The video was posted on YouTube on Monday under the user name BITcrash44. By Wednesday, it had generated more than 800,000 views and had been mentioned on Web sites like Gizmodo, Gothamist, Salon and NBC New York. One Web site even listed it as the most popular viral video on Twitter.

The multitudes who have seen the video have become swept up in an intense debate around one question: is it real? Well, it’s a fake. And the reaction is exactly what James Percelay and Michael Krivicka wanted when they produced the video as part of a promotion for the soon-to-be-released film “Limitless.”

The two men, founders of a viral marketing company called Thinkmodo, are tapping into a growing desire among marketers to attract and keep the attention of online viewers with videos that get shared on social Web sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The strategy for Thinkmodo is to make videos that viewers will think are clever and authentic without overtly pushing or mentioning a product, Mr. Percelay said.

“We’re pushing the engagement of an idea which leads you then to the product,” he said. “It just is a whole new mind-set where you don’t have to wrap everything up in a bow and if you don’t, people are going to be a lot more interested in you and what you’re selling and what your message is.”

The video released this week, Mr. Percelay said, takes its cue from the premise of “Limitless,” in which a man is able to use all of his brain capacity with the help of a pill called NZT. The video shows a man in an orange jacket standing in Times Square explaining how a makeshift electronic “repeater” and “transmitter” connected to his iPhone can take over any video screen.

First, he tries the device on two small video screens on newspaper kiosks. All the while a cameraman is filming him as he holds the iPhone so viewers can see how the content being projected syncs with the content on the screen. The man then buys a big red balloon to which he attaches the device. When the balloon floats in front of a large video screen playing a trailer for “Limitless” on the corner of Broadway and 47th Street, the iPhone video suddenly begins playing on the screen instead.

Marketing for “Limitless” includes traditional media like subway posters, television commercials featuring the song “Power” by Kanye West, digital and print advertising, and a fake Web commercial for NZT, the drug featured in the film. But even with all of those marketing dollars being spent, a viral video has its place, said Peter Adee, the president of worldwide marketing and distribution at Relativity Media.

“You are getting your message across, but it’s tangential; it’s not a direct frontal assault,” said Mr. Adee, adding that the do-it-yourself look and feel of the video is also an important element. “You don’t have to make it perfect; if anything, that would hurt it. It has to feel organic. It has to feel original.”

Advertisers have been increasingly experimenting with viral videos. One of the most popular campaigns during the last year has been for Old Spice, featuring the actor Isaiah Mustafa.

Wieden & Kennedy Portland, the agency of record for Old Spice, created a series of videos that went viral in July, in which Mr. Mustafa answered consumer questions in real time over the course of several days. The agency used social networking sites to get questions from users and posted the video responses on You Tube and other sites.

“You don’t need a production of 50 people. You can move the world with three,” said Joani Wardwell, the global public relations director for Wieden & Kennedy.

Mr. Percelay and Mr. Krivicka had been toying with the concept of viral videos for about six months before deciding to use them as marketing tools. Mr. Krivicka, 34, is a freelance video producer and Mr. Percelay, 49, has a background in television production, including a former job as a line producer for “Saturday Night Live.” Neither has a traditional advertising background nor the accoutrements that come with a traditional agency, like office space or assistants, which Mr. Percelay said actually helps them compete with large agencies.

“We represent the new age in advertising,” Mr. Percelay said in an e-mail. “Virtual offices and the ‘YouTube aesthetic’ are ushering in a sea change enabling creatives with minuscule overhead to go head to head with those with massive ones.”

The company embarked on its first official project in February, with a video featuring a helmet that could shave a person’s head. The video was shot using an iPhone in the bathroom of a nondescript Midtown Manhattan building on a rainy Saturday afternoon.

The product the commercial was intended to sell, a head-shaving device called the HeadBlade that fits on a few fingers, was not overtly mentioned in the spot. But that didn’t stop the video from becoming a viral sensation — it was viewed more than one million times on YouTube in less than a week — and from duping viewers and a few television news anchors in the process.

The video garnered more than 500 broadcast mentions in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia and was posted on more than 1,000 Web sites and blogs, according to Mr. Percelay. HeadBlade sales surged 31 percent after the video was released, and the company’s Web traffic increased 49 percent as a result, he said.

“HeadBlade asked for one thing only,” said Mr. Krivicka. “They asked for a viral marketing campaign that starts a conversation around head-shaving.”

Mr. Krivicka guarded many of his secrets for seeding viral videos on the Web, but said the best day to offer one up was on Mondays. “The weekend usually kills it, nobody is in the office, nobody passes it on, people are away,” he said.

Part of the strategy is also to tip off editors of target Web sites, buy keywords and Web site addresses and use social media to get the word out without being obvious. “It has to be finessed in a certain way,” Mr. Krivicka said. “A true viral should not need a lot of pushing.”

But Christopher Poole, the 23-year-old founder of 4chan, one of the largest forums on the Internet and widely considered to be one of the darkest corners of the Web, has never shied away from his first creation.

