Andre Agassi

Have loved this guy ever since I first saw him play - and once even played in a charity tennis event with a wig that made me look like a young Agassi - long pony tail and all. I won. Enjoy.

Stage Left, Sage Right: Agassi Says Goodbye

By KAREN CROUSE

Published: August 28, 2006

The day that Andre Agassi has had circled in his mind for months is almost here.

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Painting by Tim O' Brien

In 1994, at age 24, Andre Agassi won his first United States Open title. Last year, at 35, he lost in the final to Roger Federer. Now, at the end of this Open, he will call it a career.

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Andre Agassi, who turned pro in 1986, will retire after the U.S. Open. “I’m really clear about this being the right time to retire,” he said. “I want to be around the people in my life I enjoy.”

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Andre Agassi served to Tomas Berdych of Czech Republic during the U.S. Open on September 3, 2005 in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens, New York City.

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Andrew Gombert/European Pressphoto Agency

Andre Agassi looks up into the stands after taking part in a charity skills competition during Arthur Ashe Kids Day before the 2006 U.S. Open in New York.

It is not the opening day of the United States Open, where his first-round match against Andrei Pavel will cue a royal reception. That Agassi will suffer gratefully.

The day he has been looking forward to will dawn after his last match of the tournament, whether it is the first round or the final. Because only when Agassi retires from competitive tennis will he be free to shift attention off himself for good.

“This is a close of a certain chapter of my life, you can’t deny that,” Agassi said recently over a cheese omelet lunch in Las Vegas, his hometown. What comes after his retirement, “is the birth of who I’ll continue to strive to become.”

There is a notion, propagated by many former elite athletes, that retirement is a kind of death. Agassi scoffs at that. “I was 141st in the world,” he said, remembering his ranking in November 1997. “That felt like death.”

Can life after tennis be as stimulating? Pete Sampras, Agassi’s chief rival on the court in the 1990’s and his polar opposite off it, left competitive tennis shortly after winning the 2002 United States Open, only to resurface this summer playing World TeamTennis because he was bored. “There’s no book on retirement,” Sampras said.

It would be just like Agassi to write one. He refuses to look at retirement as a territory as desolate as a moonscape. “It’s an environment I plan on thriving in,” he said.

After everything that he has crammed into his first 36 years — including eight Grand Slam titles, $31 million in prize money, two marriages and two children — who would doubt him?

“In his life after tennis he will accomplish more than what he did playing tennis,” said Patrick McEnroe, the United States Davis Cup captain who lost all four of his matches against Agassi as a player. “It sounds outlandish, but I feel comfortable saying that.”

Agassi’s ace in the hole, as he calls it, is this: While fashioning a Hall of Fame résumé on the court, he has built a rich, full life away from it. The evidence of that, friends say, is everywhere in the house 15 miles west of the Las Vegas Strip where Agassi lives with his wife, Steffi Graf, and their two children, Jaden Gil, 4, and Jaz Elle, 2. There is not a tennis trophy or tournament memento in sight, nothing at all to indicate that a couple with 30 Grand Slam singles titles between them resides there.

People are on display instead, friends and family captured in dozens of professional-quality photographs taken by Graf. The focus of Agassi’s future will be the people in those pictures. “I’m really clear about this being the right time to retire,” said Agassi, who turned pro at 16. “I want to be around the people in my life I enjoy.”

“What he needs is the connection,” said Perry Rogers, Agassi’s best friend. “He can’t function without it.” Agassi met Rogers, when Rogers was 12 and Agassi 11. His trainer, Gil Reyes, has been with him for 17 years, commanding and cajoling Agassi to be self-centered. Theirs is the only relationship that Agassi abides in which the focus is firmly on him. “My job has been to get him to be as good to himself as he is to others,” Reyes said in a telephone interview. Reyes is the one who pushes him to rest, eat and prepare. Agassi’s bedrock relationship, though, is with Graf, whom he married in October 2001 after a two-year courtship that was preceded by many years of infatuation on his part.

Graf turned pro at 13, and at 19 became the fifth player to win all four Grand Slam singles titles in the same year. She won 107 singles titles and $21 million in her 17-year career. On the face of it, theirs looked like a star-crossed love match, this woman known for her cool, unemotional presence linked with a man who was his own worst opponent. They had their first date in the summer of 1999, after Agassi’s two-year marriage to the actress Brooke Shields ended and as Graf’s Hall of Fame career was winding down. It did not take long for them to find common ground beyond the tennis court.

“Two minutes around her and you forget what she’s done in tennis,” Agassi said of Graf.

They seem to live at the same frequency, their antennae picking up other people’s faintest wants and needs. After spending half their lives on the professional tennis circuit, where socializing among players has largely gone the way of the serve-and-volley game, Agassi and Graf seem eager to make up for lost soirees.

They entertain often. Among friends, they are famous for memorizing everybody’s orders when they are dining out, then reproducing the same dishes and drinks when they have those friends over to their home. “We’re not settled unless everyone around us is settled,” Agassi said.

As far back as the junior circuit, Agassi was adamant about wanting to lead a rich life even if it cost him tennis titles. He still managed to win all four majors, completing his career Grand Slam at the 1999 French Open with a five-set victory against Andrei Medvedev. Tennis never ruled Graf, either, even when she was dominating it. That much was made comically clear during a tournament a few years back. While playing a trivia game online to pass the time before a match, Agassi came upon a question he was sure he would ace: “Who is the only woman to win a Grand Slam final 6-0, 6-0?” The choices were Graf, Helen Wills Moody, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.

Agassi turned to Graf, who was in the room, and asked, “Did you ever win a Grand Slam final love and love?” She answered, “No, I don’t think so.” Agassi picked Moody, but the answer was Graf, who beat Natasha Zvereva at the 1988 French Open. Agassi turned to her and said, “How could you not remember that?” Her answer was telling. She said she did not commit the details to memory because she never wanted tennis to matter that much.

“That’s why those two are perfect for each other,” Rogers said.

On this day in early August, the body of the player who used to wear diamond stud earrings and gold ropes is unadorned save for a necklace made by his son with square beads that spell out “Daddy Rocks.” Parenthood has transformed Agassi’s life. “I don’t remember what I used to do with my time or what used to preoccupy my thoughts,” he said.

That is the chief seduction of retirement. He never again will have to put his tennis ahead of his children. It weighs on him when Jaden tugs at his shorts and says, “Daddy, race me!” and Agassi has to say, “Not today, son. I’ve got to play tonight.”

