Dharma Bums: "A great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier."

But as with any community, there are problems, and the problems facing CouchSurfing are of a serious sort. To begin with, how do you create trust between people who've never met? In this country, the very idea of opening your home to a stranger is anathema to most people-perhaps for good reason. Fenton, for his part, says we need to broaden the meaning of being someone's "friend" online. While most social networks are content with a single indicator of friendship-you're either a friend or you're not-CouchSurfing asks for much more information when someone seeks to be your friend on the site. Have you met in person? How would you rate your friendship? Have you stayed with one another? When did you meet? What was the quality of your experience? The site encourages members to be unsparingly honest in their evaluations, and the testimonies can't be edited or erased.

Certainly, negative comments can be found ("He is a stickler for rules and seems to have an irrational fear of authority"), but for the most part testimonies tend to be of the unflaggingly positive sort. Jessica, for instance, a 22-year-old American, writes of Daniele, who hosted her in Rome: "He deserves some sort of award for hosting. My friend and I stayed with him a record of 40 days. We became a true family and I will never forget his kindness and generosity. CouchSurfing gave me the experience of a lifetime. It forever changed me!" Invariably, people would rather say nothing than say something negative, and that etiquette stands in the way of reliable feedback.

There is a real sense, too, the bigger CouchSurfing gets and the less self-selecting it becomes, the greater the dangers that confront it. For anyone bent on doing harm, the site affords access to a world of trusting souls. The "axe murderer" scenario, however unlikely, is one Fenton ruefully acknowledges he can do little about. "This is a slice of the real world," he says. "So, yes, anything can happen. We ask people to use all the safety features of the site and to take every possible precaution. We've been fortunate that nothing bad has happened." These precautions-be careful when choosing a single male host, consider meeting for coffee first, be prepared to leave at the first sign of a problem-are certainly well-intentioned. But there are women traveling alone using CouchSurfing and some of them are young, in their late teens or early twenties, and whatever care they may exercise, the law of averages suggests that eventually something terrible will happen. It's an open question as to how the CouchSurfing community will react or how the experiment will survive the bad press sure to follow.

There are other problems, too. From the beginning, CouchSurfing has operated as a nonprofit funded by donations. While that's created a sense of community ownership, it has also produced significant limitations, and the strains are beginning to show. By Fenton's own admission, he's trying to run the equivalent of a high-traffic multimillion-dollar website on an income that amounted to about $100,000 this year (most of it brought in by donation). Rather than a team of paid employees, he has a band of peripatetic volunteer programmers. The financial constraints came to a head last June when a perfect storm of system failures, brought on by cost-cutting, led to a complete server meltdown. At the time, Fenton thought everything was lost: two years worth of data, the profiles of 100,000 members. Despondent, he posted a letter to the web signaling the end of the project-"CouchSurfing as we know it doesn't exist anymore," he wrote. Predictably, howls of protest ensued, the community itself refused to be disbanded, and within a few weeks whatever data had not been recovered was created anew. But the fact of that failure still hovers over the community, a painful reminder of how ephemeral its endeavor really is.

In June of 2006, just as MySpace neared 80 million users and Facebook approached 8 million, an article, "Social Isolation in America," appeared in the American Sociological Review. The work of sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona, it examined two national surveys of the American public, one in 1985 and the other in 2004. Their research found that the average number of people with whom Americans discuss important issues has dropped by nearly a third, from about three to two. Even more startling is that one-quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom to discuss their most important matters-twice as many as in 1984. This would suggest that in the same 20 years that saw the rise and triumph of communication technologies-the proliferation of email, cell phones, BlackBerries, and MySpace-our circle of close friends and confidants has shrunk by a significant margin. We are somehow more connected than we once were, and more isolated than ever before.

The role of the internet in this trend is the subject of considerable academic debate. Some sociologists argue that sites like MySpace might not promote strong ties between people, but they do greatly enable weak ones. And these connections lead to jobs, apartments, and partners (for some people, Craigslist alone has provided all three). A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project says, "Research is showing that the internet is not destroying relationships [but rather] enabling people to maintain existing ties, often to strengthen them, and at times to forge new ties."

Others are less sanguine, however. Lynn Smith-Lovin, one of the sociologists behind the Duke study, says of online social networks, "I don't think they're connecting us in a deeper or more complete way than before. But neither are they driving out close personal contact. They are another route for information, and they allow us to develop more specialized communities." But face-to-face encounters, she says, are the sine qua non of strong ties; a relationship can begin online but without in-person interaction it is unlikely to be sustained in any important way.

