A few years ago,

Some of these cities anticipated the developments currently popular among urbanists. Two decades after it was suspended in a filthy smog like something out of a Dickens novel, Chattanooga was greening its downtown with a riverwalk and aquarium. The city’s population has turned around, too: Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Chattanooga quadrupled its growth rate, undoing a 10 percent population loss between 1980 and 1990. Others anticipated developments popular among the urbane. Asheville, North Carolina, where the growth rate nearly doubled over those 10 years, is home to a roster of microbreweries and independent restaurants well beyond what its population of 83,000 would suggest. The city bills itself as “The World’s Only Foodtopian Society.”

Asheville isn’t alone. From Paducah to Fargo, small cities are talking a big game.

Dressed in tight shirts and slinky dresses, they nursed glasses of beer and wailed to Chinese pop songs. As he approached, they smiled, an exciting sight for any guy on the prowl but a particularly thrilling one for Chen. Back home in Gao Po, his rural village on Hainan Island, the chiseled 32-year-old rice farmer rarely gets the chance to flirt. Sure, he sees the occasional mom with her kid. But the single ladies of Gao Po, his only would-be prospects, have all moved to cities to work as waitresses and hairdressers and maids. Every last one.

In previous generations, a young, handsome man whose family owned land was practically guaranteed a wife. But in modern China, bachelors like Chen face an increasingly sparse dating landscape. The nation’s growing gender imbalance, the largest in the world, has left the countryside so overrun with unmarried men that towns like Gao Po have been nicknamed “bachelor villages.” Across the country, males outnumber females at birth by nearly 120-to-100. On Hainan Island, the birth ratio is closer to 130-to-100.

Signs of a skewed gender ratio emerged in the 1980s, and the gap escalated significantly in the following decades under China’s one-child rule. The strictest family-planning policy in the world, it limits couples to having one kid, or two in rural areas, imposing hefty fines on families who exceed their quota. With fewer chances at parenthood, many parents turn to sex-selective technology to ensure a male heir, says Yong Cai, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Researchers expect the gender disparity to widen even further by 2020, creating an imbalance of 24 million more single men than women.

The impending marriage squeeze is compounded by China’s tradition of “marriage hypergamy,” in which women typically marry up, not just in social class or wealth, but also in age. “China is probably the only country in the world that mandates a girl to marry someone two years older than herself,” says Cai, referring to a law that allows women to marry at 20, but requires men to wait until 22. As fertility declines each year and the number of available younger single women dwindles, older men must scramble to find a partner from an ever-shrinking pool.

“It’s a double-whammy game,” says Cai. In contrast to most media reports, he argues that the year-by-year ebbing of the dating population plays a far bigger role than sex-selective abortion in the marriage squeeze. “On one hand, you have a shrinking population, and the population overall has a tendency for men to marry someone younger. At the same time, because of sex-selective abortion, the female cohort is shrinking faster than the male cohort.”

The odds stacked against them, it’s poor village men like Chen who lose out. Even those born before the introduction of the one-child policy or sex-selective technology face the troubling reality that single village women inevitably leave for jobs in nearby cities. In Gao Po, most single guys realize that they also have to migrate if they want a chance at domestic bliss. It’s not a difficult calculation: The village of 230 people is home to exactly zero unmarried women.

But not every man has the opportunity to skip town. Tradition obliged Chen, the eldest in his family, to care for his aging parents and the land. As a result, the numbers say Chen’s road to love will likely be a dead end. “In China, if males don’t get married by age 30 and they aren’t educated, the chance of getting married is almost gone,” Cai says.

Yet Chen remains hopeful, even confident, about his chances. Part of that comes from studying Taoist astrology books, which predict that 2011 will bring him a wife. He clings to the forecast, using it to brush off his nagging parents and the villagers who cluck their tongues and wonder aloud, “over 30 and still not married...” And he travels two hours to the spinning lights and karaoke bars of Haikou, the capital of Hainan Island, China’s tropical province in the South China Sea. If he wants to find a wife, to prove the books right, he has no other choice.

A week later, back home in Gao Po, Chen scrolls through the numbers he scored. “A few girls sent me their pictures,” he says, rapidly thumbing his phone. He pulls up a picture of a svelte young woman, reclining on a couch, smiling behind a curtain of heavy bangs. “We’re just friends.”

Chen, who dropped out before high school, spends his days in his isolated village, a scant cluster of low-slung homes nestled among acres of tropical flora and rice paddies. On a muggy day in August, he rises at 5 a.m. to harvest beans. His bronzed, sinewy arms are sculpted from years of tending the earth and taming water buffaloes. He rides to the nearby town of Long He to sell his crop, which he fastens to the basket of his three-wheeled motorbike. The trip to town is the most exciting part of his day; he usually passes the afternoon hiding from the sweltering island sun with naps and TV, living vicariously through the dating shows that have become a nationwide fixation.

Chen ambles back home through the narrow concrete lanes of his village, passing a sleeping pregnant pig and a badelynge of ducks. He runs into another bachelor, Chen Suchiang, 42, who has just returned with a net full of freshly caught fish. Suchiang invites Chen to share his feast. At Suchiang’s house, another bachelor friend, Wu Zubing, 37, is already washing vegetables in a plastic tub. Within moments, the kitchen comes alive with men at work. Their hands move expertly, gutting flopping fish, flying across cutting boards. Soon the table is set with steaming plates of fried fish, vegetables sautéed in fresh garlic and chilies, an omelet, fish soup and roasted peanuts caramelized in cane sugar. They raise bowls of beer above the feast and shout an enthusiastic “Gan bei!” (“Cheers!”)

As they sit around the table enjoying their meal and smoking, it doesn’t take long for the conversation to turn to women—the ones who got away and the ones who never were. In China, they say, there is nothing alluring about the bachelor lifestyle. It calls to mind visions of monks in saffron robes, not sexy James Bond-like archetypes. “I’m a traditional Chinese man,” says Chen, who dreams of raising two children, a boy and a girl. “I prefer to have one woman all my life. If I have too many girlfriends, it’s not good.”

Chen has never had a girlfriend. He has tried, though; he even consulted a matchmaker a few years back. His first set-up was with a gorgeous, long-legged woman whom Chen would have married in a heartbeat. Wracked with nerves and unable to hold the conversation, Chen botched all three dates. The woman reported to the matchmaker that she found him “stupid.” The words “felt like a big rock stuck in my heart,” Chen recalls. But he didn’t exactly take the higher ground with his second set-up, whom he rejected immediately because she was too short and too fat. His third match fizzled for reasons he still cannot grasp. When he would call for follow-up dates, she’d vaguely claim to be out of town and hang up.

His friend Chen Suchiang has had better luck, but more heartache. At 23, he fell hard for a woman from a nearby village. She felt like an old friend from the moment they met. They moved in together, but she soon left for the city. Tied to the land, and to his ailing mother, Suchiang couldn’t follow. Pick a lucky date on the calendar for our wedding, his girlfriend said before leaving. But months later, she brought home some devastating news. She had met someone else. They were engaged. Isolated in the village, Suchiang has never had the chance to love again.

The third bachelor at lunch, Wu Zubing, had a few casual relationships while working in Haikou years ago, but opportunities dried up once he had to move back home. As the designated caretaker of his parents and property, he’s had less freedom to pursue the ladies than his brothers, all of whom met their wives after moving to the city. Wu owns a dirt-floored convenience store in the village. He knows he can’t be picky. But he still feels slighted when friends and relatives set him up with women with mental problems and physical disabilities.
“For me, I never give up. I want to find a good wife and have a family,” he says.

Out of options, a few of Gao Po’s lonely bachelors recently asked a local matchmaker, Zhong Hongmei, to help them find mates. The wild-eyed 40-something is not the superstitious village elder you’d picture fretting over young men’s love lives. She’s more madam than matchmaker, willing to find anything her clients want—a woman to give birth to a son, a fling on the side—so long as they have the dough. These impoverished bachelors often aren’t worth her time. And they are getting increasingly desperate over the years, she says, ever since a local newspaper named Gao Po a bachelor village. “There must be something wrong with them if they can’t find wives,” she says.

It’s the exact opposite for women from the village. Wu Chunping, 22, who left Gao Po to find work in Haikou five years ago and is now a waitress at a karaoke bar, says confidently that she has her choice of men, as do most women she knows. “For a girl in your early 20s, it’s easy to get the attention of men,” says the kitten-faced young woman. “In my opinion, at this age, one girl has at least two or three boys chasing after her.” Wu has a boyfriend, whom she met at her previous job at a hair salon. They plan to get married in a few years.

From Albania to Taiwan, countries with stark gender imbalances share three characteristics. The first is a rapid decline in fertility. Either women limit their family size by choice, or, as in China, by force of government policy. Second, with smaller families, there’s an acute pressure on mothers to ensure those precious few children are boys. Of course, there’s a financial motive in rural areas to have boys who can perform hard labor. In India, the skyrocketing costs for dowries contribute to the preference. But Lena Edlund, an associate professor of economics at Columbia University who studies marriage markets in Asia, says the desire for sons runs deeper than economics. “Ancestor worship pushes toward the notion of having one vine of ancestors through the male line,” Edlund says. Parents want to ensure they have boys so they will be worshipped in the afterlife. Third, for a skewed gender ratio to take hold, sex-selective technology must be widely available. In the early 1980s, government birth-planning officials distributed ultrasound machines throughout China to monitor the placement of women’s IUDs, which were inserted, sometimes forcibly, to prevent pregnancies under the one-child policy. It wasn’t long before the machines came to be used for other purposes.

After a generation born under these conditions, a marriage squeeze was inevitable. “If there are more men than women, someone is going to be left out, and it’s going to be the poor guys,” Edlund says. One day, as Chen ventures into the jasmine-scented jungle to find his water buffalo, he describes his family members, many of whom have been impacted by these demographic shifts. His brother keeps striking out with girls he dates in the city; his sister found a husband instantly; his uncle, desperate for companionship, bought a trafficked bride from Vietnam.

Chen’s younger brother, Chen Hongyuan, moved to Shenzhen in 2000 in search of higher-paying work and a larger pool of single women. But he found that dating in the city was still a challenge. “Aside from the extremely handsome, rich, and powerful, most Chinese guys have a tough time finding wives,” he says. The rugged 30-year-old works at a plastic-toy factory in Shenzhen, China’s manufacturing hub. Even though he met the love of his life there—“an unforgettable true love”—their fairy tale quickly came undone when she told her parents.

After their 10-month whirlwind romance, the woman, whom he met on the factory floor, returned to her home in Guanxi Province over the Lunar New Year to deliver the news. Her parents told her she was too young for marriage. Her work in the factories was still an important source of revenue for their family. And when they discovered Chen Hongyuan’s social status, they balked. He’s from a village? He works in an assembly line? They locked her in the house for months. When she returned to Shenzhen and tried to rekindle the romance, it was too late. “I couldn’t trust her,” he says, his deep voice cracking.

Since then Chen Hongyuan has had two insignificant relationships. Desperate to re-create the magic of his first love, he’s turned to Chinese takes on Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus and books from the women’s psychology section at the local library. “It’s going to be difficult for me to find a wife,” he says. “I’m broke, and I’m aging. I’m really worried.” Chen can’t help but scoff when he thinks about how his 28-year-old sister found a spouse within a year of moving to Shenzhen. “For Chinese women who want to date or marry, it’s easy. ridiculously easy.”

There’s a nickname in his village for young women like his sister and ex-girlfriend: golden turtles. Unlike their brothers, these women send almost all of their earnings back home. With demographics so heavily in their favor, they will likely “marry up,” scoring older, wealthier husbands who can further bolster the cash flow back home. “These days, our village hails these girls as a kind of treasure,” Chen says.

But the female supply-demand analogy doesn’t hang together for Lena Edlund. “Yes, the value of women goes up, but it doesn’t benefit the women,” she says, noting that it’s mainly the parents who gain from the rising bride price. And as the gender imbalance grows, it increasingly affects poor women in even darker ways, contributing to a rise in forced marriages, prostitution, and human trafficking.

Chen Hongchang’s aunt, a 39-year-old, bright-eyed Vietnamese woman named Du An Lan, fell victim to this trend when she was just 19. One of eight children, Du grew up in an impoverished village in the rural county of Haixing, Vietnam. When a businessman promised her a lucrative job in China, she leapt at the opportunity and boarded a boat to her new home. But when she arrived, she discovered he had trafficked her as a bride. The businessman disposed of her Vietnamese-style clothing and dressed her in a new pant and shirt set with a traditional Chinese collar. As a ferry carried her from the mainland to Hainan, she looked at the expanse of the emerald-green sea and contemplated jumping.

On the other end, Chen Hongchang’s uncle, a leathery-faced teacher 40 years her senior, purchased Du for 5,000 renminbi, a little more than $780 today. “We’ll live together,” Du remembers him saying; she understood his words though she didn’t yet know his language.
“If you get pregnant, we will treat each other as husband and wife. If we don’t have a child, you can live with me as my daughter.” She cried for days.

Worried that she would flee, her new husband brought Du to his schoolhouse and forced her to sit outside on a bench while he taught. At night, they ate meals she considered lavish. In Vietnam, she rarely consumed meat. Now she was eating pork daily. She was touched by the way he took care of her. Within months, she adjusted to speaking the Hainanese dialect, which shares similar vocabulary with her native Vietnamese.

She was clueless about sex. Months into their marriage, when her husband told her to spread her legs and taught her how to have intercourse, she didn’t know it would lead to a baby. Her daughter was born in 1993, a year after their marriage. Her arrival cemented their relationship. “It completely transformed our marriage,” she said. “I began feeling attached to him.” She returned to Vietnam twice to visit her family and siblings, bringing back 2,000 RMB each time. Her family tried to convince her to stay back with them, but her life in China was far more comfortable than her poor Vietnamese village.

While poor women bear much of the burden of the gender imbalance, women at the top rungs of Chinese society are affected by a marriage squeeze of their own. The expectation to “marry up” creates a tough environment for highly educated women looking for acceptable partners. “In the old days, for females, it was almost always expected that they will marry someone,” says Cai. “But now, if you look around and read the newspapers, the one important issue that people are talking about are these so-called ‘sheng nu.’” Literal translation: leftover women. Thriving in their careers, these ladies struggle to find men who can top their success. “They’ve been left out in this process,” says Cai. “But it’s by choice, not by design.”

In 2010, Sandra Bao, a Shanghai-based magazine editor, reclaimed the derogatory term by co-founding a sheng nu club, which boasts more than 1,000 members. Bao, who says she’s “around 30,” wants women to know that there is happiness to be found in single living.
“Sheng nu are not those left behind by others, it’s those who leave others behind,” she says, flicking her sleek-straight hair over a shoulder. “We are leaving old values behind.”

For the past 20 years, eternal bachelorhood has become an increasingly likely fate for Chinese men, particularly for those in remote areas without access to jobs. As this group of desperate, sexually frustrated men grows, the situation could become even more grim. Years of scientific research shows that the hormones that help men compete tend to drop when guys take on nurturing roles as husbands and fathers. And high levels of testosterone have long been associated with aggression and an elevated likelihood of committing violent crimes. In 2007, Edlund published a study that showed that a 1 percent increase in sex ratio could lead to a 5 percent increase in crime rate. Dudley Poston, a Texas A&M demographer, says that countries with an excess of men have historically been more violent. “Dangerous is probably an exaggerated word,” Cai says. “But in those villages, when better-off people move to urban areas, what’s left behind is a bunch of bachelors. I just can’t imagine what life would be like.”

The shortage of girls could lead to a warped reversal of the imbalance. Shang-Jin Wei, a Columbia University economist, says that China’s ballooning savings rate, unparalleled in the world, could be a result of families’ pressure to accumulate cash to attract wives for their sons. “If you’re a dirt-poor peasant somewhere,” Edlund says, “maybe your optimal choice would be a daughter, who can get married.” This trend could create a new marriage economy, she says, encouraging lower-class parents to sex-select for daughters while the wealthy continue to have sons. Relegated to the underclass, women’s growing financial value could prime them for exploitation by their impoverished parents who could sell them to wealthier families for ever-increasing bride prices. South Korea has been credited with eliminating its widespread gender imbal- ance in the 1990s, but it is actually an example of this exact scenario—the rich choosing sons and the poor choosing daughters, Edlund says. “They have not been able to eliminate sex selection.”

Gender-imbalance experts and Chinese policy planners are bracing for what might happen as prenatal testing improves. So far, China’s effort to stamp out sex-selective abortions hasn’t worked. It is illegal for ultrasound providers to tell parents the sex of their child, but there has been little enforcement, Cai says. The government even lowered the resolution of these machines to crack down on the practice, but most doc- tors are experienced enough that they can still read the blurry images. In some regions, the state has financially rewarded couples with daughters. State-sponsored billboards try to reverse old prejudices with sayings like, “A girl is worth as much as a boy.” “What’s needed is a very vigorous public debate about the values underlying this,” Edlund says. “What kind of cultural values are we condoning?”

Chen is back on the hunt. Ever since his friends from the karaoke bar urged him to join their new group “The Happiness Station” on the social networking site QQ—he created a profile under the name “Stop by for Love”—Chen’s cell has been buzzing every few seconds. QQ has become his obsession, prompting him to spend hours chatting with multiple women online. His go-to move is fortune telling; it’s an easy way to get women to open up. One recently offered her phone number, but Chen is hesitant to call right away. It’s too soon, he says. He doesn’t want to come off as a creep.

He doesn’t want to overreach, either. All he asks is for someone gentle and nurturing, with a good personality. “Based on my age and my poor living conditions in the village, when it comes to finding a wife, I’m not in a position to ask for too much,” he says.

Chen finds a woman whose profile notes that she likes beer. He doesn’t drink much, and he asks her if she has any tips.

“Open your mouth wider,” she responds. He laughs, but it’s unclear if he’s aware of the sexual innuendo.

“I don’t know how to drink,” he replies. “If I chase you, maybe you’ll make me drunk.”

She sends him an emoticon of a cup of coffee, an affectionate gesture. He smirks and types a response.

“Have you eaten?” he asks. She’s just about to.

“Eat more,” he says.

“If I eat more I’ll get fat.”

“No problem,” he types. Chen has rejected a woman for her size before. Not this time. “I like girls to be fat.”

Photos courtesy of the authors. Reporting for this article was funded by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Rechard Li contributed reporting.

On June 15, 1957, the city of Tulsa celebrated Oklahoma’s 50 years of statehood with an event called Tulsarama. The city buried a brand-new, gold-and-white Plymouth Belvedere Sport Coupe in a concrete vault under the lawn of the Tulsa County Courthouse. The car, which was to be unearthed in 2007, was filled with objects that the citizens chose as representative of Tulsa. They included a woman’s purse containing bobby pins, lipstick, gum, $2.73, and a pack of cigarettes. In the glove compartment they placed a bottle of tranquilizers. In the trunk, a case of Schlitz beer.

A few 16-millimeter movies were also buried inside the Plymouth. One, Destination Earth, is an odd little animated film that was produced by the American Petroleum Institute. It tells the story of an authoritarian government on Mars and its supreme ruler, Ogg. A Martian explorer visits the United States and returns to Mars to explain to Ogg that oil and competition are what make America (and American-style capitalism) so great. Keeping with the spirit of the film, the most interesting things included in the 1957 Plymouth were probably the 5 quarts of oil and 10 gallons of gas. Did the people of Tulsa believe that by 2007 technological advancements would have made gasoline a thing of the past? Its inclusion in the capsule was an implicit answer.

People have been burying artifacts in foundations and cornerstones for centuries, but it was at the 1876 U.S. International Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, an event that would later become known as a World’s Fair, that the modern time capsule was born. The centennial capsule was the first to be sealed with a scheduled retrieval date: the American bicentennial in 1976. From shoeboxes full of letters to elaborate stainless steel enclosures, time capsules stamped with “open on” dates far into the future prompt buriers and diggers alike to look outside themselves and think about what kind of legacy they might be leaving. What we decide to save and show our descendants has a way of revealing our deepest hopes and fears.

In particular, American time capsules buried since the 1950s tell the story of our relationship with oil. When President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Highway Act of 1956, the United States undertook the largest public works project in its history, constructing the vast network of interstate roads that would come to define postwar America. Still, faith in a post-oil future was a given. This period of tremendous growth and prosperity filled our heads with glorious techno-utopian visions. It wasn’t a matter of if but when we would move on to the next type of energy that would transport Americans and our goods across this enormous land. The story we told each other—and the dominant narrative in popular culture, in politics, in education—was that Americans were blessed with the power to innovate. Americans got things done. Americans were not content to let technology stagnate. Even if it already worked, Americans could make it better.

Decades before the postwar boom there were predictions that the United States would exhaust its energy resources in short order. On July 19, 1909, Pennsylvania’s Titusville Herald ran an article about U.S. Geological Survey predictions for the future of energy and natural resources. The report forecasted that all natural gas would be exhausted by 1934, all petroleum and iron would be exhausted by 1939, and all coal by the middle of the 21st century.

But what about people who were thinking even longer term? Say, to 8113? That’s the year the Crypt of Civilization, buried in 1940 at Ogelthorpe University in Atlanta, is set to be opened. The man behind the crypt, Dr. Thornwell Jacobs, chose 8113 in order to place 1940 as a chronological midpoint for civilization, using 4241 BC as the beginning. The crypt holds hundreds of items, many of them daily essentials from the five-and-dime. It also includes a mini-windmill to generate electricity.

Burying new time capsules and unearthing old ones are often civic events. Inspired by Beverly Hills, which held a festival this fall in honor of its world-famous ZIP code, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Chatsworth decided to celebrate its own postal designation, 91311. On an evening in mid-September, locals gathered in the parking lot of a Presbyterian church for “Think 91311,” a celebration of the small community at the foothills of the Santa Susanna Mountains.

A soon-to-be-buried time capsule was on display.

I arrived to find a handful of people at tables promoting their businesses and organizations. When I asked around to see who might know something about the time capsule I had read about on the “Think 91311” website, the first few people had no idea that Chatsworth planned on burying anything. I finally tracked down Carol Lucas, secretary of the Chatsworth Neighborhood Council. An attractive middle-aged woman wearing clothes that might best be described as suburban cowgirl-chic, Lucas seemed skeptical of my interest in the time capsule. But she politely explained that she intended to fill the capsule with a signed baseball from the local Little League team, a yearbook from the oldest elementary school in Chatsworth, and photos of gas prices.

In 1957, the people of Tulsa made sure to include fuel with their car capsule. In 2011, four years after Tulsa’s Plymouth Belvedere was unearthed, the citizens of Chatsworth were documenting the cost of gas. They seemed to be offering future citizens a way to compare prices—a tacit prediction that we will still be using fossil fuels in 2061, when the Chatsworth time capsule is set to be opened.

Neighborhood Council President Andre van der Valk, who owns several gas stations in the Los Angeles area, was attending the festivities with his wife, daughter, and granddaughters. He seemed like the man to ask about the future of energy consumption and whether our collective hope for the future has changed since he was a kid. He mentioned the Kennedy assassination as a turning point. Now, he said with self-assurance, “we live in more realistic times.”

At first blush, time capsules seem like they are about defining who we are at the moment of creation. We compile this stuff in a coffee can (or a state-of-the-art, acid-resistant, stainless steel tube filled with argon gas and welded shut) to understand what we care about personally and, by extension, what things mean to us as a species. But really, we are looking to the future and guessing how people will live in 50 or 100 or 5,000 years. Time capsules force us to express our guesses with material objects.

