“Really dense,” Scott Peltzer said. “It would last forever.”

“Pest-resistant,” Al Solomon said. “A Brazilian hardwood, ipe. Ten times stronger than oak.”

Those lengths of ipe had more than natural strength going for them.

Before becoming a coffee table, they had been part of the boardwalk at Coney Island, and so were pickled by sunlight and leaking custard cones and seawater dribbling from swim suits. That cosmic cocktail, and infinitely more, was worked into the grain by the footfall of millions. When the city was replacing the boardwalk, Mr. Solomon, who salvages old lumber, got his hands on it.

Beginning Friday, the coffee table made from the boardwalk, as well as 11 other pieces of furniture built with ancient, hidden woods of New York City, will be displayed in 12 x 12, an exhibition that is part of Wanted Design, an event that runs through Monday at the Tunnel/Central Stores space on 11th Avenue in Chelsea.

“Any building built before 1910 was framed with antique lumber, from American virgin forests,” Mr. Solomon said. “If you turned New York City inside out, it would look like the Adirondacks.”

Each piece of furniture in the show could be a chapter in the history of the city, and the forests that were used to build it. An 1832 counting house at 211 Pearl Street was used by A. A. Low, who was in the opium trade with China and whose son, Seth Low, was a mayor of Brooklyn and the president of Columbia University. It was gutted in 2007 — Mr. Solomon campaigned for it to be a landmark but was outmaneuvered by developers — and some of its Eastern White Pine was used as foundation shoring for the new 1 World Trade Center.

The Pearl Street pine will also be present in the 12 x 12 show in the form of a contemplation booth, an “agnostic confessional,” Mr. Solomon said, built by the architectural firm Obra.

Other pieces include a chair made from a Park Avenue water tower; a liquor cabinet of antique pine from Mars Bar, the venerable dive on Second Avenue in Manhattan; a desk of short leaf pine, harvested from 157 Hudson Street in Manhattan, which had been a stable for the United States Cavalry in the 1880s and later part of a delivery network for a company called American Express, before it got into credit cards; and a trunk of long leaf pine from an industrial building and homeless shelter on Dean Street in Brooklyn.

A distillery set up by Italian immigrants in Flushing, Queens, made vermouth after World War II, and its mighty casks of antique white oak and cypress were turned into a “bar console” by Noah Spencer of Fort Makers in Brooklyn.

“You can see the vermouth has seeped into the wood, three-quarters of an inch,” Mr. Spencer said. “The casks were 14 feet high, and they had to cut it to eight feet to be able to deliver it. It’s great wood.”

That trimming would have been done by Mr. Solomon, who grew up in the family scrap business in Massachusetts and moved to New York nearly 20 years ago, finding the rich, invisible past hidden behind the walls and underfoot. The 12 x 12 show was conceived by him and his partner in Sawkill Lumber.

The flooring for the exhibition space from old growth hard maple was mustered by Mr. Solomon from the Edison Manufacturing Company plant in Bloomfield, N.J., which was set up by Thomas Edison to advance his interests in phonographs, filmmaking and batteries.

On Thursday, the wood was being cut and laid by Mr. Peltzer and a team from Brooklyn Woods, which gives free training in woodworking to people who need a hand getting started in the world of making things. This includes men and women coming out of jail or drug rehabilitation programs. The pieces in the 12 x 12 exhibition will be auctioned to support the project.

“You have guys from prison working in high-end architectural woodworking,” Mr. Solomon said. “Historic and modern, refined and rough — it’s the contrasts that generate the energy and transforming power of the city.”

He maps the past by woods and street names and salvaged bones. Pine was the nearest, easiest timber for the early European settlers. Then cedar.

“So the first block north of Wall Street is Pine Street,” Mr. Solomon said. “The next block north is Cedar Street, the predominant exterior wood. A few blocks up, you have Spruce. In a way, we are all Occupy Pine Street.”

Huge X-shaped braces, for example, were needed to absorb the biting winds that blew in from Lake Michigan.

And there were surprises once people moved in. Residents of the highest floors in the John Hancock sometimes had to call their doormen to ask about the weather because their apartments were above the clouds.

