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1911: Exploring in Peru, Yale archaeologist Hiram Bingham locates Machu Picchu, the lost city of the Incas. The event will set off a century of controversy.

Bingham was born in Honolulu, the son and grandson of Protestant missionaries in the Pacific. He graduated from Yale University and did graduate work in history and politics at the University of California and Harvard.

Bingham had already made two expeditions to South America -- and published a book on each -- when he returned to Peru in 1911. He located the last Inca capital, Vitcos, and made the first ascent of the 21,763-foot Mt. Coropuma. Then came the find that would make him famous: Machu Picchu.

Bingham eventually left academe for Republican politics, serving as lieutenant governor of Connecticut. He was also governor for one day, before moving on to the U.S. Senate for eight years. The Senate censured Bingham in 1929 for hiring a lobbyist. He died in 1956.

Did Bingham "discover" Machu Picchu?

Hardly. He was led there by local people who lived nearby and were using Machu Picchu's agricultural terraces. He did, however, conduct the first archaeological excavations there and uncovered the famous structures hidden by four centuries of disuse. He also documented, mapped and photographed the site over several years.

Was Bingham the first European to visit Machu Picchu?

Maybe not. Some claim that the German adventurer and businessman Augusto Berns had visited the site some four decades earlier, with the blessing of the Peruvian government. Others say that two missionaries had trekked there in 1906, five years before Bingham.

Bingham, however, was clearly the first to scientifically explore the place, and he also publicized it. The entire April 1913 issue of National Geographic was devoted to it. Bingham also wrote about it, notably Inca Land: Explorations in the Highlands of Peru (1922) and Lost City of the Incas, a 1948 best-seller.

What was Bingham looking for?

After locating the capital, Vitcos, he was hoping to find the last Inca stronghold, Vilcabamba, which fell to the Spanish in 1573. Machu Picchu was in the wrong direction from Vitcos to be a likely Vilcabamba, but Bingham was so impressed by Machu Picchu's mountainous impregnability that for the first years of his exploration he thought he must have found Vilcabamba.

What kind of place was Machu Picchu?

For many years, it was uncertain if Machu Picchu was a city, a mountain fortress, a religious shrine, a royal palace or various combinations of these. Continuing archaeological exploration has produced a consensus that it was a highland retreat of the Inca royalty. "Machu Picchu was simply a royal estate," says archaeologist Richard Burger. "You can think of it as the Inca equivalent of Camp David."

Who owns the artifacts Bingham removed from Machu Picchu?

Yale University's Peabody Museum has housed hundreds of museum-quality artifacts (and thousands of fragments) for nearly a century. The government of Peru maintains that these were only loaned to Bingham, and that they belong to Peru and its people.

After years of negotiations, Yale and Peru signed a Memorandum of Understanding in March 2008. Yale acknowledged Peruvian ownership of the collection and pledged to work with Peru to promote an international traveling exhibit of the collection and create a permanent, new museum for it near Machu Picchu. Some prominent Peruvians think the agreement still gives Yale too much control.

The dispute is not alone. A similar controversy rages over Britain's continued control of the Elgin Marbles, decorative pieces removed from the Parthenon in Athens two centuries ago.

Does tourism threaten Machu Picchu?

Some people fear that. Machu Picchu was already a World Heritage Site when it was named one of the Modern Wonders of the World in 2007. That led archaeologist Luis Lumbreras to warn that the influx of tourists was already damaging both the historic site and the fragile ecosystem surrounding it.

This controversy, too, is not alone. Striking a balance between protecting a site and providing access to let people experience it has caused restrictions at England's Stonehenge, France's Lascaux cave paintings and elsewhere.

Balancing preservation and access is also a conundrum in planning for Yosemite and other national parks. Some natural sites, like the exact location of the world's oldest living tree (Methuselah, a bristlecone pine in the eastern Sierra Nevada) or the world's tallest tree (a coast redwood in Northern California) are just plain kept secret.

Diving Knife Stabs, Pumps Out Explosive Ball of Frozen Gas The Wasp Injector Knife has a CO2 cartridge in the handle. Stab it into an unsuspecting underwater predator, and the knife instantly pumps out a basketball-size bolus of frigid CO2 gas, freezing the target's internal organs (and blood) and carrying it harmlessly to the surface. See the video in Gadget Lab.

Trevor Foltz was six months old last fall, fresh off a visit to Disney World in Orlando, when the spasms first began.

Healthy until that point in his life, he began thrusting backward in his car seat, repeatedly and forcefully, as he rode with his parents north toward home in Rhode Island. "I thought it was temper tantrums," says his mother, Danielle. The next day, at home, Trevor was hit with a series of 40 convulsions and rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with infantile spasms, a rare form of epilepsy. Treatment would cost $1,600 per vial of steroid drug H.P. Acthar Gel, and Trevor would need three of them.

As if the idea of a $4,800 tab wasn't bad enough, when the Foltzes submitted their claim, they found out the company that made the drug, Questcor Pharmaceuticals, had just recently jacked up the price—to $23,000 per vial, or $69,000 for a three-vial treatment—and the insurance company wasn't going to pay. And all the while, unbeknownst to anyone at that time, an alternative, for $15, existed.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee will open hearings in Congress on dramatic price hikes for drugs used to treat children, with a focus on companies such as Questcor and Ovation Pharmaceuticals, which in 2006 bought rights to a drug that treats heart problems in premature infants, and increased the price 1,800 percent to $1,875 per three-vial treatment.

"We need answers to why a company would increase the price of a drug 18-fold when costs related to marketing, physician education, and research appear stable," says hearing chair Amy Klobuchar, a Democratic senator from Minnesota.

Politicians say they are not opposed to drug companies earning strong returns on the costs of researching innovative drugs, and understand the high prices of many medications. But they are investigating whether some companies are price-gouging, concerned more about executive stock options than about running innovative companies.

Some of those drugs, like Questcor's, are decades-old drugs that were bought on the cheap and redesignated under the federal government's Orphan Drug Act, which marks its 25th anniversary this year. Not infrequently, the drugs' new owners pass on big price hikes to consumers.

At Questcor, the increase is explained as the cost of doing business with an orphan drug.

"The company was heading toward bankruptcy," says Steve Cartt, executive vice president for business development at Questcor, which is based in Union City, California, an industrial enclave on San Francisco Bay.

"The whole rationale for the price increase was to ensure availability of the product," says Cartt. "We talked to physicians. They wanted the drug to be available. The choice was risk of availability or a price increase."