Thanks to the American bicentennial, 1976 was a banner year for time capsules. Los Angeles buried a pet rock, panty hose, a skateboard, a dress worn by Cher, and Jerry West’s Lakers jersey. Seward, Nebraska, possibly inspired by the 1957 Tulsa time capsule, filled a vault with a yellow Chevrolet Vega coupe and more than 10,000 other items. A capsule buried by the people of Crystal Lake, Illinois, contains a $1,000 government bond, which awaits the people of 2076.

On July 4, 1976, President Ford attended a sealing ceremony in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, for the national bicentennial time capsule. The capsule was supposed

to contain the signatures of more than 22 million Americans, but the signature book was stolen from an unattended van at the ceremony. And so the capsule was sealed without the signatures.

This minor defeat seems to sum up the early 1970s experience. Still mourning the assassinations of many important political figures in the late 1960s and still embroiled in the Vietnam War, the nation was uneasy about its future. Manufacturing jobs were disappearing and crime was rising, which brought out the more apocalyptic elements of the national psyche. Consequently, the predictions were often an odd mix of general pessimism about the present and naive optimism that better days were ahead. The ARCO oil company got into the bicentennial festivities by compiling predictions from average Americans about what the world of 2076 might look like. “We have always been a nation more interested in the promise of the future than in the events of the past,” begins an ad that ran in newspapers across the country asking for submissions. “Somehow, the events of the past few years have made us doubt ourselves and our future.”

At the time, it was popular to include children’s letters in time capsules. Sumner, Iowa, buried a capsule in 1977 (the bicentennial celebrations apparently bled over into the following year) that included kids’ predictions about the world of 2077. The letters share a kind of technological idealism—that things will indeed be improved through Jetsons-style automation—but are rooted in the idea that such innovations are necessary because humankind will have deeply damaged the environment. Fourth-grader Bobby Howard begins his letter by explaining the push-button utopia that awaits us in 2077: “You might have rockets on your back or you might have a robot for a maid, and you can just sit in your chair and push a button that is built in the chair to turn on the wall TV or the tabletop one. All you have to do is take one pill a day and you don’t have to eat anything else because that has all the energy you need.”

Little Bobby goes on to explain that his small town in Iowa has been renamed Bubble Station 370, and it’s connected to other bubble-covered towns by Bubble Number 365, a highway. “The bubbles are to protect the people from radiation because since we polluted the air so badly,” he writes, “we slowly ate up the atmosphere and radiation in full force hit the earth, killing millions of people all over the earth until we finally found it was radiation and told people to get underground about 20 feet.”

Bobby—er, Bob—is probably in his mid-40s today. Whether he still lives in Iowa or not, it’s safe to say he doesn’t navigate bubble-covered highways. Chances are, though, he drives a car that runs on fossil fuels.

What does tomorrow look like?

To assemble our second-ever GOOD 100 list (check out the first here), we surveyed culture and politics to pick out trends and seemingly minor moments that tell us where we’re all headed, together. The big picture is pretty exciting. We’re taking action, not just sitting around. We’re going small-scale to make a big impact. We’re returning to things that worked a long time ago but haven’t worked for quite a while—the street protest, printed matter, local manufacturing—and adapting them. We’re finally taking our kindergarten teacher’s advice and learning how to share. And even though we’re kind of over the idea of material possessions, we’re more excited than ever to learn how to make stuff. We’re doing all of this simultaneously, because the world is too complex and broken and beautiful and exciting to tackle one thing at a time.

Here are 100 glimpses of the immediate future, in a unique interactive experience thanks to our partner Fiat. What's the new Apple? The new unpaid internship? The new Adderall? The new black? We've got your answers.

We also want to hear your 2012 predictions. Click the "submit" button and let us know.

For a taste, check out this video:

Wealthier people are indeed happier—but only to a point. All that extra cash buys just a small amount of joy. We quickly get used to having money, it turns out, and we almost immediately start comparing our fancy new toys with our neighbors’.

Psychologists have a found a way to make money-fueled happiness last, however: Buy experiences, not material goods. We adapt to things we do slower than just plain
things. We’re also less likely to make social comparisons about trips and meals than cars and gadgets. As a result, experiential purchasers report being more satisfied with their lives, less anxious, less depressed, and in better mental and physical health.

Dennis Littky thinks that’s not good enough. “An 89 percent dropout rate? That’s absurd. Typically we blame the students, but it may not be all the students’ fault— it may be the colleges’ fault,” he says. “Colleges have to be student-ready rather than students just being college-ready.”

Over the past two years, Littky has launched College Unbound as a prototype for how higher learning can cater to kids, instead of the other way around. Students live in small, tight-knit communities, work one-on-one with advisers to fashion individualized learning plans built around a job or internship that speaks to a personal passion, pursue independent research related to their fields, and cover the humanities and math together in seminars. It’s an update of the educational model Littky has been refining over three decades, tailored to meet the needs of college students like Joyce Alcantara. Yet despite his track record of success with the nation’s toughest learners, funders have balked.

Littky’s artisanal, hands-on approach—he often uses the slogan “one student at a time”—flies in the face of the prevailing vision for education reform. Typified by Khan Academy’s short math videos and adaptive learning software, which were lauded by Bill Gates himself from the TED Conference stage this year, the new model calls for cutting-edge technology, millions of users, and massive amounts of automatically generated data on student outcomes. “Everybody wants to see the numbers, everyone wants results and they want them now,” says Ray McNulty, a former senior fellow at the Gates Foundation who has followed Littky’s career for 15 years. (Full disclosure: I received funding from the Gates Foundation for my latest book.)

A perpetual risk-taker, Littky is entering a whole new realm of education, about which he admits he’s “naive.” In the middle of a historic recession, he’s committed significant resources from his own foundation toward a new, untested model, and he’s fine-tuning and redesigning the car while it’s on the road.

Littky’s trying to scale up his model fast enough to prove its merits, incorporate technology, and start generating the kind of results that can convince big donors while making it financially sustainable. Even more importantly, he’s put his legacy on the line: his core belief that you can transform the lives of students like Alcantara by connecting to their passions. “Everything we’ve done has been learning and leading up to this,” he says.

When I first came to Providence last fall to visit College Unbound, Littky picked me up at the train station in his4x4 and zoomed through the crowded downtown streets, all while texting with staff and students and talking a mile a minute. (Now that we’ve gotten to know each other, I often get epic texts from him with three or four new ideas.) He’s in his 60s, wears a white goatee, often uses salty language (he calls the Gates obsession with metrics “stupid shit”) and keeps a collection of outrageous hippie hats; last summer he visited Burning Man for the first time and had a blast. He’s also known throughout the Northeast as an educational innovator. In the early ’90s, Michael Tucker of L.A. Law fame played him in a TV movie about his battle to turn around a high school in rural New Hampshire. In 1995, he and Elliot Washor founded Big Picture Learning, an organization designed to stop the dropout crisis by promoting “authentic, relevant learning.” Their flagship, Metropolitan Regional Career and Technical Center in Providence, is a high school without classes. Students spend four years shaping a personalized curriculum with advisers; along the way, they intern offsite, take classes at local colleges, and present what they’ve learned to the community through exhibitions. Tom Vander Ark, then the head of the Gates Foundation’s education program, called the Met his “favorite high school in America.”

When I visited the school, students were sitting in a carpeted hallway, working quietly together on a math problem. One might be studying geometry to use at her internship at a graphic design firm, while another might need to go over statistics for his job coaching middle school basketball and a third has to learn the accounting ropes for her job assisting a tax preparer. The atmosphere is reminiscent of some elite private schools, and the test scores and graduation rate are similar. But the school is public, and the students are from families like Alcantara’s. Since 1995, Big Picture Learning has built a network of 60 small high schools in the toughest urban districts around the country—Detroit, Newark, L.A. All share the Met’s philosophy and model: “It’s life to text, not text to life,” says Littky. “It’s about finding a student’s passion and interest, and you build everything off of that.”

Big Picture was working, students were graduating. But there was a problem: Littky had no control over what happened next. And his students were floundering once they left high school. “Colleges have some of the worst pedagogy you see anywhere—large lecture classes. The emphasis usually isn’t on teaching. They give you these fat textbooks that nobody reads after they get out, and professors try to teach everyone to be a little professor.” The Big Picture graduates weren’t getting the same personalized attention as before. They were missing the connection between their academic requirements and real life, and struggling to cover tuition and other expenses. Most of them had to balance school with work and other responsibilities. “I really thought we’re kidding ourselves if we do this job and then 90 percent of the kids drop out,” he says. “That’s fucked up! And when I get the fire there’s nothing I can do—it controls me.”

So Littky put a chunk of Big Picture Learning’s money, along with some foundation grants, behind an experiment he calls College Unbound. Littky and cofounder Jamie Scurry would recruit eight Big Picture graduates from around the country to live together with an academic and residential adviser in a house in Providence. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the students would meet in an intensive seminar that crunches three general-ed requirements at a time into one, with lots of writing. Tuesdays and Thursdays, they’d be out working on field projects, including interning at a sustainable architecture firm, making animated technology videos for the Mozilla Foundation, working on-set at an ABC drama, and making plans to open a salon for natural African-American hairstyles.

He convinced the Continuing Studies department of Roger Williams, a local private university, to accept his College Unbound students and—crucially—to award them an accelerated bachelor’s degree in three years. The first class arrived on campus in 2009.

Roger Williams expects to graduate 80 percent of that first group in the spring of 2012, and the entire second class is on track to graduate in 2013. This past fall, students started in three more College Unbound programs. One is a nonresidential night program based at Roger Williams exclusively for adult learners. The second is a residential program for traditional students at the private Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU). And the third, and most unusual, is a distance-learning program based at the Ashé Cultural Arts Center in New Orleans.

Talking to Littky’s current collaborators, you get a sense of the ripples his model is sending out across a landscape desperate for new solutions. “Higher education needs to be shaken up,” says John Stout, dean of Roger Williams’ School of Continuing Studies. How broken is the system? Over the past 20 years, the United States has fallen from first to 12th in the percentage of young people with postsecondary degrees. Tuition’s doubled in the past decade, rising faster than any other item in the Consumer Price Index since 1978. Student loan default rates are increasing. Only 56 percent of students complete a four-year degree in six years. And a nationwide study last year, using a test called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, found that 36 percent of students demonstrate no gain in learning between freshman and senior year. Stout says that working with College Unbound students has helped convince some of the more old-school faculty of the validity of buzzwords like integrated, experience-based, and outcomes-based learning. “These students are much more attuned to having to explain things to people, with their multimedia exhibitions and demonstrations of their work,” he says.
“They are forcing the whole program to be aware of how each course connects to one another, and how skills can be attained in real life.”

Paul LeBlanc, president of SNHU, was eager to try the College Unbound program as a way to improve retention among students who are first in their families to go to college. “We serve a lot of first-generation students who were maybe B students in high school, who come to us as not fully confident learners for a whole number of reasons. We want College Unbound to succeed on its own terms, but also to see how it might reshape traditional delivery as well.” College Unbound students at SNHU will live in the dorms and have a chance to join clubs, parties, teams, and all that other good stuff, but will have to balance it with their community work. “It’s a flipping of the relationship between the classroom and hands-on learning,” says LeBlanc.

When I reach Joyce Alcantara in New Hampshire a few weeks into her freshman year, she sounds exhausted but exhilarated. She says she’s had no more than an hour of downtime.

“Dennis always says that the world is our classroom. We’re out there doing things. We’re in offices and conference rooms where people in our field are seeing us as colleagues, not just as an intern.” She’ll be working with Child and Family Services of New Hampshire, where her initial project is shadowing people in various departments to build an online database of the agency’s services. Although Alcantara misses her tight-knit family—she Skypes with her mother, aunt, and nieces a few times a day “just to see their faces”—she’s comforted that she’ll be embedded with the same small learning community for the next three years. She feels surrounded by support from her classmates and program mentors. “I’m not used to people caring so much about my success and calling out my weaknesses to help me turn them into strengths.”

One of the most promising incarnations of College Unbound is unfolding in a very different setting far from the leafy Northeast: New Orleans’ Central City neighborhood. The Ashé Cultural Arts Center has been a driving force in the city’s rebirth after Hurricane Katrina, with programs in dance, theater, storytelling, and visual arts for children, women, and the elderly. Adam Bush, College Unbound’s director of curriculum, traveled to New Orleans last year with two students and attended a community-sing event at Ashé. Afterward, he got into a deep conversation with the center’s director, Carol Bebelle, a woman he says “I am in awe of.” Bebelle got excited about the idea of starting a College Unbound program
so members of the Ashé community, both employees and volunteers, could finish their bachelor’s degrees. These are people in their mid-20s to mid-50s who have well-developed passions and careers—in storytelling, in health and wellness, in early-childhood education—but are missing that piece of parchment. “It’s a way of removing another kind of glass ceiling, to create alternate pathways for people in this community,” says Bebelle. The dozen Ashé students met biweekly for almost a year and crafted individualized learning plans with Bush over Skype that include documentation to get credit for learning from their life experiences. They started their first semester this fall with a single class; three years from now, they will graduate with Roger Williams degrees. They’ll pay winter 2011 / the next big thing $6,000 a year; Ashé has raised the rest from Spike Lee’s foundation and other donors.

Bush believes that the Ashé collaboration could be the future of College Unbound: designing and supporting learning plans so people who already have jobs and support networks can complete their degrees. There are 44 million adults in the United States with some college experience and no degree, more than the number of people with bachelor’s degrees. Littky is talking to Ready to Learn Providence, a community organization that offers training to day-care workers. “A vast majority of these early-childhood workers don’t have degrees,” says Bush. “They need accreditation and certification. We could create a whole network of thematic colleges that use the structure of College Unbound and tie it to work already happening collectively.” Such an expansion— partnering with unions, community organizations, cultural centers—could be both faster and cheaper than creating communities and placements from scratch, especially if the program develops software templates to streamline the work of crafting learning plans and takes advantage of free online educational resources.

With its emphasis on engaged advisers, individualized curricula, and real-world experience, College Unbound clearly has the ability to turn drifting students into success stories and dropouts into graduates. What’s not clear is how such a labor-intensive and experimental model could grow to have a significant impact on the future of higher education as a whole. First-generation students are most typically found at community colleges, the largest sector in higher ed and also the one that has the least money to spend per student; though enrollment has skyrocketed at public two-year schools in the past decade, they face the deepest budget cuts of any type of college. Even College Unbound’s supporters say they’re not sure how the program will be able to grow in this economic environment. “I feel bad for Dennis that he’s hit a wall with funders in the last 18 months because of skepticism around scalability,” says LeBlanc.

Littky counters that College Unbound, at least the Roger Williams version, is on the verge of becoming self-sufficient at a cost of $10,000 in tuition per student. Not coincidentally, that’s the same figure that community colleges spend per student, and it can be significantly offset by Pell Grants and scholarships. What the program spends on its high ratio of advisers to students, Littky says, it saves in acceleration and in the flipped-classroom approach—having students spend most of their time doing real work for real employers is cheaper than having them in class.

Those who have been touched by this experiment so far are optimistic that Littky’s influence will percolate across the heaving higher-education landscape. “It remains to be seen if this can transfer into an institutional setting—we’re talking about very small numbers,” says Dean Stout at Roger Williams. “On the other hand, look at all the things that have come along in higher education.” For example, internships for credit, born in the ’70s, have become nearly ubiquitous. “Even if this succeeds only slightly, it could have an enormous effect. If it’s an idea that’s worth pursuing, you hope the system can adjust to it and change.”

Littky is working like “a maniac” to try to make that change. He's still overseeing Big Picture and the Met as he opens the two new programs, counseling students through money problems and mental-health crises, sitting through late-night curriculum meetings, lunching with venture capitalists, and barnstorming for College Unbound everywhere from South by Southwest in Austin to a conference in Qatar. “I want this to be so big. My dream is that we’ve hit this so right that people are going to swarm to it. With the distance learning, I think we can have millions. When I’m 80, we’ll see if I was right.”

One cool evening this fall, I stopped for a quick drink in my neighborhood. The bar I happened into, Custom American Wine Bar, is about as New Brooklyn as it gets: sleek lines, warm wood, niche bourbons, and a crowd both tattooed and understatedly but expensively dressed. Custom is nice, but not unusual. There are plenty of similar spots in postindustrial Williamsburg. The neighborhood was famously hipsterfied more than a decade ago by hordes of 20-somethings who came for cheap housing, access to Manhattan, and an appealing nightlife that soon became practically the area’s claim to fame. The cake seemed baked.

So I was surprised to learn that Custom had faced a protracted battle in 2009 when its owners applied for a liquor license. Longtime neighborhood residents showed up in force at the hearing; the bar would spur drunken nuisances, they argued, even “gang violence.” The neighborhood, despite being a hotbed of New York Times trend pieces, isn’t entirely without gangs. Still, it’s fairly clear that an establishment hoping to sell wine by the $12 glass would probably push away, not draw in, such a crowd. The neighbors were reacting, rather, to what Custom American Wine Bar represents: a critical mass of watering holes catering to the young people cycling in and out of Williamsburg nowadays. They had finally, fully taken over.

“It’s nothing personal to the people running this business, but the neighborhood is nearly saturated with bars,” Williamsburg resident Dennis Thompkins told the Community Board at the hearing. “The area is becoming unlivable. What we need are businesses that serve our community, not a transient community.”

In a way, liquor is the lifeblood of the modern urban neighborhood. Where it flows, growth often seems to follow. Upscale bars can be a sign of change—as they are in a neighborhood like mine—or they can drive change, as they do in places just starting to transform. In some cities, such as Detroit, people are even hopeful that well-placed watering holes can be a tool to reverse-engineer neighborhood revitalization—if you build it, the young will come. And as more 20-somethings embrace city living across the country, bars and restaurants have become, perhaps, what the church or country club are to the suburban lifestyle: tangible evidence of a vibrant community.

They’re also tangible evidence of gentrification. That’s a loaded word, of course; the people who study the phenomenon often prefer “neighborhood change.” But that term’s a little vague, and in spite of the sometimes-negative connotations, gentrification remains the easiest shorthand for describing the specific sort of transformation I’m talking about. No matter what you call it, though, the process by which neighborhoods evolve remains complicated. It’s messy. And as battles like the one over Custom American Wine Bar show, liquor licenses are often a proxy for understanding how and why a place develops as it does.

Lately, when I need a break from Williamsburg, I’ve being going with friends to a bar on the border of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights, an area of Brooklyn that sociologists who study this sort of thing would refer to as a “frontier.” There are plenty of young professional types who have moved in over the past couple of years, but the bar, Franklin Park, is also a few blocks from a much-publicized shooting at the end of the summer. The place is very much in transition. I like Franklin Park as much or more than any spot in my neighborhood, which in itself isn’t a reason to move (unless, perhaps, you are far more of a committed barfly than I). But as I’ve trekked there more and more, I’ve started to notice how much more elegant the dilapidated brownstones are than their vinyl-sided Williamsburg counterparts. I’ve gone home and checked prices on Craigslist, salivating at the larger spaces and lower rents. I feel a little more comfortable every time I walk from the subway—and though I’m a little ashamed to admit it, the fact that I pass a warmly lit wine shop alongside boarded-up bodegas and dollar stores is part of that comfortable feeling. When my lease runs out, I’ll think very seriously about moving to Crown Heights.

My progression is a fairly typical one. In urban-planning circles, the theory goes that people who come to a bar for the night might decide they’d like to stick around; the bar makes them feel like they know the area, like they’d have plenty of things to do if they moved. Booze, when it comes to neighborhood change as well as personal interactions, is a social lubricant. It hastens developments that were already underway.

That’s easy to forget when you look at a place like Williamsburg, where residents are taking to Community Board meetings to fight for the neighborhood equivalent of a cold shower. For the most part, people want upscale bars to move into their less-than-upscale neighborhoods, at least in the beginning. First of all, bars stay open late, making streets that would have otherwise been been dark and abandoned less vulnerable to crime. A new bar also brings foot traffic to the neighborhood, spurring both short-term business and long-term development. And when people have better options for where to drink, less-desirable booze peddlers—the seedy liquor store on the corner, say—are more likely to close. Wine shops and wine bars are a classic sign of gentrification (and here, you’re probably allowed to sneer at the term a little bit). Merlot might not be the edgiest drink order, but if it’s readily available, the neighborhood is on the cutting edge of change.

While neighborhood transformation often starts on the residential side, commercial development is key to it lasting. A wine or cocktail bar that stays in business sends a certain economic signal, says Jenny Schuetz of the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development. “Those places are hitting a fairly high price point,” she says. “They need someone with a fair amount of disposable income, so it’s a sign that [the bar] is either drawing people in from outside the neighborhood, or that the people who live there have a fairly high purchasing power.” When other businesses, like boutiques or coffee shops, see that, they become more willing to bet on the neighborhood. And, of course, more amenities attract more interest from potential residents—if all goes well, the neighborhood has locked itself into a positive reinforcement cycle.

“Liquor has been classed in a way that is very visible,” says Winifred Curran, an urban geographer at DePaul who has studied Williamsburg’s gentrification. And booze is not only an issue of social status; often, race can bring battles over liquor licenses to a boiling point more quickly. That’s perhaps one reason why Williamsburg and neighboring Greenpoint, both home to blue-collar ethnic whites, were slower to react against the hipster colonizers: The change was less apparent at first glance. It’s also why the expanding nightlife in East Austin, historically a minority neighborhood and increasingly home to the young arty set’s favorite bars, has experienced a certain amount of pushback from longtime residents.

The most basic reason that liquor licenses are such a lightning rod for worry over neighborhood change? They can be fought. In many cities, neighbors have more input and legal recourse once booze is involved, so any rage they might have felt over the fancy gelato place has to be channeled toward the wine bar. The specifics of the laws vary from state to state; in New York, for instance, the 500-foot rule grants community boards more of a say if there are a certain number of bars clustered within 500 feet of one another. In parts of Los Angeles, establishments first get a “conditional-use permit,” after which they must notify neighbors by mail to get approval.

But perhaps nowhere is the community more involved than in the District of Columbia, where Advisory Neighborhood Commissions (ANCs) wield a hefty amount of control over the issuing of licenses.

Sheldon Scott owns a stake in the restaurant group behind U Street’s Marvin and American Ice Co., among other establishments. Marvin (named for Mr. Gaye) was an instant hit in the neighborhood, which over the past few years has experienced rapid development. 

While Scott has never failed to get a liquor license for one of his ventures, he’s had to jump through a number of hoops. Others haven’t been so agile: Scott has friends who were unable to obtain ANC approval and had to scrap their business plans.

“Every liquor license we’ve ever had was protested to the point where we had to enter a voluntary agreement, above and beyond the written law, around matters of ‘peace, order, and parking,’ which are the three things neighbors tend to protest,” he says. Knowing where neighbors are likely to fight liquor license applications, and to what degree, is also crucial to his group’s success. “Down one block even, it’s a completely different neighborhood, more hostile to businesses and used to a lot less traffic,” he says. Scott has been around D.C. long enough to know that a particular ANC might not, for instance, let a bar construct a roof deck—crucial for drumming up business in an era where indoor smoking is banned at bars.

Scott is sympathetic to neighbors’ concerns. He serves as an ANC commissioner himself in a nearby neighborhood, Columbia Heights, which is also in the midst of a dramatic socioeconomic shift. “One thing you always hear is that ‘we don’t want this to become the next Adams Morgan,’” he says, referring to the bar-heavy strip as a sort of Vegas on the Potomac. “That’s a neighborhood that is more invested in serving people outside the neighborhood than the people who live there.” Scott suspects that one reason U Street residents haven’t pushed back is that the neighborhood’s change has been less by bars than by restaurants, albeit ones that serve alcohol up to last call. The mix feels more like a place that’s geared to residents, both longtime ones and newcomers. If others take the Metro in to visit, well, that’s just the cherry on top.

