SHELL OF MAN

By Wesley Morris

Anyone planning to see Non-Stop should probably just go see it. This is one of those near-perfect, peeled-onion, airplane-hijacking thrillers in which each removed layer brings you closer to a single, happy tear. The level of ridiculousness is equal to the care put into making the ridiculousness possible. It isn’t just the plotting (although the plot goes happily nuts). It’s the sense that a director actually directed, writers actually wrote, and a producer kept the movie together. It’s the idea that a genre movie this generic could have been done with mannequins and still almost have worked. Instead, it’s staffed, cockpit to coach, with good actors having a good time looking suspicious.

Liam Neeson plays Bill Marks, an American Irishman and federal air marshal, and even that bit of information takes 20 minutes to reveal and is treated like Deep Throat’s identity. He’s on a flight from New York to London, and not long after takeoff, he exchanges taunting messages with someone on the plane who’s feeling greedy (give me $150 million!) and murderous (or someone dies every 20 minutes!). People do die, in part because Bill can’t get his TSA contact to believe his story. You see, he used to be a cop and a drunk, and he’s still miserable about the death of his daughter. The account intended for the $150 million has been opened in Bill’s name (please don’t ask how; this movie is the opposite of “how”). It’s much easier for everyone on the flight to believe it’s Bill who’s trying to hijack the plane. So not only does he have to catch a terrorist, he also has to persuade the passengers and crew to help him. That takes most of the movie.

This is Agatha Christie doing the nasty with Alfred Hitchcock. One reason to just go see for yourself is the surprising pleasure of the small details. The enjoyment being had at every level of this movie is contagious. The filmmakers love the junk they’re making. Neeson’s incoming texts ding like a bell and spin around him the way stars and birds do around clobbered cartoons. At some point, the phone has a broken screen, and so the spinning text window appears to be on the fritz, too. And the main flight attendants — played by Michelle Dockery and Lupita Nyong’o — wear snazzy sleeveless uniforms, a kind of fitted boiled wool with leather accents along the shoulders.

Non-Stop is like a hamburger that would’ve been fine as just meat on a bun. But the accumulation of fixings starts to blow your mind. There’s mustard and cheese and mushrooms and jalapeños? Are you kidding me? You come for another helping of Neeson avenging while under siege and get Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey and Patsey from12 Years a Slave? Plus: Corey Stoll, Nate Parker, Linus Roache, Omar Metwally, Scoot McNairy, Shea Whigham, and the tonic-like presence of Julianne Moore. There are a couple of Germans, a surly B-boy, an accidental daredevil pilot, and a tiny unaccompanied minor who’s scared to fly.

Any one of these people could be guilty, and director Jaume Collet-Serra creates the sort of high-suspicion environment that frees you to cast and recast your doubts. He’s the Spaniard who directed Neeson inUnknown. That was an inane paranoia thriller, too, but it barreled its way to a big, nonsense conspiracy ending. The finale of this movie might be more laughable. The explanation for this hijacking is like Scooby-Doo agitprop. The script is credited to John W. Richardson, Chris Roach, and Ryan Engle, and it culminates in a lot of “Let’s roll,” 9/11, do-it-yourself heroism. But it does so in a way that feels more apt than exploitative, given the makeup of the passengers. You get over the baffling, loony, quasi-libertarian politics of personal freedom. There are more absurdly stressful, explosive matters at hand, like landing intact while flanked by a pair of fighter planes.

This is the best of these Liam Neeson post-traumatic-action-hero films. He’s expanded his career fighting terrorists and wolves. Previously, they’ve kidnapped his daughter (Taken), stolen his memory (Unknown), ruined his suicide plans (The Grey), and kidnapped him(Taken 2). At 61, he’s about a decade older than Charlton Heston was at the height of his disaster-and-apocalypse run in the late 1960s and ’70s, and Neeson’s not risking as much as Heston did.

This stretch of Neeson’s career is comparable insofar as it’s possible he’s playing different offscreen sorrow. With Heston, it was how the movies had changed right under his nose. A repeatedly decimated planet seemed like the right place for a classic-Hollywood star to lose and regain his bearings. Neeson’s assumption of the melancholy-avenger role began the year before he lost Natasha Richardson in a ski accident. Part of the appeal of him in these movies — two of which come from Luc Besson — is that you want to say, “Put the gun down,” and pour him a cup of tea. Since Taken, he’s played a deep ache instead of action. It’s shrewd strategy that’s kept Neeson from complete self-parody. It’s kept him from becoming Heston.

Not long ago, I was at a dinner party with several couples in their 40s, all married except for my boyfriend and me. The mood was jovial until, over dessert, one guest made an offhand joke about Internet porn.

His wife took issue, and during a tense back-and-forth between them, the rest of us sensed that we were about to learn way too much about their personal lives. Fortunately, another husband deftly maneuvered to a safe topic for middle-aged parents (kids and screen time!), and after a lively discussion about iPads, we made our excuses to leave.

In the car, I turned to my boyfriend and said, “I bet there won’t be any sex happening in their bedroom tonight.”

He smiled and shook his head. He predicted that the hosts would be the least likely to have sex that night.

I thought he was kidding. This couple were my “model marrieds,” true equals who share the housework and child care, communicate openly and prioritize each other’s careers. The best friends of happy-couple cliché. Earlier in the evening, I watched them work together in the kitchen, cheerfully cooking and cleaning: She bringing out the hors d’oeuvres, and he chopping and dicing. When their 6-year-old woke up with a nightmare, they wordlessly agreed that he would be the one to soothe her. It was the kind of marriage many people wish for.

“Exactly,” my boyfriend said. “Least likely.”

Marriage is hardly known for being an aphrodisiac, of course, but my boyfriend was referring to a particularly modern state of marital affairs. Today, according to census data, in 64 percent of U.S. marriages with children under 18, both husband and wife work. There’s more gender-fluidity when it comes to who brings in the money, who does the laundry and dishes, who drives the car pool and braids the kids’ hair, even who owns the home. A vast majority of adults under 30 in this country say that this is a good thing, according to a Pew Research Center survey: They aspire to what’s known in the social sciences as an egalitarian marriage, meaning that both spouses work and take care of the house and that the relationship is built on equal power, shared interests and friendship. But the very qualities that lead to greater emotional satisfaction in peer marriages, as one sociologist calls them, may be having an unexpectedly negative impact on these couples’ sex lives.

A study called “Egalitarianism, Housework and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” which appeared in The American Sociological Review last year, surprised many, precisely because it went against the logical assumption that as marriages improve by becoming more equal, the sex in these marriages will improve, too. Instead, it found that when men did certain kinds of chores around the house, couples had less sex. Specifically, if men did all of what the researchers characterized as feminine chores like folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming — the kinds of things many women say they want their husbands to do — then couples had sex 1.5 fewer times per month than those with husbands who did what were considered masculine chores, like taking out the trash or fixing the car. It wasn’t just the frequency that was affected, either — at least for the wives. The more traditional the division of labor, meaning the greater the husband’s share of masculine chores compared with feminine ones, the greater his wife’s reported sexual satisfaction.

Granted, some might view a study like this with skepticism. Correlations don’t establish causation, and especially when it comes to sex, there’s always a risk of reporting bias and selective sampling, not to mention the mood of a subject at the time of the survey. (Was she answering the questions while standing next to a big pile of garbage that hadn’t been taken out?) What’s more, while this study used the most recent nationally representative data that included measures of sexual frequency and a couple’s division of labor, it was drawn from information collected in the 1990s. (Julie Brines, an author of the chores study, explained, however, that many studies on housework since then show that not much has changed in terms of division of labor.) But as a psychotherapist who works with couples, I’ve noticed something similar to the findings. That is, it’s true that being stuck with all the chores rarely tends to make wives desire their husbands. Yet having their partner, say, load the dishwasher — a popular type of marital intervention suggested by self-help books, women’s magazines and therapists alike — doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on their libido, either. Many of my colleagues have observed the same thing: No matter how much sink-scrubbing and grocery-shopping the husband does, no matter how well husband and wife communicate with each other, no matter how sensitive they are to each other’s emotions and work schedules, the wife does not find her husband more sexually exciting, even if she feels both closer to and happier with him.