Agassi has changed over the years, although not as conspicuously as it seemed. He was never as one-dimensional as his teenage James Dean persona. Playing a rebel made Agassi rich, but it did not make him happy. In the early 1990’s, he split with his image makers from the major sports agency, International Management Group, and retained his best friend, Rogers, to oversee his business affairs.

It was a decision that many people saw as a recipe for ruin. Even Rogers wondered if it was prudent to mix finances with friendship. But Agassi’s argument was persuasive. “They don’t know me like you do,” he said.

In 1993, Rogers, who has a law degree from Arizona, was named president of Andre Agassi Enterprises, a company Agassi founded because he wanted to make money and make a difference.

On the business side, he successfully invested in a restaurant owned by a friend, the chef Michael Mina, and the partnership has grown to eight restaurants. Agassi and Rogers were among five longtime friends who bought the Golden Nugget hotel on the Strip for an initial cash investment of $50 million. They sold it less than two years later, receiving $163 million in cash, according to documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Agassi’s greater passion is the charitable arm of his foundation. Its stated goals are to assist underprivileged, abused and abandoned children in southern Nevada. One of the first recipients of the foundations largesse was a Boys & Girls Club in the poorest part of Las Vegas.

When Agassi’s game went Hollywood in 1997, after he married Shields and moved to Los Angeles, Rogers worried that the charity’s fund-raising might suffer. Then came Agassi’s victory at the French Open, which he followed with his second United States Open title, to finish 1999 ranked No. 1, the first and only year in which he did so. After raising his game from the dead, raising money and people’s consciousness would no longer be a concern. Agassi was back in the spotlight, only this time he had figured out how to use it to benefit others. “The French Open changed everything,” Rogers said.

In 2001 the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy opened, around the corner from the Boys & Girls Club, with third grade through fifth grade. The public school, constructed and financed by tax dollars and Agassi’s foundation, now extends from kindergarten through 10th grade. Classrooms for the 11th and 12th grades are under construction.

He and Rogers contributed $2.5 million to the school last year as part of a fund-raising gala for children’s programs that brought in $10 million and included a surprise performance by Barbra Streisand. The foundation and its offshoots also contribute to dozens of health and education programs for at-risk children, including financing college scholarships, grants for disadvantaged children to attend camps and programs that work to prevent domestic violence against women and children. One of the recent projects provides shelter for children who have been removed from dangerous home situations or whose parents cannot care for them and includes 24-hour health care and a school.

It is on these programs that Agassi plans to devote considerable time after he takes one last walk to the net. Tennis is a sport that lets a player touch the lives of his audience for a few hours, he said over lunch, adding, “When you touch a person’s life outside the lines, it has more permanence to it.”

On this afternoon in Las Vegas, Agassi had a full plate of commitments. But he is in a hurry only to begin his next act.

“I feel like I’ve been practicing 20 years for this,” he said.

Wynton Marsalis

Wynton Marsalis: The Once and Future King of Jazz at Lincoln Center

Richard Termine for The New York Times

Mr. Marsalis in performance at the center in “All That Jazz: Now That’s Hip,” in March 2005.

By NATE CHINEN

Published: August 27, 2006

OH Lord,” Wynton Marsalis cried from the stage of the Apollo Theater. “Oh Lord,” he repeated, in an unsteady but soulful voice. “What have I done?”

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Mr. Marsalis is artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center, but the title understates his role in its day-to-day operations.

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Wynton Marsalis at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, an addition to Jazz at Lincoln Center. The night spot, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s smallest performance space, has surpassed expectations and is now paying for itself.

Hollering the blues, backed by a tambourine and twangy acoustic guitar, Mr. Marsalis was a study in contradictions. He was invoking rustic folk traditions while attired in a Brooks Brothers tuxedo and white tie. And he was sounding a note of abject despair while basking in the glow of 1,400 admirers, some of whom had paid as much as $2,500, as part of the fifth annual spring gala of Jazz at Lincoln Center.

Mr. Marsalis is the only living jazz musician who can reliably generate this kind of hoopla. In the 25 years since his dramatic leap into the spotlight, he has achieved the cultural celebrity of Duke Ellington. Or, perhaps more accurately, Leonard Bernstein, since Mr. Marsalis, too, is a lovingly adopted New Yorker who serves as global emissary for the music he loves and the institution he leads.

His official title with Jazz at Lincoln Center is artistic director, but that significantly understates his role in its origins and day-to-day operations. He was the driving force behind its inception, and he has a hand in everything from corporate relations to the curriculum for WeBop, a jazz program for preschoolers. “There’s nothing he doesn’t touch,” says Lisa Schiff, chairwoman of Jazz at Lincoln Center’s board of directors. “There’s not a part of our organization he’s not involved in.”

As a result Jazz at Lincoln Center can sometimes look like a solo performance rather than an ensemble effort. Which raises a question that no one, including the effortlessly charming Mr. Marsalis, seems eager to engage: Could the institution function without him?

The question came into sharper focus this year, when a rumor spread through jazz circles that he had sustained a lip injury serious enough to end his career as a trumpeter. That’s an unthinkable prospect for Jazz at Lincoln Center, partly because of the psychological effect it could have on Mr. Marsalis, a former prodigy, and partly because of the credibility that the institution has always derived, in large part, from his musical prowess. For a moment it was possible to imagine that the entire edifice of Jazz at Lincoln Center, including its new $128 million home on Columbus Circle, was balanced, figuratively speaking, on that lip. The spring gala marked Mr. Marsalis’s public return to playing after a forced hiatus. But his most important exertion that evening had nothing to do with his horn.

At a postconcert banquet, he worked his way through a cavernous dinner tent, gliding comfortably among the 75 tables to stamp the fund-raising effort with a personal touch. Spike Lee got a collegial hug; Glenn Close, a few minutes of conversation. Many others got a walk-by shoulder squeeze. Photographers would capture Mr. Marsalis in a panoply of scenes: on a red carpet with Joe Cocker, Natalie Merchant and John Mayer. Striking a rakish pose with Bruce Lundvall, the chief executive of his label, Blue Note. Clasping hands, earnestly, with Kenneth I. Chenault, the chief executive of American Express.