It’s easy to assume that a neighborhood dependent on bars for growth would stay young. People might move to such a place in their 20s and live with roommates before settling down elsewhere to start a family. But that’s not the case. Even in Williamsburg, where the unappealing housing stock makes a certain amount of transience and turnover inevitable, some of the first wave have decided to stick around and raise kids. U Street appears to be headed for a mature sort of neighborhood change, as well. Where there’s a parenting Listserv, there are people in it for the long run—and U Street Tots has been active for more than five years.

The potential for such a change is part of the reason Scott and his partners decided to open their most recent establishment in Petworth, a neighborhood less far along the road to revitalization. But Scott knew there was opportunity when he saw “cranes in the sky.” There are blighted buildings to be turned into restaurants for cheap, sure, but there are also plenty of single-family homes. People can move to Petworth planning to stay. Plus, the neighborhood is still in the stage where both new and old neighbors are excited to see more commercial enterprise and more amenities arrive.

So liquor can help along a neighborhood that’s already changing, but can it keep one afloat that’s teetering on the edge, or even turn it around? Can gentrification be manufactured in a cocktail shaker? That’s the question being tested in a pair of Rust Belt cities.

Downtown Cleveland has been on the decline since the 1970s as the city’s core manufacturing industries dried up and major corporations left town. In response, the city made a big bet on entertainment, and liquor, as a way to lure people from the suburbs. Cleveland’s sports arenas were the centerpiece of a 1990s-era push for a renaissance. And in recent years, the city and various civic organizations have poured money into developing downtown’s East Fourth Street corridor as a nightlife destination, adding bars and restaurants in hopes of re-creating the pattern sociologists see in places like Crown Heights: 20- and 30-somethings come for a meal or drink, enjoy themselves, and begin to see the neighborhood as a viable place to live. Getting them to buy a condo is the goal, but booze is the bait.

Just outside downtown, though, in a neighborhood called Ohio City, liquor has been luring new residents for more than two decades. It’s been a slow, organic shift from hardscrabble, factory-worker neighborhood to the kind of place that now serves, well, slow, organic food. In the 1980s, Pat Conway and his brother opened the Great Lakes Brewing Company and an attached beer garden in an elegant-but-boarded-up red brick building that had an old-timey tiger mahogany bar (complete with a .38 slug lodged in it from some bar brawl past).

Ohio City was fairly bleak back then. But, over time, Great Lakes won over its existing neighbors and began drawing new ones. Young people looking for cheap housing and good bars—of which there are now several, in addition to the brewpub—started calling Ohio City home. Just recently, a local gourmet ice cream shop opened. The neighborhood remains socioeconomically mixed, but Conway thinks that makes Ohio City an appealing place to live—it’s got more character than the East Fourth corridor downtown. There are some concerns from longtime residents that the neighborhood has changed too quickly, but, as Conway says, that’s “a good problem for Cleveland to have.”

Cleveland’s Upper Midwest neighbor, Detroit, is famously the starkest example of a city gone to ruin. But the city’s civic boosters aren’t giving up. Talk to any of them for more than five minutes and they’ll probably mention Slows Barbecue. Now with two outposts, the restaurant has become famous for more than just its big portions of American food, careful beer menu—it often serves Cleveland’s Great Lakes on tap—and hip aesthetic. Slows, which opened in 2005 in the city’s Corktown neighborhood, has come to symbolize the effort to bring a sense of community back to the abandoned downtown.

The place is the brainchild of Phillip Cooley, a former model who’s almost accidentally become one of the ambassadors for a new vision of Detroit, one where artists and creative types can enjoy cheap rent in a city that was built by industrial titans in flusher times. The restaurant stands across the street from Detroit’s abandoned train station, which makes an appearance in just about every slideshow of ruin-porn photographs to bounce around the internet. Phillip is not unaware of the symbolism of his venture. “The restaurant is the modern dinner table,” he says. “Our generation is just as likely to believe that restaurants and bars are essential public spaces.” Slows sitting so close to the abandoned station just seems fitting.

Slows filled a void. It has a three-hour wait every weekend, and did triple the business in its first year than the owners had expected, a fact they weren’t shy about publicizing in hopes of drawing in more commercial neighbors to the still-blighted neighborhood. New establishments were slow to join the bandwagon, but now there’s a burger bar opening up nearby, along with a classic cocktail bar that will be another destination for the suburbanites who make a special trip downtown just to eat and drink at Slows.

The drink part is crucial: Cooley opened a place called Mercury Coffee Bar in 2008 that didn’t have a liquor license; it failed. There were broader management problems, says Phillip’s brother Ryan, but he’s convinced the place would have stayed in business with a liquor license. Phillip didn’t mention his own place by name, but refers in passing to other establishments that failed after getting busted for illegally allowing BYOB. Liquor licenses are actually relatively cheap in downtown Detroit—perhaps for $25,000 and in bountiful supply, compared with as much as $250,000 in the nearby northern suburbs.

Phillip is happy to help other would-be restaurateurs get accredited. He needs a critical mass to make his own business work. “In a place like Manhattan, if someone opens up a restaurant on your block, they’re cutting into your territory,” he says. “Here, we have nothing but space. We’re going to be supportive to make sure they’re successful, helping them with permits. ... I’m a huge fan of other people coming in; not just bars, but coffee shops and bookstores, too.”

Ryan runs a real estate agency headquartered right next to Slows. The brothers are gambling heavily on the idea that destination restaurants and watering holes can convince residents to move in, even though most neighborhood revitalization efforts start with real estate and are helped along by amenities. So far, Corktown has attracted the kind of people you might expect: Detroit natives who spent time in big cities and aren’t quite ready to give up the chance to live alongside a Maltese immigrant community and a smattering of artsy types enticed by cheap rent.

“Sometimes I feel like the only person who’s not in a band,” laughs Ryan about the latter group. But that’s exactly the crowd they’re trying to attract: “Interesting people” who appreciate drinking “as an interest rather than just drinking to get drunk.”

Houses in Corktown can be had for $40,000 or $50,000, about half what they were at their peak in the mid-2000s. Ryan concedes that even though Slows is going great guns, he hasn’t seen the average price point tick upward much in the neighborhood since its opening. “The block we decided we wanted to work on had places that haven’t been worked on for 15 years,” he says. “We’re a long time away from real gentrification.” As for wine stores, that classic sign—well, there are only a few in the entire city, and certainly not any in Corktown. “The gentrifying term only gets brought up locally. When people come in from other cities, they worry that Corktown is unsafe. It looks a lot scarier than it is,” Ryan says. The bars and restaurants haven’t yet been accompanied by the grocery stores and other businesses that need to follow to get people to stick around.

This year, only five houses might be sold in the area. But Ryan just closed on his highest residential sale yet, and he believes his real estate venture will turn out to be a canny one. “Slows is its own thing, but it’s hard to say where it’s all going to end up.” Still, he hopes that the community forged around Slows will make his investment pay off, and they need to not be the only game in town. “We want a successful, healthy community,” says his brother Phillip. “We can’t be successful without the rest of the community being successful.” They’ve got a vision of what that would look like, but Corktown isn’t there yet. What Williamsburg calls a problem—too many places vying to open up, and the neighborhood’s rents spiraling north as a reaction—is one the Cooley brothers would love to have.

McNally Jackson, an independent bookseller in lower Manhattan, fulfills nearly every stereotype of the urban boutique bookstore, with one important exception. There, nestled between the magazine racks and the coffee bar, sits a 5-foot-tall mechanical curiosity known as the Espresso Book Machine. The device can print, bind, and trim paperbacks in a matter of minutes, and the text can be chosen from a database of more than 4 million books in the public domain. Customers can also generate a custom edition by providing their own content.

It’s no secret that the traditional book-publishing model has struggled since the advent of e-readers. According to the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales grew 202 percent from February 2010 to February 2011, eclipsing all other publishing formats. The bankruptcy of Borders, once the second-largest bookstore chain in the country, underscores the shift away from conventional book buying. This analog-to-digital conversion of both purchasing and reading is a testament to our collective devotion to the intellectual and cultural space that books occupy, but it’s left both independent and chain bookstores scrambling to attract customers.

In this dire time to be a bookseller, the Espresso Book Machine provides a glimmer of hope. Sarah McNally, the owner of McNally Jackson, thought the EBM would be primarily used for academic purposes. After all, New York is filled with colleges and universities, and the machine could easily provide access to rare or out-of-print publications. But she’s been pleasantly surprised: Since its instal- lation in January, the machine has been used almost entirely for self-publishing.

Jennifer Rainville, a New York-based writer, printed her debut novel, Trance of Insignificance, on the EBM at McNally Jackson in April. She initially went the traditional route of signing with a literary agency to produce the novel, but was frustrated by the slow pace of the process. “Traditional publishing is based on a 'gatekeeper' model that technology has made largely irrelevant,” Rainville says. By contrast, using an EBM “celebrates writers, authors, poets, readers, book lovers in a way that I think has been missing in this country for a while with the explosion of big-box bookstores. Books are about connection, and this type of service fosters that.”

By circumventing the traditional method of book creation, McNally Jackson is opening up the market to more unconventional projects. Artist Tattfoo Tan worked with McNally Jackson to produce Rejected, a collection of rejection letters he has received from various galleries and fellowships. In the book’s introduction, he notes, “Now that technology has improved, these letters have been phased out and replaced by a less personal email version. I see the need to treasure these relics.” On Tan’s website, he directs those who wish to purchase the book to McNally Jackson (either the physical store or its website), which prints each book to order, just as each rejection letter in the book was produced as a direct response to Tan.

In With a Little Help, a collection of short science-fiction stories also printed through the Espresso Book Machine, author Cory Doctorow, editor of the popular site Boing Boing, explores what the future might bring. “One interesting thing about selling print-on- demand books is that they can be instantiated all over the world, close to where the orders are,” Doctorow writes on his personal website. “For years, pundits have predicted corner-store kiosks that can print any book ever written, and though we’re nowhere near that stage today, there are the first inklings of what such a world might look like.”

Of the 46 Espresso Book Machines in use, only 20 are in the United States, and eight of those are housed in independent bookstores. So far, McNally Jackson is the only bookstore in New York state with an EBM. For booksellers, there is still a higher profit margin on the “printed, from-the-warehouse book,” says Sarah McNally, as larger print runs reduce the cost of individual books.But for writers, the economics are better. Michael Lydon, who printed a 70-page book titled Now What? A Philosophy of Freedom and Equality, believes that the service is reasonably priced. “My books, so far, will cost me a bit under $8,” he says. “So if I can sell them at $10 to $15, I could make some money.”

Other print-on-demand options exist for self-publishing authors, such as Lulu.com or CafePress.com, but a local store like McNally Jackson offers more than just a printer. It provides self-publishers with a community. They can stop by the store and see what their fellow writers and artists are producing.

Unlike e-books, which have cornered much of the market, EBMs present an opportunity for a new relationship between authors and the product they create—and a new relationship between authors and their readers. Doctorow, for example, invites readers to send him typos they’ve found in With a Little Help, then adjusts his text and credits them for their corrections in the next printing.

E-books are convenient, but they lack a sense of place. And although the digitization of books is an inevitable and necessary step, the output doesn’t always have to be digital, too. At the conver- gence of the abundance of technology and the DIY movement, the Espresso Book Machine allows for creativity and customization, and provides a new direction for the physical marketplace.

While McNally Jackson doesn’t have definitive plans for expanding, Sarah McNally wants to find new ways to encourage her customers to take advantage of the machine—the store has set up a display nearby of the best works produced on the EBM. It’s not difficult to imagine that all bookstores of the future may look like this: a showroom of floor samples with a single machine that can reproduce them.

The small Coast Guard boat motors along the coast of southern Italy, bouncing through the swells of a royal-blue Mediterranean. It’s a cloudless, perfect day—ideal conditions for smuggling.

They are out there, says Commandante Cosimo Nicastro, pointing south to the horizon. Some 300 miles away, several boats are reported to have left from Tunisia, each one carrying around 100 refugees fleeing North Africa. The ships are headed to the Italian island of Lampedusa, the gateway for migrants trying to enter Europe. The Italian Coast Guard’s job is to stop the boats. Or, as Nicastro sees it, to save their cargo.

Since 1988, at least 17,856 people have died trying to cross into Europe, according to a report from Fortress Europe, a website that monitors refugee migration. They were found in the undercarriages of airplanes and as stowaways in trucks. They were shot by border police. They died under trains or trying to swim the English Channel. At least 114 froze to death while crossing the mountains from Turkey into Greece; 92 more died along the same border when they stepped on landmines. But no route is more deadly than the sea-lanes between North Africa and Italy, where well over half of them perished. And the Mediterranean crossing is only getting more treacherous. With 2,049 deaths there since January—more than a tenth of all reported casualties since 1988— this year is on track to be the deadliest ever. By comparison, an estimated 350 to 500 migrants die each year trying to cross from Mexico into the United States, according to the ACLU and Mexico’s human rights agency.

While the majority of immigrants still arrive in Europe by air or land, an increasing number are embarking on the harrowing journey by sea. Some European politicians, eager to fan the flames of anti-immigration sentiment, use their dramatic arrivals as telegenic fodder—if they arrive at all.

“The sea is the most difficult to control,” says Nicastro. “Four hundred people can die in five minutes.” One night last winter, Nicastro was aboard one of two boats sent to rescue 400 people in brutal weather 50 miles off Lampedusa. When the passengers spotted the Coast Guard, they all rushed to one side of the boat, causing it to capsize and dump them into the frigid sea. Nicastro’s boat moved in to pluck people out of the water. Most were already dead, but the crew saved almost 100. “They didn’t know the water. They just touched the water, the cold water, and they [didn’t] scream. They just disappeared,” he said. “Almost 300 people just died in the sea under our eyes.”

For all the talk about globalization eliminating boundaries and bringing the world closer together, it has also created new imbalances between rich and poor, spurring migration and, in turn, the construction of new barriers to stop it. In Europe’s case, where internal borders have been opened up to compete in the global economy, the focus has turned to tightening the continent’s external edge. That’s led to increased pressure on “weak link” states, and the creation of a pan-European border patrol agency called Frontex. On a continent struggling to weather an economic crisis and assimilate immigrant communities already within its borders, many Europeans see strict, unified border enforcement as the continent’s first line of defense.

This intensified border enforcement has angered activists on the European left, who argue that the deaths of migrants at sea are a function of policies of neglect, part of a coordinated effort to discourage immigration. “The Mediterranean is a mass grave,” wrote German journalist Heribert Prantl in a recent op-ed, criticizing the Italian Navy for failing to send support ships to rescue leaky boats. “Death on the Mediterranean is, like it or not, part of a deterrence strategy.” Critics accuse Frontex of drawing “a new Iron Curtain” around Europe.

Until now, the agency has been little more than a bureaucracy, coordinating border patrol units on loan from member states, including the Italian Coast Guard. Frontex also runs Rapid Border Intervention Teams (RABITs), which were created by EU resolution in 2007 to “allow, in case of urgent and exceptional migratory pressure, rapid deployment of border guards at the European level.” The agency has been playing an increasingly sophisticated game of cat and mouse with illegal migrants trying to enter the EU, and its commando-style operations have decreased the flow of boat migrants into Greece, pushing more toward the mine-laden land border with Turkey. With its success have come casualties, as traffickers are forced to take riskier routes and methods.

Now that the agency’s legal mandate is expanding, Frontex will have the authority to operate its own assets—patrol boats, aircraft, and border guards. That increased power is designed to meet a new wave of immigration from the developing world in coming years, one fueled by climate change and continued political instability. How Frontex will handle its newfound responsibility is an open question. So, too, is how humanely the organization will treat the expected hordes of refugees fleeing persecution and strife in North Africa.

As Europe’s handling of migration during the Arab Spring proved, there is room for improvement.

On August 1, the Italian Coast Guard intercepted a rickety, 50-foot boat overfilled with passengers and bobbing in azure Mediterranean waters less than a mile from Lampedusa Island. Two days earlier, the 296 migrants had embarked at a port outside of Tripoli. For many, the journey had begun on the other side of the Sahara, which they crossed in cramped trucks and off-road vehicles before navigating the borders and battlefields of Libya. They were fleeing famine in Somalia, endemic poverty and strife in Sudan and Eritrea, and the more recent unrest in Libya and Tunisia. The last and most important stretch was a mere 100 kilometers of open sea.

As passengers clambered aboard, more and more cramming in behind them, the traffickers directed dozens into the engine room, where the air was already thick with exhaust. When members of the Italian Coast Guard crew boarded two days later, they opened the engine room to find the corpses of 25 young men. Some had died of asphyxiation. Others were reportedly beaten to death by those afraid that an attempt to flee the engine room would capsize the boat.

For two decades, some analysts have been warning that a combination of environmental change, population growth, and political instability would plunge Africa and South Asia into chaos. The eruption of the Arab Spring last winter was a test case of sorts for a Europe made frantic by the possibility of 1 million Africans landing on its shores.

Some 57,000 migrants turned up on Lampedusa Island as a result of Arab Spring, and the Italian detention center there was allowed to overfill, triggering protests and clashes between authorities, detainees, and locals angry that the influx had scared off tourists. Despite recent rhetoric about pan-European solidarity in sharing the burden of large refugee flows, neighboring countries largely resisted helping Italy and Malta, who squabbled over who should take in the migrants to process their claims to international protection.

“The Arab Spring showed how the system we are building is still really a draft of what we should do, and there are a lot of flaws,” says Seline Trevisanut, a legal specialist in boat migration at the University of Cagliari. “The Arab Spring showed the weakness of our system.”

Experts and rights groups say that politicians dodged the issue, framing the people fleeing Libya and Tunisia as illegal immigrants rather than refugees seeking asylum. The reluctance to open the doors to migrants, in the long run, is likely due to concerns about climate change.

“European politicians are beginning to wake up to the idea that climate change may produce large numbers of people moving,” says Khalid Koser, a migration expert at the Brookings Institution. “One doesn’t want to speculate about climate change, but there could be millions of people affected. And if you have very large numbers of people moving, I think you’re going to face a real crisis.”

“I guess this is seen as [European politicians] putting up the first barrier to that,” he continues. “‘If we’re soft on this, how are we going to be tough when large numbers of people arrive in the next five years?”

Rather than play defense, says Trevisanut, Europe must develop a shared strategy for managing not only the borders of individual sovereign states, but also the continent’s external border. Member nations have been reluctant to cede power over their own borders, but the focus on antiterrorism measures since 9/11 has added a new urgency to the matter. Trevisanut believes that the same level of urgency must be applied to protecting migrants and upholding Europe’s obligations under international and human rights law as the system evolves. Instead, the discourse has increasingly linked the flow of people across borders with criminality and terrorism.

In recent years, European nations have tried to stem the influx of migrants largely by striking deals for stronger border enforcement in other countries; Spain has worked with Senegal and Mauritania, for example, and Italy with Libya and Tunisia. In practice, this has outsourced responsibility for protecting refugees to regimes that, in the extreme case of Libya under Gaddafi, have no respect for human rights (in Libyan detention centers financed by Italy, migrants were reportedly beaten, tortured, and forced to drink their urine). The European Court of Human Rights is expected to rule this year on whether Italy has violated its international obligations with the so-called “pushback” agreement, which allowed Italian authorities to intercept migrant boats in international waters and turn them over to their Libyan counterparts.

Other EU member states have also been implicated. A September report from Human Rights Watch chronicled the “inhuman and degrading” treatment of migrants held in sewage-infested, overcrowded Greek detention centers. The report, The EU’s Dirty Hands, took Frontex to task for knowingly turning over migrants, in its first RABIT operation, to Greek authorities it knew did not comply with EU rights standards. 

Because Frontex will likely continue to rely on member states for detaining and processing the migrants it picks up, these types of problems are “a good example of what we may expect in the future,” says Niels Frenzen, a law professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in refugee law. Rather than offering a remedy for the shortcomings of EU border enforcement, Frontex appears to be subject to its same failings. What’s more, he says, its status as a background player is actually blurring responsibility and access to information. That was also the conclusion of a recent study commissioned by the EU Parliament, which blasted Frontex, arguing that its status as a depoliticized coordinating agency has given it too much autonomy and shielded it from “proper democratic scrutiny.”

As Frontex’s influence grows, Frenzen says, so does the need for its transparency. 

In the meantime, the factors driving migrants to the open sea are not likely to diminish, linked as they are to stability and opportunity across Africa. In a squatter building occupied by hundreds of refugees in a suburb of Rome, 37-year-old Yakub Abdelunbi explains why he left his home in Darfur eight years before. “I don’t love Europe,” he says. “I love my country. But I can’t be there or they’ll massacre me.” Abdelunbi fled first to Libya, then invested in an inflatable boat with 17 others and set out for Lampedusa Island. Unlike thousands who followed, they made it.

This reporting was funded with a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting

Courtney Kendrick; photo courtesy of Justin Hackworth

“I use baby lotion to make his faux-hawk.” Natalie’s 1-year-old, Henry, watches us patiently from his high chair. His feathery hair is spiked on top of his head in a gentle bell curve. He has two teeth. He’s wearing a Ramones shirt. He’s giggling.

It’s a gorgeous day in late summer, and Natalie and I are at an outdoor café in Manhattan eating overpriced salads. I sip on a limeade, she a Diet Coke. She’s wearing a striped shirt, a furry mocha shrug, and dark jeans. Her shoulder-length brown hair is blown out, her lips glossy, her eyelashes mascara’d. She hands the baby a dab of bread and tugs at his blue jeans.

Natalie Holbrook is a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom who runs a popular lifestyle blog called Nat the Fat Rat, a nickname her Uncle James gave her when she was a chubby baby back in Mesa, Arizona. Natalie’s blog gets around 250,000 visitors a month. She’ll post pictures of what she wore to Fashion Week after she scored a last-minute invite (a cinched, yellow-and-pink dress, flipped hair, and thick-rimmed glasses) or photos of a one-woman Mad Men dress-up party. She’ll write about how much she adores her American Idol-loving accountant husband, Brandon (known as “the Holbs” on her blog), and how much she loves New York—they moved back a year ago after a stint in Idaho. Sometimes she’ll just post adorable snapshots of Henry, better known to her readers as Huck or the Huckster, after Idaho’s huckleberry obsession and her favorite Mark Twain rascal. Natalie is a character you want to be. Her life is one you want to have.

After lunch, we go back to her apartment, which is on a fancy block on the Upper West Side, a stone’s throw from the park. The place is tiny but full of whimsical details: a little green owl pitcher filled with flowers, a shelf with Huck’s favorite bedtime books arranged by color. Natalie notices I’m staring at a red, white, and blue flag above her button-tufted couch. “It’s a nautical flag,” she says. “It means ‘yes’ or ‘change in course.’ I saw it at the Brooklyn Flea and had to have it, since it seemed like this year was a giant escapade in saying ‘yes’ and ‘changing our course.’ It’s like our mascot.”

The baby giggles again. “Hey, dude,” she coos. “You’re happy, aren’t you? Is it because you had a good nap? Or because you’re Mormon?”

Natalie’s comment is a wink at me—she’s been graciously answering my questions about Mormons for more than an hour. On her blog, her religion doesn’t come up much. If she mentions that she’s Mormon, it’s as an aside. Or a joke: “That Sunday was Bring Your Non Mormon Friends To Church To See We’re Not Weird,” one post recounts. “Keep the polygamy on the supah D-L!” She pokes fun in person, too. Natalie shows me a frilly purple frock that her husband affectionately calls the “sister wife” dress.