Originally approved for multiple sclerosis in 1952, Acthar Gel had been owned by pharma giant Aventis, which was losing money on it, when the 11-year-old Questcor acquired it in 2001. Questcor, too, failed to gain traction with M.S. patients, so it sought a new track.

Now the gears at Questcor began to turn more quickly. It won orphan designation for Acthar Gel in 2003, and proceeded to the next step: getting F.D.A. approval to market the drug explicitly for infantile spasms, which under the orphan act would also include a seven-year monopoly for Questcor. The company prepared for a marketing blitz and doubled its sales force early last year. But when the F.D.A. rejected Questcor's application in May 2007, the company quickly slashed its staff and jacked up the price.

Cartt says the price was set "within the range of other orphan drugs," noting that many others go from $50,000 to $500,000 a year or higher. For instance, BioMarin, an orphan-drug specialty company, charges $70,000 a year for Kuvan, a drug to treat phenylketonuria, a genetic enzyme disorder that can cause mental retardation and brain seizures. But unlike BioMarin, which spends 64 percent of sales on research and development, Questcor spends very little; in 2007, Questcor's research and development accounted for 9.5 percent of sales revenue.

What other considerations played into the price Cartt would not say. Sales for 2007, when the price hike took effect, were $49.7 million, and net income was $37.5 million—a net profit margin of 75 percent. It was significant not only for its size, but also because it was the first profit since the company was formed, as Cypros Pharmaceuticals, in 1990.

Investors were pleased, driving up Questcor's share price from 40 cents to over $6 after the August 2007 price hike. But executives at the company started selling their shares in December, seven months after the former C.E.O., James Fares, stepped down and around the time Questcor executive Don Bailey took his place. Since December, Cartt himself has sold shares based on grants and options totaling $1.68 million; many of those options were granted at 46 cents a share. He holds nearly a million more options on Questcor stock.

"Most of us in the child-neurology community were outraged at the extent of the price hike, unusual even for orphan drugs," says Eric Kossoff, a pediatric neurologist and infantile spasms expert at Johns Hopkins Children's Center. "Most of us had no choice, unfortunately. At the time it was felt to be the best drug out there, and they're the only company that makes it. This is an incredibly serious form of epilepsy with devastating implications if not treated."

Curiously, though, he found that the price hike "was one of the best things that could have happened." Why? "Because we found something better and cheaper." Far cheaper, it turns out. "We spent a few days going through all the medical literature, looking for what works, what doesn't."

The team turned up a study from the United Kingdom that gave infants high doses of prednisolone, a well-known, generic steroid. Prednisolone had been dismissed as relatively ineffective for infantile spasms-based research that used low doses. The high doses made all the difference: The British study found efficacy rates reached 70 percent and more. Johns Hopkins began using high-dose prednisolone and found it worked in about 70 percent of cases, on par with the hospital's experience with Acthar Gel. And the price was $15 per injection—essentially free—compared with the three-injection $69,000 treatment from Questcor. "It was like in times of war. You get focused, and amazing things come out," Kossoff says. "We don't use [Acthar Gel] at Hopkins anymore for infantile spasms because the oral steroids [high-dose prednisolone] work just as well."

It's unclear, though, how many other doctors and hospitals in the U.S. will switch from the $69,000 drug to the $15 drug.

"I don't understand what's behind the price increase," says Finbar O'Callaghan, a pediatric neurologist at the Bristol Royal Hospital for Children and coauthor of the United Kingdom Infantile Spasms Study, or UKISS. The study showed that high-dose prednisolone and a synthetic form of ACTH, the active hormone in Acthar Gel, were equally effective. He cautioned that the purpose of the study was not to compare the two, but to compare steroid treatment with another drug called vigabatrin. "Having said that, you couldn't get a piece of paper between the results of the prednisolone and the results of the ACTH."

Costs aside, Hopkins is achieving the same results against Acthar Gel. "There is no reason to favor one over the other, unless there is a financial reason for doing so. That's been a big issue in the U.S.," says O'Callaghan. Comparing $15 against $69,000 "puts a different perspective on it," he says.

"Historically, and unfortunately," he adds, "doctors in general are very traditional and tend to use what's worked before."

Asked about the $15 price on prednisolone, Cartt said studies from the 1990s show low efficacy rates for the drug. When informed that those studies looked at low doses, not high doses, Cartt said no one knows the long-term implications of high-dose prednisolone, and said the company's higher profits will help it find out. "We can afford to study the long-term effects" of Acthar Gel and the alternatives, he said.

What the congressional hearing may find is that Questcor had a business problem: While its drug had a potential market of 300,000 multiple sclerosis patients, not enough of them were buying. But among a smaller market, just 2,000 babies per year, Acthar Gel was extremely effective in fighting infantile spasms. Questcor's astronomical rates may simply be a matter of hard business realities in a small potential market.

For the Foltzes, Questcor's high prices proved irrelevant, after much struggle. When at first his insurance company, WorldWide Insurance, rejected the claim, Trevor's doctor faxed in a letter stating that there was a good chance Trevor would end up mentally retarded for life without treatment; the insurer relented. But on Thursday, his mother, Danielle, will join those who testify against companies like Questcor. She says, "I feel they're going to soak every penny if they can get it."

It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire"; the year the United Nations implored the Russians to withdraw from Afghanistan; the year ABC aired The Day After, a TV movie about the wake of a nuclear attack on the US. In the midst of all this came WarGames, a fizzy little thriller about looming Armageddon. It's a deceptively simple story: High schooler David Lightman (played by 21-year-old Matthew Broderick) is a digitally proficient goofball who wants to play an unreleased computer game — and impress a pretty girl (Ally Sheedy). So he does something most Americans didn't have a word for back then: He starts hacking. Little does he know, the "computer company" he's infiltrated is actually a military installation running a missile-command supercomputer called the WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), and the game — Global Thermonuclear War — is real. Naturally, only David can stop it from setting off World War III.

Over the years, WarGames has written itself into the cult lore of Silicon Valley. Google hosted a 25th-anniversary screening in May, where keyboard jockeys cheered Broderick's DOS acrobatics. (Imagine Rocky Horror, but picture the audience in Hawaiian shirts and mandals.) "Many of us grew up with this movie," Google cofounder Sergey Brin told the packed house. "It was a key movie of a generation, especially for those of us who got into computing."

How did WarGames become the geek-geist classic that legitimized hacker culture, minted the nerd hero — and maybe even changed American defense policy? Related question: Shall we play a game?

