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Most men and women I talk to about Internet dating are confused by it. When there is a surplus of women, or a perceived surplus of women, the whole mating system tends to shift towards short-term dating.

Call 646-494-3590 with your stories and thoughts about porn— like how you came across the strangest porn, or hottest fetishes, of your life. Davis, Maureen O'Connor, and David Wallace-Wells. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation.

New York Magazine's Sex Lives

You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I. Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions. TACT transferred the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I. In the beginning, TACT was restricted to the Upper East Side, an early sexual-revolution testing ground. The demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx, most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers had signed on. Over time, TACT expanded to the rest of New York. It would invite dozens of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief media blitz. They wound up in the pages of the New York Herald Tribune and in Cosmopolitan. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week, which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and two years afterward they were married. Ross had hoped that TACT would help him meet someone, and, in a way, it had. After a couple of years, Ross grew bored with TACT and went into finance instead. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a fad. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute. Online dating sites, whatever their more mercenary motives, draw on the premise that there has got to be a better way. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. Some add an extra layer of projection and interpretation; they adhere to a certain theory of compatibility, rooted in psychology or brain chemistry or genetic coding, or they define themselves by other, more readily obvious indicators of similitude, such as race, religion, sexual predilection, sense of humor, or musical taste. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. Society—family, tribe, caste, church, village, probate court—established and enforced its connubial protocols for the presumed good of everyone, except maybe for the couples themselves. The criteria for compatibility had little to do with mutual affection or a shared enthusiasm for spicy food and Fleetwood Mac. As for romantic love, it was an almost mutually exclusive category of human experience. As much as it may have evolved, in the human animal, as a motivation system for mate-finding, it was rarely given great consideration in the final reckoning of conjugal choice. The twentieth century reduced it all to smithereens. The Pill, women in the workforce, widespread deferment of marriage, rising divorce rates, gay rights—these set off a prolonged but erratic improvisation on a replacement. The obvious advantage of online dating is that it provides a wider pool of possibility and choice. In some respects, for the masses of grownups seeking mates, either for a night or for life, dating is an attempt to approximate the collegiate condition—that surfeit both of supply and demand, of information and authentication. A college campus is a habitat of abundance and access, with a fluid and fairly ruthless vetting apparatus. A city also has abundance and access, especially for the young, but as people pair off, and as they corral themselves, through profession, geography, and taste, into cliques and castes, the range of available mates shrinks. We run out of friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. You can get to thinking that the single ones are single for a reason. If your herd is larger, your top choice is likely to be better, in theory, anyway. This can cause problems. You fall prey to the tyranny of choice—the idea that people, when faced with too many options, find it harder to make a selection. If you are trying to choose a boyfriend out of a herd of thousands, you may choose none of them. Or you see someone until someone better comes along. It can turn people into products. For some, of course, there is no end game; Internet dating can be sport, an end in itself. The Internet can arrange this for you. But if you really are eager, to say nothing of desperate, for a long-term partner you may have to contend with something else—the tyranny of unwitting compromise. Often the people who go on the sites that promise you a match are so primed to find one that they jump at the first or the second or the third who comes along. The people who are looking may not be the people you are looking for. Some hitters swing at every first pitch, and others always strike out looking. Many sites, either because of their methods or because of their reputations, tend to attract one or the other. It is now the biggest dating site in the world and is itself the biggest aggregator of other dating sites; under the name Match, it owns thirty in all, and accounts for about a quarter of the revenues of its parent company, I. In 2010, fee-based dating Web sites grossed over a billion dollars. According to a recent study commissioned by Match. For many people in their twenties, accustomed to conducting much of their social life online, it is no less natural a way to hook up than the church social or the night-club-bathroom line. There are thousands of dating sites; the big ones, such as Match. Free sites rely on advertising. ScientificMatch attempts to pair people according to their DNA, and claims that this approach leads to a higher rate of female orgasms. A site called Ashley Madison notoriously connects cheating spouses. Your suggestion should theoretically be a sufficient signal of your taste and imagination, and an impetus for getting off-line as soon as possible. Apparently, a big winner has been a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. The cutting edge is in mobile and location-based technology, such as Grindr, a smartphone app for gay men that tells subscribers when there are other willing subscribers in their vicinity. Many Internet dating companies, including Grindr, are trying to devise ways to make this kind of thing work for straight people, which means making it work for straight women, who may not need an app to know that they are surrounded by willing straight men. Most of the Internet dating sites still rely, as TACT did, on the questionnaire. The raw material, in the matching process, is a mass of stated preference: your desire or intolerance for certain traits and characteristics. Many of the sites make do with that alone. The more sophisticated ones attempt to identify and exploit the dissonance between what you say you want and what you really appear to want, through the choices you make online. He is one of those guys who say they enjoy dating. After taking stock of your stated and revealed preferences, the software finds people on the site who have similar dissonances between the two, and uses their experiences to approximate what yours should be. You may have sent introductory messages to only two people, and marked a few others with a wink—a nonverbal expression of interest—but Match will have hundreds of people in its database who have done a lot more on the site, and whose behavior yours seems to resemble. From them, depending on the degree of correlation, the software extrapolates about you. The trick is in weighting each variable. How significant is hair-color dissonance? Do political views, or fan allegiances, matter? The weightings can change over time, as nuances or tendencies emerge. And sometimes behavior changes—political opinion matters more in an election year, for example—and the algorithms scramble to keep up. The first, as it happens, was with the eldest daughter of Robert Ross, the founder of TACT. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and this hurts that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us. For the next date, on the advice of a classmate from Staten Island, who claimed to have dating experience, I took a sophomore I liked to a T. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other. Instead, I went out for coffee or drinks with various women who, according to their friends, had had extraordinary or, at least, numerous adventures dating online. To the extent that a date can sometimes feel like an interview, these interviews often felt a little like dates. We sized each other up. We doled out tidbits of immoderate disclosure. Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them—not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums. A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. Everyone these days seems to have an online-dating story or a friend with online-dating stories. Pervasiveness has helped to chip away at the stigma; people no longer think of online dating as a last resort for desperadoes and creeps. The success story is a standard of the genre. But anyone who has spent a lot of time dating online, and not just dabbling, has his or her share of horror stories, too. Earlier this year, a Los Angeles filmmaker named Carole Markin sued Match. They suggest that all good dates may be alike but that each bad one is bad in its own way. A few days later, the company announced that it would start checking subscribers against the national registry of sex offenders. To some extent, such incidents, as terrible as they are, merely reflect the frequency of such transactional hazards in the wider world. They are just awkward, or excruciating. One woman, a forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two, likened them to airplane crashes: the trouble usually occurs during takeoff and landing—the minute you meet and the minute you leave. If not, it becomes clear at the end of the evening, when he sticks his tongue down your throat. One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns—as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs. The dating profile, like the Facebook or Myspace profile, is a vehicle for projecting a curated and stylized version of oneself into the world. Demonstrating the ability, and the inclination, to write well is a rough equivalent to showing up in a black Mercedes. Sometimes he neglects to mention that he is a convicted felon. OK Cupid, in an analysis of its own data, has confirmed what I heard anecdotally: that men exaggerate their income by twenty per cent and their height by two inches , perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others. But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment. It is an axiom of Internet dating that everyone allegedly has a sense of humor, even if evidence of it is infrequently on display. Demonstrating funniness can be fraught. Good writing on Internet dating sites may be rare because males know that the best way to get laid is to send messages to as many females as possible. The come-on becomes spam and gums up the works, or scares women away, which in turn can lead to a different kind of gender disparity: a room full of dudes. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys. They exaggerate their height and salary. They hide their bald spots and back fat. Each has a distinct personality and a carefully curated profile—a look, a strong side, and, to borrow from TACT, a philosophy of life values. Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders. OK Cupid, in its profile, comes across as the witty, literate geek-hipster, the math major with the Daft Punk vinyl collection and the mumblecore screenplay in development. Dating sites have for the most part always had either a squalid or a chain-store ambience. OK Cupid, with a breezy, facetious tone, an intuitive approach, and proprietary matching stratagems, comes close to feeling like a contemporary Internet product, and a pastime for the young. Owing to high traffic and a sprightly character, OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought, for fifty million dollars, by Match. While still in school, in the late nineties, they created a successful company called the Spark, which composed and posted online study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes. At the time, they experimented with a dating site called SparkMatch. To solve the chicken-egg conundrum of a dating site—to attract users, you need users—they created a handful of quizzes, chief among them the Dating Persona Test. They also urged people to submit their own quizzes. By now, users have submitted more than forty-three thousand quizzes to the site. Essentially, OK Cupid opened a parlor-game emporium and then got down to the business of pairing off the patrons. The quizzes had no bearing on the matching, and at this point they are half-hidden on the site. They were merely bait—a pickup line, a push-up bra. There is a different question regimen for matching. On OK Cupid, the questions are submitted by users. The questions are ranked in order of how effective they are at sorting people. And yet some questions are unpredictably predictive. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings. There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions. That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other. OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it. The purpose of the blog is to attract attention: the findings, like the quizzes, are to lure you in. Rudder has written a lot about looks: whether or not it helps to show cleavage women or a bare midriff men —the answers were Yes, Especially as You Age, and Yes, If You Have Good Abs and Are Not a Congressman. The matching algorithms take these ratings into account and show you people who are roughly within your range of attractiveness, according to the opinions of others. The idea behind the matching algorithms, Chris Coyne told me, is to replicate the experience you have off-line. Does she like dancing? Does she smoke pot? Is she a furry? On the Internet, people will ask—and answer—extremely personal questions. The algorithms find the people out there whose answers best correspond to yours—how yours fit their desires and how theirs meet yours, and according to what degree of importance. The match is expressed as a percentage. Each match search requires tens of millions of mathematical operations. To the extent that OK Cupid has any abiding faith, it is in mathematics. And that creates a shitty situation. Some women get overwhelmed. The goal is to connect you with someone with whom you have enough in common to want to strike up an e-mail correspondence and then quickly meet in person. OK Cupid winds up with a lot of data. This enables the researchers to conjure from their database the person you may not realize you have in mind. In no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions. It is a gold mine for social scientists. In the past nine months, OK Cupid has sold its raw data redacted or made anonymous to protect the privacy of its customers to half a dozen academics. Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Yale and Stanford, respectively, are sifting through OK Cupid data to determine how political opinions factor in to choosing social partners. The four are Sam Yagan, the C. As they all like to say, Sam is the business, Chris is the product, Max is the tech, and Christian is the blog. Yagan, who is thirty-four, is also the face. He makes grandiose claims with a mixture of mirth and sincerity. The search for companionship is more important than the search for song lyrics. He commutes to New York every week, bunking in a hotel. Rudder, who is thirty-five and from Little Rock, met his wife, a public-relations executive from Long Island named Reshma Patel, twelve years ago through friends. They live in a modest apartment in Williamsburg, and often have friends over at night to play German board games. She is from Manhattan and works in the education department at the Frick Collection. They were classmates at Harvard, but they met again a few years later outside a night club in New York. He had a drunken woman on each arm. Chris and Jennie began e-mailing each other, and eventually went out on a date. She considers herself an excellent matchmaker, with a well-tested compatibility theory of her own—that a man and a woman should look alike. They were engaged within a year. They moved into an apartment in the same building as her parents: the San Remo, on Central Park West. Serendipity and coincidence are the photosynthesis of romance, hinting at some kind of supernatural preordination, the sense that two people are made for each other. The Internet subverts Kismet. And yet Coyne and his wife both have a profile on the site, and the algorithms have determined that she is his No. He is her No. She struck up a correspondence with her No. For all the fun that twenty-somethings are having hooking up with their Hornivores, their Sonnets, and their Poolboys, it turns out that the fastest-growing online-dating demographic is people over fifty—a function perhaps of expanding computer literacy and diminished opportunity. She lives outside Boston. As a single mother, in her forties, she gave up men for a while. When her son was ready to go to college, she started dating again. Through a dating service, she met an economist, who was eight years younger than she. They lived together for a decade. And that was that. A nice guy from Vermont drove all the way down to see me. She met a mathematician who lived in Amsterdam, and flew over to meet him but discovered within minutes that he suffered from full-blown O. They got together for coffee at Café Pamplona, in Cambridge. He was handsome, charming, and bright. He invited her to accompany him to Norway to meet the Queen. She has gone online as a man, just to survey the terrain, and estimates that in her age range women outnumber men ten to one. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony. EHarmony is the squarest of the sites, the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse. It was launched, in 2000, by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. From his own research, and his review of the academic and clinical literature, he concluded that two people were more likely to stay together, and stay together happily, if they shared certain psychological traits. As he has often said, opposites attract—and then they attack. He designed eHarmony to identify and align these shared traits, and to keep opposites away from each other. Warren was also a seminarian and a devout Christian, and eHarmony started out as a predominantly Christian site. The evangelical conservative James Dobson, through his organization Focus on the Family, had published advice books that Warren had written and provided early support and publicity for eHarmony. As it has grown into the second-biggest fee-based dating service in the world, eHarmony has expanded and shed its more orthodox orientation, and severed its connections to Dobson. In 2009, under pressure from a slew of class-action lawsuits, it created a separate site specifically for homosexuals. The director of the lab, and the senior director of research and development at eHarmony, is a psychologist named Gian Gonzaga. He and his staff bring in couples and observe them as they perform various tasks. Then they come to conclusions about the human condition, which they put to use in improving their matching algorithms and, perhaps just as important, in getting out the word that they are doing so. There is a touch of Potemkin in the enterprise. One night in March, Gonzaga invited me to observe a session that was part of a five-year longitudinal study he is conducting of three hundred and one married couples. EHarmony had solicited them on its site, in churches, and from registration lists at bridal shows. Of the three hundred and one, fifty-five had met on eHarmony. Gonzaga, an affable Philadelphian, introduced me to one of his colleagues, Heather Setrakian, who was running the study. She was also his wife. