-By Jonathan Miles
-Photographs by Mark Heithoff

The first thing you notice about Bobby Jindal—everyone says this—is how damn young he looks. Stick him next to John McCain, however, and his appearance skews toward the pubescent. It's a sun-blasted, sweat-stained late-April day in New Orleans, and Jindal—102 days into his term as the governor of Louisiana, and just 36 years into a life that's looking increasingly politically charmed—is walking beside McCain down Caffin Avenue in the city's blighted Lower Ninth Ward.

The neighborhood's few remaining residents—easily outnumbered by the hordes of National Guardsmen and political aides and the reporters sequestered in the flatbeds of two National Guard trucks—are out on their porches, with arms folded, observing this odd promenade. McCain's giant, gleaming bus ("the Straight," as his aides call it) looks like an alien spacecraft idling beside the scruffy Caffin Avenue median.

If that implies that McCain is an alien here, well, so be it. This is stop four on McCain's "forgotten places" tour, after Appalachia, Ohio's Rust Belt, and Alabama's Black Belt. These are not the typical bases that Republicans touch on the campaign diamond. It's as if McCain accidentally swapped date books with John Edwards, and it shows: The senator looks unsteady, almost sheepish, as he passes through the water-wrecked landscape, past weedy lots where shotgun houses stood before Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters crumbled them. McCain pauses in front of Fats Domino's renovated house, a one-story speck of hope amid the debris-strewn streets. The rumor on the press trucks is that Domino is home but refuses to come out. Whatever the situation, there's an awkward pause, and McCain, surrounded by his massive coterie, looks a little lost, a little overwhelmed, a little old.

Not Jindal. Jindal could get carded buying a six-pack. And Jindal, he doesn't know how to pause. Throughout the day he's been hanging behind McCain and maintaining a running—no, sprinting—dialogue with a Ninth Ward minister and other locals. When the tour ends at a Catholic church on St. Claude Avenue, Jindal continues to hang back as McCain addresses the traveling press corps and goes straight for the headline. "Never again," McCain says, then repeats the phrase for emphasis: "Never again will a disaster of this nature be handled in the terrible and disgraceful way in which it was handled."

It's strong, stinging stuff McCain's hurling at his own party leader and president, and it's amplified by the evocative setting, yet the focus moves swiftly to Jindal. It's the day's third question, shouted from the back: Will Jindal be the senator's vice-presidential pick? "Governor Jindal is one of the great governors of the United States," McCain says. "I'm honored to have his friendship, and I will rely on Governor Jindal for many, many things in the future, when I am president."

Afterward Jindal boards a helicopter to fly to Monroe, in Louisiana's northeast corner. The morning outing with McCain was a glitzy aberration; this trip, to announce $22 million in funding for a youth correctional facility, an aquifer reclamation project, and local highway improvements, is the real work governors do, the grimy nuts and bolts of the job. In a cramped room in the Swanson Center for Youth, standing before a white lattice festooned with plastic ivy and a laminated sign reading WELCOME GOVERNOR JINDAL, he outlines his spending proposals before a crowd of sheriffs' deputies, small-town mayors, and youth-facility staffers. It's meaty, complex, intensely local politics, and many of the people it will affect are gathered in the room. But when Jindal opens the floor to questions, there is just one:

Thank you, Governor, yes, can you tell us if you will be John McCain's running mate in November?

Louisiana is accustomed to exporting itself to the rest of America: its cuisine, its music, its old-timey cocktails, its Mardi Gras snapshots. But not its politicians. The last time America showed an appetite for a Louisiana politico was in 1848, when General Zachary Taylor won the White House. The legendary governor Huey Long wrote a fictionalized memoir optimistically titled My First Days in the White House but was assassinated in 1935 before it was published. For decades Louisiana has played court jester to the national political scene, sending forth a series of tragicomic flameouts: Witness current Republican U.S. senator David Vitter and his predilection for D.C. escorts, and current Democratic U.S. congressman William Jefferson, who was busted with $90,000 in cash bribes stuffed in his freezer. In the nineties, when a gubernatorial runoff pitted Ku Klux Klansman David Duke against the perennially indicted Edwin Edwards, the ubiquitous bumper stickers read VOTE FOR THE CROOK. And they meant it. "We like our politicians like many of our cultural dishes," says Donna Brazile, the Democratic strategist and native New Orleanian. "Spicy."