In 1979, Walter Parkes, the future head of DreamWorks Pictures, was a young screenwriter with the outlines of an idea he'd developed with Lawrence Lasker, a script reader at Orion Pictures. Called The Genius,it was a character film about a dying scientist and the only person in the world who understands him — a rebellious kid who's too smart for his own good. The idea of featuring computers and computer networks would come later.

Walter Parkes, Screenwriter: WarGames is looked upon as technologically prescient, but we actually started off with a concept that had nothing to do with technology.

Lawrence Lasker, Screenwriter: We were complete newbies. In 1979, we didn't even know that home computers could hook up to other computers.

Peter Schwartz, Futurist and creative consultant: I spent 10 years at the Stanford Research Institute, from 1972 to the end of 1981. That's where all this began. Walter and Larry came to SRI with a script idea called The Genius. And it was about a boy and a relationship he had with a great scientist named Falken, who was basically Stephen Hawking.

Lasker: For me, the inspiration for the project was a TV special Peter Ustinov did on several geniuses, including Hawking. I found the predicament Hawking was in fascinating — that he might one day figure out the unified field theory and not be able to tell anyone, because of his progressive ALS. So there was this idea that he'd need a successor. And who would that be? Maybe this kid, a juvenile delinquent whose problem was that nobody realized he was too smart for his environment. That resonated with Walter. So I said, let's actually go talk to people about how a kid could get in trouble and get discovered by a brainy scientist and take it from there.

Parkes: Before our conversation, the Falken character was just a way to access the adult side of the movie. It wasn't even much about computers yet.

Schwartz made the connection between youth, computers, gaming, and the military — and The Genius began its long morph into WarGames.

Schwartz: There was a new subculture of extremely bright kids developing into what would become known as hackers. SRI was in Palo Alto, and all the computer nerds were around: Xerox PARC, Apple just starting — it was all happening right there. SRI was node number two of the Internet. We talked about the fact that the kinds of computer games that were being played were blow-up-the-world games. Space war games. Military simulations. Things like Global Thermonuclear War. SRI was one of the main players in this. SRI was, in fact, running computerized war games for the military.

In the summer of 1980, Parkes and Lasker went looking for inspiration for their war room set. They found it when they pestered their way onto a tour of the North American Aerospace Defense Command's central nerve center — 2,000 feet under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. From here, American and Canadian military officials could detect an incoming Soviet nuke from hundreds of miles away.

Lasker: As we're walking back to the bus that's going to take us to the hotel, James Hartinger [then commander in chief of Norad] walks up between me and Walter and plants a hand on the back of our necks: "I understand you boys are writing a movie about me!" he says. "Let's go to the bar." Walter says: "Well, we have to get on the bus to go back to our hotel." And Hartinger replies: "Are you insane? I've got 50,000 men under my command. You think I can't get you back to your hotel? Plus, I can't drink off the base. So c'mon." He was all for the message in our script. We kind of simplified it to "machines are taking over." He said, "God damn, you're right! I sleep well at night knowing I'm in charge." So we based General Beringer, played by Barry Corbin, on the real commander at Cheyenne Mountain.

Parkes: We came up with a number of different military-themed plotlines prior to the final story. In one version, this kid was connected via computer to someone known as Uncle Ollie, or OLI. Later on, it's revealed that OLI stands for Omnipresent Laser Interceptor, a space-based defensive laser, and it's got this intelligent program running it. This was another version of what the WOPR became. We could never make it work, but I remember doing quite a lot of research into space- and Earth-based laser systems. It turned out to be too speculative, not as specific as what we decided on.

David Scott Lewis, Solar-tech entrepreneur and model for David Lightman: Hacking was easy back then. There were few if any security measures. It was mostly hackers versus auditing types. The Computer Security Institute comes to mind. I would read all of their materials and could easily find ways around their countermeasures. The part in the movie showing David Lightman perusing the library to find Falken's backdoor password, "Joshua," is clearly a reference to many of my antics.

Lasker: David Lewis wasn't exactly the inspiration. But he was a model. You could call him up in the middle of the night and ask, "Can you get a computer to play games with itself?" And he'd say, "Yes! Number of players: zero."

Parkes: There was a guy named "Captain Crunch," John Draper. He was the famous phone phreak, one of the first telephone hackers. He was called Captain Crunch because he used a toy whistle given away in the cereal to activate a telephone trunk line, enabling him to make unlimited free calls.

John "Captain Crunch" Draper, Early hacker and reformed phone phreak: I talked to them about how phone phreaks did it: The use of a dialer scanner program came from me repeatedly dialing up numbers until I found a computer modem. It's called wardialing now because David Lightman used it in the movie to make contact with the Norad computer. I called it scanning.

Kevin "The Condor" Mitnick, Early hacker who served five years in prison for computer-related crimes: Scanning was a common hacking technique. But it seemed like something from a James Bond movie.

In early '82 , the script grew so ambitious that the filmmakers needed to build the Hollywood version of Norad's Crystal Palace command center. Universal Pictures began to balk at the prospect of shooting a tech-heavy movie its executives didn't fully understand. The project stalled and ended up at United Artists, where director Martin Brest was hired. He began making changes in the script, starting with the key character, Falken.

Lasker: I still wish we'd been able to stick with the original dying-astrophysicist character. It was Marty Brest who didn't like the idea of a man in a wheelchair in a war room, because it was too much like Dr. Strangelove.

Parkes We always pictured John Lennon, because he was kind of a spiritual cousin to Stephen Hawking.

Lasker: We had communicated with Hawking — not directly. And through David Geffen, we'd communicated with John Lennon, and he was interested in the role. I was writing the first scene where we meet Hawking — Falken — in the movie. He was an astrophysicist in our second draft. I was staring at the cover of the November '80 issue of Esquire, with Lennon on the cover, and describing his face, when a friend of mine — a bit of a jerk — called and said, "You're gonna have to find a new Falken."

They had to find a new director, too; UA wasn't happy with the footage Brest had produced. The studio fired him and called in John Badham, the acclaimed director of Saturday Night Fever.

			
		
Geek GoddessThose eyes. That laugh. Those khakis. For a legion of young WarGames fans, 20-year-old Ally Sheedy was a lust object second only to the Imsai 8080. A quarter century later, Wired caught up with hacker culture's first crush. — Scott Brown

Wired: So it wasn't a love for microprocessors that drew you to this role.

Sheedy: I couldn't make heads or tails of the script. It was easy for me to do the part where she's asking questions.

Wired: What about now?

Sheedy: To be honest, I haven't seen the movie since it came out. It's probably kind of quaint.