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. The eHarmony relationship lab consists of four windowless interview rooms, each of them furnished with a couch, easy chairs, silk flowers, and semi-hidden cameras. The walls were painted beige, to better frame telltale facial expressions and physical gestures on videotape. Down the hall was the control room, with several computer screens on which Gonzaga and Setrakian and their team of researchers observe their test subjects. Each couple came for an interview three or so months before their wedding, and then periodically afterward. They also filled out questionnaires and diaries according to a schedule. In the lab, they were asked to participate in four types of interaction, where first one spouse, and then the other, initiates a discussion. The discussions ranged from two to ten minutes. It helps test the bond. Then the wife gets her shot. Their participation in the study is confidential, but they had consented to let me watch their sessions. In the conflict-resolution segment, each spouse chooses an area of grievance from a list called the Inventory of Marital Problems, developed by psychologists in 1981. Each subject rates each category on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from Not a Problem to Major Problem. Apparently, this behavior did not augur well. He was a third-generation Mexican-American from the San Gabriel Valley who worked for the city of Los Angeles. She was a Mexican immigrant who worked as a family therapist. They were both heavyset and inclined toward a projection of light amusement, although hers seemed more acerbic. He had had a mostly fruitless dating career. EHarmony selected her as a compatible partner for Leon, but he put her aside at first, because her name was too much like his. Finally, they went through the stages of communication. Who asks that question? It bounced off the ceiling into my hands. After three years, they moved in together, and married a year later. They have a one-year-old son. I watched the tease. Typically, Gonzaga gives the subjects initials to choose from, and the couple uses them to come up with a moniker. Perhaps eHarmony had chosen well. The white coat whom Match. She has used brain scans to track the activity of chemicals in the brains of people in various states of romantic agitation. Although the proposition of four types is not new Plato, Jung , her nomenclature and their biochemical foundation represent a frontier of relationship science, albeit one that is thinly populated and open to flanking attack. The new site was christened Chemistry. To sign up, you take a personality test that Fisher designed, which asks you questions about everything from feelings about following rules to your understanding of complex machinery and the length of your ring finger, relative to your index finger. Once you have a type, the site uses it to choose matches for you. My wife took the test, and I was among her first ten suggested matches. Fisher contends that dating online is a reversion to an ancient, even primal approach to pairing off. She conjures millions of years of human prehistory: small groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the savanna, and then congregating a few times a year at this or that watering hole. Amid the merriment and the information exchange, the adolescents develop eyes for one another, in view of their elders and peers. The groups likely know each other, from earlier gatherings or hunting parties. She expressed happy surprise that Chemistry. Fisher told me that her current boyfriend has read the complete works of Shakespeare aloud to her in bed, as well as some Dickens and Ibsen. She identified two big social trends that have led to a greater reliance on online dating: an aging population, and women around the world entering the workforce, marrying later, divorcing more, moving from place to place. They were not an eHarmony couple. They had both failed to make a Hollywood living and now held jobs that they hated while they struggled to nourish what remained of their creative aspirations. He was tall and wiry, and had served in the military. She had a wary, melancholic air and was curled up in a chair, as though recoiling from the camera that she knew was embedded in the wall behind her husband. Their participation was halting at first. The silliness of the tease exercise made them self-conscious. But soon they were squabbling about housework, and about the apportionment of their duties in a building they managed, and about the money he was making or not making, as he tried to launch a new company. Each was frustrated by the faltering progress of the other. I resent how I get criticized for every little thing. There was a silence in the room and on the screen. The conceit can turn the search for someone into a search for that someone, which is fated to end in futility or compromise, whether conducted on the Internet or in a ballroom. And yet people find each other, every which way, and often achieve something that they call happiness. One evening, I found myself in such a place with a thirty-eight-year-old elementary-school teacher who had spent more than ten years plying Match. Her mother felt that she was being too picky. In December, she started corresponding online with a man a couple of years older than she. After a week and a half, they met for drinks, which turned into dinner and more. He was clever, handsome, and capable. He made the arrangements. She flew down to Rio the next week, and he came to the airport with a driver to meet her. Months later, she savored the memory of that moment when he greeted her with a passionate hug, and the week and who knows what else lay before them. A swirl of anticipation, uncertainty, and desire converged into an instant of bliss. For that feeling alone—to say nothing of the chance to go to Brazil—she would do it all over again, even though, during the next ten days, with nothing but sex to stave off their corrosive exchanges over past and future frustrations, they came to despise each other. When they returned to New York, they split up, and went back online. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products and services that are purchased through links on our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. You filled out a questionnaire, fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match. Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer at I. The demolition of the Third Avenue Elevated subway line set off a building boom and a white-collar influx, most notably of young educated women who suddenly found themselves free of family, opprobrium, and, thanks to birth control, the problem of sexual consequence. Within a year, more than five thousand subscribers had signed on. It would invite dozens of matched couples to singles parties, knowing that people might be more comfortable in a group setting. Ross and Altfest enjoyed a brief media blitz. She makes Quiche Lorraine, plays chess, and like me she loves to ski. She had planned to interview Altfest, but he was out of the office, and she ended up talking to Ross. The batteries died on her tape recorder, so they made a date to finish the interview later that week, which turned into dinner for two. They started seeing each other, and two years afterward they were married. He and Lahrmer moved to London. Looking back now, he says that he considered computer dating to be little more than a gimmick and a fad. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute. They approach the primeval mystery of human attraction with a systematic and almost Promethean hand. They rely on algorithms, those often proprietary mathematical equations and processes which make it possible to perform computational feats beyond the reach of the naked brain. There are those which basically allow you to browse through profiles as you would boxes of cereal on a shelf in the store. Others choose for you; they bring five boxes of cereal to your door, ask you to select one, and then return to the warehouse with the four others. Or else they leave you with all five. Civilization, in its various guises, had it pretty much worked out. Society—family, tribe, caste, church, village, probate court—established and enforced its connubial protocols for the presumed good of everyone, except maybe for the couples themselves. The criteria for compatibility had little to do with mutual affection or a shared enthusiasm for spicy food and Fleetwood Mac. As for romantic love, it was an almost mutually exclusive category of human experience. As much as it may have evolved, in the human animal, as a motivation system for mate-finding, it was rarely given great consideration in the final reckoning of conjugal choice. The Pill, women in the workforce, widespread deferment of marriage, rising divorce rates, gay rights—these set off a prolonged but erratic improvisation on a replacement. In some respects, for the masses of grownups seeking mates, either for a night or for life, dating is an attempt to approximate the collegiate condition—that surfeit both of supply and demand, of information and authentication. A college campus is a habitat of abundance and access, with a fluid and fairly ruthless vetting apparatus. A city also has abundance and access, especially for the young, but as people pair off, and as they corral themselves, through profession, geography, and taste, into cliques and castes, the range of available mates shrinks. We run out of friends of friends and friends of friends of friends. You can get to thinking that the single ones are single for a reason. This can cause problems. You fall prey to the tyranny of choice—the idea that people, when faced with too many options, find it harder to make a selection. If you are trying to choose a boyfriend out of a herd of thousands, you may choose none of them. Or you see someone until someone better comes along. It can turn people into products. The Internet can arrange this for you. Often the people who go on the sites that promise you a match are so primed to find one that they jump at the first or the second or the third who comes along. The people who are looking may not be the people you are looking for. Some hitters swing at every first pitch, and others always strike out looking. Many sites, either because of their methods or because of their reputations, tend to attract one or the other. It is now the biggest dating site in the world and is itself the biggest aggregator of other dating sites; under the name Match, it owns thirty in all, and accounts for about a quarter of the revenues of its parent company, I. In 2010, fee-based dating Web sites grossed over a billion dollars. For many people in their twenties, accustomed to conducting much of their social life online, it is no less natural a way to hook up than the church social or the night-club-bathroom line. Free sites rely on advertising. ScientificMatch attempts to pair people according to their DNA, and claims that this approach leads to a higher rate of female orgasms. A site called Ashley Madison notoriously connects cheating spouses. Your suggestion should theoretically be a sufficient signal of your taste and imagination, and an impetus for getting off-line as soon as possible. Apparently, a big winner has been a ride on the Staten Island Ferry. The cutting edge is in mobile and location-based technology, such as Grindr, a smartphone app for gay men that tells subscribers when there are other willing subscribers in their vicinity. Many Internet dating companies, including Grindr, are trying to devise ways to make this kind of thing work for straight people, which means making it work for straight women, who may not need an app to know that they are surrounded by willing straight men. The raw material, in the matching process, is a mass of stated preference: your desire or intolerance for certain traits and characteristics. Many of the sites make do with that alone. The more sophisticated ones attempt to identify and exploit the dissonance between what you say you want and what you really appear to want, through the choices you make online. He is one of those guys who say they enjoy dating. After taking stock of your stated and revealed preferences, the software finds people on the site who have similar dissonances between the two, and uses their experiences to approximate what yours should be. You may have sent introductory messages to only two people, and marked a few others with a wink—a nonverbal expression of interest—but Match will have hundreds of people in its database who have done a lot more on the site, and whose behavior yours seems to resemble. From them, depending on the degree of correlation, the software extrapolates about you. How significant is hair-color dissonance? Do political views, or fan allegiances, matter? The weightings can change over time, as nuances or tendencies emerge. And sometimes behavior changes—political opinion matters more in an election year, for example—and the algorithms scramble to keep up. We met at a party and took up with each other for a while. The date itself came later, on the first night of Christmas vacation. I remember John Malkovich stomping around onstage and then my date catching a train back to Scarsdale. She remembers that we went to a Chinese restaurant and this hurts that I ordered a tequila sunrise. That night, anyway, was the end of it for us. On the drive there, a fuse blew, knocking out the car stereo, and so I pulled over, removed the fuse box, fashioned a fuse out of some aluminum foil from a pack of cigarettes, and got the cassette deck going again. My companion could not have known that this would hold up as the lone MacGyver moment in a lifetime of my standing around uselessly while other people fix stuff, but she can attest to it now, as she has usually been the one, since then, doing the fixing. Needless to say, we had no idea that anything we were saying or doing that night, or even that year, would lead us to where we are today, which is married, with children, a mortgage, and a budding fear of the inevitable moment when one of us will die before the other. Instead, I went out for coffee or drinks with various women who, according to their friends, had had extraordinary or, at least, numerous adventures dating online. To the extent that a date can sometimes feel like an interview, these interviews often felt a little like dates. We sized each other up. We doled out tidbits of immoderate disclosure. Some research has suggested that it is men, more than women, who yearn for marriage, but this may be merely a case of stated preference. Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them—not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. Pervasiveness has helped to chip away at the stigma; people no longer think of online dating as a last resort for desperadoes and creeps. The success story is a standard of the genre. But anyone who has spent a lot of time dating online, and not just dabbling, has his or her share of horror stories, too. They suggest that all good dates may be alike but that each bad one is bad in its own way. A few days later, the company announced that it would start checking subscribers against the national registry of sex offenders. To some extent, such incidents, as terrible as they are, merely reflect the frequency of such transactional hazards in the wider world. They are just awkward, or excruciating. One woman, a forty-six-year-old divorced mother of two, likened them to airplane crashes: the trouble usually occurs during takeoff and landing—the minute you meet and the minute you leave. If not, it becomes clear at the end of the evening, when he sticks his tongue down your throat. One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns—as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs. Demonstrating the ability, and the inclination, to write well is a rough equivalent to showing up in a black Mercedes. Sometimes he neglects to mention that he is a convicted felon. OK Cupid, in an analysis of its own data, has confirmed what I heard anecdotally: that men exaggerate their income by twenty per cent and their height by two inches , perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others. But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment. Demonstrating funniness can be fraught. The come-on becomes spam and gums up the works, or scares women away, which in turn can lead to a different kind of gender disparity: a room full of dudes. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys. They exaggerate their height and salary. They hide their bald spots and back fat. Nothing determines the atmosphere and experience of an Internet dating service more than the people who use it, but sometimes the sites reflect the personalities or predilections of their founders. Dating sites have for the most part always had either a squalid or a chain-store ambience. OK Cupid, with a breezy, facetious tone, an intuitive approach, and proprietary matching stratagems, comes close to feeling like a contemporary Internet product, and a pastime for the young. Owing to high traffic and a sprightly character, OK Cupid was also perhaps the most desirable eligible bachelor out there, until February, when it was bought, for fifty million dollars, by Match. While still in school, in the late nineties, they created a successful company called the Spark, which composed and posted online study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes. At the time, they experimented with a dating site called SparkMatch. To solve the chicken-egg conundrum of a dating site—to attract users, you need users—they created a handful of quizzes, chief among them the Dating Persona Test. They also urged people to submit their own quizzes. By now, users have submitted more than forty-three thousand quizzes to the site. The quizzes had no bearing on the matching, and at this point they are half-hidden on the site. They were merely bait—a pickup line, a push-up bra. There is a different question regimen for matching. On OK Cupid, the questions are submitted by users. The questions are ranked in order of how effective they are at sorting people. One of the founders, Christian Rudder, maintains the OK Trends blog, sifting through the mountains of data and composing clever, mathematically sourced synopses of his findings. There are now nearly two hundred and eighty thousand questions on the site; OK Cupid has collected more than