In fact, he has deftly managed to transform the notorious popularity of 4chan, which he said has a staggering 12 million visitors a month, into a launching pad for his successful career as a public speaker, an adviser at the investment fund Lerer Ventures and as the founder of the new Web site Canvas.

It has received financing from such respected venture capitalists as Ron Conway, a noted Silicon Valley investor who was one of the earliest investors in Google, Kenneth Lerer, a founder of The Huffington Post, and Joshua Schachter, who created Delicious, the popular social bookmarking service that Yahoo bought.

Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm formed by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, also invested. Mr. Horowitz said Canvas was “one of the easier investment decisions we’ve ever made.”

Canvas was officially unveiled on Sunday at South by Southwest, the technology and music festival held annually in Austin. The Web site allows people to upload images and watch as other members on the site add to and remix the content.

“It’s pure entertainment on the Internet,” Mr. Poole said. “I don’t think the idea that people just hang out online has really caught on, but that is a thing. It is an actual hobby for a lot of people.”

For now the site is limited to images, but eventually, Mr. Poole wants to add video and audio.

On one level, the flow of ideas, or memes in Web parlance, across the site resembles 4chan. A recent popular thread on Canvas featured a cute tiny brown dog covered with snow. Each subsequent image added to the original.

One introduced characters from “Star Wars” to the photo, then someone joked about calling in Charlie Sheen to help the dog clear away the snow, a thinly veiled reference to Mr. Sheen’s widely publicized struggles with drugs.

Mr. Poole likens the spontaneous interplay of these interactions to watching a particularly funny improvised comedy skit unfold or the feverish excitement of attending the opening night of a movie with a cult following in the company of hundreds of other dedicated fans.

“It’s a shared experience, knowing that you and several other people are experiencing this and participating in helping something unfold in this moment,” he said. “That ephemeral nature of that moment is special and will never be repeated in the same way.”

“That is something 4chan is really good at,” he added. “The site is just a framework of pictures and text. There aren’t any rules. But an entire culture, complete with its own vocabulary and language, sprang up around it.”

June Cohen, executive producer of TED media, said, “Like it or hate it, 4chan is an important cultural force.” TED is the prestigious conference held annually in Long Beach, Calif., where Mr. Poole was invited to speak in 2010. “It is a huge site, and so many Internet memes are formed there, it’s hard to ignore it,” she said.

Canvas is somewhat similar to 4chan. Members of the online community do not have to use their real identities to participate, which flies in the face of the Quoras, Facebooks and Twitters of the Web, which bank their business models and reputations on knowing who each user is and establishing a fixed identity on the Web.

But Mr. Poole says he hopes Canvas will create a unique social culture online, and he is quick to add that Canvas is not intended to replicate 4chan. “We’re not building 4chan 2.0,” he said, thumping his hoodie-cloaked chest for emphasis. “Canvas is a separate endeavor.”

But the challenge now for Mr. Poole is to keep Canvas and 4chan as separate entities, to keep the lack of identification from devolving into bad behavior and from cross-pollinating the mischief and mayhem that permeate his first venture.

It seems to be working. During the first few weeks while the site has been in private testing, the company has only had to remove a handful of the offensive images from Canvas that are common on 4chan.

Mr. Poole created 4chan in 2003 on summer break at 15. He modeled it after a Japanese anime site called 2chan. For the next several years, most people knew Mr. Poole only by his online handle, moot. He came out publicly as the founder of 4chan a few years ago. Before then, he ran the site in secrecy from his bedroom. Even his parents were unaware of the site. “Even in my real life, I was anonymous,” he said.

During that time, the site exploded in popularity and cemented itself squarely in Internet culture, for better or worse.

The sheer power and influence that 4chan is able to wield online is difficult to deny and often goes beyond the Internet. The site is credited with creating one of the better-known Internet memes, Lolcats, pictures of cute cats paired with quirky, misspelled captions. In 2009, 4channers concentrated their efforts on electing Mr. Poole as Time magazine’s most influential person of the year, earning him a ticket to a red carpet event that included John Legend and Diane Sawyer.

But the site is often at the root of much mayhem on the Internet. Members taunted the family of a teenage suicide victim. A few years ago, members on the site started a rumor that Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple, had suffered a heart attack, causing shares of the company to plummet. More recently, some 4channers initiated a Web attack that brought down PayPal, Visa and Mastercard, after those sites cut off donations to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing site.

Nevertheless, the drawing power of Canvas intrigued venture capitalists who provided $625,000 in seed money. The investors say this is a new kind of service that may portend a different future for Web services and behaviors.

“Our investment is in Chris,” Mr. Horowitz said. “No other site has started as many new ideas that have caught fire on the Internet as 4chan.”

“We don’t know what it’s going to become,” Mr. Horowitz said of Canvas. “But, if he can foster than in a better environment, we are willing to wait and see what happens.”

For all that traffic on 4chan, the site itself makes little money. Few companies, outside of the adult services industry, are interested in running advertisements on the site. Mr. Poole says the site generates “in the low five figures,” enough to cover the costs for the servers and bandwidth needed to operate.