I first noticed this while doing a yearlong training in marriage therapy. I was seeing a couple who had been married for five years and wanted to work out some common kinks related to balancing their respective jobs, incomes and household responsibilities in, as the wife put it, “an equal way.” Over the course of treatment, the couple reported more connection, less friction and increased happiness. One day, though, when their issues seemed largely resolved and I suggested discussing an end to their therapy, the husband brought up a new concern: His wife now seemed less interested in having sex with him. He turned to her and asked why. Was she still attracted to him? After all, he wondered, why did she appear less interested now that their relationship seemed stronger in all the ways she wanted?

“I’m very attracted to you,” she said earnestly. “You know when I really crave you? It’s when you’re just back from the gym and you’re all sweaty and you take off your clothes to get in the shower and I see your muscles.”

Her husband countered by saying that this very situation had occurred that morning but that his wife became irritated when he tossed his clothes on the floor, which led to a conversation about his not vacuuming the day before, when she worked late. He had worked late, too, which accounted for the lack of vacuuming, but still — she hated waking up to a messy room, and it was his turn to vacuum.

“Right,” she agreed. “I wasn’t focused on sex, because I wanted you to get out the vacuum.”

“So if I got out the vacuum, then you’d be turned on?”

His wife thought about it for a minute. “Actually, probably not,” she said slowly, as if hearing the contradiction even as she was speaking it. “The vacuuming would have killed the weight-lifting vibe.”

Brines believes the quandary many couples find themselves in comes down to this: “The less gender differentiation, the less sexual desire.” In other words, in an attempt to be gender-neutral, we may have become gender-neutered. It’s interesting to note that when I asked Justin Garcia, a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute, whether lack of gender differentiation affects the sex lives of gay couples, he said that male couples, who have more sex than lesbian couples, tend to differentiate by choosing partners sexually unlike themselves — who, say, want to be in the more submissive sexual position — and that lesbians don’t follow as much of a pattern of seeking their sexual opposites. I posed the same question to Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington who coined the term “lesbian bed death,” and she pointed out that gay male couples differentiate from each other in other ways, too. For gay men, she said, “the initial filter is erotic, so they’re more likely to end up with somebody who’s very different in terms of education or social class.” But, she continued, “a gay woman thinks like the heterosexual woman who asks: ‘Do we share common goals? Do we like to do things together? Is he smart?’ ” She believes that lesbian and heterosexual couples share sexual challenges because both relationships involve women who tend to seek similar mates. As she put it, most men, regardless of sexual orientation, prioritize the erotic, but “heterosexual men have to deal with heterosexual women.”

This isn’t to say that egalitarian heterosexual couples aren’t happy. Lynn Prince Cooke, a professor of social policy at the University of Bath in England, found that American couples who share breadwinning and household duties are less likely to divorce. And Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History,” told me that having a partner who does housework and child care has become a bigger factor in women’s marital satisfaction than many other factors that used to predict marital happiness, like a man’s level of income or shared religious beliefs.

The chores study seems to show that women do want their husbands to help out — just in gender-specific ways. Couples in which the husband did plenty of traditionally male chores reported a 17.5 percent higher frequency of sexual intercourse than those in which the husband did none. These findings, Brines says, “might have something to do with the fact that the traditional behaviors that men and women enact feed into associations that people have about masculinity and femininity.” She calls these associations and behaviors sexual scripts. Men and women, she said, are continuously sending out cues that signal attractiveness to a potential partner, and often these cues involve “an ongoing reminder of difference and the sense of mystery and excitement that comes with the knowledge that the other person isn’t you.” When I asked Esther Perel, a couples therapist whose book, “Mating in Captivity,” addresses the issue of desire in marriage, about the role sexual scripts play in egalitarian partnerships, she explained it like this: “Egalitarian marriage takes the values of a good social system — consensus-building and consent — and assumes you can bring these rules into the bedroom. But the values that make for good social relationships are not necessarily the same ones that drive lust.” In fact, she continued, “most of us get turned on at night by the very things that we’ll demonstrate against during the day.”

Power — and the act of balancing it — is a common topic with the couples I see in therapy. They’re eager to talk about leveling the domestic playing field but tend to feel awkward about bringing the concept of power into conversations about sex, mostly because it can feel so confusing.

One woman in her late 30s, for instance, who has been in a peer marriage for 10 years, said during couples therapy that when she asked her husband to be more forceful, “rougher,” in bed, the result was comical.

“He was trying to do what I wanted,” she explained, “but he was so . . . careful. I don’t want him to ask, ‘Are you O.K.?’ I want him not to care if I’m O.K., to just, you know, not be the good husband and take charge.” And yet, she said, his caring and his concern that she’s O.K. with what he’s doing are what she loves so much about him in every other area of their marriage, ranging from which brand of toilet paper to buy to what to feed their children to where their money is spent and which nights each of them can stay late at work. “I don’t want him to take charge like that with anything else!” she said.

I mentioned this situation to Dan Savage, the sex columnist, who told me that he sees similar themes in the letters he receives and the questions he fields at personal appearances. At a recent talk, for instance, one woman asked him if a certain sex act was “loving or degrading?”

“My reply was, ‘Yes,’ ” he told me. “Why can’t it be both?” He continued: “People have to learn to compartmentalize. We all want to be objectified by the person we love at times. We all want to be with somebody who can flip the switch and see you as an object for an hour. Sometimes sex is an expression of anger or a struggle for power and dominance. They work in concert. People need to learn how to harness those impulses playfully in ways that are acceptable in equal relationships.”

A desire for equality, and the lack of desire that equality can create, may make scientific sense, even as it challenges conventional wisdom. As Daniel Bergner has written in his book “What Do Women Want?” and in this magazine, many studies show that women often report fantasies, like those involving submission, that tend to be inconsistent with our notion of progressive relationships.

But Pepper Schwartz says that while women may have always had these types of fantasies, now they have permission to give voice to them because of how much power they have in real life. “The more powerful you are in your marriage, and the more responsibility you have in other areas of your life, the more submission becomes sexy,” Schwartz says. “It’s like: ‘Let me lose all that responsibility for an hour. I’ve got plenty of it.’ It’s what you can afford once you don’t live a life of submission.” Married women, she adds, may have had a very different relationship to their fantasies back in the ‘50s, but even so, “this mixture of changing gender roles and sexual negotiation is tricky.”

So tricky, in fact, that when I was speaking about relationships at a conference and mentioned that I was writing about this topic, a large group of women who had just waxed poetic about “Fifty Shades of Grey” suddenly seemed outraged. Was I saying people can’t have good sex in egalitarian marriages? (No, I wasn’t.) Isn’t marriage better over all when partners have equal power? (In my opinion, yes.) Then why write about this kind of thing? (Because when a roomful of women who just raved about “Fifty Shades of Grey” don’t want me to write about “this kind of thing,” that tells me it should be talked about.)

Men, of course, can feel just as uneasy with overt expressions of power in marriages that are otherwise based on equality. During a couples session, one woman in her early 40s said that it wasn’t until she came across some porn scenes her husband had viewed online that she felt comfortable telling him about her fantasies, which happened to be very similar to what she found. She thought he’d be thrilled, but although he enacted the scenes with her, she was surprised by his lack of enthusiasm.

“I felt like he was just doing it because I asked him to, not because he wanted to,” she said. I wondered if she was putting her husband in a double-bind, analogous to, “He bought me flowers on Valentine’s Day because he knows he’s supposed to — not because he really wants to.”

No, she said. It was something else: It bothered her that her husband acknowledged being turned on by watching the fantasy online but not by doing it in real life with her. “I felt so rejected,” she said. “I told him, ‘I want you to want to dominate me,’ but he said he just doesn’t see me that way, that he doesn’t seeus that way.”

For this couple, the experiment felt so awkward that they quickly reverted to their routine: sex in the usual roles and positions during a window between 10:30 and 11 p.m. when they were both tired but not yet asleep. When I turned to her husband for his perspective, he seemed relieved that he could express his puzzlement.

“It’s nice,” he said about the sex they have. “It’s not superhot all the time, but it’s really nice. I’m attracted to her, and I like being with her, and I’m very happy with our sex life. I don’t know what she expects. If I don’t clean up the bathroom, if I don’t give her equal time with her work, if I make a decision without consulting her, she wouldn’t want that. I’m so used to interacting with her as an equal — and I also want that — but I like what we have, and occasionally I like getting the other stuff on the Internet. Isn’t being a good husband and father and wanting to have semirespectful sex with my wife enough? Before we got married, we always said we’d have a 50-50 marriage, and you’d think that would be great for our sex life, but instead it’s the one area where we’re having trouble. Everything else is great. It’s the sex we don’t agree on.”