In the realm of crafty lifestyle blogs, Mormon women like Natalie are killing it. There is Gabrielle of Design Mom, Naomi of Rock Star Diaries, Liz of Say Yes to Hoboken, and hundreds more keeping carefully curated accounts of their daily lives. Many, like rookie Sharon’s NYC Taught Me, are newly monetized; other blogs, like Gabrielle’s, are the primary source of income for their families. Some of their sites trade in design and fashion, some focus on parenting, and some, like Natalie’s, paint a more complete, perfect picture. Although many are concentrated in the West, most of these bloggers don’t live in Provo. Some have five kids before they’re 30; others started blogging because of their trials with infertility. They frequently hang out in person and exchange emails. It’s not uncommon to see links on the sidebar that say something like, “My little sister—I taught her everything she knows!” They mean it literally; many of them are related.

They hint at their faith—a snapshot with the Book of Mormon in the foreground, a link to an LDS girls’ summer camp. But mostly, their religion is beside the point. They all have huge non-Mormon audiences.

Mormons who grow up outside of Utah do their best to blend in. Natalie’s family moved around a lot when she was a kid, and she took pains to hide her religion from her peers. In Connecticut, there were almost no Mormons. At her Oregon high school, people teased her. When she came home from college on holidays, her former classmates didn’t invite Natalie to parties. “She doesn’t drink,” they’d say. “She’s too good for us.”

“I felt like it was my job to prove them wrong,” she wrote later on her blog. “Be the ‘cool’ Mormon. I felt like I could prove to them that we’re not prudes, we’re not weird, we can be fun and normal, that we do NOT have horns.”

She ended up going to Brigham Young University at her mother’s urging, but she had “major attitude” about it. She had wanted to go to New York University or Oregon State, graduate single, and have a career—not go on picnics at dusk on temple grounds and hold hands with returned missionaries. Her first week at BYU, a boy called her up after they’d had a few forgettable moments of conversation. He told her he’d had a dream that he had taken her to the temple where Mormons are married. He said, “I feel like we’re meant to be together.” Natalie hung up on him.

But during her sophomore year, Natalie met Brandon, the guy who would become the Holbs, and suddenly felt fine about tying the knot. “It wasn’t even like I had some come-to-Jesus moment,” she says. “I met him and was like, ‘Oh, cool, I’m supposed to marry him.’” After a short stint in Oregon, the couple moved to New York for Brandon’s job.

Natalie Holbrook and her son, Huck

Natalie’s blog started as many do: out of boredom. In 2005, she worked a string of mind-numbing office jobs and had a lot of time to kill during the day. So she started reading lifestyle blogs like Mimi Smartypants and Dooce, eventually paying $25 a year to keep her own on Diaryland. It was confessional and rambling, mostly essays about her life in New York. She kept it a secret—“I thought it was super narcissistic back then,” she says.

A couple years later, Brandon got into grad school in Idaho, and Natalie moved with him to the tiny city of Moscow. Without New York as her inspiration, her blogging petered out. She was in a strange world with no familiar faces and no purpose. Her sister had just left the church, and Natalie started to wonder whether she should give up Mormonism, too. She went to temple but her heart wasn’t in it. That’s when a friend directed her to Courtney Kendrick’s blog, C. Jane, Enjoy It.

Natalie went through two years of archives in one sitting. She read as Courtney described her attempts at baby making—putrid fertility pills, detailed ovulation charts, the elation of finally seeing the word “pregnant” on a ClearBlue pee stick. In true Mormon fashion, Courtney paired her pain with a vote of confidence in the Lord. Natalie felt an intense connection with Courtney, even though she’d never met her. Natalie had just started to have her own pregnancy fake-outs, a stretch of infertility and miscarriages that would last for two years, and eventually end thanks to Clomid and a fertility-awareness book.

One night, Natalie had a dream that she was at her house and Courtney was in the kitchen heaving with morning sickness. Beads of sweat collected on her forehead. Their husbands were in the living room playing board games, and Natalie was nursing a beautiful baby girl. Somehow she knew it wasn’t meant for her; it was Courtney’s girl she was holding. Natalie swears that a few weeks later Courtney announced on her blog that she was pregnant with her second child.

Natalie started going back to church. She also started blogging again.

While Nat the Fat Rat is mostly designer baby slings and boat rides in Central Park, sometimes Natalie offers glimpses of her inner anxieties. But even these posts end on a playful, positive note.

“In the late afternoon sun I watched my cute husband eat a turkey sandwich on my red adirondack chair,” Natalie wrote in September 2009, at the height of her infertility frustration. “I announced my news.” Another negative pregnancy test had just reduced her to tears, and she told Brandon she was over it.

“Good!” he said. He turned his face to the sky and shouted. “Do you hear that, Heaven? We don’t want any babies down here!” “NOT US!” I yelled. “Don’t you even send us any!” Holbs hollered. “We won't take them!” “Just you keep them to yourselves!” I agreed. It felt good. As I shouted to the eternities I thought I could just see those Heavenly angels attending to me. I imagined their understanding smiles and the way they flew off to direct our message.

Mormons have been meticulously recording their lives for almost two centuries. On April 6, 1830, the Lord gave a command to Joseph Smith: “Behold, there shall be a record kept among you.” Grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ memoirs are privately published by their families and bound in high-quality leather. Bookstores and churches in Mormon hubs like Salt Lake City and Provo are stocked with blank journals. Missionaries are required to keep them; children are reminded to fill them.

In the 19th century, Mormons toted journals with them on their journeys to the West—perhaps unsurprisingly, religious commitment and persecution were major themes. While men tended to focus on religion and politics, women recorded every mundane detail about their children, their Christmas dinners, their clothes. Though they were on a grueling wagon ride across the frontier, the accounts have a glass-half-full tone. In an 1885 journal entry, Ida Hunt Udall gushes over her gussied-up baby girl, an infant as laid back as the Huckster himself:

Aunty gave the baby a beautiful piece of blue French merino, and I bought some white silk braid and took my first lessons in braiding her a suit, dress and cape. It looked lovely when finished, and I imagined she looked like a royal little princess in it. … We had not a very comfortable way to ride having no cover on the wagon, and the sun was very hot. Poor little baby got so badly sun-burned that she did not look natural for a week, but she was so goodnatured, around the camp fires and traveling along, that the boys in company pronounced her the “best kid” they had ever seen.

These diaries were written by and for Mormons. But what the LDS church lacked in proselytizing scribes it made up for with public relations. It recorded PSAs and snagged its own 1-800 numbers. The church launched the national “I Am a Mormon” campaign last year, which features videos and billboards of Mormons from all walks of life. They boast the most-visited website of any religion, and Mormons are encouraged to not only blog the good news, but to harness the power of SEO to protect their faith from disparagement.

And for good reason. The church renounced polygamy in 1890 and its racially discriminatory policies in 1978, but Americans continue to associate the religion with multiple wives, racism, and, in the wake of the fight over California’s Proposition 8, homophobia. In the 1970s, “as evangelicals gained in numbers and visibility, they started calling Mormonism a non-Christian cult,” says John-Charles Duffy, visiting comparative religion professor at Miami University in Ohio. In the Northeast United States, home to only about 240,000 Mormons (less than 5 percent of the country’s 5.3 million), non-Mormons may never come across one in person. The stereotypes dominate: a brood of six towheads, a missionary in a crisp white shirt on a bicycle, an obedient wife with a French braid snaking down her back.

In recent years, the public has developed a fascination with Mormons. In 2006, HBO debuted the polygamy drama Big Love. Then came the reality show Sister Wives and, just this year, the award-winning musical The Book of Mormon. Not one but two Mormon former governors—Massachusetts’ Mitt Romney and Utah’s Jon Huntsman— entered the 2012 Republican presidential race. But even though Mormons are in the spotlight, they’re still “them.”

Enter bloggers like Natalie Holbrook, whose lives look nothing like Big Love. They are real people. Very charming, goodlooking, cheerful people. Natalie admits her blog is less about “her life and experiences” and more about “how she sees the world.” The Holbs is a character. Her friends are amalgams. When she and her husband have an argument, or when one of them makes an off-color remark, Brandon will say, “This doesn’t go on the blog.” It never does.

“I have a lot of Mormon friends who are just as liberal and foul-mouthed as I am, but they would never get on a website and talk about things like I do,” says Heather Armstrong, a proud ex-Mormon who runs the blog Dooce. “Even when they’re going through ‘adversity’—such a Mormon word!—they have to have an optimistic outlook on life. Mormons are highly invested in preserving their image as wholesome, happy, and productive.”

Heather is one of the most successful lifestyle bloggers in the world. One and a half million people follow her on Twitter, and 50,000 people visit her site every day. Her “About” page declares, “I firmly believe that BYU is the most horrible place on Earth, worse even than Disneyland, and the list of reasons is much too long to get into here, although my time spent there taught me more about foreplay than any porn could.”

Heather and Natalie’s blogs share a set of aesthetics, but the mood is pretty different. Heather swears. She complains, she writes about poop, she mentions the guy she once had sex with who talked like Elmo in bed. “I definitely see a whole bunch of design blogs where there’s never a drop of negativity, ever,” Heather says, but that doesn’t stop her from getting decorating ideas from her relentlessly upbeat Mormon counterparts. She is an avid follower of Design Mom and a good friend of the author, Gabrielle Blair. Still, Heather always found it bizarre that Mormons didn’t complain in public unless it was a matter of life or death. At BYU, she started having serious doubts about the church. When she was a sophomore, she read a paper on Ebonics in a linguistics class and realized that her parents would be outraged to know that she supported the program for California schools. From there, her family’s intolerance made her angrier and angrier.

Heather ditched Mormonism on her last day of college in 1997, before blogs existed. She looked around BYU's campus and her parents’ temple in Tennessee and thought, “This isn’t me.” Eight years later, when Natalie was adrift, she found role models thousands of miles away, women who were breadwinners and cared about fashion and made jokes about their faith. She saw Mormons who could break with tradition, or at least bend it a little. She saw herself.

“Mormons aren’t weird,” says Jordan Ferney, who writes the blog Oh Happy Day! and lives in Paris with her family. We’re ten minutes into our phone conversation and it’s already awkward, made worse by the shitty international connection. “We haven’t been weird. We’ve been your doctors and store owners for a century. Maybe it’s just that America is bigoted.”

“People don’t get it,” she continues. “After Prop 8 there were all these protesters outside my LDS church in San Francisco. Which is so funny because everyone in my congregation is super liberal. People in my congregation probably voted the same way [the protesters] did.” Some California protesters held signs targeted at Mormons that said, “My two moms can beat up your 14 wives.” When exit polls showed that 70 percent of blacks had voted in favor of Prop 8, some Mormons, including Jordan, thought it was unfair that people weren’t protesting outside black churches. “It’s because that’s an intimidating crowd,” she says. “Whereas me and my little 3-year-old walking out of a church isn’t very scary. It’s really easy to be mad at the happy, blond person.” In other words, don’t hate us because we’re beautiful.

Or rich. Mormons are by far the wealthiest religious group in the United States per capita, with $25 billion to $30 billion in estimated total assets. According to the Pew Research Center, 38 percent of Mormons are middle-income, as opposed to a third of the general population. Six in ten Mormons have some college education; only half of the rest of the country have the same amount. Mormon families have the means to buy cute boots and tricked-out strollers. They’re also more likely to have one-income households, which, in the Mormon community, means more wives who have time in front of their computer screens.

Jordan has to get off the phone because her dinner guests have arrived. “They’re Mormon, too, by the way,” she says. “In their spare time they fight against child trafficking. They work for the foreign service. They’re very cosmopolitan.”

The air of perfection might make Mormons the ideal political scapegoats, but it also makes them the ideal lifestyle bloggers. In early 2011, journalist Emily Matchar confessed on Salon that she was an “overeducated childless feminist atheist” addicted to blogs written by Mormon housewives. The article inspired dozens of Mormon bloggers to answer the question, “Why are there so many of us?” Many remembered journaling as children, and posited that blogging was a way to keep it going. Others looked to their community’s ingrained industriousness. “Growing up Mormon, I only saw my parents relax and rest on Sundays—they were always working, playing, cooking, journaling …just a constant flow of ‘getting things done,’” wrote Emily Henderson, a style blogger who’s an ex-Mormon. “We went to thrift stores LONG before it was cool. And I swear on the Book of Mormon, that is where I got a lot of my creativity and style.”

Others suggested that they are attracted to blogging for the same reasons as many other women: It’s a way to balance the modern with the traditional, to have an outlet and a career outside of motherhood but still stay at home. It’s an especially attractive option for Mormons. “If you become a mother and you decide that you want something else, there’s a lot of pressure,” says Gabrielle of Design Mom, who is Jordan’s sister and lives a few hours away in a small town in France with her husband and six kids. “I’ve never felt criticism that I worked full time, but also I was in New York, and it’s very progressive. I don’t know if a Mormon congregation in Utah would have been as accepting.”

Some bloggers, like Jordan, barely mention their religion at all. You’ll find it in three places on her site, one of which is on her list of Frequently Asked Questions. (“Are you Mormon?” “Yup.”) Others, like Courtney, put their religion in the foreground. Most don’t think of their blogs as a proselytizing tool, but that doesn’t mean they don’t connect them to religion. Natalie was out for one of her two-mile “blog jogs” in Idaho, during which she’d brainstorm her next post, when something occurred to her: Maybe she should pray for her blog. She was embarrassed at the thought—Is my blog really worthy of God’s attention?—but she did it, anyway. “It sounds cheesy and ridiculous,” she tells me, “but I think this is something that God supports.” Still, the moment when Natalie whispered “God bless my blog” was never recounted in a post on Nat the Fat Rat.

When the bloggers are up-front about their religion, not all readers are supportive. In February of last year, Courtney wrote about “Mr. Whitehouse,” one of the few residents of Provo who isn’t Mormon. His wife had died that morning, and Courtney was trying to make sense of the tense relationship between Baptists and Mormons. It was no pious polemic, but the post opened a floodgate of negative comments. One commenter felt duped into reading a Mormon blog when he didn’t want to. Another called her an abomination of the blogging world. Courtney later deleted these and all comments on C. Jane, Enjoy It.

Reading the hateful responses made Natalie sick to her stomach. She sat down that night and wrote a post in which she “came out” to her readers: “I am Mormon, hear me roar.” She opened up about the teasing she endured in high school. She told the story of how, in her first year at BYU, one of her good friends who wasn’t Mormon called her up just to tell Natalie “how bad Mormons are. How dumb we are. How wrong we are.”

The post was met with an outpouring of love and thank-yous. One longtime reader wrote, “Good for you girl, for standing up for not just your church (that’s not really your job) but standing up for yourSELF.” Another reader gushed, “I love that you are open with your life, your faith included. <3” Still another added, “your passion is so inspiring - thanks for sharing.”

And why would her Mormonism matter to her fans? They already know her favorite romantic-comedy actress (Meg Ryan), the drink she chugs while pregnant (Fresca), the fact that she superstitiously says, “Rabbit, rabbit,” on the first of the month. They didn’t learn about her through a campaign speech or an “I Am a Mormon” billboard on the subway.

“You go through periods when you’re really in tune with your readership,” says Natalie. “You know they’re with you. That post was one of those times.”

Courtney gets emails along these lines all the time. “I am a single mother,” they begin. Or, “I am a Methodist in Texas.” Or, “I am a Jewish, liberal Long Islander.” Or, “I am a mother of two in the adult entertainment industry.” They confess their addiction to her blog, and don’t care that she’s Mormon.

“I think they understand that we’re average Americans, but that we’re also kinda weird, kinda quirky,” Courtney says. “It’s as if they’re saying, I’m not like you, but I like you.”

I’m in the street outside the house where we lived when I was 12 years old, but I’m also sitting on the fourth floor of my university library. The house is one in a line of near-identical two-story structures set on small, sloping lots; you can tell them apart by slight gradations in siding and shutter color, by how many cars the garages hold. Our house is grayish beige with dark-green shutters, a closed single-car garage, and an empty driveway with a sharp slope. It’s nice to be here again, to go back and remember how things used to be. It’s sometime during the afternoon because the house and the stand of trees spread behind it cast shadows that darken parts of the yard, but it’s summer, I think, it must be summer; the sun above me is a squeezed orange leaking light on the mown lawns arrayed around the court and so there’s still plenty of day left for playing, there has to be. I turn around in a full circle, though, and there are no kids outside, no people at all, just the houses and yards and parked cars.

I’m there in the street, but I’m also sitting on the fourth floor of my university library, at a low desk set at the end of two rows of floor-to-ceiling steel shelves filled with bound volumes of Life and Time and other eroding periodicals. I come up here because the fourth floor is always quiet; nobody looks at old magazines anymore because all the important ones have been digitized and databased. It’s winter and the wind is gusting in the empty parking lot outside, but up here the air is still and there are no windows except the ones open on my computer. In one of those windows, which I’ve stretched all the way to the edges of the screen, I can see the house where we lived the summer when I was 12 years old.

You haven’t been to my street but you’ve seen this, too. Google Street View is no longer exciting technology; it’s become banal, just another one of the simple digital tools we use every day. To create these maps, Google captures 360-degree panoramas of city streets and rural highways with 15-lens video-camera systems mounted on top of cars, GPS units that coordinate those images with the locations at which they were taken, and lasers that measure the distance of buildings from the road, allowing for accurate representations of depth. The images are then processed and projected into a 3-D environment built inside your browser window so that you can move back and forth and left and right, looking freely in any direction as you traverse the virtual world.

The Street View service, which is part of both the Google Maps and Google Earth applications, launched in 2007 in five American cities but has quickly stretched to cover most of North America and Western Europe; a meta-map on the Street View website marks expansions into all seven continents, including Antarctica. In recent months, Google has begun capturing territory that, for legal or logistical reasons, was previously considered unmappable. Street View cameras are, as we speak, roving through the streets of Tel Aviv and traveling on a raft down the Amazon River.

Google isn’t just expanding into wilderness; it’s also begun to map the geography of interior spaces, to move in from streets and avenues to galleries and dining rooms. As the days pass, the map grows larger and larger. A press release notes that there are an estimated 50 million miles of paved roads in the world, and though mapping them all “seemed outlandish at first,” the Street View team says its research has since shown it to be “within reach of an organized effort at an affordable scale.”

This is an old idea. In 1946, Jorge Luis Borges published a short story titled “On Exactitude in Science,” which describes an imaginary country where cartography has advanced to such a degree that a map was created that was the exact same size as the land it mapped and “coincided point for point with it.” The story is a dramatization of the philosophical concept of map-territory relation, which involves the connection between representations and the things they represent.

Borges’ stories are fantastical, but it’s not hard to make comparisons between the scale of his fictions and the projects Google is building in the real world. The Google Books project, which aspires to digitize every book in the world, is reminiscent of Borges’ library of Babel (in October, Google released a 3-D “infinite digital bookcase” as an interface for the mass of texts). The growing scope of Street View mirrors the map in “On Exactitude in Science,” and in one of his best known stories, Borges describes “a garden of forking paths,” an infinite labyrinth that many see as a premonition of the hypertextual web through which we use Google’s search engine to find our way.

Google is fast becoming a map for all of reality. Its mission statement is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; in other words, to do multimedia digital cartography on a global scale. At present, interfaces made by Google organize the social world (Mail, Plus), the intellectual world (Books, Scholar, News), and the visual world (YouTube, Picasa); it only makes sense that it’s now attempting to capture the physical world, too. “We’re trying to create a virtual mirror of the world at all times,” Google’s head of geographic and local services, Marissa Mayer, said last year. In 1931, the philosopher Alfred Korzybski stated that “the map is not the territory,” arguing that while people often confuse representations of reality with the things they depict, we must always remember that the two are distinct. The continued expansion of Google into our mental and physical worlds raises an important question, though; whether, as its resolution deepens, the map is beginning to overtake the territory, and, if so, what might be lost in the process.

We lived on that street for more than three years. No matter how hard I rev the hard drive of my mind, though, now I only see summer, the season that seems to be captured in the map. I can remember a Christmas morning, my brother coming in and waking me up in rumpled pajamas, but that was inside the house, not outside. I try to look up into my bedroom window from the street, to find that morning, but a tree blocks my view. The more I zoom in, the more the image blurs and smudges, the more it fragments, the less it tells me. When the digital compression of an image causes visible distortions, those distortions are called artifacts, the same name we give ancient things found buried in the ground.

This morning, before I went back to my street and the summer I was 12 years old, I visited Versailles. As part of the Google Art Project, the company’s first experiment in interior mapping, Google used a high-definition panoramic camera mounted on a small trolley to capture the interiors of 17 famous art museums, including MoMA, the Rijksmuseum, and the Uffizi. I’ve never been to Versailles, so I clicked in through the main page and was transported there in the same time it takes for my Gmail inbox to load. I strolled through the grand apartments and drawing rooms of the royal court and stared up at the trompe l’oeil ceilings and rococo gold fixtures. I got close enough for my nose to touch 400-year-old oil paintings.

I was bored. Virtual tourism of this sort has been hailed by some users as an alternative to travel, a way to get the feel of a place without actually making it there. In my experience, though, it doesn’t work for visiting, only revisiting. There’s not enough sensory detail in the mapped images to lose yourself in them unless you can overlay their projections with the texture of your own memories. My childhood house has none of the grandeur of the court of Versailles, but because I remember the way the air smelled when the tide was low in the bay beyond the woods, how heat felt on my forehead early in the morning waiting for everyone to come out and play, it moves me more, it takes me back.

This May, Google launched Business Photos, its second attempt to create immersive maps of interior spaces. Small businesses in select cities around the world can now apply through Google’s website to have a photographer come and capture panoramas of their aisles and entryways; when the images are uploaded to Maps, Street View users are able to walk through the front door of the business and have a look around inside, the same way they do in the real world.

The Business Photos FAQ advises business owners who are concerned about whether they should arrange things to be neat and clean that the photos should “show customers what to expect to see if they visited your business on a normal day.” That is, normal but empty of people and personalities. There are no individuals on Google Earth, only bodies moving through space; in response to privacy concerns, engineers developed an algorithm to search through the terabytes of captured images for human faces and blur them until they’re unrecognizable.

The summer I was 12 years old, I would tear through the sloping streets of the neighborhood on my Rollerblades. Once, launching out of our open garage to pick up speed, I caught the tip of my front wheel on the edge of the driveway and slammed into the pavement, near the place where I’m standing in the map now. I had to get three stitches in my knee and bandages on my hands. The doctor at the walk-in clinic said it was a good thing I had been wearing a helmet, that I should always wear one because otherwise I might damage my brain. He knocked on my forehead with his knuckles. Look out for that thing, he said, because without it, you wouldn’t be you.

A few years before Google launched its street-level mapping service, scientists assembled the first map of the human cerebral cortex, the place where our memories are stored. To model this part of the brain was a challenge; if unwrapped and stretched out like a map, the average cerebral cortex would be two-and-a-half square feet. Instead of a traditional flat projection, the project used a 3-D computer model to represent the complex shape of the brain. Researchers can turn the cortex around in a full circle and zoom in and out to see certain parts in greater detail. A scientist responsible for the projection compared this attempt to represent brain geography to the attempts of 17th-century cartographers to capture the sprawling curves of the Earth.

“The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” writes Betsy Sparrow, a psychologist at Columbia University, in a paper published earlier this year in Science. Sparrow argues, based on a series of experiments with human subjects, that if we think data will be available on the internet, we feel freer to forget it. Instead of remembering information, we remember how to find it. In the age of the search engine, the contents of our brains are becoming more abstract, like maps, swept clean of the crumbs of detail that make up the world.