“Two years ago we used to joke about getting investors for 4chan,” he said. “And now here we are with Canvas. But we really think there is a kernel of something great here.”

Daylight saving time, which begins on Sunday, is unsettling in the same way. Winding the clock forward in March and back in November is like biannually changing the measure of an inch.

This tinkering with clocks is our inheritance from a people obsessed with time. Clocks spread rapidly in early America. They were expensive imports, but popular among the Puritans, who despised idleness. Massachusetts passed a law in 1663 making the wasting of time a crime: “No person, householder or other shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the court shall think meet to inflict.” A century later, the Boston-born Benjamin Franklin (“time is money”) proposed a version of daylight saving time as a joke to stop slothful Parisians from sleeping in. But it was an English Puritan, Ralph Thoresby, who invented an early alarm clock.

By the mid-19th century, Americans were producing their own clocks. Workshops in Connecticut produced cheap models with wooden gears. Peddlers sold them from coast to frontier. The “Yankee clock peddlers” managed to “stick up a clock in every cabin in the western country,” reported George William Featherstonhaugh, an English geographer who visited the States. “Wherever we have been, in Kentucky, in Indiana, in Illinois, in Missouri, and here in every dell of Arkansas, and in cabins where there was not a chair to sit on, there was sure to be a Connecticut clock.”

But all these clocks were like many Americans themselves: individual, conforming to their own notions. There were hundreds of local times, each city setting its city hall or courthouse clock to match its own solar noon. When it was 12 p.m. in Chicago, it was 11:50 a.m. in St. Louis and 12:18 p.m. in Detroit. But that wasn’t a problem because local time was all that mattered.

That changed when the railroads began to unify the country. The railroads ran by their own time, which vexed travelers trying to make connections. Many stations had two clocks, one for railroad time and one for local time.

To eliminate the confusion, railroads took it upon themselves in 1883 to divide the country into four time zones, with one standard time within each zone. To resist could mean economic isolation, so at noon on Nov. 18, 1883, Chicagoans had to move their clocks back 9 minutes and 32 seconds. It’s as if the railroads had commanded the sun to stand still, The Chicago Tribune wrote. Louisville was set back almost 18 minutes, and The Louisville Courier-Journal called the change a “compulsory lie.” In a letter to the editor, a reader demanded to know “if anyone has the authority and right to change the city time without the consent of the people?” In an 1884 referendum, three-quarters of voters in Bangor, Me., opposed the 25-minute change to “Philadelphia time.”

One sees the same annoyance with the “compulsory lie” of daylight saving time. When it was being debated in 1916, The Literary Digest saw it as a trick to make “people get up earlier by telling them it is later than it really is.” The Saturday Evening Post asked, in jest, “why not ‘save summer’ by having June begin at the end of February?” And an Arkansas congressman lampooned the time reformers by proposing that we change our thermometers: move the freezing point up 13 degrees and a lot of folks could be tricked into burning less fuel to heat their houses.

We adopted daylight saving time (during World War I), rejected it (after the war), adopted it again (during World War II), and then left it up to the states and localities until 1966, when Congress once more decided it was a national concern. And as much as we complain and point out that it doesn’t make anyone more productive or save any energy, it persists. Almost every state has eight months of it each year and only four months of so-called standard time. As a result, today we rose with the dawn and next week we’ll be eating breakfast in darkness.

The change is disconcerting. But more unsettling still is the mystery we’d rather not face: If clock time isn’t real, what is time, anyway? We don’t understand time, and we definitely don’t want to admit that our allotment is limited. We just want to get on with our day.

We had a financial regime based on the notion that bankers are rational creatures who wouldn’t do anything stupid en masse. For the past 30 years we’ve tried many different ways to restructure our educational system — trying big schools and little schools, charters and vouchers — that, for years, skirted the core issue: the relationship between a teacher and a student.

I’ve come to believe that these failures spring from a single failure: reliance on an overly simplistic view of human nature. We have a prevailing view in our society — not only in the policy world, but in many spheres — that we are divided creatures. Reason, which is trustworthy, is separate from the emotions, which are suspect. Society progresses to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

This has created a distortion in our culture. We emphasize things that are rational and conscious and are inarticulate about the processes down below. We are really good at talking about material things but bad at talking about emotion.

When we raise our kids, we focus on the traits measured by grades and SAT scores. But when it comes to the most important things like character and how to build relationships, we often have nothing to say. Many of our public policies are proposed by experts who are comfortable only with correlations that can be measured, appropriated and quantified, and ignore everything else.

Yet while we are trapped within this amputated view of human nature, a richer and deeper view is coming back into view. It is being brought to us by researchers across an array of diverse fields: neuroscience, psychology, sociology, behavioral economics and so on.

This growing, dispersed body of research reminds us of a few key insights. First, the unconscious parts of the mind are most of the mind, where many of the most impressive feats of thinking take place. Second, emotion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to things and are the basis of reason. Finally, we are not individuals who form relationships. We are social animals, deeply interpenetrated with one another, who emerge out of relationships.