IN May of 1986 Lincoln Center’s Committee for the Future issued a report that concluded in part: “No compelling case can be made for adding a new constituent in an area like jazz.” (In other words, jazz could be a visitor at Lincoln Center but not sit at the table.) The following summer Mr. Marsalis, who had already played Haydn with the Philharmonic, was tapped to organize a concert series devoted to jazz: not a permanent addition to Lincoln Center’s portfolio, but an experiment nonetheless. Its success prompted the formation of another committee, headed by the lawyer Gordon J. Davis, a board member, and including Mr. Marsalis, the scholar Albert Murray and the writer Stanley Crouch. This committee came to a rather different conclusion: Lincoln Center should establish a permanent jazz program.

“There were people on the board of Lincoln Center who thought this was nuts,” Mr. Davis recently said. “The odds were 90 to 1 that we had any chance at all. Do you have any idea how hard it was to raise money for jazz in the late 80’s?”

It was hard, but the committee had a killer app: Mr. Marsalis, with his bright charisma and unimpeachable credentials. “His being a very highly respected concert musician had a lot to do with his being taken seriously,” Mr. Crouch said.

Of Mr. Marsalis and his organization, Kurt Masur, the former musical director of the New York Philharmonic, recently said: “You cannot divide them. Wynton alone can make his career as a trumpet player, but I think everybody knows the historical point of having Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

In addition to his personal assets, Mr. Marsalis was armed with a big idea: that jazz is a model of democratic action, and a prism through which American culture can be understood. This notion, first articulated to him by Mr. Murray and Mr. Crouch, has since been advanced by Jazz at Lincoln Center with the fervor of religious dogma and the adaptability of a political agenda. It served as a central conceit of “Jazz,” the 2001 Ken Burns PBS mini-series that spotlighted Mr. Marsalis not only as a commentator but also as a savior of the tradition. To a certain extent this has become the official story of jazz in the public sphere.

Certainly it has been propagated through Jazz at Lincoln Center’s educational wing, which, working with the National Endowment for the Arts, recently developed a Web-based curriculum that places jazz at the center of a discussion of American history. (It is accessible, free of charge, at neajazzintheschools.org.)

A similar though less pedagogical message is routinely disseminated through “Jazz at Lincoln Center Radio,” a program carried weekly by more than 240 public radio affiliates with the CBS News correspondent Ed Bradley, a longtime member of the Jazz at Lincoln Center board, as host. Mr. Marsalis tapes a separate satellite radio show, “In the Swing Set,” at an XM studio in Rose Hall.

“We are preaching the gospel of jazz,” Mr. Bradley said recently, though he stopped short of comparing Mr. Marsalis to a spiritual leader. “Wynton is the face of Jazz at Lincoln Center,” he said. “But he’s also involved in the nuts and bolts of being an artistic director, presenting a year’s worth of material at a time. And I’ve always been impressed with his willingness to go almost anywhere and do almost anything if he thinks he can raise a dollar for Jazz at Lincoln Center.”

In religion (and politics), but rarely in jazz, raising money and spreading a message are often part of the same outreach, especially when a force of personality is involved. It became clear which model Jazz at Lincoln Center has adopted during a lunch interview in Midtown with Katherine E. Brown, the organization’s executive director, and Ms. Schiff, the chairwoman of the board.

Ms. Schiff recalled the conversation with Mr. Marsalis that sparked her involvement with Jazz at Lincoln Center. “Wynton spoke to me specifically about the difference this music can make in our society,” she said. “He has a way of getting under your skin.”

Ms. Brown agreed: “He feels a responsibility to bring its message to the world.” She described Mr. Marsalis as “very, very active” in fund-raising for the organization.

Jazz at Lincoln Center has 105 full-time staff members, at least a dozen interns and more than 400 part-time employees, not to mention the roughly three-dozen members of its powerhouse board. These are often the people who first reach out to potential donors and corporate sponsors, which include Altria, Bank of America, Cadillac, Coca-Cola and Brooks Brothers.

“Once you’ve made that decision that the Jazz at Lincoln Center brand really can work well with your brand, Wynton’s power as the spokesperson — the front man, if you will — for Jazz at Lincoln Center really kind of takes on a life,” said Michael Valerio, Cadillac’s liaison with the organization. “He has a genuine interest in what you want to try to accomplish and how the relationship works.” As for the breadth of his company’s current involvement, “It’s 95 percent a function of my feeling and respect for Wynton,” who has shot hoops with Mr. Valerio and his youngest son backstage at Rose Hall.

“It’s a dog and pony show,” said Ms. Schiff, who often brings Mr. Marsalis on fund-raising calls. “Nobody sells it better.”

ON the last day of June, Mr. Marsalis left his Columbus Circle office and walked a few blocks to his apartment on West 66th Street. He took a familiar route, skirting the southern border of Damrosch Park and then the western edge of the Lincoln Center campus. Every security guard and garage attendant he passed was ready with a salutation, which he returned. “All right now,” he called out, more than once.

Mr. Marsalis’s apartment is impressive without feeling opulent, a perch with comfortable furnishings and a view of the Hudson River. He took some tea in the living room, sitting at first on a couch under a framed illustration of Ellington. But within 10 minutes he was at the piano in a corner of the room, sifting through notebooks to locate a preparatory sketch from a recent evening-length composition, “Congo Square.”

Eventually he found it, focusing on an intricate cluster of ensemble figures, cross-voiced between different sections of the orchestra. “I always write out a form, and express it from a human standpoint,” he said. “And this ties in actually to what you have to do to deal with the running of an organization.” On the page opposite the outline, there was a list of timely questions for the Jazz at Lincoln Center board.

Mr. Marsalis is serious when he likens jazz to management. Next month he will appear at the third annual World Business Forum at Radio City Music Hall, alongside Bill Clinton and Jack Welch, to present a lecture titled “Innovation and Jazz: Going Beyond Fundamentals to Create Value.” It hardly seems coincidental that the coming season of Jazz at Lincoln Center carries the theme “Innovations in Jazz,” a mandate some critics have accused him of slighting in the past. (One of his talking points at the forum is “Improvisation has its rules.”)

Eager to prove that his role in Jazz at Lincoln Center is not excessively large, Mr. Marsalis retrieved an internal document enumerating most of the staff’s responsibilities. Each task had a sequence of initials beside it, indicating all the people involved in its execution. At the top of the first page, he read off the artistic director’s obligations: “Select music. Program artists. Rehearse orchestra. Play concerts. Conduct education events. Write arrangements. Publicity obligations. Development. Oversee recordings. Write Young People’s Concerts. Interact with various departments on strategic issues. Create new ideas that invigorate our organization.” The big stuff.