What is it that drives some people to live so high up? And developers to keep building ever-taller edifices?

New York, it seems, is entering a tall-buildings arms race. By 2016, New York could have 6 of the 10 tallest buildings in the country (with Chicago having the other 4), and 3 of the highest residential structures, according to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in Chicago.

Following New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street and the mammoth One57 at 157 West 57th Street, even taller residential towers are in the works, including 432 Park Avenue on the site of the former Drake Hotel, and the GiraSole, proposed for 11th Avenue on the Far West Side.

Both of those buildings would be taller than One57, which will be Manhattan’s tallest residential building, at 1,004 feet, when it is completed next year. And 432 Park Avenue, a condo structure scheduled to be finished in 2016, would be 1,398 feet, surpassing One57 and second in height only to One World Trade Center, an office complex, the Council on Tall Buildings said.

Then there is 1214 Fifth Avenue, which is being pitched as the “tallest residential building on the Upper East Side,” though it is actually in Harlem. The 53-story building, to open June 15, will have 185 rental apartments set atop 20 floors of doctors’ offices.

Taller residential buildings make sense in a city like New York, of course. People are attracted to high-altitude residences because of the dramatic views they afford. For developers, the higher the building, the more square footage to sell or rent.

Marketing strategies have often turned on “highest” and “tallest” designations. When Donald J. Trump built Trump Tower at 721 Fifth Avenue in 1982, it was billed as the tallest “all-glass structure” in the city.

Today, at 664 feet, it appears as the city’s 52nd-tallest building over all.

Concern about Mr. Trump’s pride in such things apparently led Frank Gehry to make his New York rental tower a few feet lower than Trump World Tower. He told the developer, Bruce Ratner, to “make it a foot lower so we don’t have to deal with” Mr. Trump, The Observer quoted Mr. Gehry as saying in 2010 (to which Mr. Trump replied that he was “not a fan of much of” Mr. Gehry’s work, “although he is a darling”).

Lately, amid the hysteria for luxury apartments being fueled in large part by wealthy foreigners, something else has happened. While there has always been a premium for living on higher floors, developers are packing the biggest apartments in the top floors, giving them leverage to charge even more, said Jonathan J. Miller, the president of Miller Samuel, a real estate appraiser.

“The higher you go up, the higher the values go,” Mr. Miller said. “Not only are you incentivized to put more floors on the space than zoning permits, but there is a premium on those higher floors on a per-square-foot basis.”

But as with most issues in New York real estate, there are trade-offs. Height does give residents bragging rights, but you generally can’t have a terrace (or open your window at times) because of strong winds.

Most of New York’s tallest residential buildings are in Midtown. It’s an area that lends itself to tall structures because of its popularity with well-heeled foreign buyers who are less interested in neighborhoods than in park views and easy walks to theaters and luxury shopping, Mr. Miller said.

With so many developers claiming rights to superlatives about their buildings, I decided to investigate a bit more.

I started with the structure that is claiming the title of Tallest in the Upper East — 1214 Fifth. An official from Related Companies, its developer, gave me a tour. It was a gloomy day to see the building, which is just down the street from Mount Sinai Hospital, at 4 East 102nd Street. The lobby is unfinished, as are many other parts of the building. Workers in hard hats bustled about.

The apartments themselves are generously sized and boast impressive views of the northeast end of Central Park.

The residences have spacious entranceways, roomy closets and luxury finishes, including hidden dishwashers, stainless-steel appliances and marble bathrooms. “We were very specific in making sure that we appeal to that Upper East Side idea,” said Daria Salusbury, a senior vice president of Related.

Prices range from $5,500 to $6,500 a month (depending on how high up you are) for a 950-square-foot one-bedroom, to $9,000 for a 1,700-square-foot three-bedroom three-bath. A duplex penthouse with a 20-foot-high ceiling can be had for $10,500 a month.

Related is betting that the building, located amid a sea of co-ops on Fifth Avenue, can rise above the competition in the scorching-hot Manhattan rental market. Ms. Salusbury said she already had a “V.I.P. wait list” of people who have called to inquire about available rentals.