eight hundred million answers. People on the site answer an average of three hundred questions. That is, people on OK Cupid who have answered yes to one are likely to have answered yes to the other. OK Cupid has also analyzed couples who have met on the site and have since left it. Rudder has written a lot about looks: whether or not it helps to show cleavage women or a bare midriff men —the answers were Yes, Especially as You Age, and Yes, If You Have Good Abs and Are Not a Congressman. The matching algorithms take these ratings into account and show you people who are roughly within your range of attractiveness, according to the opinions of others. The idea behind the matching algorithms, Chris Coyne told me, is to replicate the experience you have off-line. Does she like dancing? Does she smoke pot? Is she a furry? On the Internet, people will ask—and answer—extremely personal questions. The algorithms find the people out there whose answers best correspond to yours—how yours fit their desires and how theirs meet yours, and according to what degree of importance. The match is expressed as a percentage. Each match search requires tens of millions of mathematical operations. To the extent that OK Cupid has any abiding faith, it is in mathematics. And that creates a shitty situation. Some women get overwhelmed. The goal is to connect you with someone with whom you have enough in common to want to strike up an e-mail correspondence and then quickly meet in person. This enables the researchers to conjure from their database the person you may not realize you have in mind. In no other milieu do so many people, from such a broad demographic swath, willingly answer so many intimate questions. It is a gold mine for social scientists. In the past nine months, OK Cupid has sold its raw data redacted or made anonymous to protect the privacy of its customers to half a dozen academics. Gregory Huber and Neil Malhotra, political scientists at Yale and Stanford, respectively, are sifting through OK Cupid data to determine how political opinions factor in to choosing social partners. The four are Sam Yagan, the C. As they all like to say, Sam is the business, Chris is the product, Max is the tech, and Christian is the blog. He makes grandiose claims with a mixture of mirth and sincerity. The search for companionship is more important than the search for song lyrics. He commutes to New York every week, bunking in a hotel. Rudder, who is thirty-five and from Little Rock, met his wife, a public-relations executive from Long Island named Reshma Patel, twelve years ago through friends. They live in a modest apartment in Williamsburg, and often have friends over at night to play German board games. She is from Manhattan and works in the education department at the Frick Collection. They were classmates at Harvard, but they met again a few years later outside a night club in New York. He had a drunken woman on each arm. Chris and Jennie began e-mailing each other, and eventually went out on a date. She considers herself an excellent matchmaker, with a well-tested compatibility theory of her own—that a man and a woman should look alike. They were engaged within a year. They moved into an apartment in the same building as her parents: the San Remo, on Central Park West. Serendipity and coincidence are the photosynthesis of romance, hinting at some kind of supernatural preordination, the sense that two people are made for each other. The Internet subverts Kismet. He is her No. She struck up a correspondence with her No. She lives outside Boston. As a single mother, in her forties, she gave up men for a while. When her son was ready to go to college, she started dating again. Through a dating service, she met an economist, who was eight years younger than she. They lived together for a decade. And that was that. A nice guy from Vermont drove all the way down to see me. They got together for coffee at Café Pamplona, in Cambridge. He was handsome, charming, and bright. He invited her to accompany him to Norway to meet the Queen. She has gone online as a man, just to survey the terrain, and estimates that in her age range women outnumber men ten to one. The clean-shaven gentleman on the couch, with the excellent posture, the pastel golf shirt, and that strangely chaste yet fiery look in his eye? That would be eHarmony. EHarmony is the squarest of the sites, the one most overtly geared toward finding you a spouse. It was launched, in 2000, by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist who had spent three decades treating and studying married couples and working out theories about what made their marriages succeed or fail. From his own research, and his review of the academic and clinical literature, he concluded that two people were more likely to stay together, and stay together happily, if they shared certain psychological traits. As he has often said, opposites attract—and then they attack. He designed eHarmony to identify and align these shared traits, and to keep opposites away from each other. The evangelical conservative James Dobson, through his organization Focus on the Family, had published advice books that Warren had written and provided early support and publicity for eHarmony. In 2009, under pressure from a slew of class-action lawsuits, it created a separate site specifically for homosexuals. The director of the lab, and the senior director of research and development at eHarmony, is a psychologist named Gian Gonzaga. He and his staff bring in couples and observe them as they perform various tasks. Then they come to conclusions about the human condition, which they put to use in improving their matching algorithms and, perhaps just as important, in getting out the word that they are doing so. There is a touch of Potemkin in the enterprise. EHarmony had solicited them on its site, in churches, and from registration lists at bridal shows. Of the three hundred and one, fifty-five had met on eHarmony. She was also his wife. To test their procedures, they needed a man and a woman to impersonate a married couple for multiple sessions. Gonzaga and Setrakian became the impersonators, and fell in love. The walls were painted beige, to better frame telltale facial expressions and physical gestures on videotape. Down the hall was the control room, with several computer screens on which Gonzaga and Setrakian and their team of researchers observe their test subjects. They also filled out questionnaires and diaries according to a schedule. In the lab, they were asked to participate in four types of interaction, where first one spouse, and then the other, initiates a discussion. The discussions ranged from two to ten minutes. It helps test the bond. Then the wife gets her shot. Their participation in the study is confidential, but they had consented to let me watch their sessions. In the conflict-resolution segment, each spouse chooses an area of grievance from a list called the Inventory of Marital Problems, developed by psychologists in 1981. Each subject rates each category on a scale of 1 to 7, ranging from Not a Problem to Major Problem. Apparently, this behavior did not augur well. He was a third-generation Mexican-American from the San Gabriel Valley who worked for the city of Los Angeles. She was a Mexican immigrant who worked as a family therapist. They were both heavyset and inclined toward a projection of light amusement, although hers seemed more acerbic. He had had a mostly fruitless dating career. EHarmony selected her as a compatible partner for Leon, but he put her aside at first, because her name was too much like his. Finally, they went through the stages of communication. Who asks that question? It bounced off the ceiling into my hands. After three years, they moved in together, and married a year later. They have a one-year-old son. Typically, Gonzaga gives the subjects initials to choose from, and the couple uses them to come up with a moniker. Perhaps eHarmony had chosen well. I share with you my pastrami. The white coat whom Match. She has used brain scans to track the activity of chemicals in the brains of people in various states of romantic agitation. Although the proposition of four types is not new Plato, Jung , her nomenclature and their biochemical foundation represent a frontier of relationship science, albeit one that is thinly populated and open to flanking attack. To sign up, you take a personality test that Fisher designed, which asks you questions about everything from feelings about following rules to your understanding of complex machinery and the length of your ring finger, relative to your index finger. Once you have a type, the site uses it to choose matches for you. My wife took the test, and I was among her first ten suggested matches. She conjures millions of years of human prehistory: small groups of hunter-gatherers wandering the savanna, and then congregating a few times a year at this or that watering hole. The groups likely know each other, from earlier gatherings or hunting parties. She expressed happy surprise that Chemistry. Fisher told me that her current boyfriend has read the complete works of Shakespeare aloud to her in bed, as well as some Dickens and Ibsen. They were not an eHarmony couple. They had both failed to make a Hollywood living and now held jobs that they hated while they struggled to nourish what remained of their creative aspirations. He was tall and wiry, and had served in the military. She had a wary, melancholic air and was curled up in a chair, as though recoiling from the camera that she knew was embedded in the wall behind her husband. The silliness