He took a deep breath before adding: “I know what a 50-50 marriage should be like. But what is 50-50 sex supposed to be like?”

Sex in any marriage is idiosyncratic and complex — and if it’s consensual and enjoyable, it’s nobody’s business, frankly. But the idea that married sex should be steamy is reflected in our culture. Take the fascination with MILFs — consistently one of the most-searched porn categories and a staple in mainstream media — in which mothers are depicted as alluring and sexually lively. In the past, a fantasy woman may have been the young, single secretary; now she’s the middle-aged mother of three with a graduate degree. In a way, this might seem like an encouraging shift for married moms. Instead of becoming invisible, we’re wanted and capable of doing it all: work, play dates and having hot sex lives. But these sorts of portrayals also create a false sense of reality.

“The passionate marriage used to be a contradiction in terms,” Esther Perel, the couples expert, told me. The quality of sex in marriage — and not just the frequency — is a relatively new conversation that has come about with more egalitarian marriages. In today’s marriages, she said, “we don’t just want sex; it has to be intimate sex. It has to be transcendent and self-actualizing.”

Which brings me back to the dinner party where that husband made a joke about Internet porn. The conversation started innocuously enough, with the husband making the observation that with men and women both balancing the responsibilities of work and household, even sex needs to be outsourced sometimes. By day’s end, he said, men feel so worn out that they, too, “get headaches” because they don’t necessarily have the energy to make sex happen or, more specifically, to make it happen in the way their wives want it to. The modern marital tableau, he quipped, is two overwhelmed people trying to relax before bed: he on Pornhub, she on Pinterest. Then they kiss and go to sleep.

The men at the dinner party laughed; the women smiled uneasily. His wife seemed perplexed. If men found release on Pornhub, what about women’s sexual needs? That’s when things got dicey. Without missing a beat, the husband deadpanned, “Vibrators do for modern men what dishwashers did for modern women.” His wife became upset, calling the comment “selfish.” He defended himself by saying that he gives his wife frequent back rubs, while she has given him a massage “maybe 10 times in our entire marriage.” (Every man at the table nodded in recognition.) As we averted our gazes, I’m guessing we were all thinking the same thing: How impossible it often feels for two exhausted equals to meet each other’s sexual needs.

Porn, of course, doesn’t tend to be about reciprocity. “Here’s the essence of porn,” Terry Real, a couples expert in Boston, told me. “What will you never see in a porn video? ‘Honey, I don’t like that, could you stop doing that, could you take a shower first?’ The archetype of the porn queen is that she’s a woman who derives sexual pleasure by giving the man pleasure, and — here’s the key — everything he does is absolutely perfect! What you don’t see in porn is anything that needs to be negotiated, the woman having needs of her own or the roles being reversed.”

In other words, it’s the antithesis of peer marriage. In “Marriage: A History,” Coontz writes that one recent marital development “is that husbands have to respond positively to their wives’ requests for change.” Yet no matter how many requests wives make and how hard their husbands try to accommodate them, the women may still end up disappointed. After all, women are now coming into marriage with sexual histories and experiences on par with men’s, leading to expectations that are difficult to replicate in any marriage, especially now that people live longer and will be having sex, presumably with the same person, for decades more.

Similarly, older c​ouples who can now wait and marry for love have less time together during their sexual primes and, if kids are in the plan, they may even miss that year or two of newlywed abandon. (Ask a 40-year-old couple trying and failing to conceive how much fun the sex is.) Pepper Schwartz, who serves as AARP’s relationships expert, observes that 50-year-olds of the past were often grandparents without great expectations about their sex lives. Now those same 50-year-olds might have a 10-year-old, placing them in a life stage formerly occupied by people in their 30s and subjecting them to pressure to maintain the culture’s view of “youthful sexuality” in marriage, especially with the ubiquity of Viagra and Estrace.

One day I was talking about these expectations with a friend, a 41-year-old married father. He and his wife, who have two young children, are in a minority in their Los Angeles social circle: She takes care of the house and kids, and he provides all of the income. He said that he and his wife consider their sex life to be good.

“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams,” he said. “But a lot of people think it’s supposed to be more exciting than this.”

He believes that we have to accept that we’re not going to get everything we want in our marriages and our sex lives, instead of constantly complaining about it or wondering if we might not be compatible with our spouse. “How much are you going to let the 10 percent of your differences dictate your future?” he asked. “Is anal sex more important than your marriage?”

I shared my friend’s observation with Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute who studies sexual attraction. She noted that even people who are satisfied with their sex lives often crave more nowadays. She told me about a study she conducted that asked participants who had had affairs why they did so. Fifty-six percent of her male subjects and 34 percent of her female subjects said they were “happy” or “very happy” in their partnerships but cheated anyway.

While past research has shown that men have higher rates of infidelity than women, those rates are becoming increasingly similar, particularly in younger people in developed countries, where recent studies have found no gender differences in extramarital sex among men and women under 40. This may be because younger women are more likely to be in peer marriages — and conditions in peer marriages make female infidelity more probable than in traditional ones. A large national study in the late 1990s found that women who were more educated than their husbands were more likely to engage in sexual infidelity than if they were less educated than their husbands. Studies also find that people who work outside the home and whose partners remain in the home cheat more — and the traditional gender roles in this situation are now frequently reversed. As women increasingly work in professions that are not female-dominated, they have more sexual opportunities with peers than ever.

Helen Fisher told me that women’s expectations for sexual fulfillment are changing so much that when she conducted a survey last year asking, “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” the least likely group to say yes was women over 60. At any age, companionship, it seems, is no longer enough of a draw on its own.

There’s a phrase I often use in therapy with couples: “competing needs.” What do partners do when they have needs that directly conflict with those of their spouses? What if both have to work on the same weekend or be out of town at the same time? Who goes to the school play or compromises without feeling resentful? It used to be that husbands and wives operated largely in their own spheres with so little overlap that these questions rarely came up. But women now make up almost half of the U.S. labor force, and 23 percent of married mothers with children under 18 have a higher income than their husbands. In fact, total income is higher in families in which the woman is the primary breadwinner. When a 2010 study of business-school graduates asked, “What is success to you?” surprisingly, it was more women than men who chose “career goals,” while more men than women picked “personal growth.”

As Sheryl Sandberg encourages women to “lean in” — by which she means that they should make a determined effort to push forward in their careers — it may seem as if women are truly becoming, as Gloria Steinem put it, “the men we want to marry.” But these professional shifts seem to influence marital stability. A study put out last year by the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that if a wife earns more than her husband, the couple are 15 percent less likely to report that their marriage is very happy; 32 percent more likely to report marital troubles in the past year; and 46 percent more likely to have discussed separating in the past year. Similarly, Lynn Prince Cooke found that though sharing breadwinning and household duties decreases the likelihood of divorce, that’s true only up to a point. If a wife earns more than her husband, the risk of divorce increases. Interestingly, Cooke’s study shows that the predicted risk of divorce is lowest when the husband does 40 percent of the housework and the wife earns 40 percent of the income.

Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and the author of “She Comes First,” sees couples struggle to find a ratio that works. “I work a lot with stay-at-home dads and men who work from home,” he said, “and one thing I hear a lot is that in theory they’re really happy balancing flexible work with stay-at-home responsibilities, while their wives are out working full-time in corporate jobs. But at the same time, a common complaint is that Mom comes home and feels guilty for being away all day, and so much time has to be made up connecting with the children, who take first priority, that these dads feel lost in the mix.” In many couples, Kerner says, the wives start to feel disgruntled because their husbands get to see more of the kids, and the husbands, whose wives are controlling more of the spending, start to feel “financially emasculated.” Sometimes, he says, a vicious cycle begins: The husband feels marginalized and less self-confident, which causes the wife to lose respect for and desexualize him. Under these circumstances, neither is particularly interested in sex with the other.

A writer who works from home in New York told me that was exactly what happened when he reduced his work hours and took on child-care responsibilities so that his wife could rise to partner at her company. According to him, she said, “When we met, you said this was going to be a two-income family.” And he said: “It is! Your income is bigger because I take care of the kid.” They would talk about it — given his flexibility, they both agreed it made more sense for him to do more at home — but the tension would resurface, and ultimately they stopped having sex.