Wired: Nowadays, cybercrime might outrank nuclear warfare as a source of collective anxiety. I sometimes feel really at sea with technology. I love email.

Sheedy: All this communicating has created a world where no one's accountable. And I have a 14-year-old daughter, so I worry.

Wired: Wow. You have a 14-year-old daughter. That just set off a wave of cognitive dissonance among the hackers who'd like to hit on you ... Do hackers hit on you?

Sheedy: No, I don't hear so much from hackers. No. No, no, no. I don't. Thankfully. No.

Wired: Just one no would've been fine.

John Badham, Director Leonard Goldberg, the producer, shows me some footage they'd shot — it was a scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy going into his bedroom, early in the movie, and he shows her how he can change her grades on his computer. She freaks out and leaves. And I'm looking at this and thinking, "What's wrong here?" Driving home that night, I realized what it was. I stopped the car, found a phone booth, and called Leonard. "I know what the problem is!" I said. "They're not having any fun!" These kids were treating this as if they're involved in some dark and evil terrorist conspiracy. If I could change somebody's grades on the computer, I'd be peeing in my pants with excitement to show it to some girl. And the girl would be excited about it! I wasn't taking the point of view that there was something wrong with this guy.

Parkes: There was such a myth that we were all subject to, that personal computing would lead to a generation of disconnected loners who stayed in their rooms. But it actually led to social networking of a kind we've never seen before. The David Lightman character we first wrote was an edgier character than the one that Matthew portrayed. The final version was edgy enough but in a slightly more playful way.

Schwartz: The first thing on his mind was impressing the girl: "I'm changing your biology grade!" He was more about that than the art of hacking. The two computer nerds he goes to visit, Malvin and Jim (played by Eddie Deezen and Maury Chaykin), are much more in the mold of the conventional hacker.

Eddie Deezen, Actor [New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael said that I was the first computer nerd of film, and since then nobody has ever challenged me.

Badham: You could get all the hacker geekiness you wanted just by standing on the set. We were dealing with things like when Matthew sits at the computer, we've got an actor who can't even type. I'd say, "No, I just really want him to type in 'David' and have him get on." They said, "No! You can't do that! You have to go through all these elaborate sequences!" I said, "No, we're not doing that. Audiences will have left the theater by the time he logs into the computer one time."

Draper: I was taken down to the set as a technical assistant. I don't really believe that there were any technical glitches — the fact that you can find a game company by scanning for phone numbers was real. That military computer, the WOPR, on the other hand, was a stupid, crazy thing. That was crazy. That was silly.

Made for $12 million, the movie was released on June 6, 1983. It was a hit, nabbing $80 million at the box office (the fifth-highest total of the year) and three Oscar nominations (for original screenplay, sound, and cinematography). Film critic Roger Ebert described it as "an amazingly entertaining thriller" and "one of the best films so far this year." When the WOPR spoke the movie's penultimate line ("A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess?"), audiences, unnerved by years of US-Soviet nuclear brinkmanship, spontaneously applauded. And Ronald Reagan did not find the WOPR crazy or silly when he saw the movie at a special Camp David screening during its opening weekend.

Lasker: I arranged that screening. Reagan was a family friend. My parents were in the movie business, and I grew up in Brentwood. We had Saturday night parties, and much the same people came. The Reagans — you could set your watch by them. At 7 o'clock, there they would be — ding-dong!

Days after the screening, wrote Washington Post reporter Lou Cannon, Reagan held a closed-door briefing with some moderate members of Congress, wherein he sidetracked discussion of the MX ballistic missile program by bringing upWarGames. Had any of them seen the film? he asked, then launched into an animated account of the plot. "Don't tell the ending," cautioned one of the lawmakers.

Parkes: I remember the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Doomsday Clock was at three minutes to midnight. The timing of it all was really interesting.

William Lord, Commander, Air Force Cyberspace Command: It was a great movie! A few years later, I was an executive officer with the Air Force Space Command stationed at Norad near Cheyenne Mountain. And I'm wondering, "Gee, where can we get such cool-looking displays?" It was a good forcing function. It required us to all of a sudden say, "If it really can look like this, why doesn't it?"

WarGames had its most indelible influence on hacker culture, not defense policy. The Cold War was ending, but the cyberwar was just getting started. The year after the movie's release saw the debut of 2600 magazine — a hacker zine named after the 2600-Hz tone Draper used to phreak phones. In 1993, the first hacker convention opened its doors. It was (and is) called Defcon, an affectionate nod to the movie that helped popularize the term. But WarGames' legacy isn't all smileys and Sunday wardrives. This was Silicon Valley's Jaws, doing for the digital demimonde what Spielberg's thriller had done for sharks: It introduced the world to the peril posed by hackers.

Mitnick: That movie had a significant effect on my treatment by the federal government. I was held in solitary confinement for nearly a year because a prosecutor told a judge that if I got near a phone, I could dial up Norad and launch a nuclear missile. I never hacked into Norad. And when the prosecutor said that, I laughed — in open court. I thought, "This guy just burned all his credibility." But the court believed it. I think the movie convinced people that this stuff was real. They tried to make me into a fictional character.

Parkes: Between John's instinct and Matthew's interpretation, Lightman ended up being a more accessible, real kid. We didn't know it at the time — we went into this researching hackers — but we probably drew a picture of a gamer. I mean, look at the line "I wanna play those games."

Lewis: In those days, there were no blackhats or whitehats. I didn't do anything too serious. Just wanted to see what I could get away with. Just like in the movie.

Parkes: If there's something naive about the movie, it's that we didn't anticipate the power of hackers. For the handful of people who ended up doing things like unleashing viruses, well, most of those guys got arrested and then worked for the computer security business. So I guess it's all worked out.

Mitnick: It was a cool script, and Lightman becomes the hero. He was just doing it for fun. Today people aren't doing it for the fun. I was an old-school hacker, doing it for intellectual curiosity. It was more innocent. Trying to find a cool game to play and accidentally stumbling across a game that was for real.

Contributing editor Scott Brown (scott_brown@wired.com) wrote about the new Batman movie in issue 16.07. Additional reporting by David Downs.

1956: A Bell X-2 rocket plane sets the record for fastest speed by an aircraft, reaching Mach 2.87, or more than 1,900 mph, 60,000 feet above the dry lake bed at Edwards Air Force Base, California.

The X-2 Starbuster, an experimental plane built by Bell Aircraft to test stability and control at supersonic speeds, made its debut in June 1952. Two were built, but only one became operational: The other was lost in a captive-flight explosion that killed its pilot in 1953.