of the tease exercise made them self-conscious. But soon they were squabbling about housework, and about the apportionment of their duties in a building they managed, and about the money he was making or not making, as he tried to launch a new company. Each was frustrated by the faltering progress of the other. I resent how I get criticized for every little thing. There was a silence in the room and on the screen. And yet people find each other, every which way, and often achieve something that they call happiness. One evening, I found myself in such a place with a thirty-eight-year-old elementary-school teacher who had spent more than ten years plying Match. Her mother felt that she was being too picky. In December, she started corresponding online with a man a couple of years older than she. After a week and a half, they met for drinks, which turned into dinner and more. He was clever, handsome, and capable. He made the arrangements. She flew down to Rio the next week, and he came to the airport with a driver to meet her. A swirl of anticipation, uncertainty, and desire converged into an instant of bliss. For that feeling alone—to say nothing of the chance to go to Brazil—she would do it all over again, even though, during the next ten days, with nothing but sex to stave off their corrosive exchanges over past and future frustrations, they came to despise each other. When they returned to New York, they split up, and went back online. From 2000 to 2005, he was the deputy editor of The Talk of the Town, to which he regularly contributes. How will we use it? They sold out in three days. Another thirty thousand copies were printed, and they sold out, too. China Central Television moved to tamp down the frenzy with an hour-long discussion on its national broadcast. But on TV Han Han projected insolent glamour, with a boy-band shag haircut that swept down and across his left eye. In the next several years, Han published four more novels and several essay collections faithful to his subjects: teen-agers, girls, and cars. They have sold millions more, though his current publisher, Lu Jinbo, does not hail them as great literature. His site—a simple chronicle in the style of a diary, on a powder-blue background with a photograph of a yellow-Lab puppy in the corner—has had nearly half a billion visitors since it began. Only Chinese stock-tip bloggers have drawn more. Han keeps the van for long trips; he is afraid of flying. His manicured, swaggering persona is a rebuke to the rumpled archetype of the Chinese intellectual, and owes equal debts to Kerouac and Timberlake. In person, he is warm and laconic, and speaks through a smile that tends to camouflage the searing edge of his comments. Replacing truth with lies, manipulating public opinion, desecrating culture, abusing facts, concealing wrongdoing, covering up problems, and creating fake images of harmony. He can also be calculatingly elliptical. When Liu Xiaobo, the imprisoned Chinese writer, won the Nobel Peace Prize last October, Han Han toyed with censors and readers by posting nothing but a pair of quotation marks enclosing an empty space. The post drew one and a half million hits and more than twenty-eight thousand comments. Thus far, he has maintained a fitful détente with the government. When unrest swept North Africa and the Middle East last winter, the Party launched the most intense crackdown on free expression in years. It is a world of sponsorships and champagne showers, disorientingly at odds with his writing life. By and large, his readers care nothing for auto racing, but the overlapping identities have yielded a singular celebrity: Han adorns the covers of style magazines while independent Web sites—Han Han Digest, Danwei, ChinaGeeks—translate and analyze his utterances. At times, his readers hang on his words even before he utters them. He has yet to return. At the wheel, Sun Qiang hesitated. The fringe of Shanghai, like those of other big cities, is a patchwork of small farms and factories, a short drive from staggering wealth. We reached a two-story brick farmhouse, fronted by a small plot. A golden retriever went berserk. We passed through a living room that carried the cold damp of the countryside, and reëmerged in a small courtyard, where Han smiled awkwardly and indicated for me to climb through a window into his wing of the house. A second giant screen was accessorized with a steering wheel and pedals set up for driving games. In the center of the room was a pool table, and Han racked up the balls and broke. He is in constant, restless motion. To indicate his rare and full attention, he turns both of his phones face down, as they buzz and bleat in protest. On the pool table, I made a shot, then flubbed the second. He sank the rest. In writing and conversation, he returns repeatedly to the connection between individual aspirations and unaccountable local governments. Han indicated a tall industrial compound in the distance, a chemical manufacturer, which he blames for fouling the stream where he used to hunt for crawfish. The stench is everywhere. The Environmental Protection Bureau says the water quality is normal, though the river is full of dead fish. So far, all it has produced is thousands of acres of rubble, unfinished and wasted. What they see around them is unfair. It was the kind of ordeal that Chinese papers regularly feature as a portrait of fortitude. But Han had come to see it differently. He is married to Lily Jin, a high-school friend who is chic and circumspect. She serves as his assistant and gatekeeper. Unlike other prominent Chinese critics of the government, he has few ties to the West; he has visited Europe but not America, and cares little for Western literature. He is still acclimating to attention from abroad. Even putting aside his political performance, or how many bad things he did, or how many people starved to death because of him, or how many people he killed, there is one thing for sure: Mao Zedong was the enemy of writers. He wrote occasionally, and when he was sixteen he heard that a Shanghai magazine was looking for young writers to enter the New Concept Essay Contest. Never mind that the more realistic scenario would be you putting the wallet in your pocket. The essay still circulates among fans. Internet use had begun a steep rise—the number of Chinese users quadrupled that year—and a climate of openness prevailed as the country prepared to join the World Trade Organization. A friend in Beijing insisted that he could find sponsors to form a racing team. Han moved north to the capital, part of a vast tide of hopefuls surging in from around the country. They lived as rebels, but with limits. When that happens, one can become irrational. None of the drivers I met have the remotest interest in his writing life. His books, often marketed under brooding dark covers, were moody and observant, but none could recapture the energy of his début. Writing subsidized his racing. Then he encountered Lu Jinbo, a writer turned publisher. Seven years his senior, Lu was a businessman, partial to pinstripes and blustery declarations. Lu saw the makings of a splashy new deal: he offered Han an advance on his next book of two million yuan, about a quarter of a million dollars—colossal by Chinese standards. His fans like everything about him. But he refuses to change. Or, one might say, free. His wife, at home, was pregnant with their first child. As distant as it was from his writing life, the accident stoked his fixation on injustice. This will satisfy all sides. The Chinese Web was a laboratory for a new era of black political humor, and it did not require him to pretend that he held policy prescriptions. Vivid and bawdy, the posts were celebrated not for originality but for saying what so many others only thought. For every writer still barred from travelling abroad, and every novel prevented from publication, another popped up unmolested in a third- or fourth-tier city that was once a cultural desert. At the end of 2007, the number of bloggers had more than doubled since the previous year, and though they risked jail for what they wrote, their cumulative power could not be ignored. In 2009, when the government announced that new computers would be shipped with a filtering software called Green Dam, Chinese users revolted. They argued that its porn filter, for instance, was so shoddy that it blocked images even of Party leaders whose portraits featured large patches of skin. Because of you, the low-wage worker. But beyond that what use are they? In China, influence belongs only to those with power, those who can make rain from clouds, who can decide if you live or die, those who can keep you somewhere between life and death. They are the people with real influence. We are just small characters beneath a spotlight on the stage. They own the theatre, and they can always bring down the curtain, turn off the lights, close the door, and turn the dogs loose. Han Han is lonely, fighting this battle by himself. He has no shortage of worshippers. What he needs is those who will travel beside him. Several months later, an early mockup was leaked to the press, including a sketch of a naked man covering his abdomen with a machine gun. But he maintained the backing of Shuhai Publishing House, an official printer with the power to produce the magazine. A blind musician chronicled his train travels; a six-year-old girl published a four-line poem. Bookstores dedicated separate sales counters to handle the crush. Three days later, according to China Digital Times, an overseas Web site that tracks censorship orders, the Central Propaganda