This body of research suggests the French enlightenment view of human nature, which emphasized individualism and reason, was wrong. The British enlightenment, which emphasized social sentiments, was more accurate about who we are. It suggests we are not divided creatures. We don’t only progress as reason dominates the passions. We also thrive as we educate our emotions.

When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds. You pay a bit less attention to individual traits and more to the quality of relationships between people.

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

When Sigmund Freud came up with his view of the unconscious, it had a huge effect on society and literature. Now hundreds of thousands of researchers are coming up with a more accurate view of who we are. Their work is scientific, but it directs our attention toward a new humanism. It’s beginning to show how the emotional and the rational are intertwined.

I suspect their work will have a giant effect on the culture. It’ll change how we see ourselves. Who knows, it may even someday transform the way our policy makers see the world.

THE OBAMA FACTOR Americans have never fully appreciated what a radical thing we did — in the eyes of the rest of the world — in electing an African-American with the middle name Hussein as president. I’m convinced that listening to Obama’s 2009 Cairo speech — not the words, but the man — were more than a few young Arabs who were saying to themselves: “Hmmm, let’s see. He’s young. I’m young. He’s dark-skinned. I’m dark-skinned. His middle name is Hussein. My name is Hussein. His grandfather is a Muslim. My grandfather is a Muslim. He is president of the United States. And I’m an unemployed young Arab with no vote and no voice in my future.” I’d put that in my mix of forces fueling these revolts.

GOOGLE EARTH While Facebook has gotten all the face time in Egypt, Tunisia and Bahrain, don’t forget Google Earth, which began roiling Bahraini politics in 2006. A big issue in Bahrain, particularly among Shiite men who want to get married and build homes, is the unequal distribution of land. On Nov. 27, 2006, on the eve of parliamentary elections in Bahrain, The Washington Post ran this report from there: “Mahmood, who lives in a house with his parents, four siblings and their children, said he became even more frustrated when he looked up Bahrain on Google Earth and saw vast tracts of empty land, while tens of thousands of mainly poor Shiites were squashed together in small, dense areas. ‘We are 17 people crowded in one small house, like many people in the southern district,’ he said. ‘And you see on Google how many palaces there are and how the al-Khalifas [the Sunni ruling family] have the rest of the country to themselves.’ Bahraini activists have encouraged people to take a look at the country on Google Earth, and they have set up a special user group whose members have access to more than 40 images of royal palaces.”

ISRAEL The Arab TV network Al Jazeera has a big team covering Israel today. Here are some of the stories they have been beaming into the Arab world: Israel’s previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, had to resign because he was accused of illicitly taking envelopes stuffed with money from a Jewish-American backer. An Israeli court recently convicted Israel’s former president Moshe Katsav on two counts of rape, based on accusations by former employees. And just a few weeks ago, Israel, at the last second, rescinded the appointment of Maj. Gen. Yoav Galant as the army’s new chief of staff after Israeli environmentalists spurred a government investigation that concluded General Galant had seized public land near his home. (You can see his house on Google Maps!) This surely got a few laughs in Egypt where land sales to fat cats and cronies of the regime that have resulted in huge overnight profits have been the talk of Cairo this past year. When you live right next to a country that is bringing to justice its top leaders for corruption and you live in a country where many of the top leaders are corrupt, well, you notice.

THE BEIJING OLYMPICS China and Egypt were both great civilizations subjected to imperialism and were both dirt poor back in the 1950s, with China even poorer than Egypt, Edward Goldberg, who teaches business strategy, wrote in The Globalist. But, today, China has built the world’s second-largest economy, and Egypt is still living on foreign aid. What do you think young Egyptians thought when they watched the dazzling opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics? China’s Olympics were another wake-up call — “in a way that America or the West could never be” — telling young Egyptians that something was very wrong with their country, argued Goldberg.

THE FAYYAD FACTOR Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad introduced a new form of government in the Arab world in the last three years, something I’ve dubbed “Fayyadism.” It said: judge me on my performance, on how I deliver government services and collect the garbage and create jobs — not simply on how I “resist” the West or Israel. Every Arab could relate to this. Chinese had to give up freedom but got economic growth and decent government in return. Arabs had to give up freedom and got the Arab-Israeli conflict and unemployment in return.

Add it all up and what does it say? It says you have a very powerful convergence of forces driving a broad movement for change. It says we’re just at the start of something huge. And it says that if we don’t have a more serious energy policy, the difference between a good day and bad day for America from here on will hinge on how the 86-year-old king of Saudi Arabia manages all this change.

Luck is half the game. It’s no good having it and being incapable of using it. On the other hand, great striving may come to naught without luck. My sense is that President Barack Obama is a lucky man.

His early political breakthroughs in Chicago, and then in his campaign for the Senate, were helped by the implosion of his opponents, often in sex scandals. His election to the nation’s highest office became inevitable when his Republican rival went on walkabout as the economy collapsed. And now, quite suddenly, his presidency has been lifted from its troubles by the liberating Arab revolutions of 2011.