Yet for all its claims of regional superiority, 1214 Fifth, at 513 feet, will be the 183rd-tallest building in New York.

“It’s like an eagle soaring out here,” Ms. Salusbury said, while showing off the view from a 53rd-floor duplex penthouse. Staring at the softball fields, the bride-favorite conservatory and ant-sized bikers in the park, I couldn’t help but wonder: Are people more likely to get vertigo from the height itself, or from the price tag for these views?

What DreamWorks did not showcase, however, was one of its newest — and most important — Chinese partners: Jiang Mianheng, the 61-year-old son of Jiang Zemin, the former Communist Party leader and the most powerful political kingmaker of China’s last two decades.

The younger Mr. Jiang’s coups have included ventures with Microsoft and Nokia and oversight of a clutch of state-backed investment vehicles that have major interests in telecommunications, semiconductors and construction projects.

That a dealmaker like Mr. Jiang would be included in an undertaking like that of DreamWorks is almost a given in today’s China. Analysts say this is how the Communist Party shares the spoils, allowing the relatives of senior leaders to cash in on one of the biggest economic booms in history.

As the scandal over Bo Xilai continues to reverberate, the authorities here are eager to paint Mr. Bo, a fallen leader who was one of 25 members of China’s ruling Politburo, as a rogue operator who abused his power, even as his family members accumulated a substantial fortune.

But evidence is mounting that the relatives of other current and former senior officials have also amassed vast wealth, often playing central roles in businesses closely entwined with the state, including those involved in finance, energy, domestic security, telecommunications and entertainment. Many of these so-called princelings also serve as middlemen to a host of global companies and wealthy tycoons eager to do business in China.

“Whenever there is something profitable that emerges in the economy, they’ll be at the front of the queue,” said Minxin Pei, an expert on China’s leadership and professor of government at Claremont McKenna College in California. “They’ve gotten into private equity, state-owned enterprises, natural resources — you name it.”

For example, Wen Yunsong, the son of Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, heads a state-owned company that boasts that it will soon be Asia’s largest satellite communications operator. President Hu Jintao’s son, Hu Haifeng, once managed a state-controlled firm that held a monopoly on security scanners used in China’s airports, shipping ports and subway stations. And in 2006, Feng Shaodong, the son-in-law of Wu Bangguo, the party’s second-ranking official, helped Merrill Lynch win a deal to arrange the $22 billion public listing of the giant state-run bank I.C.B.C., in what became the world’s largest initial public stock offering.

Much of the income earned by families of senior leaders may be entirely legal. But it is all but impossible to distinguish between legitimate and ill-gotten gains because there is no public disclosure of the wealth of officials and their relatives. Conflict-of-interest laws are weak or nonexistent. And the business dealings of the political elite are heavily censored in the state-controlled news media.

The spoils system, for all the efforts to keep a lid on it, poses a fundamental challenge to the legitimacy of the Communist Party. As the state’s business has become increasingly intertwined with a class of families sometimes called the Red Nobility, analysts say the potential exists for a backlash against an increasingly entrenched elite. They also point to the risk that national policies may be subverted by leaders and former leaders, many of whom exert influence long after their retirement, acting to protect their own interests.

Chinese officials and their relatives rarely discuss such a delicate issue publicly. The New York Times made repeated attempts to reach public officials and their relatives for this article, often through their companies. None of those reached agreed to comment on the record.

DreamWorks and Microsoft declined to comment about their relationship with Mr. Jiang.

Do you start feeling itchy every time an advertisement for a bedbug removal service comes on television?

In an ideal world, if all New Yorkers picked up after themselves, we would have far, far fewer cockroaches, rats, ants and moths to contend with inside our apartments. But there will always be supers who don’t take out the trash on schedule and neighbors who hoard pizza boxes, making this metropolis a utopia for pests.

“Whenever there’s more dense population, there’s greater opportunity for pest problems,” said Gary Braness, Ph.D, a pest management consultant and the owner of Yosemite Environmental Services, based in Fresno, Calif. “You’ve got eight million people living in New York paying high rent, and countless pests paying nothing. They hitchhike into your home in your purse or hide out in your grocery bags. There are so many hiding places, layers upon layers of construction, especially in old structures.”