Then Mr. Marsalis flipped through page after page of subsidiary obligations, the stuff that does not, presumably, require his personal involvement. But there, too, the initials W. M. appeared seemingly hundreds of times. “They have me in there more than I thought,” he mumbled, scanning the list. “I don’t remember myself being in there that much.”

He recovered quickly. “I want you to notice how many other people are on this. I’m in there, yes. But let’s say we go down those things.” He began to tick off dozens of tasks for which he has oversight but little practical involvement. “ ‘Concert marketing,’ maybe they have a meeting with me and I tell them what the concerts are. ‘Venue signage’? No. ‘Web site’? I haven’t even seen the Web site yet. One of the things I’m proud of is that I don’t know how to turn a computer on. All of this stuff goes on without me.”

Nonetheless when the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra traveled to Vitoria-Gasteiz, in the Basque country of Spain last month to perform “The Vitoria Suite,” it was Mr. Marsalis, the suite’s composer, who was honored with a life-size bronze statute of his likeness.

After the concert Mr. Marsalis joined a late-night jam session in the crowded lobby of his hotel. The following morning there were video clips of this scene on YouTube.com, and they confirmed some good news: Mr. Marsalis’s lip is nearly back in shape. He’s wearing his glasses and a black T-shirt bearing the slogan “ReNew Orleans,” a reminder of one cause that hit close to home.

A couple of weeks later he was back in New York, and in a suit (yes, Brooks Brothers) for a staff meeting. “We are reinvigorating ourselves,” he reported afterward. “We see what we have to do, and we are rededicating ourselves to our vision and our mission. We are streamlining everything that we do, we are becoming supremely efficient, we are working overtime.”

Since the construction, against enormous odds, of Rose Hall, the group had made some financial strides. The biggest success story is Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Rose Hall’s smallest space, which was projected to operate at a deficit but began to sustain itself financially after a year. “It’s paying its own internal rental, paying the artists, paying the cost of advertising, staffing costs, the sound man,” said Todd Barkan, the club’s artistic manager. “And in the context of the institution, that’s an enormous achievement.”

But there is a sense of urgency within Jazz at Lincoln Center as it heads into its third season in its new home. “We raised $131 million for the building,” Ms. Brown said. “That was a real stretch for our organization, and it’s a testament to the strength and energy of the board, and Wynton’s effort. Now we need to shift our focus to the issue of maintaining it.” She cited the budget for this next season, $36 million. “The challenges of keeping the operation going are much, much greater than before.”

“At every board meeting it’s like a wake-up call, what you have to do,” Mr. Bradley of CBS News confirmed. This season’s effort involves the second season of the Middle School Jazz Academy; the addition of Hipsters, a jazz course for infants as young as eight months; and a season dense with concerts, including a commission by Derek Bermel for the American Composers Orchestra with its jazz counterpart.

Of course Mr. Marsalis, who for the next few days is presiding over a cultural celebration in New Orleans, will crop up often in the new season. From the looks of it he’ll be playing a lot of trumpet. But he’ll be working even harder behind the scenes: raising funds, rallying troops and perhaps even setting the changes, so to speak, for an eventual successor.

“Institutions keep going,” said Mr. Marsalis, on his living room couch, when asked what Jazz at Lincoln Center would do without him. “I’ve been a part of this one since the beginning. It’s been guided more or less on my vision. So naturally they say: ‘What are we going to do?’ ” He flashed a mischievous smile. “We’ll do something. We always do.”

New York City Housing

The Housing Virgins of Manhattan

Maximillian Bode

By PENELOPE GREEN

Published: August 24, 2006

BEN SNYDACKER is just 21, and a freshly minted New Yorker. Tall and brash, he’s enjoying his third month in his new job, as a sales assistant for Virgin Records, and his new apartment, a minute space creatively described as a two-bedroom in a rank 19th-century tenement building on Avenue B that he shares with a college roommate (monthly rent: $2,600). It has been a summer of firsts for Mr. Snydacker, a Skidmore graduate: after scuffling in the city’s rental market, a sometimes-lawless agora peopled with good guys, bad guys and all the shape-shifters in between, Mr. Snydacker has emerged a little tougher and, emotionally, a little older. He is no longer a housing virgin.

Keith Bedford for The New York Times

Lani Fortier, who can’t find an apartment, calls a friend’s futon home.

Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Ben Snydacker in front of his hard-won East Village rental.

“It was probably the second most stressful experience of my life,” he said the other day. “That is, if I retained any memory of having had meningitis when I was 6 months old.”

It’s late August, and an annual Manhattan roundelay is winding down. The new college graduates have been pouring into town from all over the country since June, short of money and time but long on hope, specifically the hope of finding a safe haven on this island, which is to say a legal rental for under $1,500 a bedroom. (Williamsburg and beyond is a bridge too far for much of this crowd.) With vacancy rates at 0.78 percent, and rental prices up 15 percent over last summer, “these apartments are in high demand and usually disappear within 24 hours,” said Gordon Golub, senior managing director at Citi Habitats, the largest rental agency in the city.

“Year by year for the past three years,” he continued, “there has been more and more hiring by large firms at the entry level. And so within a tight rental market, this particular market is extremely tight.”

And the fees are higher. Three years ago, agents were, in many cases, negotiating their fees down to 8 percent; some landlords were even paying agent’s fees directly. Today, agents typically charge 15 percent of a year’s rent (which, depending on seniority and performance, they share with their companies at rates of between 20 and 60 percent).

Additionally, landlords require three months’ rent up front (first, last and a security deposit), though in some cases, if the credit history of a tenant is weak (or non-existent) and the salary not large enough, they might extract a larger deposit or ask for a guarantor. The formula for salary requirements is between 40 and 45 times one month’s rent, or about $120,000 for a $3,000-a-month apartment. That sum is well beyond the reach of tenants like Mr. Snydacker, whose starting salary at Virgin is $35,000; in such cases, a parent will often serve as a guarantor. With their laptops filled with postings from the online marketplace Craigslist and Backpage, the Village Voice’s online listing service, the new New Yorkers have encountered every dodge and near-scam that Manhattan’s so-called “rogue” brokers have to offer — the bait-and-switch, the unreturned fees, the fake bidding wars. By this week, for the most part, they will have found housing, which they’ll accessorize with a flat-screen television and maybe a few pieces of Ikea furniture, upon which their friends will sprawl and hear the war stories of the summer of 2006.