For a politician nothing matters quite as much as being able to move the spirit. Years may go by, history appear to stand still. Then, in the space of weeks, history accelerates, great events cascade upon each other, and the leader able to embody, define and propel them forward becomes forever identified with this transformative tide of hope.

In June 2009, Obama declared in Cairo: “I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the rule of law and the equal administration of justice; government that is transparent and doesn’t steal from people; the freedom to live as you choose.”

Obama’s Mideast policy then veered this way and that. He struggled to find a consistent tone on Israel — and still does. He struggled to convince Muslims of the sincerity of his outreach.

So it’s hard to trace any direct strategic line between the Cairo speech and the revolutionary events that led to his wonderful 2/11 summation of the fall of Egypt’s despot, Hosni Mubarak: “We saw mothers and fathers carrying their children on their shoulders to show them what true freedom might look like.”

And yet, and yet! It has to be said that Obama intuited something, or so it now appears. He got lucky.

When, in celebrating the Egyptian people’s peaceful triumph, he quoted Martin Luther King on this great awakening of Arab peoples determined to assert their dignity and gain their freedom, he looked a president in full, a man ensconced on the right side of history.

By contrast, the American right has found itself tied up in knots, wondering how to disentangle the words “freedom” and “Arab,” the first demanding its hard-wired allegiance, the second demanding its Israel-dictated skepticism. Pity the poor Republican newbies, once so full of certainties, confronted by a nuanced world!

This is an uprising of Arabs, by Arabs, for Arabs. It started with a tiff over a fruit cart in a small Tunisian town to which no American policymaker has ever paid a minute of attention. Much of its historic importance lies precisely in its indigenous nature, now a wellspring of Arab pride.

Obama has managed to seize this moment without stealing it. Yes, there were wobbles. But he was fast to hail Tunisians fighting for their rights, he pushed the Egyptian transition through influence over the army, he restrained the violent initial instincts of the ruling al-Khalifa family in Bahrain, and now he is pressing hard to oust Libya’s lunatic tyrant, Muammar el-Qaddafi.

If this is the overdue collapse of a rotten American-backed order in the Middle East, it is also one that suggests the postmortems on American power are once again premature.

The Arab spring continues to unfurl at great speed. There are big risks. One is a Libyan vacuum. But there are also immense possibilities now that Arabs can gather, organize and direct their lives, rather than blame others for their powerlessness. I believe 2011, in its passage from Arab rage to Arab responsibility, can be the true antidote to 2001.

For that to happen, Obama will have to keep harvesting fortune, being at his best when the pressure is greatest. European nations that freed themselves from Communist tyranny in 1989 had the safe house of the European Union to aspire to. How can the West help forge the new regional safe house of emergent Arab democracies? Obama must bring the best minds to bear on that question and a related one: How to coax Israel from its paralyzing siege mentality into seizing this moment to seek peace?

Obamaism is taking form. Its themes are nonviolence, youth-driven social media as engines of change and limiters of autocratic brutality, and the universality of those rights listed in Cairo. I am feeling more hopeful about the world than at any time since 2001. The authoritarian decade, led by China and Russia, has run its course. And the most powerful man in the world happens to be a lucky man.

Machiavelli wrote: “I believe it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.” Obama has “controlled” his luck — and I suspect he will ride it now to a second term.

1. He was a bad actor.

Well, yes and no. Most of the movies he made as a Warner Bros. contract player are unwatchable by persons of sound mind. When he was president, it was easy to laugh at them. The spectacle of the leader of the free world, a.k.a. Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft, deploying an enormous ray gun against an airborne armada was especially hilarious in 1983, the year he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, that vaporizer of foreign nuclear missiles. “All right, Hayden – focus that inertia projector on ‘em and let ‘em have it!”

Even when Reagan believed he was acting well, as in “Kings Row,” he betrayed infallible signs of thespian mediocrity: an unwillingness to listen to other performers and an inability to communicate thoughts. Now that he is dead, however, one feels an odd tenderness for the effort he put into every role – particularly in early movies, when he struggled to control a tendency of his lips to writhe around his too-rapid speech.

Ironically, he was transformed into a superb actor when he took on the roles of governor of California, presidential candidate and president of the United States. Then, as never in his movies, he became authoritative, authentic, irresistible to eye and ear. His two greatest performances, in my opinion, were at the Republican National Convention in 1976, when he effortlessly stole Gerald Ford’s thunder as nominee and made the delegates regret their choice, and at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1985, when he delivered the supreme speech of his presidency.

I asked him once if he had any nostalgia for the years he was nuzzling up to Ann Sheridan and Doris Day on camera. He gestured around the Oval Office. “Why should I? I have the biggest stage in the world, right here!”

2. He was but a movie-set soldier in World War II.

It’s true that Reagan spent virtually all the war years flying a desk at the First Motion Picture Unit, USAAF, in Culver City. But that hardly means he did not passionately want to fight for his country overseas. Army doctors found his vision to be so defective, at “7/200 bilateral,” that a tank could advance within seven feet of him before he could identify it as Japanese. His Warner Bros. colleague Eddie Albert, a veteran of the Pacific War, later told me about presenting Reagan with a souvenir from the bloodbath of Tarawa. “I’ve never forgotten the way he looked. Like I’d humiliated him.”