Google, more than any other company today, is invested in accelerating this evolution. Its pilot computer project, the Chromebook, does away with the notion of local storage almost entirely; when you use it, you can’t hold on to your data, even though the data, in some sense, is what makes you who you are. You have to, instead, connect to Google’s servers and retrieve the data you want and then, when you’re done, send it back to the cloud so that Google can hold on to it until you need to access it again.

The summer I was 12 years old, we annotated the asphalt with fat slabs of bucket chalk; we made circles and drew lines and wrote our names in cursive; we sketched arrows pointing to buried treasure, to home bases, to hiding places. On so many days that summer, we played four-square in a grid we drew in the center of the street. Today, Foursquare is a mobile app that uses maps to tell other people in your world where you are, to help them find you, but that summer, it felt like all the people in our world were inside the squares of the grid, that there was nowhere else to be.

Google’s competitor for Foursquare is a service called Latitude, named for the vast imaginary lines we use to orient ourselves on Earth. The ultimate goal for all of Google’s interwoven services is to index as many facets of reality as possible in what the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow has half-jokingly called “the Googleverse.” Privacy advocates express concerns over the company’s dominance in the digital sphere; in 2007, European Union officials questioned Google’s policy of keeping individual users’ search histories for two years (originally, the cookies were set to capture data until 2038) and, in 2010, Google acknowledged that its Street View cars had inadvertently been scraping hundreds of gigabytes of data from private wireless networks, an announcement that has prompted government regulation and possible legal action in a number of countries.

I’m not worried about my privacy, though; I’m worried that no matter what information I feed Google, its services won’t be enough to contain all my thoughts and feelings, that its maps will blunt my experience of the world around me. Street View is travel without the smog and the din and the taste of pork dumplings from the cart in the alley. Gchat, which I use constantly, is talking without hand gestures and vocal inflections, without seeing the way your lover smiles at you when you tell a joke.

As the technology advances, perhaps these interfaces will improve, but perhaps they’ll only further abstract our connection to reality. Mayer said in late 2010 that Google is working on “contextual discovery,” or “search without search,” which involves analyzing your usage history and your location to tell you what you want to know before you decide you want to know it. Apps like Foursquare and Latitude have been touted as ways of allowing us to get more out of our world, but there’s the possibility that they will, instead, limit our views, that we’ll be so busy looking at the maps on our devices that we won’t see the territory they cover, the leaves turning and trees growing, the balls bouncing past as children play games in the street. In Borges’ “On Exactitude in Science,” the perfect map of the empire is found by later generations to be useless and is left to decompose in the sun of the western deserts, its “Tattered Ruins ... inhabited by Animals and Beggars.”

The summer I was 12 years old, we made circles and drew lines and arrows, we marked the edges of our territory with chalk and played four-square in the grid. The ball would bounce out and land in the yard, in a bush or a flowerbed, and we would all run to grab it, fighting to be the one to get there first. I’m in the map now, in the summer, and I turn all around, trying to find the ball again, to hold it and feel its pebbled texture. I see the houses and I see the street and I see the arrows and lines arranging my path, backward and forward, but I don’t see the ball, not anywhere. I turn around again, I zoom in on the grass, on the ground, trying to get closer, but it’s no use, it’s not there. And the closer I get, the further I go, the more the image blurs, smudges, distorts, fills with artifacts.

On the day of the ceremony, I was antsy. In preparation, I had forgone everything from caffeine and deodorant to newspapers and food. I wasn’t feeling remotely like my normal self. I ate a little rice and looked at Facebook, but mostly didn’t cheat. I spent a lot of time sitting on my sofa, hoping I would emerge from all of this with insight. I made my friend Joe promise he’d come over and check on me the next morning. 

As the sun set, I dressed in white and packed a yoga mat, pillows, a blanket, and some pears for when the ceremony was over. I directed my cab driver to an off-duty yoga studio in Chelsea, where I’d be taking ayahuasca, a powerful South American psychedelic tea that proponents say promises not just a drug trip but a healing spiritual journey.

I staked out a spot against the wall and grabbed my personal vomit bucket, a plastic trick-or-treat jack-o'-lantern lined with a garbage bag. I made small talk with my neighbors. There were about 60 people there, mostly white 20- and 30-somethings with tattoos and asymmetrical haircuts. I heard someone talking about Burning Man. But there were also beatific 40-year-olds who looked like they had serious yoga practices, a bourgeois Indian couple, and a few senior citizens. The shaman, in his off-duty clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans, began setting up.

For centuries, South Americans have used ayahuasca in healing ceremonies and to communicate with ancestors. The vine Banisteriopsis caapi is found deep within the Amazon Rainforest. Shamans, called ayahuasceros, remove the bark, beat it until it’s soft, and then boil it into a tea with various plants that contain the Schedule I drug dimethyltryptamine, commonly known as dmt. The shamans are so powerful, believers say, that they can see deep childhood wounds and decide how much tea to give you just by reading your body language.

Once they drink the tea, users have what is usually an all-night psychedelic experience. They see verdant landscapes, Tetris-like formations locking and unlocking, people turning into jaguars or being swallowed by snakes. It sounds something like a more sinister version of Avatar. People purge, writhe in pleasure and agony, talk to spirits, feel clairvoyant.

But that’s just the fireworks. According to its proponents, the real allure of ayahuasca is its potential to help users confront pain—both physical and emotional—and reckon with their inner demons, leaving them feeling like they had done years of therapy in a matter of hours. From ecstasy to lsd, psychedelics have long had a role in experimental therapies, and ayahuasca is the latest drug to be used not as recreation, but as a conduit for personal insight.

As word of its therapeutic properties has spread, more and more religious questers have made pilgrimages to see well-known shamans in the Amazon. An industry has grown up around its use, mostly in Peru, where the city of Iquitos has become a kind of Times Square for ayahuasca tourism. It’s been written about everywhere from the London Times and National Geographic to The Atlantic. It’s appeared on the television shows Weeds and Nip/Tuck, and in a movie called Blueberry. Any self-respecting New Age bookshop has an ayahuasca section. Josh Radnor, star of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, is coming out with an ayahuasca memoir this month, called One Big Blissful Thing, which is described by his publisher as "Eat, Pray, Love for those who would rather be reading McSweeney’s.” Sting, Tori Amos, Devendra Banhart, and Paul Simon have all spoken about trying it. A performance series called The Ayahuasca Monologues, originally out of New York, is in its fifth year. “There’s a curiosity about the phenomenon,” says the Monologues’ organizer, Jonathan Talat Phillips. “We asked how many had heard about it the first year, and a quarter of the audience raised their hands. This year maybe half had said they’d tried it.”

I wanted to try it. And in theory, I could do so without hopping a flight to the jungle: Even though ayahuasca is illegal in most of the United States, would-be drinkers of the spirit vine are increasingly able to sample it in the American city of their choice. Still, it’s not a drug that you can buy from a dealer or on a street corner. You’ve got to find an underground shamanistic ceremony.

Nicolette, who didn’t want to use her real name, is a 28-year-old yoga instructor who took ayahuasca for the first time in New York, where she lives. After someone at a yoga-teacher training session mentioned it, she became curious. The first time she tried ayahuasca, she took it with a shaman and had powerful visions of her parents, who had both died when she was young. 

“It’s sort of like the Wild West of consciousness—you dive into your space and have really powerful visionary experiences led by songs by the shaman,” Nicolette says. In December 2008, Nicolette started taking ayahuasca regularly, and has done it at least 50 times.

News of ayahuasca first spread beyond South America when a geographer named Villavicencio, in his 1858 book Geography of the Equator, mentioned “a magic drink” used by tribes. By the 1950s, psychedelics were coming into vogue as a way to get in touch with the outer reaches of the mind and were studied by academics like revered Ivy League ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultz, who influenced Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and William S. Burroughs.

Addicts credit the plant with helping them kick drugs and alcohol. In 1993, UCLA launched the Hoasca Project (hoasca is the Portuguese translation of ayahuasca), a biomedical investigation of the longterm effects of its use in Brazil, where the drug is legal. The study found that instead of destroying the brain, ayahuasca increases the number of transmitters that feed it with serotonin. In other words, there is science behind the euphoria.

In the magazine Maisonneuve, writer Jeff Warren recounts a conversation with a friend about ayahuasca. “I suggested the most prudent explanation lay with the brain’s chemistry and the intersection of the drug’s two active agents,” he writes. “One plant boosts the amount of serotonin in the body, creating a hyper-alert ecstatic feeling, while the other boosts the amount of dmt, a naturally occurring brain chemical thought to play a role in rem sleep. ‘Thus,’ I said, ‘the serotonin circle overlaps with the dmt circle, and we sit in the middle, submerged in a waking dream.’”

Most people who seek out ayahuasca, though, are looking for an experience that transcends logic and science, or at least transcends the low expectations one might have of a ceremony in which each user is issued a barf bucket. “Ayahuasca completely transformed my reality,” says Talat Phillips, Ayahuasca Monologues organizer and author of The Electric Jesus: The Healing Journey of a Contemporary Gnostic. “I didn’t believe in a spiritual reality and my materialist worldview was shaken. The great thing is that this isn’t a party drug. I’m impressed by the practitioners because it’s not easy and it’s also not fun.”

There are two main ways of taking ayahuasca: with a shaman or as part of a religious service. In a shamanic ceremony, you sit on a mat and go within, not interacting with anyone else. The religious use is far different. The Santo Daime (“holy give me” in Portuguese) sect, which combines Christianity with Kardecist Spiritism, believes that the tea is a sacrament, a manifestation of Jesus Christ that brings practitioners closer to God. A Santo Daime service lasts four or five hours, sometimes as long as 14. Men and women sit on opposite sides of the room, and there are candles and a table in the center of the room like an altar.

Nicolette, who joined a Santo Daime community in 2008, prefers the church setting to the shamanic. “I’m an Aquarius,” she says, “so social movements and groups and working toward higher causes are important to me.” She is one of the younger members of her community, a diverse group of Americans, Russians, Brazilians, and Colombians in their 20s to their 50s. “There’s a sort of foundation and strength in numbers,” she says. “We utilize prayer to pray for each other, world issues, what’s going on with water and deforestation in South America, pray for the children of the world. It’s very socially conscious.”

When her church meets, about twice a month, anywhere from five to 200 people pay between $40 and $250 apiece, which covers the cost of the ayahuasca plus renting out a space (often an after-hours yoga studio) where they can practice. She has never asked how the tea is brought to the United States. 

Because the sacrament at the heart of their religion is illegal, new practitioners have to be vetted by community members through a series of interviews and orientations. Their caution is understandable—to some outsiders, ayahuasca is viewed as simple drug use, not religious practice. Jeffrey Bronfman, grandnephew of Seagram’s founder Samuel Bronfman, faced objections from both the government and his neighbors when he tried to build a Santo Daime church in a posh part of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Despite the fact that ayahuasca can be legally used in church settings in Hawaii and Oregon, communities there are just as closed off to outsiders as Nicolette’s, rumored to not allow members who aren’t residents of that state. People who have taken ayahuasca have a habit of assuring those who are interested that the vine will find them. “When they have the desire to practice, they will find it,” Nicolette says. “Where there’s a will there’s a way.” But when I asked Nicolette if I could try it with her community, she didn’t invite me along. While there’s a desire to create awareness about the drug, there are also sensitive legal issues, Nicolette says. “It’s still scary for those of us who want to practice our religion.”

And then there’s the question of the efficacy of drinking ayahuasca in the United States, far from its native jungles of South America. “There’s only so much we can handle here,” says Nicolette. “When we’re done, we have to walk through the streets of New York. You go back to Penn Station, it’s intense! Imagine that after you’ve opened up your third eye.” People in her community aren’t allowed to ride the subway home after ceremonies. If you’re taking it while on vacation in Peru, you can spend the next day relaxing in a hammock, processing the experience. In America, you have the comfort of being at home, but you also have to go to work, deal with people, be present the next day. “It’s a challenge if you’ve had a rough night of your own personal purgatory,” says Nicolette. “For that reason the ceremonies themselves are more intense in other parts of the world, though there’s still amazing work, deep work being done here.”

Margaret de Wys, the author of Black Smoke: A Woman’s Journey of Healing, Wild Love, and Transformation in the Amazon, accompanied a shaman on his first trip to the United States. “In New York, it was artists and psychiatrists, and they needed twice as much tea! It was more suspect and intellectual; it was very different from all of the times I had used it in South America.” De Wys recommends interested parties fly to the rainforest to do it in its native habitat. “I’ve done it in the U.S., and it’s been disappointing to me,” she says. “There is something to be said about doing in the nature, where you see anaconda snakes and jaguars.” De Wys likens the difference between taking ayahuasca in the jungle versus the city to “enjoying a spa in Sedona as opposed to some dumpy, dipshit place on the corner.” 

“Ayahuasca-based religion is flowering all over the world,” says Adam Elenbaas, who wrote a memoir called Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest. “It’s diversifying itself. It’s the first worldwide psychedelic-based religious movement.” As with yoga’s nascent days in the United States, a culture is slowly building around it. But, Elenbaas says, ayahuasca use has no bureaucratic center and “there is too much hippiedippie New Age mumbo jumbo surrounding the culture in general” for it to become widespread.

That’s a good thing, says Itzhak Beery, who has worked as a shaman in New York City since 1995 but believes ayahuasca use should stay in the jungle. “The spirit of the plant belongs there and not here. There are some people that have had bad experiences here—they had encounters with entities that were not very friendly and experiences that they didn’t know how to deal with.” He advises anyone taking ayahuasca, but particularly those in the United States, to tread carefully. 

The conversation with Beery made me anxious—he was the first person who warned me against using it in New York—but I was still dying to try it.

Eventually, my contact information made its way from a friend of a friend to someone organizing an ayahuasca ceremony with a shaman in the States. I was in.

A five-page preceremony letter from the shaman explained that I should wear white, keep an upright posture, and take deep breaths. I was to be silent, stay with the group, and listen to the icaros, or shamanic songs. “You must pay less attention to the fireworks of ayahuasca and look for a more profound level of opening. Pay attention to this depth that leads to deeper consciousness and spiritual evolution.”

And then it got to the advance preparations. This plant medicine reacts negatively with antidepressants and antianxiety medications, and as luck would have it, I was on both. One night I drove myself into paranoia by reading forums about how the combination of ayahuasca and ssris (most antidepressants) could be fatal. I immediately stopped taking Abilify and Pristiq, and bid farewell to my Xanax stash, which left me an emotional wreck and gave me days of vertigo. I quit smoking pot. I stopped drinking alcohol. For five days before the ceremony, I gave up pork, red meat, spicy foods, citrus, caffeine, dairy, and sex.

The scariest part was the waiver I was forced to sign, which included the line, “I VOLUNTARILY ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY RISK OF LOSS, PROPERTY DAMAGE OR PERSONAL INJURY, INCLUDING DEATH."I signed it, gave my best friend’s number as my emergency contact, paid my postal money order for $230, and hoped I’d find some insight.

On the big day, I arrived at the yoga studio almost a full hour before the ceremony began, but I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that ayahuasca enthusiasts aren’t the most punctual. Finally, the shaman changed into a long black robe, took a seat, and made his opening remarks, including a statement about how we were all born alone and die alone. This made me slightly scared, but mostly I was impatient. He told us to breathe, pay attention to the icaros, and sit upright the whole time. There were two people by the door who would remain sober and help us walk to the bathroom. The lights were turned off.

One by one, we drank the tea, which tasted a bit like prune juice mixed with coffee grounds. It had an oily finish.

I went to the bathroom and stared at myself in the mirror. Nothing. I sat back down, waiting for it to kick in, seeing if anything felt different or distorted. By this time, the shaman had started to sing. Sounds were what I noticed first: distant ambulance noises and the rustle of a neighbor scratching his head were equally loud. My tongue started to feel like it was growing in my mouth, and I had a moment of paranoia that I wouldn’t be able to breathe—my only anxiety of the night. But it subsided once I inhaled deeply and listened to the music.

I closed my eyes and began to see trails of color that looked like blood pulsing through a vein. The music intensified and then there were fireworks, vibrant colors, and geometric shapes. I opened my eyes and could feel the serotonin pumping through my system—my eyes rolled back in ecstasy. I may have drooled a little. At one point, I dove into Beyoncé’s stomach and saw her unborn child. People started throwing up. A man near me was vomiting, making me a little less high—until my friend Nick appeared. He danced a jig that erased everyone around me and I was suddenly back to my own thoughts. I saw golden birds flying everywhere.

A voice deep within me asked if I was ready to go deeper, and I said yes. I saw vignettes from my childhood, almost like watching a movie about my relationship with my parents. At first, each episode highlighted my strength and perseverance during an unhappy childhood. I could feel the drug congratulating me for surviving and thriving. And then, as if I were in A Christmas Carol, I was taken through more views of my childhood, this time illustrating ways in which I was hard on my family. I had a newfound sympathy for my parents. I opened my eyes and stared at the moon through a large skylight in the ceiling of the yoga studio and felt myself crying. But the rapid-fire insights didn’t feel violent or overwhelming; instead, they were gentle and healing, as if these answers had always been within me.

I would have some major insight followed by an odd, minor revelation—at one point I heard a voice telling me to use a neglected handbag more often. I whipped my hair around my face, played with my necklace, took my poncho on and off. I saw a man give one of the sober sitters a hug that seemed to last a full five minutes. When I managed to get on my feet and walk with a runway gait to the bathroom, in the mirror my eyes looked like saucers.

The path to sobriety felt long and gradual. I was sore from sitting—I had been there for seven hours—and was exhausted but elated. It had, in some ways, lived up to its promise: I felt like I had just condensed a few years of therapy into one night. But I didn’t feel like the drug had changed me for good, like some people said it might. I wasn’t disappointed, though. The experience fell somewhere between a thrilling recreational drug experience and something more medicinal. With pixilated landscapes and a lot of rainbows.

I wonder if the experience would have been wilder if I’d gone deep in the South American jungle with a smaller group and no cellphone service, no car horns in the distance, no pop-culture preoccupations. As the shaman closed the ceremony, he told us about one of his mentors, someone who had achieved the shamanistic equivalent of a black belt, who had the power to turn into a jaguar—something that I don’t think happened to anyone that night in the yoga studio. The jungle, he said, is full of mysteries. Manhattan, maybe less so.

To most Americans, Minneapolis is a stranger. There are exceptions, moments when the city percolates up—the first time a kid somewhere hears the Replacements, say, or when a bridge falls into the Mississippi. But to most people most of the time, Minneapolis is a place with no real shape or texture.

Perhaps the city is to blame for its anonymity. Maybe the people hard at work in this laboratory for progressive culture should worry more about outsiders taking notice. The attention, when it comes, is certainly appreciated.

Minneapolitans relish the steady drumbeat of “best city” rankings: No. 1 Bike City (Bicycling magazine, 2011), Gayest City in America (The Advocate, 2011), Most Literate City (America’s Most Literate Cities study, 2007-08). In 2008, Minneapolis was one of only two American cities to make the British Monocle magazine’s list of the most livable cities in the world.

Sure, these are sometimes frivolous and arbitrary contests. But for a city that lives in the imaginations of Americans as a culturally isolated outpost of extreme and permanent cold, they are small but significant triumphs—and evidence that something is going right in Minneapolis.

Civic achievement, banal as it sounds, can be found without following a flow chart during a public meeting at City Hall. It is a buzzing park, a painter turning a street corner utility box into art, block after block of thriving independent businesses, a festival for every obsession and persuasion—it’s growing, engaged immigrant communities. Minneapolis is all of these things. It is not a utopia, not by any stretch. It’s just a city that works.

Across the country, progress tends to come easier at the local government level, if only because partisan politics don’t have the same grip on city hall as they do on the statehouse or on players in Washington, D.C. In Minneapolis, this is especially true. While Minnesota’s state government shut down for 20 days because the GOP-dominated Legislature couldn’t make a budget deal with the Democratic governor, the city’s Democratic mayor answers to a 13-member City Council with nary a Republican member. (Or, for that matter, an independent; the only non-Democrat represents the Green Party.)

City Council President Barb Johnson insists that the city’s one-party makeup is not the reason Minneapolis runs well—theirs is just a less party-centric level of governance.

“That party stuff just does not get in there,” she says. “Why? Because there is no Republican or Democratic way to pick up the garbage. And because you have to be able to perform. When somebody calls 911 and needs a police officer, you have to send a police officer. If a water line breaks in front of somebody’s house, it has to be fixed. It isn’t policy, it is doing the work. And that’s what city government is all about.

“My mother was on the City Council for 23 years and she used to say she liked city government because if somebody asked you to do something, maybe you could actually get something done. We own equipment, we build stuff, we take care of things. The other people are just pass-throughs.”

“We Build Stuff and Take Care of Things” would be a fitting motto for Minneapolis (the current version—“City of Lakes”— could use an overhaul). In this city, “bike friendly” doesn’t just mean painting a few stripes on busy roads; it means entire streets being converted to “Bike Boulevards.” In a place deeply committed to locavore values, the city has fueled a thriving network of community gardens through its “Homegrown Minneapolis” program.

Or take a more urgent issue: youth violence. In 2008, the city launched its “Blueprint for Action” initiative, which required broad involvement from the community, paid special attention to young people who turned up in emergency rooms with injuries from fights, promoted employment programs for people with criminal backgrounds, and paired young people with adults to help get them through summers. Since 2006, youth homicides dropped by half and youth violent crime overall fell by more than 60 percent.

Oh, and that bridge that fell down? The city convinced former Republican Governor Tim Pawlenty to make its replacement lightrail ready.

The City of Lakes is not without its problems and failures. The economy is stagnant. Poverty is increasing. But many of the city’s issues are rooted in decisions made far beyond the reach of City Hall. 

“Shit rolls downhill, right?” says David Brauer, who has covered Minneapolis city government on and off for three decades. “They can’t pass their obligations off to some other unit of government, so on some level that is where it all settles.”

Standing right there, where all of it settles, probably smiling and waving in his trademark mismatched socks, is Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak.

“City governments are the last standing functional form of government in the United States and possibly the world,” says Rybak, who was 13 when he decided he wanted to be mayor.

The 56-year-old Minneapolis native has had the job for a decade. Over that time, he has paid down the city’s debt, maintained a healthy relationship with the City Council, and steered the city to that list of scattered accolades.

And he’s managed to make himself a national figure. Rybak was the first mayor to endorse Barack Obama, and that was after leading an effort urging him to run. This fall he was selected to serve as a vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee, a position rarely filled by a mayor. It’s no surprise to anybody who has been watching Rybak’s evolution. He embodies the progressive ethos just as fully as he does the city that has elected him three times.

“I was watching that show Undercover Boss,” says Barb Johnson, “and they had the mayor of Cincinnati disguise himself and go out to talk to city employees about their work. It was fascinating, and I was thinking, ‘That could never happen here, I don’t care what you put on him.’ He is Mr. Minneapolis. He walks down the street and people call out, ‘R.T.!’ They have this personal connection with him. He has changed the mold for Minneapolis mayors just on the force of his personality.”

For all his charisma, he’s not a Chicagostyle Mayor Daley type. That kind of arrogance would be unbecoming of a Minnesotan, and Rybak is all Minnesotan. “I have a lot of strong opinions,” he says, “but I don’t want a job where I just walk into a room and say, ‘Here’s my idea!’ and slam my fist on the table. I do some of that, but mostly what I do is try to lead a very complicated, empowered coalition of public and private partners.”

There is no room for dictators at any level, says City Council member Gary Schiff. “In many cities across the country, I meet my colleagues who just relish the role of being a ward boss and the only person you can go to if you want a broken manhole cover fixed,” he says. “Those are cities, frankly, that do not work.”