CouchSurfing, for all its problems, might well be an example of an online social network that actually works. It brings about real conversation. It harnesses the tools of social networking software to create meaningful in-person encounters-Fenton's "right person in the right situation at the right time." And it has begun, however quietly, to pull down the curtains that separate us from one another. The evidence is there on the site itself, in the testimonies of friendship between people who were once strangers but who met, say, over a weekend in Prague and whose lives were changed utterly as a result. And it is not just young people who are being brought together. I spoke with a

76-year-old grandmother from Petaluma, California, who had "CouchSurfed" her way through Greece for several weeks. As she put it, "Who wants to sit in a lonely hotel?"

On my last day in Montreal, I sit with Fenton on the back porch of the Collective's apartment. The place is a hive of activity-people scurrying in and out of rooms, constant footsteps on the stairs, the shower running incessantly-but the porch is quiet. In the stillness of the morning, Fenton describes plans for a "CouchSurfing University," a layer within the network that will allow someone to design a trip not by destination but for the purpose of learning something new: a skill, a craft, or, more vaguely, "life wisdom." For Fenton, who couldn't afford college and dropped out after his freshman year, it's clearly an enticing idea, and as he talks about it, his words tumble out in an eager rush.

There are constant interruptions. Fenton's cell phone rings or someone bursts through the door with pressing news: a friend needs to be picked up at the airport, a programming problem has arisen, so-and-so has been stopped at the border (Canadian customs officials seem to be weirdly paranoid about the Collective). Fenton himself seems tired, faint dark crescents hang beneath his eyes and his voice is laced with weariness, but he responds to each interruption with his full attention and with an unflappable calm. As he deals with one problem after another, it begins to dawn on me that he is both liberated and imprisoned by the social network he's fashioned. It has opened a world to him, bestowed friendship and adventure and purpose. But tens of thousands of people have come to depend on the site, and the site still depends almost entirely upon him.

I ask Fenton whether he feels at all overwhelmed. He considers this, and shifts in his seat. Yes, he says, finally, but the good still outweighs the bad. "Years ago I was a kid sitting in a room by myself and the world was a big place," he says, looking out past the porch. "Now I can go anywhere in the world and I feel as if I'd have family there. I have a huge family now, and the world has become a small place." At this he smiles and runs a hand across his face. He seems momentarily appeased by this thought, by the knowledge that a shy person like himself could, in effect, conjure a family of friends.

But soon enough the disruptions return, and Fenton is needed. He hauls himself up, says goodbye, and trudges back into the chaos and clamor of the apartment. The Collective swarms around him, a dozen people whirling in an orbit of industry and excitement, and Fenton slips among them, disappearing once more into the universe of his own creation.]]>

Wearing only boxer shorts and sandals, a tall man steps onto the landing of an apartment in the outer Plateau Mont-Royal, a working-class neighborhood in Montreal. It's an early August morning, the streets are just beginning to stir, and the young man-a traveler from Germany who arrived late last night-slips a hand-rolled cigarette between his lips, scratches his head, and surveys the traffic humming along the wide lanes of Rue St. Denis. It's his first glimpse of the city in daylight, and from where he stands, he can see row upon row of tidy brick apartment buildings with winding metal staircases that curve up two or three flights, tentacles of steel that gleam pink in the sun.

Behind him, through the open door, backpacks crowd the hallway, empty beer cans litter the countertops, and in each bedroom, on almost every square inch of floor, are mattresses. He's staying with the "Collective," a loose-knit band of travelers, many of them computer programmers, who've gathered from around the world to sleep side-by-side in this small two-bedroom rental where they administer CouchSurfing-a website that connects travelers with a free place to stay. Here, their numbers differ from day to day, with as few as five and many as 20, and they come from all over: Poland, Mexico, New Jersey. A mathematics Ph.D. student from Belgium, an Iraq War vet from Arizona, a hairdresser from New York. As some leave, others arrive with plans to stay for a day or a week or a month.

On this morning, one of the first to wake is a pretty 27-year-old Finnish woman who landed here a few days ago, having quit her job as a programmer in Helsinki. With her blonde hair pulled back in a loose bun and her cheeks flushed from sleep, she shuffles into the computer room and stations herself before a bank of flickering monitors. Others wander in every five or 10 minutes. A young man with disheveled hair drops into a sofa chair grumbling about the late-night exertions of a couple in the bunk above him. A woman in sweatpants walks into the room clutching a yogurt in one hand and a Monster energy drink in another. "Breakfast of Champions," she says, with a wan smile.