Now that they are divorcing, he’s still confounded. “For all the men from the days of ‘Mad Men’ who felt like the woman’s place was in the home, all the sexist troglodytes who might have thought that way, or even the enlightened men who cared deeply about their partners’ happiness,” he said, “you could round up a thousand of them, and not one would say the woman should watch the kids, clean the house, do the cooking and at the same time make the same amount of money as the guy. So when my wife had those expectations, it seemed a bit unrealistic. She’d say, ‘I work 10 hours a day.’ I’d say, ‘I work 16, and half of those I don’t get paid for.’ ”

Certainly, there are couples who have no problem with, and even genuinely enjoy, these types of arrangements. But frequently I hear from husbands and wives who say they want progressive marriages, in which women have the option to do anything their husbands do and vice versa, then start to feel uncomfortable when that reality is in place. And that discomfort, more often than not, leads to less sexual desire — on both sides.

Recently, a male therapy client who came to me because he began feeling depressed said that he had tremendous empathy for what women have been voicing all these years. “I have to hold down a job, I have to juggle the kids’ schedules, I have to get dinner on the table three nights a week, I have to volunteer at school, I have to get the bills sent in each month and on top of this I have to be the fun dad and the sensitive husband and then be ready to romance my wife if I want sex before bed — usually after listening to the rundown of her day and going over the list of what needs to happen the next day,” he said. “I rarely even have time to get to the gym, which is the one thing that relieves my stress.” As he tries to balance work and parenthood and his marriage and household responsibilities, he’s going “a bit mad — and I mean that in both senses of the word.”

I asked how interested he was in having sex with his wife, and he looked at me and laughed.

I met my boyfriend online, and like many marriage-minded people clicking on search criteria, I was seeking a partner similar in intellect, background and interests. I shared this with Betsey Stevenson, a well-known economist who studies relationships and whose egalitarian partnership was profiled in The New York Times two years ago, and asked how she feels about so much similarity. In her view, she said, going through life with a peer is a positive development.

“It used to be,” she explained, “that you lived your life in one way, and he lived his in another. With equal partners, there’s more of a sense of people who are kindred spirits. Now you have people who have similar interests and lifestyles.”

On an emotional level, “kindred spirits” sounds lovely. But when it comes to sexual desire, biology seems to prefer difference. Helen Fisher, for one, pointed me to the famous “sweaty T-shirt” experiment, conducted in 1995 by the Swiss researcher Claus Wedekind. He had women sniff the unwashed T-shirts of various men and asked them which scent they were most attracted to. Most women selected the T-shirts of men with genes markedly different from their own in a certain part of the immune system. Other studies confirmed these findings. Presumably this attraction to genetic variation is an evolutionary adaptation to prevent incest in our ancestral environments and improve the survival prospects of offspring. Interestingly, a later experiment found that women partnered with men who had genes similar to their own in this part of the immune system were more likely to be unfaithful; and the more of these genes a woman shared with her partner, the more she was attracted to other men.

There’s an important exception, though. These findings didn’t apply when women were on the birth-control pill: They responded differently to the T-shirt test by selecting partners who had similar immunity and were less “other.” One study even suggested that when “a woman chooses her partner while she is on the pill and then comes off it to have a child, her hormone-driven preferences change, and she may find she is married to the wrong kind of man.”

Of course, we are not driven by biology alone. There were certainly some cultural factors that caused us to choose difference in the past. Until recently, Stephanie Coontz said, “the idea was that you’re only half a person and you can’t be complete unless you get the opposite half. Both men and women were trained to find attractive somebody who did things and had things and were things that they were not.” But now that women do and have and are many of the things that they used to seek in their partners, Pepper Schwartz says that a result can be something more siblinglike than erotic. Her research likewise suggests that too much similarity in egalitarian marriages leads to boredom and decreased sexual frequency. “When you’re best friends with your partner, there’s lessfrisson,” Schwartz says. “Introducing more distance or difference, rather than connection and similarity, helps to resurrect passion in long-term, stable relationships.” She also found that in lesbian couples in which there’s a high degree of intimate conversation, there’s less sex.

And yet a married friend who described his wife as his “best friend” said he was happy to take a high degree of simpatico over a high degree of sexual pull. “I can walk down the street and be attracted to 10 people and want to have sex with them,” he said, “but it doesn’t mean they’re going to make me happy. It doesn’t mean I’d want to live the day-to-day with them. There are always going to be trade-offs.”

Is the trade-off of egalitarian marriage necessarily less sexual heat? It’s possible that the sexual scripts we currently follow will evolve along with our marital arrangements so that sameness becomes sexy. Regardless, more people marrying today are choosing egalitarian setups for the many other benefits they offer. If every sexual era is unhappy in its own way, it may be that we will begin to think of the challenges of egalitarian marriages less as drawbacks and more like, well, life, with its inherent limitations on how exciting any particular aspect can be.

For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation. No way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night. No way of explaining how another went to sleep clothed, only to wake up naked and covered by dirty fingerprints all over her body. No way to understand how another could dream of a man forcing himself onto her in a field—and then wake up the next morning with grass in her hair.

For Sara Guenter, the mystery was the rope. She would sometimes wake up in her bed with small pieces of it tied tightly to her wrists or ankles, the skin beneath an aching blue. Earlier this year, I visited Sara at her home, simple concrete painted to look like brick, in Manitoba Colony, Bolivia. Mennonites are similar to the Amish in their rejection of modernity and technology, and Manitoba Colony, like all ultraconservative Mennonite communities, is a collective attempt to retreat as far as possible from the nonbelieving world. A slight breeze of soy and sorghum came off the nearby fields as Sara told me how, in addition to the eerie rope, on those mornings after she’d been raped she would also wake to stained sheets, thunderous headaches, and paralyzing lethargy.

Her two daughters, 17 and 18 years old, squatted silently along a wall behind her and shot me fierce blue-eyed stares. The evil had penetrated the household, Sara said. Five years ago, her daughters also began waking up with dirty sheets and complaints of pain “down below.”

The family tried locking the door; some nights, Sara did everything she could to keep herself awake. On a few occasions, a loyal Bolivian worker from the neighboring city of Santa Cruz would stay the night to stand guard. But inevitably, when their one-story home—set back and isolated from the dirt road—was not being watched, the rapes continued. (Manitobans aren’t connected to the power grid, so at night the community is submerged in total darkness.) “It happened so many times, I lost count,” Sara said in her native Low German, the only language she speaks, like most women in the community.

In the beginning, the family had no idea that they weren’t the only ones being attacked, and so they kept it to themselves. Then Sara started telling her sisters. When rumors spread, “no one believed her,” said Peter Fehr, Sara’s neighbor at the time of the incidents. “We thought she was making it up to hide an affair.” The family’s pleas for help to the council of church ministers, the group of men who govern the 2,500-member colony, were fruitless—even as the tales multiplied. Throughout the community, people were waking to the same telltale morning signs: ripped pajamas, blood and semen on the bed, head-thumping stupor. Some women remembered brief moments of terror: for an instant they would wake to a man or men on top of them but couldn’t summon the strength to yell or fight back. Then, fade to black. 

Some called it “wild female imagination.” Others said it was a plague from God. “We only knew that something strange was happening in the night,” Abraham Wall Enns, Manitoba Colony’s civic leader at the time, said. “But we didn’t know who was doing it, so how could we stop it?” 

No one knew what to do, and so no one did anything at all. After a while, Sara just accepted those nights as a horrific fact of life. On the following mornings, her family would rise despite the head pain, strip the beds, and get on with their days.

Then, one night in June 2009, two men were caught trying to enter a neighbor’s home. The two ratted out a few friends and, falling like a house of cards, a group of nine Manitoba men, ages 19 to 43, eventually confessed that they had been raping Colony families since 2005. To incapacitate their victims and any possible witnesses, the men used a spray created by a veterinarian from a neighboring Mennonite community that he had adapted from a chemical used to anesthetize cows. According to their initial confessions (which they later recanted), the rapists admitted to—sometimes in groups, sometimes alone—hiding outside bedroom windows at night, spraying the substance through the screens to drug entire families, and then crawling inside. 

But it wasn’t until their trial, which took place almost two years later, in 2011, that the full scope of their crimes came to light. The transcripts read like a horror movie script: Victims ranged in age from three to 65 (the youngest had a broken hymen, purportedly from finger penetration). The girls and women were married, single, residents, visitors, the mentally infirm. Though it’s never discussed and was not part of the legal case, residents privately told me that men and boys were raped, too. 