“It would have been a lot of fun to be a mayor during the Great Society, where you could write a big fat check and make something happen,” Rybak says. “Now you have to bring your resources to the table. Very few mayors can solve any major problems on their own. You must bring what the city has to offer and inspire people from other levels of government, the private sector, business and residents to come together. There are close to 400,000 people living in 60 square miles here, and my job is to figure out a way to get them to do as much of the work together as possible.”

Rybak didn’t expect to win. It was his first campaign for public office, and his opponent seemed unbeatable. Sharon Sayles Belton was the city’s first black mayor, its first woman mayor, and she had been in office for eight years—an incumbent hadn’t lost in Minneapolis in nearly a quarter century. Rybak’s plan in 2001 was merely to run, get name recognition, and lose. He’d go back to his family and his work as an internet consultant, and then he’d run again later.

He took 65 percent of the vote.

In an early profile, the newly elected Rybak dismissed the traditional up-the-ladder approach in politics: “This isn’t the Army, where you have one rank then go to the next rank,” he said. “I’ve trained for this job in ways that no one’s trained for this job. If people think the only people qualified to elected office are the ones who are already there and the rest of us who have never held office are somehow supposed to be subjects of that permanent ruling class then we have a pretty lousy idea of a democracy.”

At Boston College in the mid-’70s, Rybak studied urban affairs, political science, and communications—a makeshift major in mayoral studies. “I went away to college with the express idea that I wanted to come home, write about development for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and then be mayor,” he says. 

Rybak basically stuck to the script, though he added a half-dozen steps between his years as a reporter and his first day in the mayor’s office. He learned real estate from the inside, developed plans to bring valuable businesses to the city (and met mixed results), became part of the local media landscape as publisher of a now-defunct altweekly called the Twin Cities Reader, and gained tech savvy as an internet consultant. In his spare time he worked with a group of friends to host annual events—quirky galas with cheap tickets—to raise money for nonprofits working to make systemic changes in the lives of the poor.

Oh, and there was the time with the pajamas. One of the last bold endeavors of Rybak’s civilian life was Residents Against Airport Racket (ROAR), a group of locals living near the Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport that became known for “pajama protests.” Organization members and sympathizers would show up in whatever they wore to bed to underscore a simple point: the noise was keeping them up. Not surprisingly, they were covered generously. Rybak’s next public stunt was running for mayor. 

His talent for eye contact is the stuff of legend. When we met this fall at a south Minneapolis cafe, he locked eyes with me before I had even asked my first question. I waited for him to break the stare. An hour passed and it didn’t happen once. I swear— not once. It was like he was trying to send me quotes telepathically.

Rybak’s gaze is just as intense when he is listening. He says it was his years as a newspaper reporter that taught him to listen. On his earliest door-knocking expeditions,one would open and, “I’d launch into this big speech. People would be polite, or glaze over or slam the door. Then I realized, ‘You’ve done this before; go back to your training as a reporter.’ So I’d walk up to the door and just start asking people questions.” 

What he heard began to shape his political philosophy. “When I’m no longer asking questions and can’t tell the story of Minneapolis,” he says, “I shouldn’t be mayor.”

One Minneapolis story is familiar to cities everywhere: debt. In 2001, while Rybak was still door-knocking, Minneapolis lost its AAA bond rating. The city was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt after years of awarding bonuses for businesses moving into town, including a $62 million taxpayerfunded subsidy to lure Target’s corporate headquarters and $39 million for an entertainment and retail complex that has been dying a slow death ever since.

Campaigning against this kind of spending, Rybak told a Star Tribune reporter, “You need to know when to write a check from the citizens’ checkbook and when to make the private sector pay their own bill.” Once in office, Rybak focused on paying down the city’s debt. “As a mayor, you can be a very progressive person who is also a tough fiscal manager,” he says. “I don’t know where else in politics you can do that anymore.”

Another Minneapolis story: diversity. The city has the largest Somali population in the nation. The refugee community’s connections to suicide bombings and other attacks inside Somalia have made international headlines and drawn the attention of federal law enforcement, but the lesscovered story is one of boundless contribution to the city’s culture and economy.

The city is also home to a large Hmong contingent; refugees first started settling in the United States after the Vietnam War. And there are significant Latino and Native American communities. Statewide, Minnesota’s population is largely homogenous; looking and feeling more than a little like the world of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor’s fictional, white-bread town. Still, as immigrants and refugees find work away from the state’s urban center in small-town processing plants and other agricultural enterprises, Keillor’s Minnesota grows more fictional by the day.

The hardest Minneapolis story for Rybak to tell: the one about its inequality. According to a 2011 study by the Minneapolis Foundation, more than half of the city’s black children are living in poverty. People of color make up 40 percent of the city’s population but just 17 percent of its workforce. A 2010 report from the Economic Policy Institute ranked the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas by the black-white employment gap; the Twin Cities, where the unemployment rate for blacks is three times that of whites, was the worst of the bunch.

“This town often has a more extreme reaction to people of different races than any of us like to admit,” Rybak told a reporter in 1990. He was quoted in a story about young people of color feeling distrusted, and worse, in downtown Minneapolis. The 30-something Rybak was in real estate at the time.

“The biggest issue with our city,” Rybak says today, “is this place, which has done phenomenally well, has one of the worst haves-and-have-nots situations of any city in the country.”

Nowhere is the gap more glaring than on Minneapolis’ north side, where neighborhoods have been taking one hit after another. There was the foreclosure crisis, of course, which hollowed out entire city blocks. Then, this year, a tornado wracked the area; one estimate put the number of families made homeless at 100. And this summer, though violent crime overall has been on the decline, three teenage boys were murdered on thenorth side.

“I want to solve north Minneapolis,” Rybak says. A moment later, he is more measured: “We won’t ‘solve it.’ But we will continue to move the dial forward.”

The city has poured resources into youth mentoring, job training, and other initiatives on the north side and in poverty-stricken neighborhoods of the south side. Just as important, Rybak insists, is the simple act of being present.

At a national meeting of American mayors not long after taking office, Rybak was pulled aside by a mayor he’d rather not name. The unsolicited advice: Never bring the bad news, and never be where the bad news is. “I reject that,” Rybak says. “When something happens, I dive in. I show up.”

That might mean showing up to a meeting to discuss allegations of police misconduct or it might mean showing up at the scene of a crime.

Ask Rybak about Tyesha Edwards and he exhales slowly. At 3 p.m. on November 22, 2002, 11-year-old Tyesha and her 8-year-old sister were sitting at their dining room table, settling in for math homework. Gunshots were heard outside. A bullet came through a wall and went into Tyesha’s chest, knocking her to the floor.

The mayor got a call at his office. The victim, who was the same age as one of his own children, was at the hospital, her condition unknown. Soon, Rybak was in a waiting room with Tyesha’s parents.

“We were in a room together as complete strangers and the doctor comes in to tell them that Tyesha was dead.” He struggled then, as he struggles now, with what his role should be at times of great personal tragedy.

At some point, he says, he realized, “I’m representing all the people who see it on the news and feel horrible and want to say something. So I just go there.” If a family doesn’t want him around, Rybak says, he gets out of the way. “People don’t want me there, I’m not there.”

“Over time, when you do that a lot, it takes a toll,” he says. “I’ve wondered how ministers do that kind of thing so much.”

He rattles off the programs the city has in place to address the full spectrum of issues that lead to violence—the Blueprint for Action, North 4 Project (intensive job training and case management in four north Minneapolis neighborhoods), Summer612 (1,000 kids working on youth-led, microgrant-funded creative projects)—and says, “Years ago, when a kid got shot and I was dealing with grieving family members, there were a couple of times I honestly thought, ‘I don’t know what to do.’

“Now we do. It’s resources, it’s focus, it’s sometimes just, you know, compassion. We know what to do. We’ve got a plan.”

Every week Rybak and his staff meet and stare up at a whiteboard where everybody has listed their priorities. There is a column off to the side called “Incoming.” This is where major catastrophes like a bridge collapse or a tornado might go, as well as urgent matters of lesser intensity. As we spoke, the Occupy Minnesota protests, planned for a spot across the street from City Hall, were in that column.

“One of the appeals of this job to me is that you have to keep lots of plates spinning at once, and they’re very different shapes,” Rybak says. “I need to take very seriously the issue of a kid getting shot in north Minneapolis, but in a different way, equally seriously, the break-in of a neighborhood that expects to be safe all the time.

“Every day you wake up and there are thousands of actions you could take. But the most important thing is to pick one and stay there.”

It’s past midnight and we’re in Gerry Chapa’s white Mercedes, a hand-me-down from his brother, driving down Sunset Boulevard to the infamous Chateau Marmont, where one of Chapa’s coworkers is a mid-week DJ. I’m one of the few people in Los Angeles who calls him Gerry. His other friends call him Chapa; his family and his employers call him Gerardo. He grew up in Houston, Texas, and Monterrey, Mexico. In college, where we met, his origins were affectionately referred to as Tex-Mex.

Chapa is telling me about the job that just brought him to Los Angeles, the opportunity, he found, with “the most upside” after stints in film production in South Africa and London. Chapa is now the right-hand man for Martin Breidsprecher, the new CEO of Azteca America, the U.S. subsidiary of Mexico’s second-largest television network, TV Azteca.

Breidsprecher has assembled a team—which also includes Chapa’s DJ coworker Rawdon Messenger—to make Azteca America competitive with the big networks like Univision within five years. Breidsprecher is a Mexican of German descent who now lives in the United States. Messenger, Azteca’s director of digital media, is British. Marlene Braga, the vice president for programming, is the Miami-born daughter of Cuban exiles. For those scoring at home, that’s a Mexican-Texan, a German-Mexican, a Cuban-American, and a Spanish-speaking Englishman trying to get American Latinos, primarily of Mexican descent, to watch television produced in the country they or their families left behind.

Easy, right? “There’s a tremendous amount of demand for Spanish-language content, not only from viewers but also from partners such as advertisers and distributors,” says Cesar Conde, the president of Univision. No. 1 in the Nielsen ratings for Spanish television and No. 5 overall, Univision is the unquestioned king of Spanish-language TV in the United States. The station regularly beats giants like Fox and NBC in individual ratings battles and reaches 97 percent of Spanish-speaking households in the United States. Azteca America, by comparison, is the No. 5 Spanish-language network, behind not just Univision but also Telemundo, Telefutura, and Estrella. It’s a daunting landscape for little Azteca, which is much younger (only 10 years old, compared to Univision’s 1962 pedigree) and smaller (in terms of distribution) than its competitors. Still, it reaches about 89 percent of Latino households.

That’s a respectable share of the more than 50 million Americans who described themselves as Latino or Hispanic in last year’s census, some 16 percent of everyone in the United States. “Not only is that a population base that is growing, but that is also a population base that is gaining more economic clout,” says Professor Alan Albarran, a Spanish-language media expert at the University of North Texas. “Hispanic consumers have surpassed African-Americans in terms of household income.” Latinos spent nearly $130 billion on discretionary purchases in 2010. They are a coveted audience.

Figuring out what people want to watch on TV is, at its heart, an exercise in figuring out who they are. And if it’s going to compete with the big stations, Azteca has to come up with some answers.

A few weeks later, I meet Chapa and Breidsprecher for a late lunch at an Italian restaurant. It quickly becomes clear that between them and the staff, I am the only non-Spanish speaker in the building. “I can go around speaking Spanish in L.A. without any problems,” Breidsprecher says with a smile. “You go in the restaurant, everyone greets you in Spanish.”

Los Angeles is the Latino capital of the United States. Almost 10 percent of all Latinos in the country live in L.A. County, making up nearly half of the county’s population and creating the impression of two worlds occupying the same space. “I skip a lot of lines, get out of paying valets sometimes,” Chapa says, smiling and stroking his neatly trimmed dark beard. Growing up in a Spanish-language-dominant household, Chapa’s TV-watching habits were pretty representative of other second-generation immigrants. He watched sports, news, telenovelas, and the long-running weekend variety show Sábado Gigante with his parents and grandparents. Most of that programming hasn’t changed much since he was a kid.

“I think we’re kind of a lost demographic,” says Nabila Chami, a 21-year-old senior at American University who grew up watching Spanish-language TV in Texas and with her grandparents in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “Univision and Telemundo don’t appeal to us; they honestly don’t really try to. My grandparents are in their late 70s and have watched that since day one. [The networks] don’t focus on our generation because they have such a pull with that generation.”

For the younger generation, Spanish-language television is nostalgia. Mostly, they watch programs produced in the same language—English—their non-Latino friends do. This is the most daunting problem facing the industry: the skew. The audience for Spanish-language television is older than the Spanish-speaking population. The skew may be a problem for the industry and its advertisers, but it’s also an opportunity. More than one in every five people under 18 in the United States is Latino, and turning those people into loyal viewers could guarantee decades of success.

Conde, the Univision chief, speaks frankly about his company’s goal of making shows “that speak directly to the Latino experience in the United States,” referencing the success of a Dancing with the Stars-style show that attracts a broad audience with a mix of young, bilingual stars and classic Latino celebrities grooving to music in both languages. But Conde refers to those shows as a complement to—not a replacement for— Univision’s internationally produced programs.

“Their strategy remains, ‘We are going to focus on that older consumer,’ and most of their programming and their tastes are geared toward an audience that is over 35 years old,” Albarran says. Sudden changes in Univision’s lineup could create a ratings problem if loyal viewers don’t like what they’re seeing.

Azteca America, though, has nothing to lose. The network is set to leave the prime-time telenovela to its competitors and take advantage of the skew by launching a new slate of programs to court the next generation of Latino television viewers. “My goal is for audiences to watch ... and say, ‘that’s me,’ or ‘thank God that’s not me,’ or ‘I wish it were me,’” says Braga, the programming executive.

Azteca has a few advantages over its competitors: Most of the content it broadcasts is produced in Mexico by its parent network, the second-largest manufacturer of Spanish-language content in the world. This keeps costs low and creates greater opportunities for distribution. Further, the network owns the rights to approximately half of Mexico’s national soccer league broadcasts, a guaranteed ratings winner. Finally, its identity is explicitly Mexican, and more than two-thirds of American Latinos trace their origins to Mexico. But those advantages also force Azteca to walk a tightrope, leveraging home-country nostalgia and pride to attract viewers while still making their shows relevant to their viewers’ American lives. Chapa compares Azteca’s situation to that of any immigrant: Once you cross the border, you have to find a way to live in a different place while remaining, at heart, the same.

“We’re going back to things that are more relevant to the U.S. audience, to the younger U.S. audience,” Breidsprecher says. Like a lot of networks, Azteca

America used to operate under the impression that all Mexicans had the same interests, no matter which side of the border they were living on. “They thought they had the same kind of values, the same kind of thought process,” Breidsprecher says. But then Azteca performed extensive research. “Watching the focus groups, it became very evident that they were very different. If in Mexico it works,” he says, “here, guess what? It doesn’t.”

Mexicans in America, Chapa explains, believe more in social mobility. They came to the United States with aspirations for themselves and their children, and seek out media that reflects those hopes. Many Mexican-produced telenovelas crack class-based jokes that read as condescending to low-income Mexicans who may be poor in the United States but are ambitious and already have access to more plentiful goods than they might have in their home country. For instance, a Mexican telenovela might show a woman doing laundry outdoors.

“We’ve got to go from el lavadero to la lavadora,” Chapa says—from the washboard to the washing machine.

“The cleaning lady comes once a week to my house,” Breidsprecher says. “She has a van, just like I do.”

She probably has a smartphone, too. Latinos are more likely to use a phone to surf the web or watch videos than the rest of the population. Azteca America recently struck a deal to stream its programs on Verizon phones, and Breidsprecher and Messenger have convinced Ricardo Salinas, TV Azteca’s billionaire owner, to let Azteca America distribute programming, including entire television shows, through a variety of online outlets—a move that puts it ahead even of many English-speaking networks.

Still, cultural resonance is key, and the difference between engagement and alienation can be as simple as accents. Mexico City is the country’s cultural center, and its accent dominates Azteca’s broadcasts. Many Mexicans in America, though, are from rural areas, not the city centers, so Azteca America is asking its presenters to moderate their posh accents so viewers feel more connected. The same goes for getting the names right in the United States. “If something happened in Van Nuys, they have to say ‘Van Nyes,’ not ‘Van Noo-ees,’” Breidsprecher says. “What we’re trying to do is build a bridge so that the producers understand who the target market is and who they are producing for.”

The answer is an increasingly American audience, which means adapting existing shows to deal with American themes and creating new ones that take their cues from English-language programs that Latinos watch. The company is producing a reality show about aspiring soccer players in the Mexican leagues, and has a prime-time hit called Al Extremo—to the extreme!— which shows clips featuring violent, racy, or supernatural content. There is talk of more news reporting on the United States, original children’s programming, a la Nicktoons, and Comedy Central-style roasts.

But whether it’s a show for kids in Denver or college dudes in D.C., everything Azteca does still starts south of the Rio Grande.

When I arrive at TV Azteca’s campus in Mexico City, Lalo Quero ties a “Yo Soy Azteca” ribbon around my wrist. Quero, an Azteca veteran who is something of a company cheerleader, shows me around the grounds, past an Eastern-style health zone (Salinas is a fan, Quero explains) that offers employees acupuncture, cupping, and massage. We walk through the master control room; Azteca America appears to be broadcasting an infomercial on how to fit a brassiere. In an empty sportscasting studio, larger-than-life athletes cover the walls—Chicharito, the Mexican soccer star, Rafael Nadal, the Spanish tennis player, and Mark Sanchez, the Mexican-American New York Jets quarterback. He’s developing a following here, Quero says.

We stop by the set of a talk show called Cosas de La Vida—The Stuff of Life—hosted by Rocío Sánchez Azuara, who dispenses straight talk to a mostly female audience. She’s Mexico’s answer to Oprah, with a dash of Jerry Springer. When we enter the sound stage, the audience is applauding and hissing, and the guests are on their feet, shouting, with Sánchez Azuara in the middle, alternately provoking and mediating in four-inch gold heels.

To resonate with different demographics, Cosas films different episodes for broadcast in Mexico and the United States. After the show, I ask Sánchez Azuara what she changes for her American audience. “We need to be more hard, because the people there think we are so soft,” she says. “More powerful, more punch!”

That reality is stark on the set of Al Extremo, the shock-video show. Producer Omar Ochoa can broadcast grisly footage of narcos torturing their enemies in the United States that he cannot show in Mexico, but some sexier clips that barely raise eyebrows south of the border make U.S. audiences uncomfortable. He says part of his show’s appeal to Mexican-Americans is that it provides an unfiltered look at what’s happening back home, with man-on-the-street interviews in Mexican cities. But he is excited to bring his show north—he’ll soon begin scouting locations in Texas and Los Angeles.

The last stop of the day, a short drive from campus, is the huge complex of sound stages and dressing rooms where Azteca films its telenovelas. Six hundred people work here. We stop by the set of Cielo Rojo, where they’re shooting a rather intimidating prison scene, and meet the award-winning star, Regina Torné, who has been performing since 1966 but is perhaps best known to American audiences for her role as the mother in Like Water for Chocolate. Torné acts every bit the grand dame, ribbing the director, actors, and assorted production flunkies, shouting for a cafecito, and praising her stylist. To my surprise, she speaks perfect English.

“I was raised in San Diego,” she says, but born in Tabasco, Mexico. When she was 20, she returned to study medicine, but fell in love with drama. I ask what kind of audience she pictures when she performs.

“People!” she says. “Just as in the movies, just as in the night club, you have to win them with your work.”

While Spanish-dominant households watch a lot of Spanish-language TV, bicultural or English-language households watch much less, and successive generations become more and more English dominant. That’s not a problem for Azteca America now, because its focus is still on first- and second-generation Latinos. But as Latino births overtake Latino immigration, it is possible that, like ethnic media created and consumed by past waves of American immigrants, Spanish-language television could be set for a decline immediately after its bubble.

“Are we going to have Spanish-language media by 2040?” Albarran asks. “Naturally, the main players are very bullish; they think it will be here for decades to come, despite the fact that the younger audiences are more into bilingual and bicultural patterns.” Some argue that if the U.S. economy improves, immigration will be more attractive and reverse the trend toward Spanish-dominant Latinos.

There’s a key distinction between this wave of immigration and those of previous generations. “Most of the early European immigrants, when they got off the boat in Ellis Island, and a lot of the Asian immigrants when they got off the boat in San Francisco, that was it for the old country,” says Federico Subervi, a professor at Texas State University San Marcos. “That has never, ever been the case for Latinos from Mexico, Cuba, Central America. There’s always been a revolving door of going back and forth, bringing family members, going back there, staying a few years.”

Technology, too, changes the equation. It keeps immigrants closer to their native countries. Messenger compares Azteca America to BBC America, the venerable British broadcaster’s offering in its former colony.

“When I first left, I tried to follow the UK news, but 11 years after I left, I’m interested in the international framing,” he says. “I’ve become less of an expat; I feel like that’s a process a lot of people go through.”

Latinos are bending and being bent by life in the United States, Subervi says, which means that Spanish-language media will continue to thrive. But it will change and become more targeted to different demographics, just as English-language media has. “Latinos are selectively picking what of their culture they keep and what of the other cultures they adopt,” Subervi says. “It’s a very situational latinidad—I’ll pick Latin music when I’m out with my Latino friends; if I’m not with my Latino friends, I’ll have the rock ’n’ roll.”

There may be an audience out there just waiting for an invitation. Coral Diaz, a 35-year-old second-generation Mexican-American, recently caught her parents watching Teresa, a popular telenovela, and got hooked. Now she is showing her children Plaza Sésamo (Sesame Street).

“If they have novelas like Teresa, they have a fan for life!” Diaz says. “Maybe there needs to be more of an effort on their part to advertise to the English-language community, to find those of us Latinos who forgot they were there in the first place.”

This isn’t just a story about Latinos assimilating to American culture. Ugly Betty was, after all, the U.S. adaptation of a long-popular telenovela. NBC bought the rights to a popular Colombian novela called Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso—loosely translated, No Tits, No Heaven. Good luck getting that past the censors.

“Anglos are becoming more Latino with their food and their music. They’ll embrace it,” Subervi says. “They’ll be Latinos one moment; the next, they’ll be Anglos.”

As Azteca America has learned, it’s not just about speaking the right language. It’s about telling the right story.

David King got his start as a professional programmer working odd jobs. He took on small software projects, set up networks, that sort of thing. For fun in his spare time he’d contribute to the open-source operating system FreeBSD—a pastime many developers consider the most thankless job ever. People started to notice. Eventually, King landed a gig with Reddit, the biggest social news site on the web. Now he’s one of six engineers at Hipmunk, a travel site with good buzz and $5 million in funding. He works with his friends, makes a good living, has equity. By all accounts, Dave King is the midst of an impressive career. He’s a successful developer. And, like many of his peers nowadays, he did it all without a college degree.

While there are a few high-level computer-science concepts that require a college education to master, King says, 90 percent of developers won’t use that knowledge in their day jobs. And yet a diploma is still the first thing recruiters at most large companies look for when hiring a programmer. “It can be very difficult to prove yourself to the people you want to work for without a degree,” King says. “You aren’t even given a chance.”

That process is fine for most industries—a Harvard-educated accountant is a lot more likely to be a good hire then a self-taught one. But programming isn’t accounting. It requires creative thinkers and problem solvers, people unlikely to thrive in the confines of a college classroom. So why do hiring managers apply traditional methods to a nontraditional job?

As programmers become the backbone of the business world and the tech industry embarks on a bubble-driven hiring blitz, that thinking is going to have to change. In many places, it already has.