She, too, is part of the Collective, the true believers within the CouchSurfing community-the converts, the hard-core fans of the wanderlust life who've used the site to travel to all corners of the globe. The programmers among them have come to Montreal to help expand the site, tweaking the design, adding features and new search methods. The roles of the others are less clear. Some are just passing through town (Montreal has 2,000 CouchSurfers, more than any other city in the world), others have come to help but lack programming skills, so they're the ones who run errands and field phone calls and carry out brainstorming sessions about the "future of human connection." And they cook. At one point in July, with 20 people crashing there, the kitchen was staffed around the clock.

A rumor begins to circle among them: "The site's down." This seems at first like a mistake. How can the site be down? The Finn begins tapping on the keyboards of different computers, to no avail. The voices in the room grow increasingly anxious. "There must be a bug." "Can anyone get on?" The yogurt girl begins to pace nervously. The German strolls into the room, still in boxers. "There's definitely a bug." A question is ventured: Do we wake Casey? The question gathers urgency as a flood of emails descends on the apartment, emails from Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney, emails from distraught CouchSurfers who have suddenly been frozen from their world.

Where is Casey? A search ensues, into the bedrooms, down to the front steps, back upstairs to knock on the door of the one bathroom. Casey cannot be found. After awhile it doesn't matter anyway-they find the glitch, the site is restored, the crisis averted. But all this time Casey was here. The leader of this band of vagabonds, 28-year-old Casey Fenton, is lying prostrate on a futon on the back porch wearing a black blindfold cinched tight to block out the sun. One arm falls across his freckled face and tussled red hair and the other dangles off the futon, his fingers inches from an ashtray. Despite the commotion, despite the blare of traffic in the distance, Fenton, with only a thin blanket to cover his bare shoulders, is sound asleep. Of all the places to crash-the mattresses, the bunk beds, the cushions tossed on the floor-Fenton, the creator of the CouchSurfing universe, has claimed the apartment's only couch.



The rise of online social networks is by now a familiar story, one that has so far been told in numbers-and the numbers are staggering. Five hundred thousand people create a profile on MySpace every week, an audience for which Rupert Murdoch was willing to pay $580 million in July of 2005. Company executives at Facebook are reportedly seeking $1 billion in acquisition talks. YouTube, purchased by Google in October for $1.65 billion, has over 13 million users. These numbers are not unique to the U.S. In Britain, the social network Bebo is now the sixth most popular website, with over 25 million users. In South Korea, the network CyWorld has, in five years, attracted nearly a third of the country to its site, and nearly 90 percent of the nation's teenagers.

All this seems like a positive step toward the "great and gathering conversation" predicted a decade ago by internet sage John Perry Barlow. Social networks like CouchSurfing have suddenly enabled millions of people with common interests to find one another. But in the rhapsodizing over such sites, in all the talk about Web 2.0 and a new evolution of the internet, it's peculiar that comparatively little is being said about whom we're actually talking to online, and to what effect.

To Danah Boyd, a graduate fellow at the USC Annenberg Center and social media researcher at Yahoo!, what transpires on popular networks like MySpace is less about joining a global conversation than it is about replicating the social network you already have. "This is not about meeting strangers," she says. "You go to MySpace to talk to your friends and to find out the gossip of the day." Profile pages on sites like MySpace and Facebook are filled with the kind of inside jokes and cliquish comments that might once have given you shivers of alienation in the middle-school cafeteria.

What this suggests is that the utopian promise of internet networking-the ability to leap across the previously inviolable social boundaries of school or town or country or culture-is far from being met. With the exception of dating sites and the libidinous (and admittedly odd) "Casual Encounters" section of Craigslist, we're not really finding new people to connect with; we're talking to the people we already know. And so the conversation, though it may be growing, is still smaller than we might have imagined.

Casey Fenton wants to change this. He founded CouchSurfing in 2004 to connect travelers with places to crash-not in hostels, but in people's homes, a notion that many no doubt find bizarre. Unlike other online networks, CouchSurfing allows its users to find one another online in order to meet and host each other offline. That alone is something of a radical concept (it's easy to imagine the collective panic of loved ones everywhere: "You're going to stay with strangers?"). But there is a deeper purpose behind the site, says Fenton. Fenton calls himself, only half in jest, a scientist of human connection. His mission is to transform people's lives. "We want to create memorable, intense experiences," he says, "to put the right people together in the right situation at the right time. This isn't just about a place to crash."