Here’s Mr. Snydacker’s: With a job that began on June 5, he was camping at his dad’s apartment in Connecticut and commuting an hour and a half each way, each day, into the city. He started off by replying to individual postings on Craigslist, but he grew leery of meeting agents on street corners and seeing one-bedroom apartments that had been advertised as two.

“I felt like it was time to go to a big agency so there’d be accountability,” he said. “I didn’t want to be making deals on street corners with these agents who were saying, ‘Please don’t go in my office.’ They were trying to undercut their own companies.”

But size did not guarantee fair play, he said. An agent at one of the larger firms showed him a two-bedroom in the far East Village, on the heels of another showing by another agent for the same apartment.

“Then it was a race to see who could get their application in first,” said Mr. Snydacker, who drew $500 from an A.T.M. as a kind of place holder, for which the agent wrote out a receipt. Apartments are not taken off the market until an application has been approved and the certified checks duly cashed, but a $500 deposit shows a landlord a would-be renter’s good faith during the application process. It’s typically returned, or applied to the broker’s fee or the rent itself.

“Except when I arrived with all our checks to sign the lease,” said Mr. Snydacker, “the guy refused to give me the money back. He said we needed two receipts. He was pretty aggressive, and there was a moment when I thought, ‘I’m already spending $5,000, what’s another $500?’ But my dad called a lawyer, and then called the broker, who then got really aggressive with me. I called customer service at the agency, and they were pretty decent. They said, ‘Don’t worry. Come in and get your money.’ ”

Mr. Snydacker took his roommate to the agency’s office, where he said the agent scowled beetle-browed and silently counted out a stack of $20 bills onto his desk. Just as silently, Mr. Snydacker said, he counted them, and left.

“I don’t know why this guy felt like he had a right to be angry with me,” said Mr. Snydacker. “But he was furious. He’s a big guy, and it was pretty scary.”

CRAIG NEWMARK, the founder of Craigslist (and a San Francisco resident), said last week that monitoring the site’s New York City housing section is “my biggest single project, actually. When you are in a situation where you feel everyone else is cheating,” he said, “a lot of people feel a moral sanction that they can cheat, too.”

“Over the years we’ve been telling brokers that’s not O.K., and over the years the less ethical behavior is slowing down,” he said. “On the other hand, there are some persistent bad guys, and the worst of them I’ve reported to New York State’s Department of State. Real estate in New York is a blood sport. It’s not like anywhere else.”

Mr. Newmark has taken to dropping in on real estate agencies unannounced when he is in Manhattan. “I’m letting them know I am really committed and that I really exist. I’ve had a few cases, specifically three, where people have reported problems getting a fee back, and in each case I’ve talked to the agent and gotten it back.”

Last summer, Ann Marie Yoo, a 23-year-old Columbia graduate now working as a health care consultant, and two of her college roommates applied for an apartment in Morningside Heights. They lined up their financial ducks in three days, she said, but when Ms. Yoo arrived in the agent’s office with her sheaf of certified checks, her agent announced that the landlord had given the apartment to someone else.

“I never felt like the broker was looking out for us,” she said, “and he was really impatient through the whole process. He tried to get us to stay, to keep our deposit for another apartment, but I’d had it.”

This is when she made her move from a large agency to “a completely random agent on Craigslist,” said Ms. Yoo.

“He was the sketchiest man,” she said, “and the apartment was — eh. But the location was just so prime and he said ‘We don’t do credit checks and we only charge 12 percent.’ ” And so Ms. Yoo and her friends once again assembled the sheaf of certified checks. On the morning of the lease signing, the agent called Ms. Yoo three or four times to say he was stuck on a train, he was on his way, he would meet her on a corner near her Midtown office.

“I’m waiting, and 10 minutes goes by, and then 20, and he pulls up in huge, grimy white minivan, and says, ‘Why don’t you step inside?’ ” Ms. Yoo remembered. “And I’m wondering what all the stuff about the subway was, as I say, ‘No way am I going to step inside your van!’ He starts giving me grief, saying stuff like, ‘I don’t feel like working with people who don’t trust me.’ And I’m freaking out because I think we’re going to lose the apartment, even though there’s no way I’m getting in the van. So I’m begging him to take the checks, to guarantee me the apartment.”

But the agent drove away, leaving Ms. Yoo gape-mouthed on Madison Avenue, after making another appointment to meet that evening at a Starbucks near the apartment.

“I take my roommates with me,” Ms. Yoo went on to say, “because there’s no way I’m going to meet him alone, and as we’re walking to the apartment with the keys he calls me on the whole thing again. He literally said something to the effect of, ‘You’re not comfortable with me because you’re Asian,’ and I’m like, ‘No, I’m a young woman alone in the city.’ ”

“Brokers always provide you with an experience you never forget,” she concluded wryly.

Some young graduates forgo the rental scene altogether, hopping from one couch or futon to the next, hoping their friendships and their welcomes don’t wear out too quickly.

Lani Fortier, 24, spent eight months of her first year out of the University of Connecticut in the Mercy Ships program, which uses former ocean liners-turned-floating hospitals to provide medical treatment to developing nations.

When Ms. Fortier joined, her ship was moored off Liberia, where in addition to assisting the ship’s doctors, Ms. Fortier played on the Liberian women’s soccer team and rebuilt an orphanage that had lost all its funding.

Ms. Fortier and a business partner are now in Manhattan starting their own charity, Charityis.com, to pay for projects like Mercy Ships. Ms. Fortier, who said she hopes to make $500 a week once the charity is operating, is sleeping on a futon in the postage-stamp-size West Village living room of her best friend from New Hampshire, and another roommate, Jessica Flint, an editorial assistant at Vanity Fair.

Ms. Flint, who has lived in four apartments in four years since graduating from Miami University in Ohio (including a room in the apartment of an unemployed woman who’d racked up $1,000 in cable charges she tried to foist on Ms. Flint) has a particular soft spot for Ms. Fortier.

Ms. Flint also offers advice to newbie Manhattanites: she and her friend Cate Edwards, daughter of John Edwards, the 2004 Democratic vice-presidential candidate, have a blog, www.urbanistaonline.com, a kind of Zagat-like lifestyle guide.

“My experience was so bad,” Ms. Flint said, “I feel fine about Lani staying here.”

One morning last week the two new roommates were perched on “Lani’s room,” a black futon Ms. Flint bought last year. Ms. Fortier’s possessions were tucked inside her sister’s red suitcase, which was parked demurely in the long front hall of the apartment. She left many of her things in Africa, she said, including her own suitcase. “In hindsight, giving away most of my clothes was maybe not a good thing,” she mused.