Lt. Col. Frank "Pete" Everest was at the controls for the record flight. Everest, who flew over 150 combat missions during World War II, became a test pilot after the war, setting several speed marks and establishing an unofficial altitude record of 73,000 feet in a Bell X-1.

The 1950s were the golden age for test pilots, with numerous high-speed, experimental aircraft rolling out of Bell, Northrup and Douglas factories to test the limits of manned flight. Everest piloted almost every single aircraft type during his stint as a test pilot.

Once [the rocket is] going … you’re hanging on and trying to fly a prescribed flight path to give you the best performance. This isn’t easy to do, because you have to climb and try to get to about 60,000 feet, then level off and perhaps dive a little to try and get the maximum Mach number out of the airplane. You do this until your propellants are exhausted and then head home.

Even as he set the speed mark, Everest was gathering data. He reported later that the X-2's flight controls were not completely reliable at top-end speeds, the aircraft becoming more difficult to handle. Pressure shifts were also a factor, and Everest's impression was that the plane would encounter significant stability problems as it approached Mach 3.

Everest's record was broken a little over two months later by Capt. Mel Apt, flying the same X-2. Apt reached Mach 3.2, becoming the first pilot ever to top Mach 3, but that flight ended tragically when he attempted to adjust his course and the aircraft spun out of control and crashed. Apt's death was the end of the X-2 program, and most supersonic research was suspended until the North American X-15 arrived three years later.

Forget hydrogen. The car of the future has an extension cord and a great big laptop battery.

The next evolution of the automobile will be plug-in hybrids that get their juice from a household electrical outlet. They'll start rolling into showrooms within in 18 months. Experts say plug-in hybrids could account for about 20 percent of vehicle sales within a decade -- and half of all sales by 2050.

"It all boils down to the three ways electricity is better than gasoline," says Felix Kramer of Cal Cars, a plug-in advocacy group. "It's cleaner, it's cheaper and it's domestic."

Advocates say plug-in hybrids are the best chance to address global warming and wean the nation from oil. Consumers remain unsure about electric vehicles. Ethanol's a shaky proposition because of the food-for-fuel debate. And it'll be decades before hydrogen is a viable option. That, advocates say, leaves plug-ins as the best option. They'll go up to 40 miles on a charge; but they'll also have a gas engine to keep you going beyond that at 80 to 100 mpg or more.

People have been converting conventional hybrids to plug-ins for years, but the auto industry has been slow to catch on. Now the big automakers and start-ups like Fisker Automotive are scrambling to build them despite questions about their cost and long-term reliability. Those are just two of the issues that automakers, battery manufacturers and utility companies will discuss next week at the international Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose.

"The discussion is no longer one of 'if,' but of 'when' and 'how,'" says Chelesa Sexton, executive director of the advocacy group Plug-In America. "This has moved beyond the grass-roots level into the policy and business arenas."

It all starts in 2010. General Motors promises to have the Chevrolet Volt rolling into showrooms by then. Toyota says it will roll out a small fleet of plug-in Prius hybrids to see how they do. Volkswagen has similar plans for its plug-in Golf. And Fisker hopes to have a few dozen pricey Karma sedans in driveways within 18 months. Ford and others are moving more slowly, aiming for 2012 and beyond.

Automakers know plug-in hybrids are their best shot at meeting tightening federal fuel-economy regulations, and California's zero-emissions-vehicle mandate requires them to put nearly 60,000 of them on the road in six years. They're also responding to a seismic change in the market as record-high gas prices have consumers, fed-up with paying through the nose for gasoline, joining environmentalists to demand fuel-efficient cars.

"For the longest time, this was seen as a crunchy environmental California movement," Sexton says. "It never was, but now there's a broad coalition of people sitting at the same table to demand these cars. There's a collective frustration with the status quo."

Critics note that most of our electricity is generated by coal or natural gas and say plug-ins don't reduce carbon dioxide, they just move it around.

Mark Duvall of the Electric Power Research Institute says they're wrong. His research shows widespread adoption of plug-in hybrids could cut greenhouse gas emissions by more than 450 million metric tons annually by 2050. That's the equivalent of removing 82.5 million gasoline vehicles from the road. "There's significant CO2 reduction with plug-in hybrids over conventional vehicles and hybrids, and that reduction increases over time," he says.

"We can handle as many plug-in hybrids as the auto industry wants to provide and people want to drive," he says. "The supply of electricity is almost limitless."

All those plug-ins would cut petroleum consumption from 20.6 million barrels a day to 16 or 17 million. But the lithium-ion batteries that will store that electricity remain the cars' Achilles heel.

The long-term reliability of lithium-ion batteries remains unknown, and by some estimates they cost as much as $15,000. That'll make selling plug-ins at a price most people can afford a tough proposition until the cars are made in volume -- and the cost of batteries comes down. GM says it doesn't expect to turn a profit on the $40,000 Volt anytime soon.

Sales undoubtedly will start off slowly. Analysts don't expect GM to sell more than 30,000 Volts annually for the first couple of years. Other automakers will see similar sales figures until the cost of batteries comes down.

"We're looking at small volumes initially," says Mike Omotoso of J.D. Power & Associates. "But we could see critical mass by 2015."

Advocates say politicians and policymakers can help by creating tax breaks to make it easier for consumers to buy the cars and automakers to build them. Such incentives -- coupled with perks like carpool-lane access -- helped hybrids gain a foothold, they say, and could do the same for plug-ins.

The Department of Energy has handed out more than $60 million since 2006 to advance hybrid and battery technology and hopes to disburse another $62.3 million by the end of next year.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain have hailed plug-in hybrids in general -- and the Volt in particular -- in recent weeks and promised to spur development of such cars if elected. And Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tennessee, has called for Washington to go further by launching a "New Manhattan Project" that would include getting plug-in hybrids on the road in large numbers.

Editor's Note: Cond� Nast Portfolio spoke with Katharine Weymouth prior to July 7, when the Washington Post named former Wall Street Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli as its new executive editor.

Nobody knows better than Katharine Weymouth that the newspaper industry is experiencing what may be called, euphemistically, a period of transition. But the new publisher of the Washington Post isn't big on euphemisms.

"The numbers suck in our business," the 42-year-old granddaughter of legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham declares, holding her tall, lithe frame dancer-straight, the result of a childhood spent in ballet classes.

It's a lovely day in early April, and Weymouth is at the Post's downtown D.C. headquarters, meeting with the staff of Style, one of the paper's more popular sections. The session is a stop on the listening tour of the newsroom that she's been conducting since February, when she was named publisher and chief executive of Washington Post Media, a newly configured unit that encompasses the newspaper's long-divided print and web operations. (View a slideshow featuring some of the newspaper's major players.)