In the spring of 1945, Capt. Reagan, as the FMPU’s intelligence officer, spent weeks processing raw color footage from the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. The images so burned into his brain that later in life – quite understandably – he imagined he had been there at Ohrdruf and Buchenwald. He kept one of those Army reels to show to each of his children in early adolescence, so that they could learn about man’s inhumanity to man. Ask Patti. Ask Ron.

3. He was warm-hearted.

No. But Reagan wasn’t cold – except in his detestation of totalitarianism – so much as cool, in the way a large, calm lake is cool. Like many another natural leader (George Marshall and Charles de Gaulle come to mind), he viewed those who clustered around him abstractedly. He registered audiences rather than individuals. Reagan intimates have confessed to me that they were never sure he knew who the hell they were.

His three younger children have publicly stated that there were times (decades before any rumors of dementia) when he treated them as complete strangers. As for his marriage to Nancy, I’ll note only that she was the fourth short, tough, street-smart woman he dreamily depended on to organize his everyday life, the others being his mother, Nelle Reagan; his first fiancee, Margaret Cleaver; and his first wife, Jane Wyman. He had no close friends. And until young Ron reminded him, it didn’t occur to him to put a headstone on either of his parents’ graves.

4. He was only a campaign Christian.

On the contrary, Reagan was a “practical Christian,” that being the name of a mainly Midwestern, social-work-oriented movement when he was growing up. At 11, young Dutch had an epiphany, prompted by the sight of his alcoholic father lying dead drunk on the front porch of the family house in Dixon, Ill. In a moving passage of autobiography, Reagan wrote: “Seeing his arms spread out as if he were crucified – as indeed he was – his hair soaked with melting snow, snoring as he breathed, I could feel no resentment against him.” It was the season of Lent, and his mother, a devotee of the Disciples of Christ, put a comforting novel in his hand: “That Printer of Udell’s” by Harold Bell Wright. Dutch read it and told her, “I want to declare my faith and be baptized.” He was, by total immersion, on June 21, 1922.

I read a speckled copy of that book in the Library of Congress. Almost creepily, it tells the story of a handsome Midwestern boy who makes good for the sins of his father by becoming a practical Christian and a spellbinding orator. He develops a penchant for brown suits and welfare reform, marries a wide-eyed girl (who listens adoringly to his speeches) and wins election to public office in Washington.

Shy about his faith as an adult, Reagan was capable of conventional pieties like all American politicians. He attended few church services as president. But on occasion, before critical meetings, you would see him draw aside and mumble prayers.

5. He was an “amiable dunce.”

Yeah, right, Clark Clifford. Ronald Reagan only performed successfully in six different careers: radio sportscaster, movie actor, trade union president, corporate spokesman, two-term governor and two-term president of the United States. Lucky for him he wasn’t hampered by Jimmy Carter’s intelligence!

I did throw in the last one to keep you interested. Sue me.

This month, The Houston Chronicle published an opinion piece by the former first lady titled “We Can’t Afford to Cut Education,” in which Mrs. Bush pointed out that students in Texas currently rank 47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores.

“In light of these statistics, can we afford to cut the number of teachers, increase class sizes, eliminate scholarships for underprivileged students and close several community colleges?” she asked.

You’d think there’d be an obvious answer. But the Texas State Legislature is looking to cut about $4.8 billion over the next two years from the schools. Budgets are tight everywhere, but Perry, the state’s governor, and his supporters made things much worse by reducing school property taxes by a third in 2006 under the theory that a higher cigarette tax and a new business franchise tax would make up the difference. Which they didn’t.

“In Austin, I’ve got half-a-dozen or more schools on a list to be closed — one of which I presented a federal blue-ribbon award to for excellence,” said Representative Lloyd Doggett. “And several hundred school personnel on the list for possible terminations.”

So the first choice is what to do. You may not be surprised to hear that Governor Perry has rejected new taxes. He’s also currently refusing $830 million in federal aid to education because the Democratic members of Congress from Texas — ticked off because Perry used $3.2 billion in stimulus dollars for schools to plug other holes in his budget — put in special language requiring that this time Texas actually use the money for the kids.

“If I have to cast very tough votes, criticized by every Republican as too much federal spending, at least it ought to go to the purpose we voted for it,” said Doggett.

Nobody wants to see underperforming, overcrowded schools being deprived of more resources anywhere. But when it happens in Texas, it’s a national crisis. The birth rate there is the highest in the country, and if it continues that way, Texas will be educating about a tenth of the future population. It ranks third in teen pregnancies — always the children most likely to be in need of extra help. And it is No. 1 in repeat teen pregnancies.

Which brings us to choice two. Besides reducing services to children, Texas is doing as little as possible to help women — especially young women — avoid unwanted pregnancy.

For one thing, it’s extremely tough for teenagers to get contraceptives in Texas. “If you are a kid, even in college, if it’s state-funded you have to have parental consent,” said Susan Tortolero, director of the Prevention Research Center at the University of Texas in Houston.