Ms. Fortier will stay as long as she’s welcome, which, judging from Ms. Flint’s demeanor, could be many months. She’s been living out of a bag for so long, she said, it’s no hardship. “And this is a very nice futon,” she said, patting it approvingly. “Nice and thick!”

Ms. Flint’s own tiny room is rather stunning, with canvases painted in lavender and pale green and laid out like a puzzle on one wall, a chandelier that pours like a baby fountain from the ceiling and sheer lavender curtains she’s stenciled with a few lines from “The Great Gatsby.”

It’s the part about how Manhattan looks from the Queensboro Bridge, though Ms. Flint has substituted the word “penthouse” for the bridge because “last year I lived in a penthouse,” she explained, and then quoted her version.

“The city seen from the penthouse is always the city seen for the first time,” it reads, “in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world.”

Ms. Flint is very happy to be home.

Finding an Apartment Without Being Taken

THE best sources for apartment listings in Manhattan are online, at craigslist.org and backpage.com, the Village Voice’s listings. As a result of efforts by volunteers who police Craigslist for listing abuses, and the attention of the site’s founder, Craig Newmark, bad behavior on Craigslist is diminishing. Backpage may still be a bit unruly, said Jonas Sigle, chief technical director at the rental agency Manhattan Apartments Inc. and one of many self-appointed “policemen” trawling Craigslist.

Since June, another factor that has cut down on listing mayhem is the $10 charge that Mr. Newmark has required of all fee apartments posted on his listing service. The charge has winnowed down a big annoyance: multiple postings of the same apartment by the same agent. Since new postings appear higher on the Craigslist Web page, repeated postings of the same apartment were a Darwinian strategy followed by most agents, resulting in a blizzard of listings. (Almost as quickly as the $10 charge policy was initiated, many agents began posting on owner-only sites, where no charges are levied.)

Not all agents are rogues, of course. In evaluating an agent, Mr. Sigle recommends looking out for someone “who knows the product, knows what kind of accounts — or landlords — are going to accept what kind of application.” In other words, he said, “will they take students or someone who needs a guarantor? Someone who is clear and honest and upfront.”

Beware of agents who will not disclose their agencies; you want the protection of a customer service department or an office manager should something go awry.

Leroy Frazier, a special prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, said that the amount of outright fraud in the rental market has remained constant from year to year, and mostly has to do with people offering apartments that don’t exist or don’t belong to them.

“I would certainly advise not renting an apartment entirely online,” he said. “I would inspect the apartment, and while inspecting it, I would try and talk to a neighbor or, better, the super — someone who can document that you’ve been there.” Always create a paper trail with certified checks or a credit card, never cash.

It’s a big red flag, he said, if someone tries to talk you out of doing any of the above.

No more 24-hour marriages

Vegas Closing 24 - Hour Marriage Office

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: August 24, 2006

Filed at 11:32 a.m. ET

LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Spontaneous lovebirds and celebrities take note: there won't be any more early morning quickie marriages in Vegas. After years of sanctioning hastily made matches, the Las Vegas marriage bureau plans to close its all-night counter. County officials approved a new 8 a.m.-to-midnight schedule that will take effect next Wednesday, eliminating 24-hour marriage license service on Fridays, Saturday and holidays.

The counter did not offer after-midnight service Monday through Thursday.

Officials said the move would affect less than 4 percent of the licenses issued by the bureau and save $200,000 a year.

But the cost-cutting move could jeopardize Las Vegas' self-proclaimed standing as the marriage capital of the world, although it could also save the rich and spontaneous from some high-profile grief.

Britney Spears, Nicky Hilton and Demi Moore and Bruce Willis all wed in the late-night hours in Las Vegas.

All three unions ended in divorce, with Spears' January 2004 nuptial to childhood pal Jason Alexander being annulled just 55 hours later. Moore's marriage to Willis, however, lasted 13 years.

Charlotte Richards, whose 24-hour Little White Wedding Chapel married Spears, said she was saddened by the change.

''Let's face it, man, this is Las Vegas. This is the marriage capital of the world,'' she said. ''People just automatically think, `Let's go to Las Vegas! They're open all night!'''

Richards said she marries 10 to 20 couples after midnight on a typical weekend. She provides a stretch limo to shuttle the betrothed back and forth to the courthouse to obtain a license for the ceremony. She said pre-dawn weddings are popular among members of the military, lovers driving in from Southern California and celebrities.

''All the stars come out at night,'' Richards said. ''People that are high profile, when they come down to Las Vegas to get married, they don't want to come in the middle of the day when people are around. They like the privacy.''

County officials, who issued 122,259 licenses last year, said the new schedule won't prevent holy matrimony after midnight, but will just force a little planning to obtain a license in advance.

''They just can't run down to the bureau at 3:05 and be married by 3:10. They have to give just a little thought to the process,'' said County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre.

judicial power

Op-Ed Contributor

A Law Unto Herself

By ANN ALTHOUSE

Published: August 23, 2006

Madison, Wis.

David Suter

TO end her opinion in American Civil Liberties Union v. National Security Agency — the case that enjoins President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program — Judge Anna Diggs Taylor quoted Earl Warren (referring to him as “Justice Warren,” not “Chief Justice Warren,” as if she wanted to spotlight her carelessness): “It would indeed be ironic if, in the name of national defense, we would sanction the subversion of ... those liberties ... which makes the defense of the nation worthwhile.”

As long as we’re appreciating irony, let’s consider the irony of emphasizing the importance of holding one branch of the federal government, the executive, to the strict limits of the rule of law while sitting in another branch of the federal government, the judiciary, and blithely ignoring your own obligations.

So often, we’ve heard complaints about “activist” judges. They’re suspected of deciding what outcome they want, based on their own personal or ideological preferences, and then writing a legalistic, neutral-sounding opinion to cover up what they’ve done. That carefully composed legal opinion makes it somewhat hard for a judge’s critics to convince people — especially anyone who likes the outcome — that the judge did not decide the case according to an unbiased legal method of analysis.

So perhaps the oddest thing about Judge Taylor’s opinion in the eavesdropping case is that she didn’t bother to come up with the verbiage that normally cushions us from these suspicions. Although the first half of the opinion, dealing with the state secrets doctrine and the first part of the standing doctrine, has the usual detail and structure one expects in a judicial opinion, the remainder of her text dispenses with the formalities.