This should be a very good day at the Post. The day before, the paper won six Pulitzer Prizes, a record for the Post and the second-biggest haul ever for any newspaper in a single year. To celebrate, Weymouth threw open the doors of her decidedly unflashy home for an impromptu shindig, greeting coworkers in her bare feet and chatting with young staffers into the night.

But the afterglow is already waning, and now it's back to the dismal reality of newspapers everywhere. "We are going to have to get smaller and better and still find a way to put out the best product we can," Weymouth tells the assembled reporters and editors at the headquarters of the Post. "That may mean that we have to make some choices about what we can cover and what we can't—and those are going to be hard choices." (View a pop-up graphic showing how the Post's ad revenue and circulation stack up to the competition.)

Weymouth, a divorced mother of three young children, is the lone member of her generation of Grahams to work at the family-controlled, publicly traded company that her great-grandfather, Allied Chemical tycoon Eugene Meyer, bought at a bankruptcy auction in 1933. Her new role makes her the almost inevitable successor to her uncle, Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Don Graham, and the two can often be seen circling the Post building together, walking and talking. Don, a physically fit 63-year-old, isn’t planning to go anywhere anytime soon, and in the meantime, Weymouth must prove herself by running the unit that defines the Washington Post's celebrated brand but that may also have the bleakest future.

The Post Co.’s performance tells the story of a fading industry: Over the past 24 years, its cable unit has prospered but the newspaper, broadcast and magazine divisions, including Newsweek, have become dwarfed by its Kaplan unit, which offers education, test-preparation and career-training services and whose cash flow today accounts for nearly half of the company's $4.1 billion annual revenue. The tail has become the dog, and the Washington Post Co.—forever identified with fearless reporting on the Watergate scandal and the Pentagon Papers—now defines itself as a "diversified education and media company, with education as the largest and fastest growing business."

Weymouth "is very talented, very smart, and she has a huge challenge, which is to be in the newspaper business at this particular time," says longtime family friend Barry Diller, chief executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and a director of the Post Co., whose share price recently slid below $600 from a 52-week high of $885.

At a lunch with Post editors and reporters, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer confidently predicted that in 10 years "there will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form" and "no media consumption" except via the internet. Weymouth’s maybe impossible mission: to change that future—or at least figure out how the Post can survive in it.

It was probably not an omen, but shortly before she was named publisher, Weymouth was mugged at gunpoint on a Washington street. It was midnight, and she and a female friend were leaving a dinner party at the home of a Post colleague. "I always feel like I'm a tough chick and nobody is going to mess with me," Weymouth says. "We were paying no attention to our surroundings, which we should have been. This guy comes around the corner and says, 'Your purses.' Then he pulled out a gun, and we realized he wasn’t joking." Emerging from the ordeal stripped of cash, credit cards and Weymouth's Washington Wizards basketball tickets—but otherwise unscathed—they retreated to a lounge, where Tim the friendly bartender served them margaritas on the house to steady their jangled nerves.

Jangled nerves, of course, are the least of the challenges Weymouth faces. The Grahams today are almost the last of the great American newspaper families. They have managed to nurture and retain possession of a thriving journalistic institution while other media dynasties—the Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times, the Bancrofts of the Wall Street Journal, and the Binghams of the Louisville Times and Courier-Journal, to name a few—have loosened their grip, taken the cash from big corporate buyers, and faded into a gilded oblivion. Even the Sulzbergers of The New York Times are fighting to stay in power amid rising shareholder discontent over the company’s sinking stock price.

"It's so amazing to see this family continue in control," says Post Co. vice president at large Ben Bradlee, who served as the Post's executive editor for 23 years and, with Katharine Graham, transformed the paper from a merely respectable publication into a world-class one. He adds that Weymouth's ascension guarantees that there will be a member of the family there for another 30 years. "When I heard she was coming in, it made me feel optimistic and good," Bradlee says. "And then when I saw her and the way she handles herself around here, with total ease and yet no sense of entitlement, I was really impressed."

t was Weymouth's grandfather, Philip Graham—Katharine Graham's husband and Meyer's son-in-law—who first put the Washington Post Co. on the map as an emerging media power. After World War II, he bought a majority stake in the local 50,000-watt CBS radio station, then the CBS television affiliate, and then a TV station in Jacksonville, Florida. Philip bought the rival Washington Times-Herald and merged it with the Post, launched a wire service with the Los Angeles Times, and acquired Newsweek magazine. But all the while, he battled a severe form of manic depression, and in August 1963 he committed suicide, shooting himself at the family farm in Virginia. Katharine Graham found his body.

The rest of the story is legendary in journalistic circles: Rejecting handsome offers from various media conglomerates to buy the company, Katharine took over as president. Shy and awkward, she felt inadequate to the task and, as she later admitted, terrified, but she was determined to keep the Post in the family. She'd spent her adult life as a wife and mother, driving a car pool for her four children, and knew little of business and nothing about management. But she steeped herself in expert advice and, with the help of a small group of executives who'd been hired by her husband, she presided over the newspaper and its related enterprises with increasing self-assurance and authority.

An outwardly correct and reticent lady (who displayed a wicked sense of humor and cursed eloquently in private), she formed a seamless partnership with Bradlee, whom she hired in 1965 as managing editor after he famously told her he'd give his "left one" to edit the Post. Together, they faced down Richard Nixon's White House in publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, when government intervention could have jeopardized the Post Co.'s plans to go public. They pursued the Watergate investigation at a time when vindictive Nixon operatives were actively considering pulling the company's broadcasting licenses.

Mrs. Graham, as she is still called by nearly everyone at the Post, died in July 2001 at age 84, after falling and sustaining head injuries while attending the Allen & Co. media-mogul retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho. But her descendants still seem to enjoy an almost mystical bond with their employees. When Weymouth made a heartfelt acceptance speech in the company auditorium on the day her promotion was announced, some Post traditionalists, such as former managing editor Bob Kaiser, were teary-eyed.

Wearing her grandmother’s pearls for luck, Weymouth told the crowd about a recent conversation she'd had with a coworker in the advertising department, where she'd spent the previous three years as vice president and director. The colleague "poked her head in my office," Weymouth explained, "and said that there was a story that she thought I would want to hear. She asked me if I had ever noticed that often the elevators stop on the lobby floor when you have not pressed the button for the lobby. And the doors open, and no one gets on or off. I said yes, I had noticed that. She said, 'Well, my girls think that is your grandmother getting on the elevator.' I got chills when she told me that. And this morning, it happened to me. I was riding up from the garage level, a nervous wreck. And the elevator stopped on the lobby floor, the doors opened, and no one got on."