In August 2011, the veterinarian who’d supplied the anesthetic spray was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and the rapists were each sentenced to 25 years (five years shy of Bolivia’s maximum penalty). Officially, there were 130 victims—at least one person from more than half of all Manitoba Colony households. But not all those raped were included in the legal case, and it’s believed the true number of victims is much, much higher. 

In the wake of the crimes, women were not offered therapy or counseling. There was little attempt to dig deeper into the incidents beyond the confessions. And in the years since the men were nabbed, there has never been a colony-wide discussion about the events. Rather, a code of silence descended following the guilty verdict. 

“That’s all behind us now,” Civic Leader Wall told me on my recent trip there. “We’d rather forget than have it be at the forefront of our minds.” Aside from interactions with the occasional visiting journalist, no one talks about it anymore.

But over the course of a nine-month investigation, including an 11-day stay in Manitoba, I discovered that the crimes are far from over. In addition to lingering psychological trauma, there’s evidence of widespread and ongoing sexual abuse, including rampant molestation and incest. There’s also evidence that—despite the fact that the initial perpetrators are in jail—the rapes by drugging continue to happen.

THE FRONT BOTTOMS -- Au Revoir (Adios)

An excerpt from Chuck Klosterman's new book, I Wear the Black Hat.

I had to take a lot of psychological tests. These tests asked certain questions. One of the questions was, "When you walk into a room, do you think everybody's looking at you?" Yes! "When you walk into a room, do you feel people are talking about you?" Yeah, I do. Now, if a normal person says "yes" to those questions, they have some kind of complex. They have some kind of problem. But (for me), it's true. I know when I walk into a room, people are looking at me. I know when I walk into a restaurant, people are talking about me.

— O. J. Simpson, telling the truth

I didn't really seek attention. I just wanted to play the game well and go home.

— Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, being honest

IT'S unfair to write this, but I'm going to do it anyway: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and O. J. Simpson have a lot in common. We don't normally lump them together, because certain key contrasts are tricky  —  for example, one man is a Muslim intellectual and the other more or less decapitated his ex-wife. This is more than a significant detail. But let's think about that specific dissonance last. Before we examine what makes them different, here's what makes them similar …

Both are known by names that do not reflect their original identities. Abdul-Jabbar was born Lew Alcindor, which he changed for religious reasons; Simpson was born "Orenthal James" but chose to go by his initials for simplicity and panache.

Both attended college in Los Angeles during a period of massive social upheaval: Abdul-Jabbar arrived at UCLA in 1965, while Simpson showed up at USC in 1967.

Both were culturally defined by their response to identity politics. Jabbar refused to participate in the '68 Olympics in accordance with the black power movement and has recalled an "antiwhite" phase he explored during high school; Simpson is generally viewed as the first black athlete who was able to break into the white world of advertising endorsements on a national scale.

Both had high-profile relationships with white women (and were unjustly criticized for it).

Both began their professional careers in small markets (Abdul-Jabbar in Milwaukee, Simpson in Buffalo) and both finished on the West Coast (L.A. and San Francisco).

Both were the premier superstars of their respective sports throughout the 1970s. This is unquestionably true for Abdul-Jabbar, the winner of six NBA MVPs from 1971 to 1980. It's a more debatable designation for Simpson, but he was absolutely the best running back in an era dominated by the running game.

Both played at least one season longer than they should have.

Both became actors who are best remembered for supporting roles in absurdist, farcical comedies directed by David Zucker (Kareem in Airplane!, O.J. in the Naked Gunseries).

Both are  —  to wildly varying degrees — vilified figures. One was vilified slowly, for reasons that were shallow and often specious. The other was vilified suddenly and dramatically, in a way history will never forget. But they each illustrate something uncomfortable about the relationship between those who are famous and those who consume fame. There is a collective expectation that celebrities  —  and especially black celebrities  —  will calibrate their relationship to the public within a specific window of acceptable exposure. They will not be too private or too public. The size of the window is different for every person, but it always (somehow) exists. And if a celebrity drifts outside that space  —  in either direction, and for any purpose  —  that (somehow) validates whatever people believed about them in the first place.

  I am not, in any way, trying to argue that the "unpopularity" of O. J. Simpson is mainly a reflection of his media persona. This would be like claiming Christianity became popular because people trust beards. The reason Simpson is despised is because virtually all rational humans believe he brutally murdered his ex-wife Nicole Brown and a handsome waiter named Ronald Goldman (who happened to be at Brown's home when the killer showed up on the evening of June 12, 1994). After a trial that lasted almost a year, Simpson was found not guilty by a jury of his peers. It's still not totally clear how this happened. The best argument is that the Los Angeles Police Department wrecked the prosecution's case by attempting to frame an already guilty man. Another strong possibility is that the prosecuting attorneys were amazingly inept and choked under the pressure. Still another theory suggests that the jury was unconsciously equalizing centuries of racial unfairness by allowing the black Simpson to walk for a crime he clearly committed; a more insulting (but not impossible) hypothesis is that the members of the jury were not educated enough to understand the magnitude of the DNA evidence. There is, I suppose, the infinitesimal possibility that Simpson actually was innocent, and that the twelve members of the jury are the only twelve Americans who saw this case devoid of bias; a handful of rogue contrarians have made the argument that the murders were actually committed by O.J.'s son Jason, which is slightly less ridiculous than it sounds (but only slightly).

I'm not going to try and reprove the state's case against Simpson, because no person needs that. What I'm interested in is the period after Simpson's acquittal, considered from the (fictional) perspective of an honest, wrongly persecuted O.J. It necessitates an ethical question that is rarely asked: If you were wrongly accused of murder and found not guilty, how would you live the rest of your life, particularly if everyone in the world still believed you were the murderer?

"I advised him, and many people advised him, to do what Claus von Bülow did after he was acquitted [of trying to kill his wife]: disappear from the public view." These are the words of Alan Dershowitz, von Bülow's appellate lawyer in 1984 and an advisor to Simpson's defense team. He said these words in a documentary titled O.J.: Monster or Myth?, an ostensibly pro-Simpson film that makes O.J. seem extra guilty. "Of course, O. J. Simpson never followed that advice," Dershowitz continued. "On the night of the acquittal, he called in to The Larry King Show."

Because Simpson has always seemed so bombastically culpable, it's impossible to view his post-trial profile in any other way. But for a moment, let's pretend: Let's pretend that you are O.J. and that you are innocent. Let's pretend that someone you once loved was murdered, and every coherent person in the world assumed you were the killer. Let's pretend you were acquitted in a trial that everyone watched on television, so the espoused wrongheadedness of the outcome is culturally omnipresent. Let's also pretend your skin color is a central aspect of the conversation, and that you've already been famous for twenty-five years before any of this had happened, and that Joni Mitchell has written a song about you (sarcastically titled "Not to Blame") that doubles as a backhanded condemnation of Jackson Browne's relationship with Daryl Hannah.

How would you live the rest of your life?

There are three options:

The first option would be to leave the country and live as an exile in someplace like Australia or France. At first, this will seem like the smart move. It almost feels like the obvious move. But it has some glaring downsides. On a practical level, it would mean abandoning or uprooting your children (who, in theory, would now need you more than ever). Despite being found not guilty in the criminal trial, you would still need to return to the U.S. for the inevitable civil trial. But these are the small problems. The larger problems are more metaphoric. If you're innocent, leaving a country you love makes it seem like you're imprisoning yourself. It's like self-imposing a penalty for a crime you did not commit. More important, fleeing the country as an innocent personmakes you seem guilty. One assumes part of Alan Dershowitz's advisement to Simpson was based on the fact that Dershowitz never believed his client hadn't committed the crime he was acquitted of.

A second option would be to exit public life while remaining in America. This feels like a reasonable tactic. Yet it would be virtually hopeless, even in the bygone twentieth century. Simpson had been appearing on television commercials for over twenty years (most notably for Hertz rent-a-car) when he suddenly found himself featured on multiple TV networks, all day long, for over a year. This would not be a situation like J. D. Salinger, where only weirdos wanted to find you; you'd be hunted by tabloids on a daily basis (particularly if you were putting sincere effort into being unseen, thus making every image even more valuable). You also have to consider how unnatural this shift would feel to a person of O.J.'s stature; for most of his life, being famous was the best part of who he was. It was the intangible reward for being fast and difficult to tackle and socially intelligent; it granted him access to a tier of society that would have normally shut him out, and it allowed him to date women who looked like Nicole Brown.