Immensely difficult matters of First and Fourth Amendment law, separation of powers, and the relationship between the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Authorization for Use of Military Force are disposed of in short sections that jump from assorted quotations of old cases to conclusory assertions of illegality. Orin S. Kerr, a law professor at George Washington, told The Times that the section on the Fourth Amendment is “just a few pages of general ruminations ... much of it incomplete and some of it simply incorrect.”

For those who approve of the outcome , the judge’s opinion is counterproductive. It will be harder to defend upon appeal than a more careful decision. It suggests that there are no good legal arguments against the program, just petulance and outrage and antipathy toward President Bush. It helps those who have been arguing for years about result-oriented, activist judges.

Laypeople consuming early news reports may well have thought, “What a courageous judge!” and “It’s a good thing someone finally said that the president is not above the law.” Look at that juicy quotation from Judge Taylor’s ruling: “There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution.”

But this is sheer sophistry. The potential for the president to abuse his power has nothing to do with kings and heredity. (How much power do hereditary kings have these days, anyway?) And, indeed, the president is not claiming he has powers outside of the Constitution. He isn’t arguing that he’s above the law. He’s making an aggressive argument about the scope of his power under the law.

It is a serious argument, and judges need to take it seriously. If they do not, we ought to wonder why a court gets to decide what the law is and not the president. After all, the president has a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution; he has his advisers, and they’ve concluded that the program is legal. Why should the judicial view prevail over the president’s?

This, of course, is the most basic question in constitutional law, the one addressed in Marbury v. Madison. The public may have become so used to the notion that a judge’s word is what counts that it forgets why this is true. The judges have this constitutional power only because they operate by a judicial method that restricts them to resolving concrete controversies and requires them to interpret the relevant constitutional and statutory texts and to reason within the tradition of the case law.

This system works only if the judges suppress their personal and political willfulness and take on the momentous responsibility to embody the rule of law. They should not reach out for opportunities to make announcements of law, but handle the real cases that have been filed.

This means that the judge has a constitutional duty, under the doctrine of standing, to respond only to concretely injured plaintiffs who are suing the entity that caused their injury and for the purpose of remedying that injury. We trust the judge to say what the law is because the judge “must of necessity expound and interpret” in order to decide cases, as Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in Marbury. But Judge Taylor breezed through two of the three elements of standing doctrine — this constitutional limit on her power — in what looks like a headlong rush through a whole series of difficult legal questions to get to an outcome in her heart she knew was right.

If the words of the written opinion reveal that the judge did not follow the discipline of the judicial process, what sense does it make to take the judge’s word about what the law means over the word of the president? If the judge’s own writing does not support a belief that the rule of law has substance and depth, that law is something apart from political will, the significance of saying the president has gone beyond the limits of the law evaporates.

There’s irony for you.

Ann Althouse, a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin, writes the blog Althouse.

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The End of Welfare?

Op-Ed Contributor

How We Ended Welfare, Together

By BILL CLINTON

Published: August 22, 2006

TEN years ago today I signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. By then I had long been committed to welfare reform. As a governor, I oversaw a workfare experiment in Arkansas in 1980 and represented the National Governors Association in working with Congress and the Reagan administration to draft the welfare reform bill enacted in 1988.

Yet when I ran for president in 1992, our system still was not working for the taxpayers or for those it was intended to help. In my first State of the Union address, I promised to “end welfare as we know it,” to make welfare a second chance, not a way of life, exactly the change most welfare recipients wanted it to be.

Most Democrats and Republicans wanted to pass welfare legislation shifting the emphasis from dependence to empowerment. Because I had already given 45 states waivers to institute their own reform plans, we had a good idea of what would work. Still, there were philosophical gaps to bridge. The Republicans wanted to require able-bodied people to work, but were opposed to continuing the federal guarantees of food and medical care to their children and to spending enough on education, training, transportation and child care to enable people to go to work in lower-wage jobs without hurting their children.

On Aug. 22, 1996, after vetoing two earlier versions, I signed welfare reform into law. At the time, I was widely criticized by liberals who thought the work requirements too harsh and conservatives who thought the work incentives too generous. Three members of my administration ultimately resigned in protest. Thankfully, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans voted for the bill because they thought we shouldn't be satisfied with a system that had led to intergenerational dependency.

The last 10 years have shown that we did in fact end welfare as we knew it, creating a new beginning for millions of Americans.

In the past decade, welfare rolls have dropped substantially, from 12.2 million in 1996 to 4.5 million today. At the same time, caseloads declined by 54 percent. Sixty percent of mothers who left welfare found work, far surpassing predictions of experts. Through the Welfare to Work Partnership, which my administration started to speed the transition to employment, more than 20,000 businesses hired 1.1 million former welfare recipients. Welfare reform has proved a great success, and I am grateful to the Democrats and Republicans who had the courage to work together to take bold action.

The success of welfare reform was bolstered by other anti-poverty initiatives, including the doubling of the earned-income tax credit in 1993 for lower-income workers; the 1997 Balanced Budget Act, which included $3 billion to move long-term welfare recipients and low-income, noncustodial fathers into jobs; the Access to Jobs initiative, which helped communities create innovative transportation services to enable former welfare recipients and other low-income workers to get to their new jobs; and the welfare-to-work tax credit, which provided tax incentives to encourage businesses to hire long-term welfare recipients.

I also signed into law the toughest child-support enforcement in history, doubling collections; an increase in the minimum wage in 1997; a doubling of federal financing for child care, helping parents look after 1.5 million children in 1998; and a near doubling of financing for Head Start programs.

The results: child poverty dropped to 16.2 percent in 2000, the lowest rate since 1979, and in 2000, the percentage of Americans on welfare reached its lowest level in four decades. Overall, 100 times as many people moved out of poverty and into the middle class during our eight years as in the previous 12. Of course the booming economy helped, but the empowerment policies made a big difference.

Regarding the politics of welfare reform, there is a great lesson to be learned, particularly in today’s hyper-partisan environment, where the Republican leadership forces bills through Congress without even a hint of bipartisanship. Simply put, welfare reform worked because we all worked together. The 1996 Welfare Act shows us how much we can achieve when both parties bring their best ideas to the negotiating table and focus on doing what is best for the country.

The recent welfare reform amendments, largely Republican-only initiatives, cut back on states’ ability to devise their own programs. They also disallowed hours spent pursuing an education from counting against required weekly work hours. I doubt they will have the positive impact of the original legislation.