So how do you take up arms against the vermin in your home? All pests want food, water and shelter. Get rid of those three necessities and you will go a long way toward a pest-free existence. This means sanitation is everything. Equally important is stopping critters from entering your home in the first place. If this seems daunting, call in the professionals.

Just don’t call them exterminators. Nowadays they call what they do pest management control, and with good reason. Today’s professionals are much more knowledgeable than the old baseboard jockeys, who sprayed and prayed. They regularly consult with entomologists. Some are certified in green business practices. Most are cognizant of what types of chemicals they use and how often. The really good ones will determine how the creepy crawlies are getting in, and stop them at the source. Prices for pest management services vary widely, based on the pests involved and the size of the invasion. But the tab can run from $250, for a minor case, to thousands for a full-blown bedbug infestation.

If you want to try and tackle the problem yourself, you might wonder whether homemade remedies will do the trick, or if that ultrasonic device on sale at the drugstore really does chase away cockroaches with high-frequency sound waves. It depends. The Web is full of sites with recipes for concoctions to ward off ants and the like, and some do indeed work. Try them out. Peppermint oil is said to be wizard at destroying bird mites. And you’ll know soon enough whether or not that citrus-sugar solution is killing off a colony of ants. Ultrasonic devices? The experts are skeptical.

But there is no true panacea.

“Sanitation helps,” Dr. Braness said, “but sanitation alone won’t totally control them. And unless you eat out every day and don’t bring home a single crumb of food, pests will thrive.”

Finding a buildingwide solution to pests like mice and cockroaches can make the individual’s battle much easier.

One bit of good news is that the number of complaints about bedbugs to 311, New York City’s information hot line, is on the decline, having fallen to 19,588 in 2011 from 27,298 in 2010. This doesn’t mean you are free to start rescuing nice-looking upholstered chairs from the sidewalk, but the peak of the bedbug invasion seems to have passed. Unfortunately, rodents and cockroaches are still as pesky as ever. So are ants, flies, bees and pigeons.

Their presence can be a particularly acute problem for people about to list their apartments for sale. Brokers will tell you it is hard to say which is worse for buyers touring an apartment: seeing mousetraps in every corner, or being greeted by the living, breathing pest itself.

As New Yorkers, we have little sway over who lives around us, but we can try to control the creatures living uninvited in our homes. Our guide to eradicating some common ones is a basic how-to on waging war against the harpies of the rodent realm and the billions of six-legged monsters marching and flying across the welcome mat. It was compiled after consultation with pest-control specialists and entomologists, and is intended as a starting point in what, with luck, will not be a prolonged battle.

Word that Mr. Ricketts had considered bankrolling a $10 million advertising campaign linking President Obama to the incendiary race-infused statements of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., brought waves of denunciation from Mitt Romney, the Obama campaign and much of the rest of the political world.

Highlighting the perils of mixing partisan politics and corporate citizenship, the reverberations also swept through the Ricketts family’s business empire.

Liberal groups encouraged like-minded investors to drop their accounts with TD Ameritrade, the brokerage firm Mr. Ricketts founded. His family’s plan to seek public financing for improvements to Wrigley Field, home of their baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, ran into new political opposition. And he was forced to write a letter to reporters at his New York news organization, DNAinfo.com, assuring them he believed that “my personal politics should have absolutely no impact on your work.”

By early afternoon, Mr. Ricketts had announced that he had rejected the ad campaign as out of keeping with his own political style, a day after his aides indicated that it was still under consideration.

The episode all but ensured that Republicans would remain under intense pressure not to invoke Mr. Wright’s provocative statements so directly for the balance of the campaign. And, in a year when the loosened system of campaign finance regulations is encouraging wealthy individuals to weigh in on behalf of candidates and causes, Mr. Ricketts became a case study in the risks of political neophytes with big checkbooks seeking to play at the highest and roughest levels of politics.

After a storied career, Mr. Ricketts, 70, set out to break into the exclusive but growing new fraternity of megarich, conservative “super PAC” donors, people willing — and permitted as never before — to pour millions of dollars into influencing an election. He has seemed motivated primarily by his belief that government spending is out of control and that Mr. Obama cannot be trusted to rein in the deficit and reduce the national debt.