Plus, the Perry government is a huge fan of the deeply ineffective abstinence-only sex education. Texas gobbles up more federal funds than any other state for the purpose of teaching kids that the only way to avoid unwanted pregnancies is to avoid sex entirely. (Who knew that the health care reform bill included $250 million for abstinence-only sex ed? Thank you, Senator Orrin Hatch!) But the state refused to accept federal money for more expansive, “evidence-based” programs.

“Abstinence works,” said Governor Perry during a televised interview with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune.

“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country,” Smith responded.

“It works,” insisted Perry.

“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.

“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said Perry, doggedly.

Tortolero, who lectures around the country on effective ways to prevent teenage pregnancy, once testified before a committee in the Texas House that was considering a bill to require that sex education classes only provide information that was medically accurate.

The bill was controversial. I’ll let you ponder that for a minute.

Tortolero said she got some support from a legislator who was also a pediatrician. “We talked back and forth for a month. But some groups in Texas were threatening him and he was a very junior member,” she recalled. The bill died.

Meanwhile, Perry — having chosen not to help young women avoid unwanted pregnancies and not to pay enough to educate the booming population of Texas children — wowed the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington with his states’ rights rhetoric.

Which would be fine, as I said, if his state wasn’t in charge of preparing a large chunk of the nation’s future work force. Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it.

Certainly not Vint Cerf.

In 1976, Mr. Cerf and his colleagues in the R.& D. office of the Defense Department had to make a judgment call: how much network address space should they allocate to an experiment connecting computers in an advanced data network?

They debated the question for more than a year. Finally, with a deadline looming, Mr. Cerf decided on a number — 4.3 billion separate network addresses, each one representing a connected device — that seemed to provide more room to grow than his experiment would ever require, far more, in fact, than he could ever imagine needing. And so he was comfortable rejecting the even larger number of addresses that some on his team had argued for.

“It was 1977,” Mr. Cerf said, in an interview last week. “We thought we were doing an experiment.”

“The problem was, the experiment never ended,” added Mr. Cerf, who is a former chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or Icann, a nonprofit corporation that coordinates the Internet naming system. “We had no idea it would turn into the world’s global communications network.”

Today, the Internet that Mr. Cerf helped create more than 30 years ago is about to max out. Within the next 12 to 18 months, or perhaps sooner, every one of the 4.3 billion Internet Protocol addresses will have been allocated, and the Internet, at least as it exists today, will have reached full capacity.

I.P. addresses are the unique sequence of numbers assigned to each Web site, computer, game console or smartphone connected to the Internet. They are distinct from domain names, which identify Web sites, like nytimes.com.

“There are 4.3 billion addresses, and a lot of people have more than one,” said Leo Vegoda, manager of number resources at Icann. “And there are seven billion people on the planet. That’s a big mismatch.”

The rapid expansion of Internet adoption in Asia has sped things up even more.

Experts saw this problem coming years ago, and the transition to a new system, referred to as Internet Protocol version 6, is well under way. This new standard will support a virtually inexhaustible number of devices, experts say. But there is some cause for concern because the two systems are largely incompatible, and as the transition takes place, the potential for breakdowns is enormous.

“This is a major turning point in the ongoing development of the Internet,” Rod Beckstrom, Icann’s president and chief executive, said. “No one was caught off guard by this.”

Still, the question looms, is the Internet industry prepared?

The answer depends on whom you ask. While it is true that no one has been caught off guard, some parts of the industry responded faster than others, leaving some technology companies scrambling to catch up. Software companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook, along with PC makers, say they have been taking the problem seriously for years in hopes of thwarting any major calamities. The major operating systems — like Microsoft’s Windows 7 and Apple’s Mac OS X — have already incorporated the new system. And providers, including Comcast, say they are ready to make the switch.

But Mr. Cerf is critical of Internet service providers, along with the manufacturers of Internet devices, for not addressing the problem sooner, saying that many chose to wait until customers started asking for the new system.

“How can customers be expected to know what they need?” Mr. Cerf said. He compared Internet protocols to the internal workings of a car engine. “It’s like changing a gear in a car’s transmission,” he said. “People shouldn’t have to worry about that.”

I.P. addresses are allocated by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, which is operated by Icann, to five registries representing regions of the globe. Those registries distribute the addresses to Internet service providers like cable and phone companies, universities, governments and large corporations. Millions of new devices will be attached.

At a ceremony early this month in Florida, the last block of addresses based on the original standard, known as IPv4, were allocated to the five registries.

Comcast began working on the problem nearly six years ago, and last year began customer trials nationwide. Jorge Alberni, a Comcast spokesman, said the trials so far had gone smoothly.

Comcast is now beginning to distribute dual-mode cable modems, for example, that support both the original and the new Internet Protocol versions. By the time the transition is fully under way, Mr. Alberni said, most Comcast customers will already be using cable boxes and modems that support IPv6, as the new version is commonly called. In some case, customers with older equipment will have to make a swap.