We should address the inadequacies of the latest welfare reauthorization in a bipartisan manner, by giving states the flexibility to consider higher education as a category of “work,” and by doing more to help people get the education they need and the jobs they deserve. And perhaps even more than additional welfare reform, we need to raise the minimum wage, create more good jobs through a commitment to a clean energy future and enact tax and other policies to support families in work and child-rearing.

Ten years ago, neither side got exactly what it had hoped for. While we compromised to reach an agreement, we never betrayed our principles and we passed a bill that worked and stood the test of time. This style of cooperative governing is anything but a sign of weakness. It is a measure of strength, deeply rooted in our Constitution and history, and essential to the better future that all Americans deserve, Republicans and Democrats alike.

Bill Clinton, the 42nd president, heads the Clinton Foundation.

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Poisonous Fish

Yikes ! Be forewarned.

Venom Runs Thick in Fish Families, Researchers Learn

By DENISE GRADY

Published: August 22, 2006

One moment he was reaching for the telephone, the next he was out cold.

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Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Another venomous creature, the firefish.

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Video: Venom That Swims

Graphic: How Venomous Fish Deliver Their Goods

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Venom Evolution Widespread in Fishes: A Phylogenetic Road Map for the Bioprospecting of Piscine Venoms (Journal of Heredity)

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

Dr. William Leo Smith

William Leo Smith, then a 20-year-old college student, woke up on the floor of the pet shop where he worked, blinking up at a ring of worried faces and feeling as if he’d been stabbed in the hand.

Actually, he’d been stung by a fuzzy dwarf lionfish — a dead one, no less. Someone had thrown it away, and Mr. Smith did not notice it when he tried to retrieve a telephone that had fallen into the same trash can. A row of spines along the fish’s back, armed with venom, jabbed him.

Today, a dozen years later, Mr. Smith is Dr. Smith, an ichthyologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, with an abiding curiosity about venomous fish. They are, he contends, undercounted, misunderstood and sadly unappreciated — an untapped resource for “bioprospecting” to find drugs among their thousands of venoms. Not many of the venoms have been studied, even though they can play havoc with crucial functions like blood clotting, nerve and muscle activity, blood pressure and heartbeat.

Although previous researchers estimated that there were about 200 species of venomous fish, Dr. Smith and Ward C. Wheeler, a curator at the museum, recently published a study suggesting at least 1,200. Many carry their venom in spines and barbs, some in fangs. Though the 1,200 species are not new, scientists did not know they were venomous. Now, biologists may need to rethink some of their old ideas, Dr. Smith said. “With very few exceptions, everything we thought was wrong,” he said.

The study, published in June in The Journal of Heredity, analyzed and compared DNA sequences from 233 species and used the results to create a new family tree for spiny-rayed fishes. That group includes many types of toadfish, scorpionfish (lionfish are a type of scorpionfish), surgeonfish, rabbitfish, jacks, stargazers and saber-toothed blennies.

The family tree shows how the species are related, and which evolved from the same ancestor. Based on the tree, the researchers predicted which species should be venomous. Then, to test their predictions, Dr. Smith dissected 102 specimens, looking for venom glands and delivery systems like spikes, fangs or sharp fins.

Of the 102 species he examined, previous research had suggested that 26 were venomous. But the new analysis predicted that 61 would be venomous — and the dissections bore that out.

“The world of vertebrate toxins will need some reordering,” Dr. Wheeler said.

Dr. J. Andres Lopez, an ichthyologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, said the study was the first effort in almost 20 years to understand the evolutionary relationships among venomous fish. He said the new family tree could help guide researchers who want to study particular types of venom.

“In a way, it’s a call for the biologists interested in the biological properties of animal toxins to go out there and start exploring this,” Dr. Lopez said. There are huge information gaps in ichthyology, Dr. Smith noted, and every year biologists find 200 to 300 species that had not been known before.

“We really don’t know anything about fish,” Dr. Smith said.

Most venomous fish come from the Indo-Pacific, off eastern and southern Africa, Australia, Polynesia, the Philippines, Indonesia and southern Japan. About 50,000 people a year suffer from stings, or envenomations, with an array of symptoms like pain, fainting, blisters, fever, convulsions, breathing trouble and sometimes even death.

Venomous fish tend to be either flamboyant, with intense colors to warn their enemies, or “complete camouflage experts” that bury themselves in the sand, “and if you step on them, you’re nailed,” Dr. Smith said.

Apart from obvious uses like defense and hunting, Dr. Smith said venom might also have evolved because it helped bottom-dwelling fish to kill bacteria trying to invade their skin.

The most dangerous venomous fish is the stonefish, which buries itself and has a venom that can be deadly. The spikes on its back are “basically, hypodermic needles,” Dr. Smith said, adding that the stonefish actually has control over whether to shoot its venom, which it does when frightened or provoked. Other species, like the lionfish, cannot release the venom unless something strikes their spines.

Lionfish, though not native to North America, have made themselves at home in the ocean around Florida and have begun working their way north, even as far as New York, off Fire Island, in late summer. They are pretty, and popular with some aquarium owners. Dr. Smith figured they probably took hold in American waters after being imported by wholesalers in Florida, kept in outdoor pools and then washed into the ocean by a hurricane.

Lionfish are also ornery, Dr. Smith said. They will dart at scuba divers and slam their venomous spines right into the facemask. Web sites warn that lionfish will even spike the friendly hand that cleans out their tank. If the spines puncture flesh, they break off and leave painful fragments in the skin along with their chemical weapon.

The pain can be intense. The best treatment is to immerse the wound or run it under very hot water for at least 30 to 40 minutes. The idea is not to wash away the venom, but, essentially, to cook it. Made of protein, venoms can be broken down by heat.

One of Dr. Smith’s favorite venomous fishes is the stargazer, which buries itself and can fire electric shocks as well as venom. In some cultures it is a delicacy (cooking destroys the venom, and so does the human digestive tract), and Dr. Smith has seen it for sale in fish markets in Chinatown in Manhattan, with the electric organ carefully ripped out by fishermen.

Dr. Smith bought a small stargazer recently from a pet supplier, and he keeps it in an aquarium in his lab at the museum, where it hides under a pile of sand until he gently digs it out (with a probe, to avoid being shocked) to show visitors its scowling snout before it can furiously rebury itself.

“They’re the meanest things in creation,” he said delightedly. “I was so excited to get it. It’s the worst pet on earth.”