If Bobby Jindal, now 37, who pinballed from a gubernatorial-cabinet position at the age of 24 to two terms in Congress and then to the governorship, can't be called your typical Louisiana politician, it's because he's not your typical Louisianan. He doesn't care much, for instance, about food. His musical tastes run toward middle-of-the-road FM rock—Clapton, the Beatles—though, really, whatever's on the radio will do. He doesn't drink alcohol—an anomaly in a state where, as the old joke goes, cirrhosis of the liver gets listed on death certificates as "natural causes"—or even coffee, Louisiana's second official liquid. In a state so devoted to hunting and fishing that its license plates read SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE, Jindal's chosen sport is tennis. But something else sets Jindal apart in this deep-fried southern state: His first name is Piyush, not Robert, and he's the son of Indian immigrants who arrived in the United States just six months before his birth.

"Being the son of an immigrant is almost like being a convert to Americanism," says Jindal, sitting behind his desk in his handsome, high-ceilinged fourth-floor office in the state capitol building in Baton Rouge. Jindal is slight and fine-featured, with an aquiline nose and a heavy, beetling brow, and he speaks with a pure southern accent, humid and twangy. He's talking about a subject he broaches so infrequently that some critics say he evades it: his cultural roots. "As a kid, I would roll my eyes at my dad when he'd say 'Be grateful you are an American,'" he says. "I'd think, 'What else would I be?' But I think I'm close enough to my father's experience now that, no matter what happens in life, I think, 'Boy, I'm lucky I'm here.'"

Amar and Raj Jindal, the governor's parents, emigrated from the Punjab, in northern India, to Baton Rouge so that Raj could pursue graduate studies in nuclear physics at Louisiana State University. Amar was an engineer. Piyush was born June 10, 1971, and remained Piyush until he was 4 years old. That's when he renamed himself Bobby, after his favorite character on The Brady Bunch. It was his first step toward ingratiating himself into the local culture—a fitful process that would involve his rejecting his parents' religion and politics.

But not their work ethic. Amar was a strict taskmaster, and Bobby was expected to excel. "When my father would say 'You have great potential,' it wasn't a compliment," Jindal says. It meant there was room for more effort. Effort, however, is something Jindal has never failed to give. He entered high school at the age of 13, and in his spare time he launched a local computer newsletter, a retail candy business, and a mail-order software company. "He was very precocious, as you can imagine," says Mary Lee Guillot, his principal at Baton Rouge Magnet High School. "What you see now is what you saw then—focused, feet on the ground, always knew where he was going."

Image courtesy of the Associated Press

When Bobby Jindal was 12, a Southern Baptist friend named Kent gave him a paperback Bible for Christmas. Jindal was disappointed, not least because the Bible was engraved with his name and thus unreturnable. "I was raised in a strong Hindu culture, attended weekly pujas, or ceremonial rites, and read the Vedic scriptures," Jindal wrote in a 1993 article in America, a Jesuit magazine, one of many religious essays he published in the early nineties. "I considered myself anti-Christian," he wrote in another piece; elsewhere, he confided that he thought Christians worshipped fish ("in the same way that many Westerners think Hindus worship cows"). The Bible went into a closet, and might have remained there had Jindal not sneaked away with a girl from a high-school dance at a Baton Rouge hotel.

Jindal and the girl, Kathy, slipped off to the rooftop and talked about their futures. She aimed to be a Supreme Court justice, she told him, so that she could stop people from "killing babies." Her passion astonished Jindal. "While she could not reply to any one of my arguments for abortion," he later wrote, "I could not help but be amazed by her genuine compassion and innocence. . . . Kathy's sincere convictions showed me an aspect of Christianity I had never encountered before."

Thus began Jindal's conversion to Catholicism, an epic process into which he funneled all his trademark energies, intellectual and otherwise. "I even learned bits of Latin, Greek and Hebrew," he later wrote. In the same closet to which he had once consigned Kent's Bible, Jindal now studied its verses by flashlight, away from his parents' eyes. "I was probably the first teenager who ever told his parents he was going to a party so that he could sneak off to church," he wrote. "My parents were infuriated by my conversion. [They] blamed themselves for being bad parents, blamed me for being a bad son and blamed evangelists for spreading dissension."