Bureau instructed the Beijing press not to report further on the phenomenon. A million copies were pulped. He laid off the staff, and when we met at his half-deserted office, a couple of weeks later, page proofs and photos still hung on the walls. A bottle of champagne, to celebrate the new issue, remained unopened on a desk. The favorite was Call of Duty, a shooter game. He said the end of the magazine was a function of its success. Now are you trying to take control? He unwrapped a burger. He re-installed it in the bun. Most of all, he regrets what the shutdown says about the vibrancy of Chinese culture. On his blog, Han avoided the subject. Nevertheless, when the Shanghai Party Committee Propaganda Department distributed guidance to the local press, on March 12th, it is said to have included an order not to report on anything about Han beyond his car racing. Such directives are more porous than they sound—stories inevitably seep through—but they can be read as clues to official thinking. So in what ways will that reflection transform them? His biography bears all the minor victories and indignities, the reasons for aspiration and cynicism, that accompany being young and restless in China today, and this makes him powerful. For two decades, Chinese young people have been apolitical, not simply because the basic conditions of life had improved but also because the alternative was frightening and hopeless. At a car race, a small, exuberant crowd of fans waited to catch a glimpse of him. Among them was Wei Feiran, a wiry, spiky-haired nineteen-year-old from Anhui Province, who seemed on the verge of levitating with anticipation. Contacts are indirect; in the case of his magazine, government agencies contact his publishers or his blog host. Han permits few illusions about his willingness to stay on the safe side of lines he can see. He has never made a move to take his activism from the Web to the street, and he opposes hastening multiparty elections. Han also knows that his labored distinctions go only so far. Han acknowledges a change in tone. Touring cars look like souped-up street vehicles, rather than the open-wheel racers of Formula One, and for the Shanghai 333 Racing Club Han drives a Volkswagen Polo hatchback. The air carried the scent of oil and rubber, and the sound of cars buzzing through turns like angry bees. He wore a silvery racing suit that advertised Volkswagen across his midsection, Red Bull along his cuffs, and Homark Aluminum Alloy Wheels on his right biceps. Race-car drivers strutted in and out, flicking open the tent flaps like sultans in old movies. Is he going to do something out in the street? Ai had been detained the previous weekend—the most noteworthy high-profile arrest since the crackdown began. The government had yet to say where he was being held or what would become of him. Last week, he was allowed to return home. We have a hundred things to talk about. Flocks of gangly models had arrived, in fractional vinyl outfits—Volkswagen miniskirts, Kia crop tops—and they loped along in go-go boots while shy car guys photographed them from a distance with their phones. The windows bore decals with his number—15—and his blood type O positive. Cars roared out of the start and into a crash on the first turn. When competition resumed, Han was in eighth place. He drifted farther back, passed by No. His car had a mechanical problem. On the fifth lap, he crawled back to the pits. The team had been testing a new engine, and it failed, he explained. But it was only the first race of the season. It reminded me of the day he told me about the end of his magazine. I can live to watch them die. He had never seen it, either. But I meant it. No matter how many hours I practiced, no matter how many instructors I saw, how many books and magazines I read, or how many teaching aids I tried. Then it hit me. I was in the final stage! There was a time when I was always angry on the course. Driving fast in the cart. You stink at everything. I hardly ever finished a round. Once, I bought a brand-new set of clubs, and then, after a particularly terrible day, I gave them to the caddy at the sixteenth hole and left. I have a jump shot! I can go to my left. Obviously I have it in me. I have it in me! How can you spend a week with Leadbetter and not get better? All I want to do is hit the ball. What is it You want? Is that what You want? Can I bring my BlackBerry? Just let me hit the ball! What do You care? What did I ever do to Him? I joked about it! I was a model bald man. Was it the TV show? Did He not like the show? I can be nice. Did I say three? No one can survive three trips down there. What do You say? Two trips to Florida! Or even every other shot. I was never going to be good. Playing Chopin for Julie Delpy. But instead I wasted my life on this game. It looked so easy. The ball just sits there. Any idiot could do it. But every instinct I had was wrong. I want to hit it up to make it go up. All I do is chop up the course. How can that be? So you hit down to make it go up and swing easy to make it go far? I will never be good. There, I said it. I like saying it. What those are I have no idea. Flossing and dishwashing come to mind. I will never stand over the ball without considering the disaster about to befall me. Never face a chip without fearing the decel. I actually hit some great range shots. What the hell is that? Have I stumbled upon the Secret? I just want to try this blindfold idea. I have a very good feeling about it. Behind him was a matching dresser, opposite him a picture window, through which he could see a cluster of damp sheep, then some rising pastureland that disappeared into low cloud. Of course, it was the students who were expected to cook, wash up, and keep the place tidy, but, since half of them were older than he was, it would have been stuffy not to muck in. So he stacked plates, made toast, and had even promised to cook them a big lamb stew on the final night. After supper, they would put on their waterproofs and slog a mile down the track to a pub. Each evening, he seemed to need a little more drink than before to keep himself stable. All did so except for Bill, a rather truculent ex-serviceman, who preferred to address him as Chief. Some of them, it was true, enjoyed literature more than they understood it, and imagined that fiction was mere autobiography with a tweak. He preferred to muse on the question of plausibility. Take his own case. He understood women leaving men because they were failures, but leaving him because he was a success? Where was the motivation in that? Where was the plausibility? Everyone was looking at him, expecting him to take charge. Which he would, of course, though not by sitting in judgment, rather by telling them a story. He never explained why he was doing it, but each free-form intervention was designed to make them ask: Is this a story? If not, how might we turn it into one? What do we need to discard, what keep, what develop? Friends had rented a house on Naxos for three weeks. It was high summer, and six hours on an open deck from Piraeus had left him with a sunburn that made him nauseous and kept him indoors for the first two days of the holiday. The few other foreigners on the island were as conspicuous as his little English group must have been. In particular, he remembered an American, a chunky fellow with white hair and a short-trimmed beard; he wore a loose white shirt over belted shorts and drove a white jeep or buggy, which seemed equally at home on the beach as on the coastal road. The man would roar past, one leg out on the running board and one arm around a woman—late thirties, perhaps—with olive skin and black hair dyed an unconvincing blond. Occasionally, he and his friends would see the couple in a bar or a restaurant, but mostly they were in motion, showing off. The fellow had clearly been modelling himself on Hemingway, and the prim Englishman, both impressed and disgusted by the macho swagger, had hated him on sight. Every time the jeep drove past him on the beach, even if it was far away, it seemed to be throwing sand in his face. And, if they had asked, he would have replied that, for him, Hemingway, as a novelist, was like an athlete bulked up on steroids. At university, he and his friends had taken to mocking the line, inserting the names of other cellists, other instruments, other physical attributes. It had been a game that ran and ran. I wish someone would say that about me. Any woman can tell. They were a nice bunch, all eight of them: five women and three men. But perhaps aspirant poets were different from their prose equivalents. Luckily, she was up at the bar buying for them all. Trying to seem casual, he asked if any of them had read Hemingway. There were only two yeses, both from men. The consensus was that Hemingway was a writer whose era had passed, and whose opinions were now out of date. Vicky began a long rant about cruelty to animals, and, yes, perfectly on cue, Bill asked her if her shoes were made of leather. At the pub, he stopped being a tutor; they could say what they liked. Responding to their praise, he told them his theory of writers and cooking. Novelists, who were in it for the long haul, were temperamentally equipped for stewing and braising, for the slow mixing together of many ingredients, whereas poets ought to be good at stir-fry. Ah, dramatists—they, the lucky sods, were basically mere orchestrators of the talents of others, and would be satisfied to shake a leisurely cocktail while the kitchen staff rustled up the grub. Jane Austen and Bath buns. The Brontës and Yorkshire pudding. There was