It’s a good time to be a developer. Businesses from Fortune 500s to neighborhood bars need a digital presence to compete. Add that to a ravenous market for mobile app development and a booming startup scene and you have the makings of a new tech bubble. There just aren’t enough programmers to go around. The country’s jobless rate may be hovering around 10 percent, but a recent study by Dice, a technology and engineering career website, put the number of available tech jobs at more than 84,000.

The demand starts at the top. For years, the big Silicon Valley companies have been locked in an escalating battle for the world’s top talent. Salary, of course, is the big lure. Google, The New York Times reported this year, has increased starting salaries for recent college grads by nearly $20,000, hoping to fend off startups. In case paychecks aren’t enough, companies use perks to differentiate themselves. Facebook will do your laundry, Google offers free haircuts, and game developer Zynga covers pet insurance.

While the industry is growing exponentially, it’s also becoming highly segmented. Developers are building careers on platforms and technology that didn’t exist a few years ago. Having a 9-to-5 job is no longer a requirement. While it’s not easy, savvy developers are increasingly enticed by solo paths: building their own iPhone apps, starting freelance businesses, or founding startups that cater to new segments of the web. In the same Times story, a recruiter for the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said one-third of the engineers she attempts to recruit ask for funding to start their own businesses instead.

Developers have an attractive menu of options. They can enjoy the fat paychecks and quirky perks at a big company, they can get their hands dirty building something new at a startup, or they can strike out on their own. But what’s good news for developers poses a challenge for established companies that fall somewhere in the middle. They’re having such a hard time hiring talent that some have stopped trying. Last year, when the analytics firm Webtrends couldn’t find enough developers to build Facebook apps, it acquired the app-development firm Transpond. It was easier to buy a company than hire coders.

Even with many companies facing such an intense hiring squeeze, they haven’t yet taken the professional-sports approach and started drafting coding superstars straight out of high school. Most haven’t even changed their college-degree requirements. Companies that pride themselves on being innovative remain hung up on the diploma. Which is doubly surprising given that bypassing college isn’t a new idea in the tech world—it’s just newly relevant. The last time the diploma debate was this heated? At the height of the previous bubble.

In 1998, Forbes published a story called “The Tyranny of the Diploma,” in which author Brigid McMenamin highlighted the fact that Bill Gates had completed only three years at Harvard before dropping out to start Microsoft. The article sparked more then 200 comments on Slashdot, one of the original user-curated tech news sites. They couldn’t agree on the best course—to school or not to school. Many commenters argued that, while a formal education doesn’t teach practical skills, recruiters don’t know how to filter applicants without looking first for a degree. The site’s founder, Rob Malda (aka CmdrTaco), called his college education a four-and-a-half-year “time suck.” He wrote, “Education can’t really keep pace with ‘modern’ technology. Sure, learning theory and getting some practice never hurts, but if you’re already a geek, is it a waste of time?”

The conversation hasn’t changed much over the years, at least not when it comes to getting a job at the entrenched Silicon Valley giants. Google’s hiring policy remains famously strict: Applicants must have a degree and a high GPA, regardless of how many years it’s been since they graduated. At Netflix, however, the line between graduates and nongraduates is getting hazier.

Jeremy Edberg, a hiring manager and lead site engineer, says that while his company doesn’t require that job applicants have a degree, managing the data-heavy video delivery Netflix does is better learned in school. Still, he adds, those jobs are the exceptions. And only the top programs—MIT, Berkeley, Stanford—are teaching the skills they demand.

“There are two kinds of degree. One where you learn about theory and one where you just learn how to write a programming language,” Edberg says. “That [second] one’s not that useful. You’re just learning syntax, and any coder can pick that up quickly. But a good education is based in theory and principle.”

Edberg didn’t need either kind to get his first tech job. He dropped out of Berkeley in 1999 at the height of the boom to work at a tech company where a friend was working. (Laid off after the bubble burst, Edberg went back to school and majored in cognitive science.) His next stop was at eBay, where he worked until 2007, at which point he decided to attend Paul Graham’s Startup School—a daylong seminar for engineers and entrepreneurs focused on building businesses, and one of the few areas of “education” that programmers can agree on. He soon became Reddit’s first employee.

Edberg’s story isn’t that unusual in the startup world. Staffs are small, so factors other than a degree take precedence: Will the applicant get along with the rest of the staff? Can she play several roles at once? Self-taught coders are often quick learners with a broad knowledge base and the ability to adapt—exactly what founders are looking for.

“Résumés are important,” says Christopher Slowe, who handles much of the hiring at Hipmunk, where King works. “Projects and past work are more important to the hiring process. We ask for a tic-tac-toe program that uses a web server as the ‘first glance’ at a potential hire.” Slowe says that when it comes to web development, as long as you’re not working in a specific role like Edberg does at Netflix, no skill is more important than problem solving. Every issue is new and they all need to be resolved quickly.

Nathan Manousos, a freelance developer who dropped out of college, says that he has rarely encountered a startup looking to hire people with computer-science degrees. “There’s a sense that if somebody didn’t go to school they must be really passionate,” says Manousos, who’s also hired developers. “If I see somebody who’s really good and didn’t study it in school, I think they must really care about what they’re doing.”

In college, Manousos spent his time teaching himself programming skills he knew would be important to a career. “Meanwhile I was failing a lot of math classes. There’s a lot of knowledge that you gain in a computer-science program about theory and low-level things and data structures and algorithms, which are nice to know but aren’t really that applicable day to day.”

While startups have long valued showing your work over proving your pedigree, the idea seems to be trickling up. Midsize companies, feeling the squeeze between the behemoths and the startups, are beginning to ask applicants to submit completed projects along with their résumés.

ClickFox, a consumer analytics firm, employs about 40 developers on its research-and-development team.

The hiring manager who oversees the group, Tom Wheeler, says he doesn’t worry about degrees. He’s much more concerned that the applicant is aggressive and has the right type of personality. “I care about what they have built, how they built it, and how they work together,” he says.

Wheeler was one of the first developers to leave college before graduating. “When I went to school there was no pure computer-science degree. I just wanted to write software and I dove right into the business world.” At the time his decision was unusual. Now, he says, the industry has become so broad and diverse that it’s getting easier for folks like him to find a company where they fit.

“If you’re a very bright individual and you’re good at self-starting, you don’t need to go to college,” Wheeler says. Nor do many programmers want to.

“Developers are a different breed of people. They don’t understand the way the rest of the world thinks. And that’s why they’re successful without getting a degree.”

Ultimately, the developer job market is a disjointed place, with different employers requiring different experiences for the exact same work. That’s a recipe for a lot of very confused undergrads. Students know that their education won’t be particularly applicable in the real world, unless they want a job that relies heavily on theory. But leaving school breaks with tradition and societal expectations. It’ll upset the parents.

Katie Zhu, a computer-science major at Northwestern, decided to stay in school. “It’s easy to think about the shortcomings of it,” Zhu says. “But there’s still a big overarching security. I think that’s invaluable.” Still, she makes sure to work on projects in her free time so she can have something to show employers once she graduates. “They spend a lot of time in college teaching you how to write a résumé but not how to make a GitHub file,” she says. GitHub is a social coding site that lets programmers upload their projects and collaborate on solving problems. Many developers point to the advent of open-source software as a turning point in self-education; it allowed programmers to pick through each other’s code and discover new ways to attack problems.

“There’s more of a void in terms of the university creating the opportunity for you to do projects,” Zhu says. “You have to do that in your own time. The school could make that more part of the dialog.”

If Jim O’Neill had his way, Katie Zhu wouldn’t have gone to college in the first place. O’Neill runs the Thiel Foundation, which gives grants to individuals to start companies to spur scientific research and technological innovation. In September 2010, the organization announced its newest fund: 20 Under 20. It will give 20 entrepreneurs under the age of 20 the money to start their own businesses. The only catch: recipients have to drop out and concentrate on their endeavor full time.

Funded by Peter Thiel, a cofounder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, the foundation believes that college ultimately prevents many innovators from reaching their full potential. (Like Gates, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg also dropped out of Harvard.) “Not only is college a potential barrier, it also does not necessarily have the benefits that lots of people assume,” says O’Neill. “For one thing, you don’t need college to be a good coder. But most people take the time and expense to go to college, and it’s not a rational decision. It’s more of a default. People don’t think about the cost benefits and choices. They do what their friends are doing and what their parents expect.”

The Thiel Foundation hopes that by giving young people a chance to bypass college and actually try out their ideas, it can prove college isn’t the only route to starting a career. “We think employers should stop requiring a college degree. It’s vague and means so many different things,” O’Neill says. No two computer-science programs are the same, he argues. “[A diploma] doesn’t provide information.”

Expect more companies to start judging applicants by how they spent their post-high school years, not where. After all, hiring managers and developers agree that, ultimately, programming comes down to critical thinking. The way to truly know what developers are capable of is to look at what they have produced. How do they solve problems? What projects have they completed on their own?

Perhaps most importantly, were they willing to take a risk and dedicate themselves to writing code? If someone has the drive and passion to tackle difficult tasks without the support of an institution, hiring managers and recruiters should take notice. Just ask Hipmunk’s David King. “Being self-taught isn’t easy,” he says.

“Thanks, Dan, I’m really excited!” says Elaine Levia. She smiles as she eyes the Flight of Three—the name given to the triptych of shot glasses on the glass-top bar before her. “Do you have drinking instructions?” she asks.

Of course he does. For a month, Kougan has been planning the details of each beverage for his hops-themed menu. It’s his week to curate the Slow Bar, the backspace of the coffee shop Intelligentsia, where baristas take turns designing and executing a custom menu. The venue is part laboratory, part classroom, and part theater. Coffee groupies sit on bleacherlike benches in a precaffeinated state of awe, waiting for a barstool to open up.

Sip from lightest to darkest, instructs Kougan. “The hops will kind of ramp up in bitterness and effervescence. And then the chocolate malt will curb that flavor, and the espresso will take it back up.”

Levia complies. The coffee alchemy works its magic. “Absolutely phenomenal,” she says. As a fellow barista at the shop, she’s no stranger to the Slow Bar’s signature blend of high-quality espresso—from a refurbished 1972 La Marzocco machine— and baroque flourishes. During her week as curator, Levia opted for a “vintage coffee experience,” pairing each brew with a different bite-sized pastry. “It turned into a focus on the drinkware, actually,” she admits. “I served Turkish coffee in Moka pots and tried to make it really, like, ’50s housewife style.” She laughs. “With Fiesta ware.” Another barista highlighted alternative milks—from macadamias, cashews, and Brazil nuts.

The idea of the Slow Bar is to “give the customer an experience that expands their idea of what coffee is,” says Charles Babinski, who trains the staff in different brewing techniques and hosts educational events for customers. It’s a place where customers can sit down and ask questions about coffee, but it’s “not meant to be beating people over the heads with education as much as just creating different coffee experiences.”

“Customer education” and “coffee experiences” are terms you hear a lot when talking to the roasters and baristas who make up the ultra-high-end coffee movement, a trend that’s been percolating for the past decade. If you visit a shop like Intelligentsia—or Blue Bottle in San Francisco or Stumptown in Portland or Third Rail Coffee in New York City—you’ll encounter a staff eager to discuss the distinct regional characteristics (or terroir) and flavor profile of each coffee on the menu, sourced from a handful of elite farms known as “microlots” in places like El Salvador, Kenya, and Indonesia. You’ll be encouraged to try a cup of lightly roasted, brewed coffee, which had become all but passé with the Starbucks-backed ascendancy of dark roasts, espressos, and lattes in the late 1990s. You’ll look on as a brewer takes several minutes to unleash a stream of boiling water from a silver kettle into a cone full of coffee grounds—the meticulous process behind every mug of individually brewed “pour over” coffee—to unlock the beverage’s most subtle flavors.

But perhaps the most memorable part of the experience comes at the register: a cool $5 for an unadorned cup of brewed coffee. And that’s if the bean is more common. This fall, a cup of Intelligentsia’s Kenya Tegu was selling for $6.50. “Ethereal and luminous,” a description on the company’s website reads. “Lychee, persimmon and botanical notes bring a weightlessness to the muscular and expansive Tegu. Marmalade and sweet herbs float in the background while the finish hangs onto a hint of spice.”

“We think our coffee is ridiculously cheap,” says Ben Kaminsky, director of quality control at Ritual Roasters in San Francisco, where a pound of beans starts at $19.95. His sentiment is echoed by many working in high-end coffee. “It’s interesting to me that the same consumer that will go to 7-11 and buy a bottle of Fiji Water for five dollars will go crazy and complain about a cup of coffee,” says Geoff Watts, Intelligentsia’s vice president and green (unroasted, that is) coffee buyer. “This is a meticulously grown agricultural product from halfway around the world that was hand-harvested, hand-picked, and roasted and brewed. It’s got all these different flavor characteristics. It’s got antioxidants. It’s got all the things you could want in a drink.”

A luxury drink, that is. “Coffee as cheap fuel for the masses is a historical anomaly,” says Peter Giuliano, director of coffee at the North Carolina-based roaster Counter Culture. “There’s no nutritive value. It’s drunk just for the pleasure of it. It’s a total miracle of global agriculture, a feat that spans cultures and countries.”

Mother Nature might be on the side of Giuliano and his cohorts. At the exact moment that rare beans are becoming all the rage, all beans are becoming rarer. The price of a cup of coffee—whether it be a $6 pour-over, a $2.50 dark roast at Starbucks, or a $1.50 mug of diner swill—is being driven up by a complex combination of weather events, pest and fungus outbreaks, speculation on commodities exchanges, an unstable labor market in the developing world, and an unprecedented thirst for good coffee among a growing global middle class. The problem, in simple economic terms, is that supply has gone down and demand has gone up.

“We’re going back to where coffee began,” Giuliano says, “as an exotic, beloved culinary experience.”

Arabica, the strain of coffee that makes up most of the world’s supply, is a notoriously fickle organism, “the Barbra Streisand of plants: a diva,” as coffee writer Taylor Clark told The New York Times. To develop the complex flavors that drive coffee nerds wild, the best beans demand a lot from their surroundings: tropical climates with warm, sunny days that fade into chilly evenings; altitudes between 1,800 and 2,400 meters; copious rains at certain times of the year; dry spells at others. Low-quality Arabica is abundant throughout low-lying regions of Brazil, where one-third of all coffee comes from. But just a few regions on Earth are hospitable to such a needy guest as the world’s best beans, which grow only in the high peaks of the tropics in East Africa, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia.

The delicate balance in those ecosystems is being thrown off kilter. In Colombia, the world’s third-biggest coffee producer, agricultural scientist Peter Baker has watched while record rainfall, increased heat, and frequent plagues have devastated farms across the country’s Andean coffee- growing region. It was 2005 when Baker “started to think seriously that climate change was not just about the future but was already happening.” Today, the signs are plentiful. Average temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees in some areas over the past 30 years, “especially nighttime minimum temperatures,” says Baker, “a tell-tale signature of [man-made] climate change.” Hotter, rainier weather nourishes pests and disease, particularly coffee rust, a fungal plague that’s ascended Colombia’s mountain peaks, which were formerly too chilly for the organism. Heavy rains damage Arabica’s delicate blossoms—the same blossoms that eventually turn into coffee cherries, whose seeds are coffee beans. As heat and pests climb Colombia’s mountains, “the lower limit at which coffee is grown is starting to go up,” says Baker. As growers move higher into the mountains, they run into another problem: mountains have tops.

“Over the last four or five years nearly every farmer in every country I work with has experienced climate events that they’ve described as completely out of whack,” says Watts, who helped found Intelligentsia in Chicago 16 years ago. “And these are people that have been growing coffee on those farms for 20, 30, 40 years. ... They’re seeing rain when they had droughts before; they’re seeing droughts when they usually have a lot of rain. They’re seeing hail and frost in places where it didn’t exist before.” Extreme weather events “are happening simultaneously in every part of the coffee-growing world,” he adds.

The result? Between 2006 and 2009, the Colombian yield shrank by a quarter—from 12 million bags to 7.8 million, the lowest yield in 33 years. The forecast doesn’t look good for the rest of the coffee-growing world, either: more pests in East Africa, more hurricanes in Central America, more droughts in Indonesia. Global coffee stockpiles are close to record lows. “There is simply not enough coffee in the world,” Jose Sette, now the former executive director of the International Coffee Organization, told Bloomberg in February. Combine this with other economic realities—the rising cost of fertilizer and the fact that young people, bound for the cities, aren’t following in their parents’ coffee-growing footsteps—and you can understand the term that Peter Baker has coined as a warning: “peak coffee.” Just like with oil, the world is maxing out the volume of coffee it can sustain.

Now Baker is trying to come up with “a toolbox of different methods” to help farmers cope with the rising temperature. But he says that researchers are only in the “early stages of thinking about what we can do for farmers that’s practical. At the moment a lot of people are taking measurements and looking at models and mapping out likely changes.” A game-changing solution, like developing heat-tolerant hybrids, for example, will take at least 10 to 15 years, says Tim Schilling, executive director of the Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative.

While climate change’s harshest effects won’t be felt for two or three more decades, “it would not surprise me if one of these years we get a fairly serious drought” in a major coffee-producing country like Brazil, Baker says. “That could cause coffee scarcity for quite a prolonged period.” Coffee production will continue to experience booms and busts, but Baker asserts that “in the long run, people will have to get used to drinking a bit less coffee.”

Or paying a lot more for it.

Not long ago, coffee growers had the opposite problem. Coffee was dirt cheap and about as plentiful. In the late 1980s, the Reagan administration was beating the free-trade drum, and the global financial community turned against the protectionist policies of export-dependent economies. The coffee industry’s quota system met its demise in 1989, and overproduction became an issue in the 1990s, particularly in Brazil and newcomer Vietnam, where the industry grew at a breakneck, unregulated pace. At the turn of the millennium, supply often exceeded consumption by 13 percent. From the 1980s to 2002, the global price of coffee declined from a high of $2 a pound to less than 50 cents a pound—when adjusted for inflation, the lowest price paid for coffee in a century. While the value of coffee’s retail sales grew from $30 billion to $70 billion between the early 1990s and 2005, the amount that trickled down to farmers declined precipitously, from $11 billion to $5.5 billion, pushing many small growers deeper into poverty.

Watts calls the prices during that period “unsustainably low.” Farmers barely made enough money to survive, let alone invest in the long-term viability of their farms. Some growers even shifted focus: to pineapples in Costa Rica, soy in Brazil, and livestock in Colombia (as well as drug crops like coca and poppy).

With coffee supplies running short, prices escalated at a rapid clip, outpacing even gasoline’s monumental ascent. Between spring 2010 and spring 2011, coffee roughly doubled in price. On the futures exchange in New York City, the price per pound crossed a frightening milestone—the $3 mark—hitting a three-decade high on May 3, 2011. Peet’s Coffee, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, and Starbucks announced price hikes. Low-end grocery store staples followed suit. Smuckers, the parent company of Folgers and Dunkin Donuts’ supermarket line, announced an 11 percent price increase on all coffee products. Kraft raised prices by 22 percent on brands like Maxwell House. Since spring, the commodities market has calmed, and major brands have lowered prices slightly.

The coffee industry has downplayed concerns that climate change is causing price fluctuations. “I think at the end of the day, [climate change] could be a canceling effect,” says Judy Ganes-Chase, a consultant to the coffee industry. “It’s not like the world is going to freeze and suddenly can’t grow coffee anymore.” In March of this year, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz told Reuters that speculators were to blame. There’s still plenty of chatter about climate in the industry, though. “It’s one of the topics at almost any conference, because the conference organizer puts it in there,” Ganes-Chase adds. “Is it having a pronounced impact on the markets today? No. That’s a long-term factor.”

In the meantime, high prices are putting the squeeze on big coffee companies’ efforts to maintain quality. Low-end brands that run a volume game—think of instant coffee, cheap diner coffee, or supermarket coffee— are likely to descend the quality ranks even further. Rather than raise prices, they’re choosing to cut their beans with older coffee, lower-quality Arabica (say, Brazilian instead of Costa Rican beans), or Arabica’s ugly stepsister Robusta—cheaper, hardier stuff grown on an industrial scale in Vietnam that packs even more of the caffeinated jolt with none of the sensual complexity.

Small, high-end companies are often better situated to cope with rising prices. “As somebody that loves coffee, I’m happy to see the markup,” says Watts. “Prices are finally at a place where it is very possible that a farmer can make money and be profitable.” More revenue for farmers means more investment in the quality and the sustainability of the product. Smaller roasters feel the ripples of the price hikes coming off the commodities market, but they’re insulated from them. They often negotiate prices directly with small growers or buy coffee at local auctions. Not to mention, they’re already used to paying huge premiums for rare coffees—five or even 10 times the price of the commodity stuff. Cheap coffee is simply catching up. Still, rare and specialty coffee is a “very, very, very small percentage” of the total industry, says Ganes-Chase. “Who cares if it’s grown 300 percent? That means a cup a day. It’s still small.”

The lion’s share of coffee-shop joe is brewed from beans that coffee snobs might declare “just ok.” In a retail setting, companies peddling high volumes of midgrade beans face tough decisions as the price goes up. Skimp on quality, and an increasingly savvy customer base will notice. Refuse to compromise, and affordability goes out the window. According to Ganes-Chase, consumers might notice cup sizes go down or muffin prices go up if retailers aren’t comfortable charging more for their signature product. Coffee shops might bank on the fact that a customer won’t quit her morning ritual because of a small price increase; instead she’ll just “put less money in the tip jar for the barista,” says Ganes-Chase.

There’s one more option that midrange retailers are exploring, and it’s straight from Intelligentsia’s playbook: Create a “coffee experience” so compelling that customers won’t think twice about paying more.

Just two miles southeast of Intelligentsia’s shop in Venice, there’s a strip mall in Marina del Rey that’s home to a Starbucks. It’s one of the select, big-city locations to pilot Starbucks Reserve, the corporation’s line of high-end, single-origin coffees. “We see those trends in many independent shops, and I think we’re delivering it to our consumer through the Starbucks Reserve program,” says Dub Hay, Starbucks vice president for coffee. He says these beans are “rare and exotic and special in a particular way.” (One particular way is the packaging: “Exotic, Rare, Exquisite,” it reads.)

While Starbucks will prepare pour-over coffee at some locations, the signature technology behind the new product line is the Clover, an $11,000 contraption that was hyped as a game changer when it came out in 2006. Baristas loved the machine for the unprecedented level of control it gave over brewing conditions, the high-tech aura surrounding the invention, and its ability to offer delicious single servings of brewed coffee with the click of a button. With a certain element of coffee porn—the Clover ejaculates used grounds at the climax of its performance—“it made single-cup brewing sexy,” says Intelligentsia educator Babinski.

Starbucks was sold. “We think that’s the finest brewed cup of coffee you can make,” Hay says. By 2007 the company was experimenting with a few Clovers in Seattle and Boston. In 2008, it bought the startup that invented the technology, the Coffee Equipment Company, and began testing the machine in more shops. While the Clover had been a hit when it was used with lightly roasted beans, early reviews of Starbucks’ Clover-brewed darker roasts were dismissive. One taste-tester from The New York Times declared, “‘I hate it. That’s really spoiled fruit, like really bad wine.’”

Since then Starbucks has scoured the Earth for better beans and come up with bags of stuff like Guatemala de Flor and Honduras Premier. The coffees, like their crosstown counterparts at Intelligentsia, have terroir and flavor notes. “When sampling these beans in our Seattle tasting room,” reads one bag, “a heady lavender scent filled the air, transporting our buyer back to a coffee estate in Guatemala’s Antigua valley.” The cashier in Marina del Rey describes the brew as “bold.” A half-pound sack retails for $15, about twice as much as Starbucks’ standard fare.