I met Fenton for the first time a year ago, when CouchSurfing was still in its relative infancy, with 20,000 members (it now has more than 125,000, and at its current rate of growth could reach a half million in a year). Word of the website was just beginning to spread, and about Fenton there was only rumor and conjecture. Fellow CouchSurfers seemed to revere him as a kind of furtive cult hero: a gypsy king of wanderers. Before our rendezvous at a side-street bar in San Francisco's Mission district, I imagined him as a bohemian savant, wild-eyed and bedraggled. But he arrived in a button-down shirt and blue jeans, clean-shaven, carrying a notebook with the word "Life" etched on the cover. From across the room, the bartender gave his youthful face a long, appraising look. Smiling, Fenton dipped his slight frame into a corner booth. It was late afternoon and the bar was quiet. Still, it was hard to hear him; he speaks in a surprisingly faint voice, but his gestures have an excitable energy. He shifts a lot. The story of CouchSurfing, he said, began six years ago.

Fenton, then 22, was already harried, a software programmer in New Hampshire working 100-hour weeks for a headhunting dot-com he himself had founded. He was struggling to keep the company afloat, and spending endless hours staring into a monitor, programming code. Eager for a break, and with only a weekend to spare, he found a cheap last-minute ticket to Iceland. The flight left in four days. Fenton didn't know a soul in Reykjavik. "I tried to imagine myself there," he said. "What am I going to do in Iceland? I pictured myself walking down freezing streets, alone. I didn't want the empty feeling of staying in a hotel or hostel, but I was a shy person and I didn't know how to connect with people." So he did what any reasonably competent, ethically flexible programmer might do: he hacked into the University of Iceland student directory and spammed 1,500 students. "Basically I said, 'I'm coming on Friday. I want to see the real Iceland. Will you show me your country?'" He received more than 50 replies. Fenton spent one of the best weekends of his life gallivanting through Reykjavik, sleeping in someone's garage, staying up late into the half-light of the arctic night, and making friends that he has kept to this day.

For a shy kid from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, raised by hippies in a cabin a mile from the nearest road, it was as if the world had, in three days, laid bare its secrets. "I got back on the plane on Monday morning and said to myself, 'I need to travel like this all the time.'" When the flight landed in Boston five hours later, Fenton had already begun to conceive of CouchSurfing. The next four years would take him to other jobs, and to Alaska, where he got involved in state politics-he managed internet strategy for Tony Knowles's unsuccessful 2004 senate campaign-but throughout that time he always held on to the idea of the site, programming lines of code while riding on campaign buses. Finally, in January of 2004, while Fenton was living in Juneau, CouchSurfing went live.



That same month, 3,500 miles to the south, Jim Stone, presently the world's foremost CouchSurfer, had an epiphany. He says this as we rumble down the boulevards of Montreal in his silver Nissan pickup. Stone, 29, an affable, broad-shouldered Texan, has been staying with the Collective for over a month, serving as a kind of right-hand man to Fenton (they became friends through the site). He's not a computer programmer but he helps with errands and makes money for himself on the side by taking on small Craigslist moving jobs with his truck. As he hunches over the steering wheel, searching street signs for a road that doesn't seem to exist, he describes the moment, two years ago, when his life changed.

Stone was then living in Denton, a college town in north Texas, stuck in a sales job he hated. "All my friends had left," he says. "I was getting apathetic. I could see another five years going by just the same way. I remember checking my mail one day, and the postmark on the letters was the same day I had graduated two years earlier. Two years gone, just like that. And I freaked out."

He quit his job, packed his belongings, and split town, staying first with his father in west Texas. When he discovered CouchSurfing a month later, he signed on as the 99th member. He has since become, by all accounts, its most well-traveled participant. In the two years since he left Texas he has stayed in over 120 homes throughout Europe, New Zealand, the east coast of Australia, and most of the United States. He has "CouchSurfed" with a former soap opera star in Paris and with a couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in Denmark. He has lived for weeks with an Italian family in a villa outside of Naples. Like other members of the Collective, Stone seems to travel in bursts, stopping somewhere long enough to save a little money and then stretching it for as long as he can on the road. Four months in Europe cost him $3,000, a number he now shakes his head at. "I could do it for a lot less today," he says.