The numbers do suck: The Post's circulation and advertising are down and dropping, the cost of newsprint is through the roof, and advertising revenue from the web isn't growing nearly fast enough to stanch the bleeding. In 2007, the Post's print-ad revenue plunged 13 percent from the previous year—from $573.2 million to $496.2 million (a decline hardly offset by an $11.5 million hike in the website's revenue, an 11 percent increase over the previous year). Average daily circulation has dropped to 673,180 from a peak of 832,232 in 1993. The staff was cut earlier this year through a round of voluntary buyouts, the third since 2003, a move that cost the company a record $80 million in severance payouts. Over the past five years, the newsroom's head count has shriveled from about 900 to less than 700, and the threat of layoffs still looms. It’s a sad, scary time. At a recent farewell party for the latest group of buyout recipients, several of them Pulitzer Prize winners, Don Graham was choked up.

"Our single-copy sales are declining by about 10 percent a year, and home delivery is almost flat," Weymouth tells the Style staff at the April meeting. Responding to a writer who complains that the Post's front page is often boring to readers who aren't obsessed with politics and government, she says, "I think the evidence will tell us you're right. There are days when I look at the front page and think we've done a better job, and there are days that I think, You must be kidding me!" The staffers laugh. Weymouth goes on, "There are days on Saturday that I think maybe somebody is trying to not have people buy the paper."

Those are striking words for a newspaper publisher, whose traditional responsibilities don't usually include second-guessing the editors on their Page One selections. In the meeting, Weymouth insists she’s not going to bigfoot editors on news judgments. "It wouldn't be appropriate," she says. But in her short time on the job, she's made it clear that she'll involve herself in all aspects of the operations that define the brand, an approach that's symbolized by her decision to move the publisher's office to the fifth-floor newsroom to make herself "accessible"—a highly unorthodox step strongly discouraged by her immediate predecessor, Post Co. vice chairman Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., one of Don Graham's oldest friends from Harvard.

"Bo hates my idea of moving, hates it, and has tried repeatedly to talk me out of it," Weymouth tells the Style staff. "But I don't like to be stuffed away in a cubby. I don't know how many of you have been to the official publisher's office on the seventh floor. It's like a dreadful funeral coffin." Don Graham, who spent much of his early career as a reporter and editor, endorses the move. "Katharine came up on the business side, but she loves the newsroom and the people in it, and by being in the middle of it she'll learn a lot, and they'll learn a lot about her," he says.

One thing they've already learned: She has opinions about almost everything. "Do you remember the rural-dentist photo, a month ago or whatever?" she asks the Style staff. "There was that elderly woman with, like, no teeth, dying in bed, and he was treating her? That was a good story, and I'm sorry to be so horrible—I'm hoping it was no one in the room who picked the photo—but there were better photos!

"I went on the website and—not to do a Sam Zell thing—they have the same dentist with a beautiful old-fashioned truck and, no kidding, a dalmatian on the hood." Zell, the foulmouthed billionaire who recently bought the Tribune Co., appeared in a notorious YouTube video in which he accused a photographer at the Tribune-owned Orlando Sentinel of "classic journalistic arrogance." After the photographer argued that if ordinary readers had their way, the paper would carry stories about puppy dogs at the expense of stories about Iraq, Zell responded with a bracing "Fuck you!"

"Sam Zell may be a loon with Tourette's syndrome," Weymouth jokes, "but he's not crazy. To some degree, it is puppies and Iraq."

Though Weymouth has no journalism experience, the newsroom chatter about her has been positive so far, in part because she seems down-to-earth and decisive at a time when morale is low and apprehensiveness is high. She has moved with surprising speed to exercise the publisher's prerogative to name her own executive editor. Leonard Downie Jr., who has held that job since 1991, announced his post-Labor Day retirement plans on June 23. Countering stories suggesting the timing of his departure was Weymouth's idea, not his, he says, "I’m 66 years old, I have a novel being published in January, I have a lot of things I want to do with my life."

While denying publicly that she was in any hurry to replace Downie, Weymouth nevertheless did little to hide her head-hunting activities. She sounded out nearly a dozen prospects both inside and outside the paper, including current Post managing editor Phil Bennett, New Yorker editor and former Post staff writer David Remnick (who said he wasn’t interested in the job), and two leading outside contenders, New York Times deputy managing editor Jonathan Landman and former Wall Street Journal managing editor Marcus Brauchli, who was ousted from that job by the paper's new owner, Rupert Murdoch, this spring.

No other decision Weymouth makes will be riskier or more important, or will reflect more seriously on her leadership. The consequences of a mistake will be dire. As this magazine went to press in late June, Weymouth appeared poised to break with Post tradition and name an outsider. Brauchli was the leading contender. "In my mind, it's three different qualities," she told me, about what she was looking for in her own Ben Bradlee. "One is obviously intellectual caliber—the ability to run our newsroom and identify good stories. Two is charisma and leadership…. and the third is the ability to think strategically about the newsroom of the 21st century. There has to be someone who looks around and says, 'OK, what are we trying to accomplish?' Now we have the web, we have mobile, we have the Kindle and whatever other devices are going to come up, so what is the best way for us to exist in order to do the best journalism we can do?"

Meanwhile, Weymouth has also been focusing on the kind of less exalted newsroom-personnel issues that publishers have traditionally avoided. It didn't take her long, in a series of informal one-on-ones with reporters and editors, to pick up on morale problems among the national news staff. Two and a half months after Weymouth became publisher, the section's assistant managing editor, Susan Glasser, was removed from that position and given another one outside the newsroom, working for Don Graham on special projects. Glasser's tense relationship with many of her reporters was already under scrutiny from her bosses. (Glasser had no comment.) Yet there's little question that Weymouth weighed in with her concerns, which likely accelerated Glasser's reassignment and prompted embarrassing coverage from rival news outlets, notably a detailed story about the episode in the New York Times. "It’s shocking to me," Weymouth says about the press coverage, dismissing it as gossip but declining to comment on her role. "As publisher, I'm going to take a lot of heat for almost anything I do. Some people are going to like it and some people are going to be horrified by it."