The reaction of the high-end marketplace is mixed. Intelligentsia—which consulted on the Clover’s design, according to Babinski— ditched the gadget after Starbucks’ acquisition. Babinski says that while it made great coffee, Intelligentsia is more interested in manual techniques and educating the consumer about replicating them at home. “There’s nothing a brewer can do to add quality. That quality is in the bean itself,” says Babinksi, who also criticizes the Clover’s rushed brew time and inefficient use of coffee grounds.

“I think it would be awesome if Starbucks started doing more and more specialty coffee things,” Babinski says. “But I dunno ... .” He is not one to talk down about coffee, but when he hears that the Reserve line includes Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee, he cringes. “It’s a brand,” he says. “That’s not something I necessarily associate with quality.”

The real issue, it would seem, is scale. Starbucks is so large that it’s not possible for every employee to be passionate about coffee. “This isn’t something that you can just do,” Babinski says of Intelligentsia’s dedication to quality. “I never worked in a coffee shop in my life where there’s this much of a collection of totally dedicated coffee professionals who are absolutely psyched to come to work every day,” he says. Indeed, this is how high-end companies will always be able to differentiate themselves, even as big coffee tries to catch up in the quality game. Coffee technologies and exotic beans can be commoditized, but true coffee geeks are a rare breed.

In Marina del Rey, the menu of Starbucks Reserve coffees hangs to the left of a sign announcing the return of fall drinks including the Salted-Caramel Mocha and the Pumpkin-Spice Latte. The Clover, a big black box with a faucet sticking out of it, sits behind a piece of glass to shield it from sneezing customers. A barista begins to brew a grande cup of the Guatemala for $4.45, a couple dollars more than the regular brew. The barista grinds the coffee, weighs it on a balance, dumps it into the shoot, and irrigates it with a hot water drip. The coffee disappears inside the machine, and shortly after, you can hear the sound of brewed coffee squirting into a paper cup.

The Guatemala is piping hot and a rich black. The notes of lavender are there. But the barista who made it says it’s not her favorite of the Reserve coffees. In fact, she doesn’t have one. “I don’t really drink brewed coffee,” she says. “I’m more of a tea person.”

He is not wearing a shirt. He doesn’t apologize for that.

He leads me past an enormous telescope, two bean bag chairs stacked beside a chaise longue, up a staircase, and into his bedroom.

“I had meant to put those pants on,” he apologizes, pointing to a pile of denim on the floor, before excusing himself to brush, floss, gargle, and apply a T-shirt.

I wait on his maroon bedspread, run my feet over his circular maroon rug, and take inventory: zebra-print headboard, stone fireplace, big TV, can of spray-on deodorant, two-dozen lighters, and the tallith from his bar mitzvah. Outside his maroon drapes, Deen has a sweeping view of the San Fernando Valley below.

It feels like no one actually sleeps here.

The porn mansion clichés come as a surprise, since James Deen looks like an average 25-year-old guy from Pasadena. He is 5'8" and 150 pounds. He has wavy brown hair, bright blue eyes, and day-old stubble. He tweets about bacon, hot girls, and his difficulty finding time to shower. He cracks Jew jokes. He doesn’t work out. His penis is 9 inches long. On the internet, you can watch him employ it in a thousand different ways.

Deen has carved out a niche in the porn industry by looking like the one guy who doesn’t belong there. Scroll through L.A.’s top porn agency sites and you’ll find hundreds of pouty women ready to drop to their knees, but just a few dozen men available to have sex with them. These guys all have a familiar look—neck chains, frosted tips, unreasonable biceps, tribal tattoos. Deen looks like he was plucked from a particularly intellectual frat house.

It’s not that more normal-looking guys don’t want to be in porn, it’s that the industry isn’t exactly looking for them. Within the major porn talent agencies, female performers outnumber male ones almost 5-to-1. The directors and producers hiring them are mostly men. They’re staffing porn’s workforce with an eternally refreshed slate of female bodies, and a handful of guys who look like what men think women want: Big arms. Big abs. Big dicks.

The porn machine churns out performers to satisfy every fantasy, be it MILF, dwarf, fat, granny, or gang bang. But if you’re interested in watching a young, heterosexual, nonrepulsive man engage in sex, James Deen is basically it.

He emerges from the bathroom and offers me a list of places we can talk—his living room, his home office, door open or closed, wherever I feel the most comfortable. I choose the office, door closed. Deen shifts between managing his Twitter feed, texting from his phone, watching YouTube videos his dad sent him, and reviewing takes from a scene he’s just shot. (Deen isn’t just an actor—he also directs.) He’s eating a burrito I’ve brought him, carefully avoiding its pockets of sour cream. For the most normal guy in porn, porn has always been normal.

“My problem is I never really had anything I wanted to do in life other than porn. I’ve never really had a hobby. I never really had any ambition,” Deen says. “I was in kindergarten or something and I saw porn for the first time, and I said, ‘This is what I want to do. I want to grow up and be in porn.’”

When Deen was 18, photos of his erect penis hit the inbox of Pamela Peaks, a leathered industry vet who claims 50GGG-size breasts and a squinting resemblance to Pamela Anderson. Peaks was “kind of rude” to Deen until she saw the photos. “She immediately took an interest in me,” Deen says. “I think it was my nonthreatening, everyday look, but I really have no idea.” (Peaks later cast him in an audition-themed film in which Deen plays an aspiring actor who performs favors on Peaks to secure the job.) He took a junior-high nickname—he was always brooding across the street, smoking in a leather jacket—and spun it into a stage name. Deen made his porn debut in 2004’s Art School Sluts, a sort of Reality Bites with penetration. Deen spends the bulk of the film looking vaguely impressed with himself. But he could maintain an erection, and the mainstream porn world opened its doors.

The porn industry has endless uses for an 18-year-old woman, but an 18-year-old man is good for just about one thing. For the better part of a year, Deen shot scenes every day for websites like MILFseeker.com, working with older female performers he described at the time as either “girls in their late 20s to mid-30s who are smoking hot” or “old ladies who can’t get laid in real life and want to have sex.”

Soon, Deen raised his rates and expanded his audience. He filled a void the industry hadn’t even realized existed. “Here comes my skinny little Jewish ass,” Deen says of his debut. “Everyone’s like, ‘Huh, he stands out.’ It was a Where’s Waldo-type situation.” Viewers turned off by the typical porn guy— especially young women—started picking Deen out of the scenery.

Today, they can watch him engage in vanilla sex with large-breasted “schoolgirls” for Brazzers, bind and gag sex slaves for Kink.com, stage explicit Seinfeld parodies for New Sensations, and penetrate punk princesses for Burning Angel. There are some things he won’t do: Deen stopped working for one site because he found the plots “a little rapey."

He records a new scene almost every day. In 2009, when Adult Video News named him “Male Performer of the Year,” he was the youngest guy ever to snag the title. Deen knows he should have been thinking, “‘I’m the man! I won this!’” Instead, he snuck outside for a cigarette to avoid taking the stage. “My overanalytical Jew brain goes, ‘Fuck, I have to win this every year or it goes downhill. I’ve peaked at 20.’”

But despite a growing female following, the industry’s engineers are reluctant to invent new uses for him. Like all men who work consistently in pornography, Deen is clean, punctual, and erect. He knows how to angle a woman toward the camera. In some videos, he appears only as a disembodied, thrusting penis. He bills himself as “the luckiest boy alive.” Deen is polite, self- deprecating, and speaks well of everyone. Online, he tweets about being too apathetic to brush his teeth. At home, he cleans them thoroughly.

On YouTube, you can watch a 19-year-old Deen fire off an interview while reclining at the foot of a bed before a scene. A dim young porn actress orbits around him, chewing on cashews and attempting to redirect the camera’s attention. “I’m in this for money, not to be famous,” Deen tells the camera. When asked, he rattles off his earnings: He averages $10,000 to $15,000 a month, he says, once hitting a high of $22,000. “I’m doing pretty damn good. I’m very pleased with the way my life is going,” he tells the camera. “It’s one of those things that every guy wants to do.” To hear Deen tell it, all he has to do is show up. “It’s his scene,” Deen says of the porn director. “I’m just fucking in it.”

Since the interview resurfaced in April, it’s been viewed more than 14,000 times. “I want to go back and punch that kid in the face,” Deen says. “I’m sitting here and watching it like, ‘What the fuck, just shut up, you fucking idiot!’ But you know, I was 19 years old and I was doing porn for a living. I was a little cocky.”

When he informed his family about his career, Deen says his parents “didn’t want me to get involved in drugs or buying dumb things like fast cars and big houses and stuff like that.” We are sitting in his big house watching a video of a Nissan GT-R—the model he owns—zoom past other high-end cars. But Deen still has the money he invested from his bar mitzvah. He no longer discusses his monthly haul with reporters, simply insisting that he is overpaid. He’s learned a lot. “Psychologically, it’s the most interesting job in the world,” Deen says. On the other hand, “you don’t really use math skills.”

Deen says he earned his parents’ blessing when “they found out I was career-oriented and that this isn’t like a game for me.” At that point, his family life was already strained. When Deen was a teenager, his parents split, Deen took a test to exit high school early, and he moved out of the house. “My dad sort of—he didn’t vanish,” Deen says. “He moved out. My mom didn’t want him seeing us.” Tensions rose among Deen, his mother, and his older sister, and he fell in “with a bunch of gutter punks,” living in Pasadena parks and abandoned apartments. He enrolled in community college classes and shilled coffee at Starbucks to pay for them.

He still wanted to be a porn star. “I would joke around with all my friends and stuff, but I knew I was gonna do it,” Deen says. He began attending Hollywood parties to network and fell into bed with a 20-something stripper who had touched herself online for money. She hooked him up with friends of friends of friends. Then Pamela Peaks fished him from the gutter.

Deen no longer speaks to his sister. But he’s reconnected with his parents, the punks are still his friends, and Pasadena is still home. “The rare time I leave my house and do something, I go there,” Deen says. He only calls a few industry people friends—among them, sometime girlfriend and Burning Angel founder Joanna Angel and MILF performer Lisa Ann.

Deen calls director Chico Wang his porno mentor. Wang “taught me how to shoot a camera. The way I perform has a lot to do with him,” Deen says. When Deen joined him on the set of Wang’s 2005 gang-bang title Down the Hatch 14, Wang had already been charged with beating and kidnapping his girlfriend. In 2007, Wang’s porn actress wife of 20 days, Haley Paige, turned up at a hospital without a pulse. A month later, Wang was found dead of a methadone overdose in a California Economy Inn next to a makeshift shrine to Paige and an empty box of Milk Duds. “He was always good to me. But he was such a horrible person to so many other people,” Deen says of Wang. “I still to this day don’t know what was in his head, if he was an asshole or actually a good guy.”

At 25, Deen is rounding eight years and a couple thousand titles, but he remains one of the youngest guys in the business. In a few years, his female peers will graduate to MILF roles, but Deen could spend the rest of his career performing alongside freshly minted
18-year-olds. And his teenage fans can’t wait to watch him do it.

Emily was sitting in her fourth-grade classroom when she was first introduced to porn. “These boys were sitting next to me, talking about boobs,” she says. Emily asked one of them what that meant, and “he stared at me like I was crazy.” In school the next day, the boy slipped her a piece of paper with a URL written on it.

She caught “like five seconds’ worth of humping” before closing the page. Now 17, Emily is distributing porn links of her own—this time, to other teenage girls across the United States. Emily runs a Tumblr blog dedicated to her two obsessions: Twilight and James Deen. Thanks to Deen, Emily is no longer watching porn for the generalized humping. “When I watch his videos, I don’t really pay attention to the sex,” Emily says. “I watch his videos for his reaction. It amazes me.”

Deen is not supposed to be the star of his scenes—his sex partners are. But on Tumblr, a network of teenage bloggers has emerged to turn the focus on him. The young women trade Deen videos, post candid photographs, and pluck out all the minute details that turn them on: the way he looks at a woman, touches her, stares into her eyes, whispers in her ear. “There was just something about the way he moved,” Emily says of her first exposure to Deen. He seemed to be “speaking to the girl, but not with his mouth, with his hand over the girl’s throat, and with his eyes.” Now, Emily says it doesn’t matter if Deen is having intimate sex with a woman on a bed or shoving her into the trunk of his car: “I go for just about anything.”

Deen’s young fans gush over the sight of him thrusting into a woman while holding her hand. They sigh over a private photo of a clothed Deen commuting by plane. They create animated GIFs of Deen’s greatest moves so they can watch him execute them again and again and again without rewinding. They pepper their Deen fantasies with Harry Potter jokes and circulate them to other girls. Several propose marriage.

“I think he is really cute (not in a sexual way),” one woman writes. “I want to talk to him and tell him why I like him,” another says. “It’s not only cause of his amazing talent, it’s because of his personality.” One woman shares a video that “doesn’t have James fucking her but he is there and he is being sweet so I think it’s cute to watch anyway.”

It’s a well-worn cliche that women don’t experience sex visually. So why can’t they take their eyes off James Deen? Clearly, some women do like porn. They just require a little bit more than a disembodied penis to get into it.

Gaby Dunn, a 23-year-old journalist and comedian, discovered Deen in college when a friend, a “connoisseur of porn,” referred her to Deen to satisfy her interest in “nerdy Jewish dudes.” Deen fit the bill. “He was almost like a guy that you would just hang out with at Hebrew school,” she says.

But he’s conspicuous in the industry. “Male porn stars used to look like the Brawny paper towel man,” says Chanel Preston, a 26-year-old performer who has worked with Deen several times. She says Deen stands out in another important way. Other guys “can be very robotic. It gets boring.” But Deen inspires “real facial expressions. He’s an amazing performer.”

Deen denies this: “It’s not that hard to get your dick hard.” He says he’s only taken medication to aid this process once. To get in the mood, he finds the appeal in every woman. “This part of you is really nice,” Deen will think. “You have really nice eyes, you have really nice hair, you have really nice boobs, your vagina is really cool, I can’t wait to jerk off all over your face.”

For his young fans, Deen’s perceived accessibility is part of the charm. He tweets every few hours to his 27,000-plus followers, most of them women. Between porn jokes, Deen tweets about wanting someone to go to the zoo with him. On his blog, he intersperses sophomoric interludes with photos of anuses. “Today my blog post is going to be all about Adrianna Nicole’s butthole,” Deen writes in a typical post. “Adrianna Nicole has an awesome butthole. You can put things in it. She can put Things in it. We can all [p]ut things in it. we can do it one at a time or as a group. There is no stopping her butthole.” The blog receives more than 4,000 hits a day. He reads every comment from his fans. Sometimes, he chats with them.

“I do have girls every now and then who are underage who are talking to me and stuff,” Deen says. “I’m like, ‘How old are you? And they’re like, ‘Oh, I’m 16, I’m going to be 17 soon,’ and I’m like, ‘Hey, we have to stop talking.’”

Deen is still figuring out how to manage all of this attention. He keeps getting older, but his fans stay the same age. “Even if I was 25 talking to a 17-year-old girl and I wasn’t having sex with her and we were just talking on the internet and nothing was ever going to happen, why the hell am I talking to a 17-year-old girl?” Maybe, he says, it’s “weird or creepy” because he’s “you know, ‘a porn star.’ Something about that rubs me the wrong way.”

Deen is more comfortable dispatching his porn-star persona on the over-17 set. When Gaby Dunn graduated college and launched an online interview project, she pursued Deen as a subject. She tweeted at him. He sent her his phone number. She arranged to interview Deen at his home, and the meeting turned flirtatious. (“I looked at your pictures first,” he told her, maybe joking). When she posted the first-person account on her blog, the response was deafening. “Women are so mad at me that I did not have sex with him,” says Dunn. She and Deen have remained friends, but her attraction has “dimmed,” she says. “It’s hard to try to watch porn with this guy in it when 10 minutes earlier he was Gchatting me about The Simpsons. The fourth wall has disappeared.”

Sometimes he dates, but he says it’s difficult to maintain a relationship while satisfying his sex drive. “I’ve always been a giant megaslut. Every girl I’ve ever dated, I’ve been like, ‘Hey, I’m a giant megaslut.’ Porn makes it almost more honest.” When he’s not working, he rarely leaves his house. A week after I bring Deen a burrito, he tweets to his followers: “BRING ME A BURRITO!!!!!!!!!!!” Then three days later, “I am hungry. Bring me a burrito.... no really. Who is bringing me food?”

One of Deen’s young fans tweeted back, answering the request. After Deen sent her a private tweet—“for reals :-)”—she rushed back to Tumblr to present the message to her friends. “I’M GOING TO FAINT OH MY GOD FUCK,” she wrote. When other bloggers asked how the conversation evolved, she told them she was “too shy to say anything back to him.” After all, “it wasn’t like he was all ‘HEY LET’S HAVE SEX AFTER YOU BRING ME FOOD.’”

“They don’t actually want to marry me,” Deen says.

For his teenage fans, James Deen is a window to a world of sexual expression that had previously been no-girls-allowed. For many, it’s an aspect of their sexuality that they’re exploring exclusively on the internet. “I don’t really discuss it at all; it kind of just stays where it’s supposed to, online,” Emily says. She’s since scrubbed the internet of her Deen-related Twitter, Tumblr, and Blogspot accounts.

Kay, 17, knows how to swiftly scroll past a Deen pic just before her parents walk by. Her viewing relationship with Deen is best described as monogamous. “I lost interest in a majority of male porn stars since becoming a fan of James,” she says. She communicates her attraction only through her blog. “The few friends I have that actually watch porn are male and don’t really feel comfortable with talking about porn with me,” says Kay. Besides, “I’m pretty sure I’ve actually watched more porn than they have.”

When men do weigh in on Deen, “it’s always these really asshole-ish comments only coming from guys who are clearly super butthurt that girls actually like a porn star for once,” one Deen blogger writes about the negative feedback she’s received from men. Deen, too, receives hate mail from viewers, “always dudes, always dudes.” One guy “told me I had to start working out. He said it would make the scenes better and the girls would like me more," Deen says.

When Dunn wrote about Deen on her blog, her male friends were unimpressed. "They thought it was blowing up their spot,” Dunn says. “It was shining a light on something that was supposed to be secret and just for them.”

“How many of you want to be in porn?”

Several hundred men who would kill to be James Deen have gathered at the Los Angeles Convention Center for the annual Exxxotica Expo, one of the largest porn conventions in the United States. In a makeshift lecture hall, Joshua Lehman, a bald, tattooed producer from sex toy and film distributor Adam & Eve, has com- mandeered the mic at a seminar called “So You Wanna Be a Porn Star?” Two platinum blondes are perched on folding chairs behind him, but all eyes are on Lehman.

A dozen men raise their hands. Yes, they want to be in porn. One woman with long brown hair, sitting quietly under a man’s extended arm, reluctantly lifts her hand. “For you, it would be easy,” Lehman announces in her general direction. “Not because you’re a hot chick, but because you’re a chick.”

“Everybody with a vagina,” Lehman continues, “you don’t even need boobs or a butt. You can be a porn star.” Actually, “you don’t even need a vagina. You could have boobs and a penis and still be a star,” he says. Most men are out of luck. “I get 300 dick pictures sent to my phone every day. I don’t want to see your penis. That’s not how you get into porn.” He advises straight men to “get the hottest bitch you can and make her your girlfriend,” then “go into a producer’s office and have her tell him that you’re the only guy she’ll fuck.”

If a woman enters the industry at 18, she can ride it for ten years, starting with solo scenes ($250) before advancing to “girl-girl” scenes ($600), then “boy-girl” arrangements ($800-$1,000). Along the way, she can secure pay bumps by exposing herself in new ways: blowjobs, anal, double penetration, gang bang. If she gains a following by her late 20s, she can keep working well into her MILF days. A man won’t make as much as a woman, but he can work every day without risk of overexposure. As far as the porn industry is concerned, no one is really paying attention to him anyway. “A male talent is a prop,” Lehman says.

One of these men is staffing his own booth at Exxxotica, just across from the seminar. Evan Stone, a tanned, muscular 42-year-old with a mop of blond hair and a broad, gap-toothed smile, wears only a white and gold wizard’s robe. For a new guy to break into the industry today, Stone says, “You have to kill someone.” I ask him how he broke through. “I killed someone,” he delivers. Stone is funny, and that’s helped him stay popular. Male fans will approach him and tell him, “I’m not gay or anything, but I love that you have a sense of humor.”

But even the most beloved male stars have no hope of transcending their supporting role. Everyone in the industry—from stars to agents to producers—seems to agree that it’s too risky to invest in fresh male talent to appeal to its growing female audience. “If you’re a producer or director, you’re working from a limited budget,” says porn publicist Adella Curry. “You have a limited period of time to get your movie shot. If a male performer can’t do the ‘performing’ part, you’re out a lot a lot a lot of money.” That’s why you see the same male performers used over and over again. To the porn industry, Evan Stone’s penis is interchangeable with Ron Jeremy’s or Rocco Siffredi’s or Manuel Ferrara’s or James Deen’s.

Aside from the erection, Lehman suggests that male stars can differentiate themselves by “treating the girls nicely and not being a scumbag.” Male performers must also play nice with producers and directors, who often double as actresses’ husbands and boyfriends. “I did Jenna Jameson three times,” said 19-year-old Deen. “Her husband hates me.”

All of this changes, of course, when there are no girls involved at all. Gay porn stars make “a ridiculous amount more,” Lehman says. “The best male performers make $1,000 a scene on average. Some of the male performers in gay porn make up to $10,000 a scene. That’s why guys do it.” According to Lehman, “some of the guys who do gay for pay would rather be in straight porn,” but if you turn up in gay porn, “we don’t really want you on the straight side,” Lehman says.

Lehman tells me he was recently approached by “two well-known male performers” floating a DVD of their sexual exploits with women. “The box is basically them. Huge pictures of them. In the background, there’s a couple of hot chicks, but it’s real small,” he says. “I looked at it and said, ‘Is it gay porn? Because that’s what it looks like.’” Lehman cannot imagine a future in which this rule does not hold. “Even James Deen. You may see him in every movie, but do you see him at the center of a box? I don’t think so,” Lehman says. “If you put a man in the foreground on a box cover, male and female customers are going to assume it’s gay porn.”

The straight male performer must be attractive enough to serve as a prop, but not so attractive that he becomes the object of desire. As Curry puts it, “No one wants to alienate the male audience.”

But she’s hopeful the industry will start to see women as consumers in their own right. Curry excitedly points me to New Sensations’ Romance Series, a line of “erotica for her.” “They’re little Jennifer Aniston-type romantic comedies,” Curry says. “They’re adorable.”

But it turns out these feature-length films are more like “erotica for them”—porn for men to buy their reluctant wives. “We’re often targeting couples,” says Jacky St. James, publicist and writer for New Sensations. According to the website, titles in the series are “written by a woman and directed by a man,” and have features to appeal to both. For her: “passionate, connected, and intimate sex.” For him: a money shot. However, there are absolutely “no pop shots above the neck.” The company’s research has shown the stomach to be the most respectful part of a woman’s body on which a man can deposit his sperm.

“I don’t know a single woman that watches any of these porn-for-women Playgirl type of things,” Deen says. Most women? “They want to see porno. They’re watching what they want to watch, regardless of what’s marketed toward them.” He says he has considered launching his own website, JamesDeen.com. “Here’s me, just doing what I want to do, the scenes I want to do.” He continues, “In a sense it would be focused on me,” before stopping himself. “Not any more than a regular scene would be focused on me.”

Meanwhile, teenage girls are cutting and pasting Deen’s work to fit their needs. On their blogs, James Deen is their own personal star. They call on him for love or sex or idle conversation depending on the hour of the day. They collect his tweets and photos and craft their own narrative fantasies. He comes wherever they want him to.