Stone pulls the truck back onto the highway, having given up on finding the street he's looking for. He sighs and shoves his bangs away from his eyes, exasperated by the traffic. I ask him what he's learned in all of his wandering (his business card actually reads "Vagabond"), and we drive along in silence as he ponders an answer. "I let the people choose my destination," he says at last. "That's what I've learned. I'll travel to some small little town in Austria that I've never heard of if I find someone who sounds interesting living there." Stone says that the intimacy of staying with strangers has changed him.

This narrative of transformation is common among CouchSurfers. I've heard variations on it from a dozen different people. It seems to go like this: Being welcomed into someone's home, perhaps the most private place in which to meet, creates instant, deep connection and lasting friendship. In having to tell our own story to others, over and over again, we come to realize certain truths about ourselves. If we are shy, we begin to talk more. If we are brash, we begin to listen. And by witnessing other lives, we open to possibilities that we were once blind to. Alex Goodman, 23, a member of the Collective who, as it happens, is also a sociologist studying the group, said this: "If I were 16 and in search of answers for how to live my life, I wouldn't go to a rabbi or a priest or a Buddhist monk. I'd try to find a way to systematically evaluate the experiences of everyone around me, to see what has worked and what hasn't, what makes for a good, happy, worthwhile life and what doesn't. Information technology and the emergence of social networks are making this possible."



The reach of CouchSurfing, after only two years of operation, is impressive. There are people, at this moment, offering their homes through the site in Iran and Turkey, in Malaysia and Venezuela and Nepal. The site has enabled a kind of spontaneous, footloose exploration of the world, and the numbers speak to this: 40,000 homes visited, 17,000 cities represented, 125,000 members participating, and several thousand more joining each week. It brings to mind the vision that Jack Kerouac heralded a half-century ago in Dharma Bums: "A great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier."

But as with any community, there are problems, and the problems facing CouchSurfing are of a serious sort. To begin with, how do you create trust between people who've never met? In this country, the very idea of opening your home to a stranger is anathema to most people-perhaps for good reason. Fenton, for his part, says we need to broaden the meaning of being someone's "friend" online. While most social networks are content with a single indicator of friendship-you're either a friend or you're not-CouchSurfing asks for much more information when someone seeks to be your friend on the site. Have you met in person? How would you rate your friendship? Have you stayed with one another? When did you meet? What was the quality of your experience? The site encourages members to be unsparingly honest in their evaluations, and the testimonies can't be edited or erased.

Certainly, negative comments can be found ("He is a stickler for rules and seems to have an irrational fear of authority"), but for the most part testimonies tend to be of the unflaggingly positive sort. Jessica, for instance, a 22-year-old American, writes of Daniele, who hosted her in Rome: "He deserves some sort of award for hosting. My friend and I stayed with him a record of 40 days. We became a true family and I will never forget his kindness and generosity. CouchSurfing gave me the experience of a lifetime. It forever changed me!" Invariably, people would rather say nothing than say something negative, and that etiquette stands in the way of reliable feedback.

There is a real sense, too, the bigger CouchSurfing gets and the less self-selecting it becomes, the greater the dangers that confront it. For anyone bent on doing harm, the site affords access to a world of trusting souls. The "axe murderer" scenario, however unlikely, is one Fenton ruefully acknowledges he can do little about. "This is a slice of the real world," he says. "So, yes, anything can happen. We ask people to use all the safety features of the site and to take every possible precaution. We've been fortunate that nothing bad has happened." These precautions-be careful when choosing a single male host, consider meeting for coffee first, be prepared to leave at the first sign of a problem-are certainly well-intentioned. But there are women traveling alone using CouchSurfing and some of them are young, in their late teens or early twenties, and whatever care they may exercise, the law of averages suggests that eventually something terrible will happen. It's an open question as to how the CouchSurfing community will react or how the experiment will survive the bad press sure to follow.

There are other problems, too. From the beginning, CouchSurfing has operated as a nonprofit funded by donations. While that's created a sense of community ownership, it has also produced significant limitations, and the strains are beginning to show. By Fenton's own admission, he's trying to run the equivalent of a high-traffic multimillion-dollar website on an income that amounted to about $100,000 this year (most of it brought in by donation). Rather than a team of paid employees, he has a band of peripatetic volunteer programmers. The financial constraints came to a head last June when a perfect storm of system failures, brought on by cost-cutting, led to a complete server meltdown. At the time, Fenton thought everything was lost: two years worth of data, the profiles of 100,000 members. Despondent, he posted a letter to the web signaling the end of the project-"CouchSurfing as we know it doesn't exist anymore," he wrote. Predictably, howls of protest ensued, the community itself refused to be disbanded, and within a few weeks whatever data had not been recovered was created anew. But the fact of that failure still hovers over the community, a painful reminder of how ephemeral its endeavor really is.