“We don’t foresee any problems for our customers,” he said.

To help make the transition to IPv6 easier, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, whose Web sites generate a combined traffic of more than a billion visits a day, have agreed to participate in a sort of trial run on June 8, named World IPv6 Day, to make sure their systems are ready. Participants are hoping that such an experiment will shed light on potential glitches.

Still, Leslie Daigle, chief Internet technology officer at the Internet Society, a nonprofit Internet policy organization overseeing the test run, warned that the transition to IPv6 was complex, and would most likely cause headaches for customers as they grappled with compatibility problems. The hope is that the test run will reveal the exact scope of the challenge.

The change will require companies to retrain technicians and instruct help desk personnel how to field compatibility questions.

“I almost wish we could train the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts to come to people’s houses to help out with this,” said Mr. Cerf, now chief Internet evangelist at Google. “This is not just about adding extra numbers,” he said. “It’s a different system.”

If the transition is not done right and done quickly, he said, Internet users with new equipment could face problems viewing Web sites based on the original standard.

Mr. Cerf compares the size of the challenge to the problem facing computer users at the turn of the 21st century, when every software program out there had to be modified to recognize the year 2000 and beyond.

“We had to find every place on the network,” he said.

In the end, the year 2000 issue, often referred to as Y2K, caused very few interruptions. But in this case, the problem won’t go away after a certain date.

Mr. Vegoda is optimistic that most people will not notice the difference between the two standards, and expects the transition to go relatively smoothly. “Most Internet users have no idea they’re using IPv4 today and if things go well they will have no idea they’re using IPv6 in the future,” he said.

These developments drew headlines because they seemed to exemplify significant trends in the American economy. But look at America’s stock exchanges more closely, and there’s less to them than meets the eye. In truth, the stock market is becoming increasingly irrelevant — a trend that threatens the core principles of American capitalism.

These days a healthy stock market doesn’t mean a healthy economy, as a glance at the high unemployment rate or the low labor-market participation rate will show. The Tea Party is right about one thing: What’s good for Wall Street isn’t necessarily good for Main Street. And the Germans aren’t buying the New York Stock Exchange for its commoditized, highly competitive and ultra-low-margin stock business, but rather for its lucrative derivatives operations.

The stock market is still huge, of course: the companies listed on American exchanges are valued at more than $17 trillion, and they’re not going to disappear in the foreseeable future.

But the glory days of publicly traded companies dominating the American business landscape may be over. The number of companies listed on the major domestic exchanges peaked in 1997 at more than 7,000, and it has been falling ever since. It’s now down to about 4,000 companies, and given its steep downward trend will surely continue to shrink.

Nor are the remaining stocks an obvious proxy for the health of the American economy. Innovative American companies like Apple and Google may be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, but most of them don’t pay dividends or employ many Americans, and their shares are essentially speculative investments for people making a bet on how we’re going to live in the future.

Put another way, as the number of initial public offerings steadily declines, the stock market is becoming little more than a place for speculators and algorithms to compete over who can trade his way to the most money.

What the market is not doing so well is its core public function: allocating capital efficiently. Apple, for instance, is hugely profitable and sits on an enormous pile of cash; it is thus very unlikely to use its highly rated stock to pay for any acquisitions. It hasn’t used the stock market to raise money since 1981, and there’s a good bet it never will again.

Meanwhile, the companies in which people most want to invest, technology stars like Facebook and Twitter, are managing to avoid the public markets entirely by raising hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars privately. You and I can’t buy into these companies; only very select institutions and well-connected individuals can. And companies prefer it that way.

A private company’s stock isn’t affected by the unpredictable waves of the stock market as a whole. Its chief executive can concentrate on running the company rather than answering endless questions from investors, analysts and the press.

There’s much less pressure to meet quarterly earnings targets. When the stock does trade, the deals can be negotiated quietly, in private markets, rather than fall victim to short-term speculation from the high-frequency traders who populate public markets. And companies love how private markets allow them to avoid much of the regulatory burden of being public.

That burden comes largely from the Securities and Exchange Commission, which was created in the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash to protect small investors. But if the move to private markets continues, small investors aren’t going to need much protection any more: they’ll be able to invest in only a relative handful of companies anyway.

Only the biggest and oldest companies are happy being listed on public markets today. As a result, the stock market as a whole increasingly fails to reflect the vibrancy and heterogeneity of the broader economy. To invest in younger, smaller companies, you increasingly need to be a member of the ultra-rich elite.

At risk, then, is the shareholder democracy that America forged, slowly, over the past 50 years. Civilians, rather than plutocrats, controlled corporate America, and that relationship improved standards of living and usually kept the worst of corporate abuses in check. With America Inc. owned by its citizens, the success of American business translated into large gains in the stock portfolios of anybody who put his savings in the market over most of the postwar period.

Today, however, stock markets, once the bedrock of American capitalism, are slowly becoming a noisy sideshow that churns out increasingly meager returns. The show still gets lots of attention, but the real business of the global economy is inexorably leaving the stock market — and the vast majority of us — behind.