even an argument when Virginia Woolf and cucumber sandwiches were put together. But without any discord they placed Hemingway in front of an enormous barbecue piled high with marlin steaks and cuts of buffalo, a beer in one hand and an outsized spatula in the other, while the party swirled around him. All you had to do was look at me properly, make some kind of sign. He wondered if this was a correct conclusion, based on his sympathetic imagination, or merely mad vanity. But, in any case, she was now on a different train, heading toward a different life, while he sat at the window on his own, looking out at wet Wales. He found himself thinking that, driver aside, a white beach buggy had an unquestionable glamour about it. If you drove one around London, people would probably think you a member of a rock band rather than a mere prose writer. All he could afford was a secondhand Morris Minor. Fifteen feet away, at the other end, was Guenther, his teaching assistant, whose broad shoulders and cheerful sweater obscured a view of forest, looping cables, and high mountains. It was mid-July: the ski shops and hire places were closed, as were half the restaurants. There were a few tourists, some groups of hikers, and this summer school, which had invited him to teach—in English, fortunately—for six days. His only other obligation was to give a public reading on the final night. He was looking forward to this: his generation of writers had adapted well to the expectation that they become performers as well as private, solitary truth seekers and truth-tellers. He was at ease with interviews, usefully provocative on political issues—especially when he had a new book out—and a little whorish at the microphone. Ah, the lure of the prepared impromptu. This side of him had come as a surprise, pleasant to him, less so to Lynn, his wife, who had just left him. It had not been an agreeable time lately. He had raised his hands, palms forward, as if to say that not only would he never do that but it had been a clear mistake in the first case. Even if the novel had made a couple of short lists. Even if fiction was, as he liked to say, omnivorous and essentially amoral. It was an afternoon session, which was intended to range more broadly. In the morning, they discussed texts that the students were to be examined on; in the afternoon he was expected to stretch their brains, make wider cultural connections, discuss social and political topics. It ought to have been a breeze, but there were times when their Continental minds, their natural ease with the abstract and the theoretical, made his English pragmatism seem like mental sloppiness. Still, they liked him, and he liked them, not least because they seemed to ascribe his lack of rigor to the vibrancy of his imagination. He, they never forgot, was the Herr Professor, the one who had written the books. And, if all else failed, he could always tell them an anecdote, a dream, a memory, a shaggy-dog story. They were very polite, and had heard about the famous English sense of humor, so anything he said that was at all odd or incoherent was greeted with respectful laughter. You hear a lot of Tchaikovsky, a bit of Bruckner, Dvorák, perhaps, anyway, the great nineteenth-century European symphonic tradition. Then the Third—shorter, just as melodic, and yet more restrained, held back, moving in a new direction. Then the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic, the work where he most engages with modernism. To my doubtless fallible ears, one of the things Sibelius is asking, from the Third to the Seventh, is: What is melody? How far can we compress it, reduce it to a phrase, even, but make that phrase as charged and memorable as some Big Tune from the good old days? Music that seems to question itself and its underlying justification even as it beguiles you. I wish I could play you some. His teaching assistant was always looking for ways to assist, which was logical, and yet, at times, disconcerting. Still, Guenther was very good at shameless queue-barging to fetch the Herr Professor his coffee. What is this thing—this ancient, wonderful thing—we call a story? This is a question modernism asked, and, you could say, we all still need to ask. So when I consider that simple, essential question—What is narrative? Well, a break, perhaps, and, yes, thank you, Guenther, and no milk. How did you do it? He was delighted to lend you the records. He sends you his honored greetings. The player belongs to the school. How wonderful the music was, how darkly orphic in this landscape of tall trees, clean air, and blue sky. His life was a mess, his last novel had been crapped on from a great height by all the shitbags in London, he doubted he would ever write anything of lasting value, and yet—with those strings climbing timorously and the brass clearing its throat as if to make some great statement that was never, finally, made—there were still transcendent moments to be had in this poor existence of ours. And just sat there, not saying a word, but trying to imply: I rest my case. Later, at supper, where everyone sat hugger-mugger, some of the students told him how much they had liked the music. And, more and more, he thought, that was the best you could hope for in life: a kind of pause. Why would anybody want to go around pretending to be Hemingway? The stories, rather than the novels: in his view, the Hemingway method worked better over the short distance. Well, it was the same with James Joyce. He liked this opinion of his, and the way it always caused disquiet—here even more than usual, he noted. It had a three-part structure. In each part, a man—an expatriate American—was waiting for a train at a different Swiss railway station. All three were waiting for the same train, and the men, though they had different names, were versions of one another, or, quite possibly—not literally, but metaphorically, fictionally—the same man. He is waiting in the station café, because the train is late. He drinks, he propositions the waitress, he teases the locals. Perhaps he is burned out. Perhaps his marriage is in ruins. Or maybe his ultimate destination is America. So it was a story about flight and the return home—also, perhaps, a flight from the self and a possible, hoped-for return to it. And the way the three parts of the story overlap, just as the men overlap and the cafés overlap and the train overlaps, makes us think about the way our own lives overlap with one another. How we are all connected, all complicit. From the start, he had declined to take his expected position at the head of the three metal tables that had been loosely bolted together. He would place the student whose work was being discussed at the head, and the principal critic, or responder, at the foot. He himself would sit a third of the way along one side. His positioning was designed to say, I am not the arbiter of truth, because there is no final truth in literary judgment. It may well be that the most useful assessor of your work will be found among your classmates. From a distance, the temptation was always to see it as a country that every so often went mad on power, and gave itself over to the violent outbursts of a steroid abuser. Here, away from the places and the politicians that gave it that bad name, life was much like life everywhere else. People worried about the usual small things, which to them were big things. As in his fiction. No, of course he would write it. The question was: Would anyone ever publish it? Everyone said it was as good as all his others—and therein lay the problem. His sales had been flatlining for years; he was white and middle-aged, with no other identity—smug TV panelist, for instance—to lift his profile. In his view, the novel—indeed, The Novel—delivered its rare truths through the artful mingling of intimate voices; yet nowadays people wanted something noisier. No, his novels were good, just not good enough, that was the truth. Teasing, at times, could be almost as good as love, sometimes better. Though his main point, had he been harsh enough to make it, would have been: Why is this male take on existential angst so reminiscent of all the others you have submitted? Today, he strode off as if he had business elsewhere. He walked to the nearest edge of the campus, which was built on a rise, and looked out into the flat, inexpressive, agricultural distance. The view and its vast ordinariness were as good as nicotine. He grunted quietly to himself. When he first met his class, one of them had addressed him as Professor. Some distance was necessary. At times, the label hurt. The celebration of machismo. Now read the story. He had turned on his favorite; worse, he had stepped out of character. There was a tall poet on campus with a reputation for humiliating his students, destroying their poems line by line. But everyone knew poets were crazy and unmannerly. Prose writers, especially foreign ones, were expected to be civil. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. Instead, he began again, as if for the first time. He talked about the myth of the writer, and how it was not just the reader who became trapped in the myth but sometimes the writer as well—in which case we should feel pity rather than blame. He talked about what hating a writer might mean. How far and for how long do we punish thought-crime? And how that prose was so different from the way it looked. It seemed to be simple, even simplistic, but at its best was as subtle and deep as anything by Henry James. And of how, alongside what might appear to be boastfulne.

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