In June of 2006, just as MySpace neared 80 million users and Facebook approached 8 million, an article, "Social Isolation in America," appeared in the American Sociological Review. The work of sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona, it examined two national surveys of the American public, one in 1985 and the other in 2004. Their research found that the average number of people with whom Americans discuss important issues has dropped by nearly a third, from about three to two. Even more startling is that one-quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom to discuss their most important matters-twice as many as in 1984. This would suggest that in the same 20 years that saw the rise and triumph of communication technologies-the proliferation of email, cell phones, BlackBerries, and MySpace-our circle of close friends and confidants has shrunk by a significant margin. We are somehow more connected than we once were, and more isolated than ever before.

The role of the internet in this trend is the subject of considerable academic debate. Some sociologists argue that sites like MySpace might not promote strong ties between people, but they do greatly enable weak ones. And these connections lead to jobs, apartments, and partners (for some people, Craigslist alone has provided all three). A recent report by the Pew Internet and American Life Project says, "Research is showing that the internet is not destroying relationships [but rather] enabling people to maintain existing ties, often to strengthen them, and at times to forge new ties."

Others are less sanguine, however. Lynn Smith-Lovin, one of the sociologists behind the Duke study, says of online social networks, "I don't think they're connecting us in a deeper or more complete way than before. But neither are they driving out close personal contact. They are another route for information, and they allow us to develop more specialized communities." But face-to-face encounters, she says, are the sine qua non of strong ties; a relationship can begin online but without in-person interaction it is unlikely to be sustained in any important way.

CouchSurfing, for all its problems, might well be an example of an online social network that actually works. It brings about real conversation. It harnesses the tools of social networking software to create meaningful in-person encounters-Fenton's "right person in the right situation at the right time." And it has begun, however quietly, to pull down the curtains that separate us from one another. The evidence is there on the site itself, in the testimonies of friendship between people who were once strangers but who met, say, over a weekend in Prague and whose lives were changed utterly as a result. And it is not just young people who are being brought together. I spoke with a

76-year-old grandmother from Petaluma, California, who had "CouchSurfed" her way through Greece for several weeks. As she put it, "Who wants to sit in a lonely hotel?"

On my last day in Montreal, I sit with Fenton on the back porch of the Collective's apartment. The place is a hive of activity-people scurrying in and out of rooms, constant footsteps on the stairs, the shower running incessantly-but the porch is quiet. In the stillness of the morning, Fenton describes plans for a "CouchSurfing University," a layer within the network that will allow someone to design a trip not by destination but for the purpose of learning something new: a skill, a craft, or, more vaguely, "life wisdom." For Fenton, who couldn't afford college and dropped out after his freshman year, it's clearly an enticing idea, and as he talks about it, his words tumble out in an eager rush.

There are constant interruptions. Fenton's cell phone rings or someone bursts through the door with pressing news: a friend needs to be picked up at the airport, a programming problem has arisen, so-and-so has been stopped at the border (Canadian customs officials seem to be weirdly paranoid about the Collective). Fenton himself seems tired, faint dark crescents hang beneath his eyes and his voice is laced with weariness, but he responds to each interruption with his full attention and with an unflappable calm. As he deals with one problem after another, it begins to dawn on me that he is both liberated and imprisoned by the social network he's fashioned. It has opened a world to him, bestowed friendship and adventure and purpose. But tens of thousands of people have come to depend on the site, and the site still depends almost entirely upon him.

I ask Fenton whether he feels at all overwhelmed. He considers this, and shifts in his seat. Yes, he says, finally, but the good still outweighs the bad. "Years ago I was a kid sitting in a room by myself and the world was a big place," he says, looking out past the porch. "Now I can go anywhere in the world and I feel as if I'd have family there. I have a huge family now, and the world has become a small place." At this he smiles and runs a hand across his face. He seems momentarily appeased by this thought, by the knowledge that a shy person like himself could, in effect, conjure a family of friends.

But soon enough the disruptions return, and Fenton is needed. He hauls himself up, says goodbye, and trudges back into the chaos and clamor of the apartment. The Collective swarms around him, a dozen people whirling in an orbit of industry and excitement, and Fenton slips among them, disappearing once more into the universe of his own creation.]]> Peter Alsop Thu, 7 Dec 2006 09:26:14 PST