The third option — and the one Simpson selected — was to actually live like the innocent person he portrayed himself to be. He actively looked for publicity and tried to monetize his experience (which seems callous, but — were he truly innocent — not undeserved). He played a shitload of golf. He went to all the Los Angeles restaurants he'd missed when he was in jail. He did not show any remorse, based on the principle that there was nothing for him to feel remorseful about; he did not express a preponderance of grief over the death of his ex-wife, but she'd now been dead for over a year. Imagine the emotional complexity of living inside that situation: Would there not be an overwhelming desire to return to the amazing life you once had? Would a return to this life not seem owed to you?

When considered objectively, Simpson's public profile during the late 1990s accurately reflects the reasonable response of a stubborn, egocentric person who did not murder two people. In a weird way, it's the strongest argument in his favor (and maybe the only one). But it was a terrible, terrible move — and not just because I believe he murdered those two people. It would have been a terrible move even if he had not. He forced people to hate him, even if they barely cared.

IT took me a while to figure out that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was not beloved. When I became obsessed with basketball in 1980, he was my second-favorite player, and I just assumed this opinion was roughly shared by everyone (because Kareem was the best player, and  —  since I was eight  —  I assumed people were obligated to respect whoever was the best at anything). But I slowly got the impression my dad didn't like him, and neither did my older brothers. And whenever people interviewed him on TV (about anything that wasn't directly tied to a game he'd just finished), the questions always seemed obtuse and insulting, and Kareem always seemed annoyed or bored (or both). In January of that year, Sports Illustrated ran a profile on Abdul-Jabbar titled "A Different Drummer" that depicted itself as evidence that Abdul-Jabbar was becoming a more open, less moody superstar (moody was the word everybody always used). But this, of course, is not how magazine profiles operate. When a reporter claims that his or her subject is evolving in a positive manner, it's inevitably a way to catalog every unspecific criticism that has ever been levied against that subject in the past. It allows the reporter to be negative without taking any responsibility (because how can a story be considered a hit piece if the alleged takeaway is how the target is becoming a better person?). The story opens with a description of how a crowd at the Forum did not boo when informed by the PA announcer that Abdul-Jabbar had a migraine headache. Was Kareem supposed to feel good about this? Is he supposed to be elated that people didn't blame him for being incapacitated? Later, the writer asks Abdul-Jabbar how he felt about the way the media had reversed its position on him, suddenly deciding that he was a better player than Bill Walton (who they'd collectively argued was the more complete NBA center in 1977): "I view that with total cynicism," he replied. Which was both a) the correct answer and b) proof that he wasn't changing at all.

If you tried to sum up Abdul-Jabbar's lifelong problem with the public into one thought, it would be that he was "not likable" — not necessarily unlikable, but distant and difficult to love. He had an adversarial emotional compass; it seemed like you were supposed to appreciate him more than you were supposed to root for him, which is acceptable in every idiom except sport. Like so many unusually tall people, it was hard for Kareem to seem ecstatic about playing basketball. The profession didn't feel like his choice. For agile seven-foot skeletons, basketball is rarely an obsession. It's a game they are pressured to pursue, usually before they turn thirteen years old. [Former NBA guard Steve Kerr has noted that a key exception to this inclination is Tim Duncan, a six-foot-eleven adult whose infectious love for basketball mirrors that of a caffeinated five-foot-eleven schoolboy. This might explain why Duncan is liked by almost everyone, despite sharing the same stoic, mechanical demeanor as Abdul-Jabbar.] If a great tailback decides that football is barbaric, he can run track or wrestle; if a gifted shortstop finds baseball unsatisfying, he can usually excel at golf or tennis. Undersized hoop prodigies are inevitably good at every possible athletic pursuit, so they've consciously selected basketball over everything else. [I have no doubt that — had he chosen differently — Steve Nash would have been the greatest soccer player in Canadian history.] But such alternatives do not exist for human giants, and Kareem is the best example. This is not to say that he hated the game of basketball, because that would be untrue (if you count high school, he played it for twenty-eight consecutive years). All it means is that Abdul-Jabbar didn't really have agency in the matter. There was no better option for how he could spend his life. And what made Kareem so different was his total unwillingness to pretend that he did not know this.

There's a B-side from the rock band Pearl Jam titled "Sweet Lew," written by guitarist Jeff Ament (the "Lew" in its title refers to Jabbar's Christian name). If you listen to the song casually, you wouldn't immediately perceive it as a criticism of Abdul-Jabbar, as the lyrics are mostly complimentary and kind of juvenile ["Wilt the Stilt had nothing on you / Lambchops and Afro-do, Milwaukee Bucks and a barbecue"]. But Ament's interior motive for writing the song was based on a negative encounter he had with Abdul-Jabbar upon meeting him at a charity event. Ament (a lifelong hoop fan and a decent player as a high school student in Montana) was deeply hurt by Abdul-Jabbar's abject lack of interest toward his personal fandom. He didn't even pretend to care. This is telling. What made Pearl Jam dissimilar from their platinum-selling peers (most notably Nirvana) was that — despite being completely suffocated by a level of fame they did not anticipate — they still felt an obligation to appreciate the people who bought their records. Perhaps they did this naturally, or perhaps they did this as a social compulsion. Either way, Pearl Jam has always felt a responsibility to return whatever adoration was directed toward their existence. The motive of that return is beside the point, because the effort is what matters. It's certainly possible to dislike Pearl Jam's music, but you can't hate them as people, unless a) you believe they are somehow fake and b) you have some kind of teenage punk fixation on realness. To any normal person, a facsimile of gratitude is enough; that facsimile is an acceptable amount of emotional access. When Ament met Abdul-Jabbar, all Kareem needed to say was, "Thanks, man. That means a lot. Good luck with your life." He would not have needed to mean any of those words. Even if he'd been transparently acting, it would have been enough to satisfy a person who had pre-decided to love him. But Abdul-Jabbar can't do that. He can't ignore the stupidity of that false relationship, which is why a song like "Sweet Lew" exists. Kareem (being Kareem) loves jazz music — but even if he loved rock, he'd never relate to Pearl Jam (except for maybe "Corduroy"). He would prefer mid-period Rush: "I can't pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend."

As he's moved into the winter of his life, Abdul-Jabbar has grown conscious of his image and has tried to evolve into a conventionally nice celebrity — which is disappointing on two levels. He has grown more patient with interviewers, partially because they have migrated to his side: It seems increasingly absurd that this intelligent, well-spoken, socially conscious person who is the all-time leading scorer in the history of basketball cannot get a job as an NBA head coach, simply because he's not super friendly. He had a cancer scare in 2008, so that generated some warranted sympathy; as an author, he's probably done more for the lost history of twentieth-century African-Americans than every other athlete combined. He made a cameo on a sitcom starring Zooey Deschanel, and it's so goofy and superfluous that only a jerk could criticize the decision. Muslims don't drink alcohol, but Kareem still endorsed Coors. If he's a villain, he's the best possible kind. Still, there are parts of his personal history that will never evaporate. He may ultimately be remembered more affectionately than anyone would have guessed in 1980, but that turnaround will always be framed as a surprise. He played the game, but he didn't play The Game. He refused to pretend that his life didn't feel normal to the person inside it, and he refused to pretend that other people's obsession with abnormality required him to act like the man he wasn't.

THERE'S very little about the life of O. J. Simpson that could be classified as "under-reported." However, I can think of one element that totally is: His 2007 memoir,If I Did It. The existence of this book is deeply, vastly, hysterically underrated. My natural inclination is to try and compare it to something equally unusual, but I can't isolate a comparison. I want to write something along the lines of "If I Did It is as bizarre as _________," but no cultural minutia fits in that space. Roman Polanski would have to make a biopic about Charles Manson's music career.