But associates acknowledged that his experience on Thursday, when a confidential proposal for the Wright campaign became public in The New York Times, helped hammer home the high stakes of his decision to initiate discussions with some of the most seasoned and aggressive strategists in Republican politics about going after Mr. Obama in a high-profile way.

The proposal was drafted under the leadership of Fred Davis, a veteran political advertising strategist who worked for the presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, John McCain and, most recently, former Gov. Jon M. Huntsman Jr. of Utah.

In a statement on Thursday, a spokesman for Mr. Ricketts said the plan Mr. Davis’s team submitted was “merely a proposal” and “reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.”

The president and general counsel of the Ending Spending Political Action Fund, Brian Baker, said through a spokesman that the plan was submitted to a group that included him and two of Mr. Ricketts’s sons at a meeting in Chicago last week. “I was surprised and troubled by what I saw,” he said. “It was not what we asked for.”

Mr. Baker, asked in an interview on Wednesday evening whether Mr. Ricketts had rejected the advertising proposal, said only that no decisions had been made.

IA page in the proposal about potential staff members for the effort says, “With your preliminary approval at the New York meeting, we have discussed this plan in highly confidential terms with the following proposed team members,” who, it says, are “ready to jump into action upon plan approval.”

Associates of Mr. Ricketts acknowledged that upon seeing a commercial Mr. Davis produced in 2008 for Mr. McCain featuring Mr. Wright, which Mr. McCain rejected, Mr. Ricketts said. “If the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.” The quote was highlighted in the proposal.

Mr. Ricketts was shown the commercial at an initial meeting at Mr. Davis’s offices in California, which Mr. Ricketts requested as he sought to build a team of top Republican strategists to lead his foray into the presidential campaign. (Aides acknowledge that a second meeting followed in New York, where, they say, he gave Mr. Davis general directions to move ahead with a plan that would create maximum impact for $10 million but did not specifically approve one based on Mr. Wright.)

After retiring from Ameritrade’s board in 2011, Mr. Ricketts began putting more energy into philanthropy and politics, initially with a nonpartisan group Taxpayers Against Earmarks. After Congress banned earmarks, the group shifted into a debt-focused organization, Ending Spending. The effort Mr. Davis was working on would have been undertaken by the Ending Spending political arm, the Ending Spending Action Fund.

Though newer to presidential politics, Mr. Ricketts has long been politically active in Nebraska. He was defeated in a local race for Republican Party chairman because he was seen as too moderate. He was a prolific donor to state candidates, investing money for ads that helped influence a United States Senate race this week.

Mr. Ricketts is described by friends as difficult to characterize politically.

But it’s worth remembering that the highway system was created by mere humans, using only human intelligence. To find out if it’s optimally designed, we need to consult a higher authority. Namely, slime mold.

Let us explain.

There is a slime mold known as Physarum polycephalum that lives in forests around the world. It feeds on various kinds of microscopic particles. As it forages for food, protoplasmic tubes of slime extend out and bifurcate like tree branches; whenever it happens upon a source of nutrients, it gathers into a bloblike formation. The whole thing — blobs connected by tubes — is a single organism, and the network serves to transport nutrients throughout its “body.”

An interesting fact about this slime mold is that it is highly intelligent — or at least it behaves as if it is. In locating food in its environment, it builds networks that have been shown to be optimally efficient in transporting the nutrients over the area in question. If placed in a maze, for instance, with a source of food outside the maze, the slime mold will discover the shortest path out.

The Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Nakagaki and his colleagues have demonstrated that the slime mold’s foraging behavior can be used to perform sophisticated computations, as long as the problems are represented spatially. Problems solved by the slime mold include not only the shortest path out of a maze, but also other complex mathematical challenges (like creating a Voronoi diagram and a Delaunay triangulation).

Despite its ability to solve an array of problems, the slime mold was designed by evolution to solve just one problem: how to build an optimal transport network (for its nutrients). So we decided to investigate how the slime mold, when presented with the task of connecting the major urban areas of the United States, would design a transport system. Would its design resemble that of the United States highway system, or would the slime mold propose a superior one?