Weymouth joined the Post in the fall of 1996 as an in-house counsel, from the blue-chip Washington law firm Williams & Connolly. (I met her soon after she arrived at the paper—I was a reporter there from 1980 to 2003—when she was assigned to vet one of my stories. She advised me to delete some potentially libelous material. We haggled; she won.) After graduating from Harvard College and Stanford Law School—with a brief interlude at Oxford's Wadham College, reading English literature and rowing on the Thames—she had clerked for a couple of judges in San Francisco, where she planned to make her home. But she couldn’t find suitable employment.

"I wanted to stay in California, but I graduated during a recession and couldn't get a job in California," she tells me over coffee at the Madison Hotel, across the street from the Post building. She’s dressed casually, in corduroy trousers, a Gap shirt, and a jacket from a New York street vendor; in a few hours, she's taking a crew of editors to a Washington Nationals baseball game.

Moving to the Post after three years as an associate at Williams & Connolly, Weymouth spent the subsequent 11 years in a variety of positions on the paper's business side—associate counsel to Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, which included the paper's website, Washingtonpost.com; liaison between the often fractious advertising teams of the website and the newspaper; director of help-wanted advertising; and finally vice president of the entire advertising department, where she directed a sales force of 450. All were part of the grooming process. During that time, she presided over declining ad revenue, but Don Graham was still impressed with her performance: "I have long and deep relationships in that department, and I knew how well people were reacting to her, and I knew how many ideas she had. I knew from several jobs ago how really smart she is about picking people."

Katharine Graham was pleased when Weymouth finally joined the family business. "She was optimistic but uttered some cautionary words to the effect that Katharine would have to prove herself on the job, which would be true of any Graham at the Post,” says Mrs. Graham's youngest son, Stephen, another of Weymouth’s uncles. Granddaughter and grandmother were very close; when I ran into them occasionally at Washington parties, they were clearly enjoying each other's company. "I would often end up with nothing planned on Friday night, and we would have dinner in front of the TV and watch Jim Lehrer," Weymouth says. "I would tell her about my dating life, and she would be amused."

In July 1998, she married attorney Richard Scully; her wedding gown was designed by family friend Oscar de la Renta, and among the guests were Warren Buffett, Charles Schumer, Alan Greenspan and Andrea Mitchell. Weymouth changed her surname to Scully but changed it back again when she and Scully divorced six years later.

Weymouth is herself a child of divorce. Her mother, Newsweek senior editor Lally Weymouth, who is Don's older sister, and father, Yann Weymouth, a prominent architect, separated when Katharine was 5. She grew up with her younger sister, Pamela (now a writer and teacher in California), on Manhattan's Upper East Side, attending the posh Brearley School for girls while studying at George Balanchine's famed School of American Ballet. "Ballet taught me discipline," Weymouth says. "If I wanted to dance three hours a night, I had to make sure to deal with everything else, getting my homework done. I had a little schedule written out, and I didn’t like people to mess with it."

Yann Weymouth, older brother of former Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth, recalls a little girl who "would worry about whether she had completed all her tasks, whether she had done all she needed to do in school, worried about doing her homework and doing it right." The formidable Lally, known for her incisive interviews with world leaders, declined to be interviewed herself. "I can’t think of anything I'd like to do less," she quipped, half in jest but wholly in earnest.

Weymouth learned early how to mix with grownups, many of whom were among the most distinguished in their respective fields. It was during one of her mother's parties, when Weymouth was 11, that Norman Mailer emptied the contents of his scotch glass in Gore Vidal's face, head-butted him, and socked him in the mouth, thus launching one of the more entertaining literary feuds of the latter half of the 20th century. Vidal memorialized the occasion as "The Night of the Tiny Fist."

But with her own friends, Weymouth tried to keep her high-powered connections on the down-low. Molly Elkin, a Washington lawyer and daughter of novelist Stanley Elkin, knew nothing about Weymouth's illustrious family when the two bonded while they were both at Oxford. She and Weymouth decided to travel to Israel together during a school vacation, and Weymouth offered to make all the arrangements, instructing her friend to bring a decent dress just in case they ended up at a fancy dinner. Flying out of Paris, they submitted to a routine interrogation by security-conscious officials of El Al airline. "They asked us, 'Do you know anyone in Israel?'" Elkin recalls. "And I said, 'Yes, my friend Ricky Gold, who I've known since I was 3.' And then Katharine pulls out a five-page typed itinerary that I didn't even know she had with her. And it says, 'Dinner with Leah and Yitzhak Rabin,' who was then the defense minister. 'Lunch in the Knesset with Bibi Netanyahu,' 'Visit to the Jerusalem Post to meet with editor Ari Rath'—things like that. And my reaction was to look at Katharine and say, 'Who are you?'"

Once the appointment of a new executive editor is behind her, one of Weymouth's highest priorities will be integrating the operations and staff of the newspaper and its website. The move is far more than bureaucratic; it threatens long-standing traditions and fiefdoms at the paper. The Post has long seen its internet enterprise as independent from the downtown newsroom and placed it across the Potomac River in suburban Virginia. The newsroom reported to Downie, and the website reported to Washingtonpost.com C.E.O. Caroline Little (who recently left the company). The corporate and geographical separation resulted in two very different and clashing cultures. Now the two entities for the first time report to the same person—Weymouth—a structure that, she says, reflects the "growing size and importance" of the website. "The idea, and the reason we named the new entity Washington Post Media, was so that we could really begin to think about ourselves as a media company—and not as a newspaper company and a web company," Weymouth says.

To date, revenue from the print operation still far exceeds that of the internet, but this could change. "My goal is to make sure that the Washington Post is reporting and writing great stories and distributing them to our readers on whatever platform they want to get it on. If we can do that, then it won't matter whether revenues at the website are bigger than those at the newspaper, or vice versa. If we do this right, we will be a news company."

In short, Weymouth is the woman in charge of reinventing one of the world's best newspapers in the age of the internet, and her success or failure at that task will be a leading indicator of the industry as a whole. "It’s going to be cutting costs and developing new products and trying new things—throwing a little more spaghetti against the wall," she tells the Style staff. "Some of them will work and some of them won't. I don't think there’s a magic bullet that is going to turn our industry around.

"Think about the record companies," she continues. "They’ve all been in this position, and some have survived it and some have not. Apple completely reinvented themselves. I.B.M. did not. TiVo did not. Microsoft constantly reinvents itself. Google has sort of a one-hit, brilliant wonder and is now trying to look for lots of other revenue streams but really hasn't, in my mind, succeeded. So I wish I could come up with what the iPod is for us."

Whatever Weymouth does, Liz Spayd, a Washingtonpost.com editor who is also a veteran of the downtown newsroom, predicts that the new publisher will move forcefully and fast.

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