Let me first describe what this book is: It's the nonfiction story of Simpson's relationship with Nicole Brown, plus one fictional chapter (near the end) in which O.J. explains how he would have killed Nicole, always staying within the facts and parameters of the actual homicide. After 123 pages of straightforward romantic memoir, O.J. casually drops in the following one-sentence paragraph …

Now picture this — and keep in mind, this is hypothetical:

What follows that sentence are fifteen pages written exactly like the previous 123, except that we are now supposed to assume all the actions described are some nightmarish fantasy Simpson created for our entertainment. When I first purchased the book, I assumed this section would be a description of "murder strategy," in which O.J. describes how a clever person would have committed these crimes (as opposed to the brutal, unsubtle manner in which they actually occurred). But this is not the case. Instead O.J. creates a second character (a fellow he calls Charlie) who rides along with him to Brown's bungalow and watches him stab Brown and Goldman to death in an act of animalistic rage. Nothing is delivered in a theoretical context. There's lots of profane dialogue throughout the passage, and the phrases are amazingly specific (at one point, O.J. imagines himself saying, "Fuck that. I'm tired of being the understanding ex-husband"). When he "fictionalizes" the physical confrontation with Goldman, he describes his adversary's fighting posture precisely and mocks Goldman's attempts at karate. It's expressed like a memory, and I'm almost certain that's what it is. The inclusion of the Charlie character is the only thing that makes it seem unlike the conventional view of what happened that night; I'm not sure if Charlie is supposed to be a literary device (so that O.J. has a vessel to turn his interior monologue into a printable conversation) or if this is some perverse attempt at implicating Simpson's buddy A. C. Cowlings as an accessory to murder. The "fabricated" anecdote ends back at Simpson's residence, where O.J. describes how he would (did?) manage to sneak back into the house and take a shower before leaving for LAX and flying to Chicago; at this point, If I Did It resumes being a memoir, in which Simpson gives his account of the arrest and the days that followed (it also includes a full transcript of his first interview with the LAPD). In other words, this is a short book in which a guy intimately describes his bad marriage (which is supposed to be real), how that relationship made him feel (which is also supposed to be real), a detailed account of his ex-wife's murder (which is supposed to be unreal), and the man's memories of what happened in the wake of her death (which is not only real, but verified by audio tape). And it's all written in the same voice, seemingly for the same purpose.

The story behind the publication of If I Did It is part of the reason this book is destined to become a lost artifact, despite its temporary status as a bestseller: The book was originally a pure money grab: Simpson and his cowriter (screenwriter Pablo Fenjves, a neighbor of Brown's who paradoxically testified against O.J. during the '94 trial) were to cobble the book together for Judith Regan, a highly successful, highly unscrupulous publishing magnate with HarperCollins, a company owned by News Corp. The machinations of what was really going on here remain unclear; Fenjves was told that the revenue would go toward Simpson's children, while Regan later alleged that her only motive for publishing the memoir was to prove Simpson's guilt. Regardless, the book was aborted before it came out. The public was predictably outraged by what it assumed If I Did It would be, and further incensed by a TV special that was intended to coincide with the book's release (in theory, Barbara Walters was going to interview Simpson during the November ratings sweeps). For a moment, it looked as if If I Did It would never exist. (HarperCollins reportedly destroyed four hundred thousand copies of the book before it went on sale.) But then something even more bizarre occurred: A bankruptcy court in Florida awarded the rights to If I Did It to Ron Goldman's estate. As one might expect, the Goldman family had always been very, very against the book on the grounds that it exploited the death of their son. But Simpson (despite his victory in the criminal trial) had been found guilty in the civil suit filed by the Goldmans and now owed them $33 million. And since Simpson was living in Florida — a state whose bankruptcy laws were heavily tilted in O.J.'s favor — the Goldmans were never going to see any of that money. So a judge decreed that the Goldmans could publish If I Did It as financial compensation for Ron Goldman's death. The family made some key changes to the book's presentation, most notably the addition of a not-so-subtle subtitle ("Confessions of the Killer") and one of the most consciously misleading book covers in the history of literature: The words I DID IT are printed as large as possible in red, while the minuscule word IF is lodged inside the letter I.

My copy doesn't even have O.J.'s name on the cover, a crazy idea that makes total sense. The reason it makes sense is that people still do not like the idea of O. J. Simpson writing this book. They want to imagine that the book was created against his will. If you don't believe me, try reading If I Did It in public. The moment anyone figures out what you're actually holding, they reflexively embrace (or feign) disgust.

"Why would you want to read that?" a writer friend of mine asked when I told him how fascinating it was.

"Because it's a murderer writing about murdering people while still pretending he's innocent," I said. "It's totally unique. Would you prefer to read an essay by a journalist who interviewed O.J. about this situation?"

"Well, yes," said my friend. "That would be great."

"Would you want to read a roman à clef about an ex–football player who murders two people and escapes prosecution?"

"That might also be okay," said my friend. "It would depend on the execution. But those are different situations. It's just fucked up that O.J. is the author of the book you're reading."

"He didn't make any money off it," I replied. "Why is someone interpreting the event a better source than the person directly involved?"

"Because he's obviously lying," my friend said. "And it's just weird."

It is weird. That's true. The book is nuts. But that really wasn't my friend's argument. He was using the word weird in place of the word wrong, because wrong seems self-righteous. "It's just wrong" seems like something Mitch Albom would say about If I Did It. But this wrongness — this abstract wrongness that can't be verbally justified, because it harms no one — is why O. J. Simpson is despised in such a culturally penetrating context. It's a hatred that transcends his alleged crimes or his ability to divert justice. When Lizzie Borden was acquitted of her parents' murder in 1893, the people of New England were outraged — but Lizzie didn't taunt the public for failing to convict her. She just moved into a nice house with her sister and became a recluse. A century later, Borden is "hated" by no one; anyone captivated by her life is predisposed to think about the murders from her perspective (and to hunt for any clue that might validate her improbable innocence). Over time, the public will grow to accept almost any terrible act committed by a celebrity; everything eventually becomes interesting to those who aren't personally involved. But Simpson does not allow for uninvolvement. He exceeds the acceptable level of self-directed notoriety and changes the polarity of the event; by writing this book, he makes it seem like the worst part of Brown and Goldman's murder was what happened to him, and that he perversely wants the world to remember that he killed them (even if he's somehow internally convinced himself that he did not, which is what I always assumed during the trial). He keeps reminding people that he is famous because two other people are dead.

There are many, many sports fans who believe Kobe Bryant raped a woman in 2003 and was never penalized.

Nothing — nothing — has happened in the subsequent ten years that would lead anyone to be convinced Kobe was wrongly accused. But Bryant refuses to acknowledge that the incident even occurred. He won't answer any question related to the accusation and just pretends like he doesn't remember anything about it. A lot of people still hate him for this, but they can't access the incident in question. It's now a footnote to the rest of his life. They have to hate him for other things, so they accuse him of shooting too much and being a terrible teammate and trying to be cooler than he actually is. We have to inject our distaste for his alleged crime into things that don't really matter, so most of the criticism comes across as unfair and ad hominem. Kobe (probably) did something bad in Colorado, but he handled it perfectly. O.J. keeps doing the opposite. He elects to tell a terrible story that cannot not be interesting, because he's the only person alive who can know what he knows. There is no comparable text to If I Did It. If the only thing that mattered about reality was the proliferation of information and perspective, it would be an invaluable document. But nobody thinks this way, except maybe me. If I Did It teaches us nothing we consciously want to know. It only proves that O.J. knows the most about what happened on June 12, and that he doesn't care at all.

Shell: I was lucky enough to run into Tim O'Reilly's talk for the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast series created by Stanford University. His advice? Make a positive social impact.

Wired: Your new credo these days is “Create more value than you capture.” What does that mean?

Tim O’Reilly: Everybody wants to foster entrepreneurship, but we have to think about the preconditions for entrepreneurship. You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure that nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation.

So many technologies start out with a burst of idealism, democratization, and opportunity, and over time they close down and become less friendly to entrepreneurship, to innovation, to new ideas. Over time the companies that become dominant take more out of the ecosystem than they put back in. We saw this happen with Microsoft. It started out with a big vision: How do we get a PC on every desk and in every home? It was profoundly democratizing. But when Microsoft got on top, it slowly started choking off the pathways to success for everybody else. It stopped creating more value than it captured.

Wired: So how do you turn that around?

O’Reilly: At our company, we do it by marketing big ideas instead of our own products. To promote change elsewhere, you start by talking. I once had a conversation with Eric Schmidt where I was urging him to consider the notion that “Create more value than you capture” might be a better metric for Google to use in judging its actions than “Don’t be evil.” One is measurable, the other more subjective. And Google does seem to think about this a lot. But generally there’s just not enough awareness of it. Pursuing this path is not only altruistic. If companies don’t think systemically enough—if they try to capture too much of the value—eventually innovation moves somewhere else.