Here’s how our experiment worked. As we detail in a forthcoming article in the journal Complex Systems, we took a large dish in the shape of the United States and placed rolled oats (a food for the slime mold) in the locations of 20 major urban areas. Then we put the slime mold on the rolled oats representing the New York area. The slime mold propagated out from New York toward the other urban areas and eventually spanned them all with its network of protoplasmic tubes. We performed this experiment a number of times.

What did the resulting network look like? It looked remarkably like the United States interstate highway system.

We found that the slime mold approximated almost all interstates. Links from Dallas to Houston, from Chicago to Milwaukee and from New York to Boston were reproduced by the slime mold in almost all experiments. We also found that in three out of four experiments, the slime mold approximated the routes from the San Jose, Calif., area to Las Vegas; the chain of links connecting Denver to Albuquerque to the Phoenix area to the Los Angeles area; and the chain of links connecting Kansas City, Mo., to Oklahoma City to the Dallas area to the Houston area.

It also approximated two chains — one connecting Milwaukee to the Chicago area to Nashville to Memphis; the other connecting Boston to the New York area to Charlotte, N.C., to Atlanta to Jacksonville, Fla. — that are bridged by a link from the Chicago area to New York. (Routes that weren’t approximated were those directly connecting Denver to the San Jose area, the Houston area to Albuquerque and Jacksonville, the New York area to Nashville, and Boston to the Chicago area.)

From the slime mold’s point of view, Interstates 10 and 20 represent the core backbone of the United States transport network: when these interstates are removed, the network separates into disconnected western and eastern parts.

The United States is not alone in having an interstate highway system that gets the slime mold’s seal of approval. We have done similar experiments with various colleagues, using slime mold to approximate the highway systems of Britain, Mexico, the Netherlands, Canada and Brazil.

For all of these countries, we found that the slime mold network matched, at least partly, the network of human-made transport systems, though the closeness of fit varied from country to country. The United States highway system, for instance, is less slime-mold-like than that of Canada.

How Americans feel about that fact depends, presumably, on how they feel about the wisdom of slime.

I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’ ”

And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for $15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy of the document banishing him from the game.”

I had no idea that in 2001 an elementary school in New Jersey became America’s first public school “to sell naming rights to a corporate sponsor,” Sandel writes. “In exchange for a $100,000 donation from a local supermarket, it renamed its gym ‘ShopRite of Brooklawn Center.’ … A high school in Newburyport, Mass., offered naming rights to the principal’s office for $10,000. … By 2011, seven states had approved advertising on the sides of school buses.”

Seen in isolation, these commercial encroachments seem innocuous enough. But Sandel sees them as signs of a bad trend: “Over the last three decades,” he states, “we have drifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society. A market economy is a tool — a valuable and effective tool — for organizing productive activity. But a ‘market society’ is a place where everything is up for sale. It is a way of life where market values govern every sphere of life.”

Why worry about this trend? Because, Sandel argues, market values are crowding out civic practices. When public schools are plastered with commercial advertising, they teach students to be consumers rather than citizens. When we outsource war to private military contractors, and when we have separate, shorter lines for airport security for those who can afford them, the result is that the affluent and those of modest means live increasingly separate lives, and the class-mixing institutions and public spaces that forge a sense of common experience and shared citizenship get eroded.

This reach of markets into every aspect of life was partly a result of the end of the cold war, he argues, when America’s victory was interpreted as a victory for unfettered markets, thus propelling the notion that markets are the primary instruments for achieving the public good. It was also the result of Americans wanting more public services than they were willing to pay taxes for, thus inviting corporations to fill in the gap with school gyms brought to you by ShopRite.

Sandel is now a renowned professor at Harvard, but we first became friends when we grew up together in Minneapolis in the 1960s. Both our fathers took us to the 1965 World Series, when the Dodgers beat the Twins in seven games. In 1965, the best tickets in Metropolitan Stadium cost $3; bleachers were $1.50. Sandel’s third-deck seat to the World Series cost $8. Today, alas, not only are most stadiums named for companies, but the wealthy now sit in skyboxes — even at college games — that cost tens of thousands of dollars a season, and hoi polloi sit out in the rain.