Wired: If you could pick a company that needs to hear this, which would it be?

O’Reilly: Apple. They’re clearly on the wrong path. They file patent suits that claim that nobody else can make a device with multitouch. But they didn’t invent multitouch. They just pushed the ball forward and applied it to the phone. Now they want to say, “OK, we got value from someone else, but it stops now.” That attitude creates lockup in the industry. And I think Apple is going to lose its mojo precisely because they try to own too much.

Wired: How about Amazon? Is it a killer or an enabler?

O’Reilly: It’s both. Amazon is clearly trying to own the entire stack. They ate most of the retail part of the stack, and now they’re trying to eat the publisher part of the stack. On the other hand, Amazon is doing so many good things—their cloud-computing initiatives have been earthshaking, and I give Jeff Bezos great kudos for getting the publishing industry to move seriously toward ebooks. I am so impressed with them. I just wish they were a little less ruthless.

Wired: In the early days of the Obama administration, you predicted that Internet values would change government. But a lot of technology people got disenchanted by how hard it was to change things.

O’Reilly: I wouldn’t say they’re disenchanted but that they’re burned out. Everybody who goes into government gets somewhat chewed up in the process. Being a senior appointee is like being at a startup, only more so: You run into opposition from the entrenched oligopoly of contractors whose business model is to extract as much money from government as possible for doing as little as possible. At O’Reilly, when we first found out about the World Wide Web and recognized its potential, we went around to all the phone companies to get them to provide Internet access with the Global Network Navigator as a front end. They didn’t listen. And when we went to publishers to talk about pushing books online, they had zero interest. It’s very similar when you’re trying to bring new ideas to government. People are comfortable with what they’re doing, and they don’t see the future coming at them. There’s that great story in the book of Jeremiah where he’s been preaching and nobody’s paying attention, and he feels that he might as well be preaching to the ground. Well, I was out there being Jeremiah.

Wired: It sounds like that’s the thinking behind a project you advise, Code for America, which places programmers into city governments so they can build new applications and software.

O’Reilly: Yes, founder Jen Pahlka figured that instead of talking about how government should change, you have to demonstrate how to do it. The key output of Code for America is not apps, it’s culture change. The teams tackle projects that officials have been told will take years and cost millions, and they do it in six weeks. The people in government wind up asking, “What’s wrong with us?” It makes an impact.

Wired: You’re a publisher and big reader as well as a technologist. What is the future for books?

O’Reilly: Well, what kind of book do you mean? Because there are many, many things that were put into codices that have no particular reason to be books. Things like paper maps and atlases are just gone. Online dictionaries and online encyclopedias have killed printed dictionaries and encyclopedias. I collect how-to books of various kinds just because I want to have them. And certainly if there were a major disaster, a book could be a useful thing to have. But I don’t really give a shit if literary novels go away. They’re an elitist pursuit. And they’re relatively recent. The most popular author in the 1850s in the US wasn’t Herman Melville writing Moby-Dick, you know, or Nathaniel Hawthorne writing The House of the Seven Gables. It was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow writing long narrative poems that were meant to be read aloud. So the novel as we know it today is only a 200-year-old construct. And now we’re getting new forms of entertainment, new forms of popular culture.

Wired: What about the argument that the Internet shortens attention spans and will kill the demand for long books?

O’Reilly: I do think that there are pieces of sustained argument that deserve to be in books, but most extended-argument books are inflated. You know, there are an awful lot of books that are pretty lousy, and I don’t think we need to be pissing and moaning because there are fewer of them. On the other hand, I’m listening now to a wonderful audiobook, The Swerve, about the rediscovery of Lucretius. It’s erudite, it’s well written, and I’m hanging on every word. So I think what will happen to long books is that people will have to get better at writing them.

Wired: Even though you were an early advocate of the web, did you understand its potential?

O’Reilly: I had no idea it would be as big as it became. I still remember in 1993 my partner Dale Dougherty originally wanted to do Global Network Navigator as a quarterly online magazine. And I remember saying to him, “Dale, I think people will have the web browser open on the desk every day. We have to think about them accessing it every day.” I had no idea that it would be every minute.

Wired: Just as you were early to recognize the Internet movement, you helped Dougherty start Makemagazine in 2005, at the beginning of the DIY revolution.

O’Reilly: Yes, but the maker movement is more than just DIY. A lot of people’s thinking about the movement is stuck in the past. DIY is great—getting your hands on things, knowing how things work. But the maker movement is also about new possibilities of hardware, like putting multitouch screens on phones for the first time. Makers like Jeff Han at NYU were doing that. So you can say that the first great product to come out of the maker movement is Apple’s iPhone.

Wired: You also pioneered the ad hoc “unconference” with the Foo Camp, where around 200 “friends of O’Reilly” make up the agenda in real time. How did those start, and what have you learned from them?

O’Reilly: We did the very first Foo Camp in 2003. It was in the middle of the dotcom bust, and we had a lot of empty space. It was really for fun, a thank-you to all the people who had given us the gift of their time, attention, and ideas over the years. The output is not what we learn but what they learn. It goes back to creating more value than you capture. I love helping people make new connections. Heck, my daughter met her husband at Foo Camp!

Wired: While your company has done well, it never experienced the hypergrowth of other successful tech businesses. Do you ever look back and think, “Hey, I saw that first—why aren’t I a billionaire?”

O’Reilly: Not really. First of all, I’m very, very aware of the role of luck in all of that. It’s certainly true that if we had been different people, we could have done something. You know, there were a number of times when I passed up venture capital because I preferred to build something for the long term. I certainly have felt bad for some of my employees—they see people who joined some odd startup and became wealthy. We haven’t been able to monetize at the same level, but I feel really good about what I’ve accomplished and the choices I’ve made. I’ve seen too many O’Reilly employees who wanted to make their fortune and left for the startup world. And they joined two or three startups that proceeded to fail. I think of one guy who was so critical that I wasn’t making a fortune for him—now he’s a sommelier somewhere. There are way too many people in Silicon Valley who have a lottery mentality, and way too many people who won the lottery who shouldn’t have. I hope that they take their good fortune and use it for good.

Wired: Do you think that, in general, there’s a disconnect between the tech world and the rest of the country?

Hi Max,

Thank you for your recent email. I’m glad you enjoyed my visit to your school and that I was able to autograph your book. I’m just happy kids your age know who I am let alone ask me for advice. You wanted to know the best way to become a professional basketball player.

The first part of my advice you’re probably not going to like very much. Ready? Here it comes: Go to college, study really hard, and get good grades. I know the life of a pro looks pretty glamorous with fancy cars and lots of money, but the truth is that money doesn’t make life interesting and neither does just playing basketball. What makes life really fun is interacting with all kinds of people and if all you can do is talk about the shot you made or the ball you stole, you won’t be very interesting to people.

Also, life is long but basketball careers can be short. Injuries, age, or just better players make the average length of the pro career about six years. Mine was twenty years, but that’s unusual. Even with my long career, I’ve been retired from the game longer than I played it, which is why I’m so grateful I studied so hard at UCLA. My studies in history and English have made it possible for me to become a writer rather than just a guy who used to play basketball.

Now, if that scared you off, then you never really wanted to be a pro, because a pro can’t be scared off. He or she can’t picture anything else but themselves playing on that court night after night. There is no one path to becoming a pro, but there are some general guidelines that might help:

1.     Practice every spare moment you can.

2.     Never neglect your studies for basketball.

3.     Don’t rely only on the moves you’re already good at. Keep developing new skills. Each skill you have that someone else doesn’t makes you that much more valuable on a team.

4.     Go to college and play your heart out, but don’t go to college just to play. Treat it as an extra-curricular activity—one that you love, but that’s not as important as your studies.

Hope that helps, Max. Good luck to you.

Kareem

In the city of Naples and the surrounding countryside of Campania, Italy, the Mafia has controlled the waste-management industry for decades – dumping and burning trash across its rolling hills and vineyards. In 1994, the European Union declared the situation an official environmental emergency, and things have only gotten worse since then. VBS investigates and finds mutated sheep, poisoned mozzarella, alarming rates of cancer, and pissed off farmers ready to push back against the Camorra, Italy’s most powerful and dangerous criminal organization (and the government that enables it).