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions.

“Democracy does not require perfect equality,” he concludes, “but it does require that citizens share in a common life. … For this is how we learn to negotiate and abide our differences, and how we come to care for the common good.”

Wait: where the heck is Zuck?

Mr. Zuckerberg, the hoodied man-child of Facebook, is stuck in the men’s room. Apparently, the suits can wait.

Up on the stage, Sheryl K. Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg’s No. 2 and the polished, corporate yin to his nerdy, coder yang, vamps a little: You know Zuck, she shrugs. And the money types laugh: yes, we know Zuck.

It’s May 7, a week before Mr. Zuckerberg’s 28th birthday. And, as Wall Street, Silicon Valley and the wider world all know, something big is coming. It is the deal that will either prove once and for all that Facebook is changing just about everything, everywhere, or that the mania over social media and this company, its apotheosis, is spiraling out of control.

Inside a ballroom at the Sheraton New York in Midtown Manhattan, Facebook’s executives, spinmeisters and bankers are choreographing its initial public stock offering. This is no mere I.P.O. It feels like a cultural event, a pinnacle in the history of tech, a moment. The deep pockets have arrived at the Sheraton for a multibillion-dollar sales pitch. If all goes well, Facebook will go public on Friday in an I.P.O. that could value it at nearly $100 billion.

One hundred billion dollars — for a company that, eight years ago, didn’t even exist.

No one has more riding on this than Mark Elliot Zuckerberg, hero-villain of “The Social Network,” destroyer of worlds, devourer of time and, for better and worse, the latest in a line of revolutionaries stretching back to Gutenberg who have upended the way we communicate and think.

The outlines of the Zuckerberg story thus far — the boyhood in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., the Harvard wars over “thefacebook,” the relentless rise in Silicon Valley — are by now well known. But Facebook’s I.P.O. will begin a new chapter — indeed, a new volume — in one of the great business narratives of our time. It will also make Mr. Zuckerberg almost impossibly rich. In an instant, his stake could be worth upward of $18.7 billion.

Mind-boggling figures aside, the question on many minds is this: Is Mr. Zuckerberg really ready for this? Is he — there’s no sugarcoating it — grown up enough to lead a public corporation that is more valuable than McDonald’s or Goldman Sachs? The answer to those questions will determine the future of Facebook, as well as the fortunes of its new, public shareholders. For the first time, Mr. Zuckerberg will be judged, in real time, by a relentless stock market. And that market, as C.E.O.’s everywhere know, is merciless.

“You’re making a bet, and the bet is always on ‘Can the founder go somewhere?’ ” Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn, an adviser to Mr. Zuckerberg and an early financial backer of Facebook, said in an earlier interview. “And Zuck’s done great.”

It’s hard to argue. The question, however, is where Mr. Zuckerberg goes from here as a chief executive. He declined to be interviewed for this article, but interviews with dozens of venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, as well as with Facebook colleagues and outsiders who have mentored him along his climb, paint a promising picture. Beneath that hoodie, these people say, is an increasingly assured leader, one tempered by failures — and there have been some big ones — as well as astonishing successes.

Friends and colleagues agree that Mr. Zuckerberg’s goal is be a C.E.O. for the long haul. Like a software engineer writing a program, he has tried to fill in the gaps in his personal code, and to ensure, as a programmer might put it, that his code doesn’t break.

Even now, with a multibillion-dollar brass ring at hand, Mr. Zuckerberg remains intensely aware of his limitations, these people say. Where he is strong — in product design and strategy — he tends to micromanage. Where he is weak — day-to-day management, operations — he hires people with a defter touch. He has enlisted top engineers and managers, including the formidable Ms. Sandberg, 42. Friends and colleagues say she has coached the often-awkward Mr. Zuckerberg on how to interact with employees and to build Facebook’s business.

But Mr. Zuckerberg has also invested in a personal brain trust beyond Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. He cultivated as advisers such tech giants as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, as well as others as varied as Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, and Donald E. Graham, the chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company.