This family turmoil—dramatic enough for Jindal to liken himself to "the earliest Christians hiding from government persecution"—is glossed over in accounts of the governor's conversion. (His parents have never spoken publicly about it.) Jindal doesn't deny the tumult but says his parents have come around to his Catholicism. "I think it's something they now respect, they support, and they encourage," he says. "They were at the baptisms of my children, and they were at my wedding." (His wife, Supriya, who was also raised as a Hindu, converted after their 1997 marriage. "For me, it was a spiritual journey," she says. "I think it was very much an intellectual journey for him.")

"You have to put yourself in their position," Jindal says of his parents. "I think their initial skepticism was rooted in the belief that maybe this was teenage rebellion. Was this just an act of a child rejecting something because his parents identified with it—or was it deeper?"

Indian-American critics of the governor, like Ramesh Rao, a communications professor at Longwood University in Virginia who used to serve on the executive council of the Hindu American Foundation, see nascent political motives in Jindal's conversion. "Was the 16-year-old Bobby Jindal already so determined that he wanted to appeal to his classmates?" Rao asks. "No one really knows much about that transformation. He'd make for a fascinating psychological treatise."

But Jindal's own writings on the subject—extensive, and largely overlooked—suggest that there's a fierce depth to his adopted religious beliefs. Jindal entered Brown University at the age of 17, as a biology and public-policy major intent on a career in medicine, and it was there in Providence, Rhode Island, that he was baptized. While at Brown, a friend of Jindal's—whom he called Susan in his 1994 account—confided to him that a lump on her scalp had been found to be cancerous and that she was seeing visions and was plagued by the sulfurous odors traditionally associated with demons. Later, during a University Christian Fellowship prayer meeting on campus, Susan fell to the floor and "started thrashing about," Jindal wrote, "as if in some kind of seizure." She was screaming his name, but Jindal stayed back while the other UCF members pinned her down and chanted "Satan, I command you to leave this woman." One brandished a crucifix. "It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force," he wrote. After a protracted struggle, Susan's fits subsided. This amateur exorcism, Jindal wrote, seemed to work wonders. When surgeons removed the lump, they "found no traces of cancerous cells." Susan "claimed she had felt healed after the group prayer," he wrote. "The physician's improbable explanation that the biopsy may have removed all the cancerous tissue is no less far-fetched." Though the cancer was gone, Jindal's concerns over Susan's possession weren't: "With holy water and blessed crucifixes, I have even given her physical protection from the demons that have only once reappeared, and then for a mere moment."

Image courtesy of the Associated Press

If Jindal severed ties with the religion of his parents, he also broke, less rancorously, with their politics. "They were Democrats," he says, noting that they later gravitated toward the GOP. "I don't think they thought long or hard about it." Like many other young conservatives, Jindal credits his rightward tilt to seeing Ronald Reagan on TV. "People's tastes in music, food, and clothing get fixed at some age," he says. "I came of age during the 1980s, and the political figure that dominated the eighties was Ronald Reagan. He was very popular, so it was easy to identify with a lot of the things he stood for."

As an undergrad at Brown, Jindal interned for Jim McCrery, a Republican congressman from Shreveport. One week into the job, Jindal requested something substantive to work on. Annoyed, McCrery asked him to formulate a solution to a problem considered intractable by Beltway insiders: Medicare. "He just grinned," McCrery recalls. "I expected never to see him again." Two weeks later, Jindal plopped a thick manuscript on McCrery's desk: Medicare, solved (at least to Jindal's thinking). Jindal's policy analysis, McCrery says, "was excellent." Especially for a 20-year-old.

By 1994, Jindal had been to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and had taken a lucrative job as a consultant in Washington, D.C. But he was already restless. He called McCrery to recommend himself for Louisiana's secretary of health and hospitals, a cabinet-level position involving oversight of 40 percent of the state budget. "Remember," McCrery says, "Bobby was like 23 years old. So I asked if he'd consider a deputy position." Jindal said no. A year later, McCrery got Jindal an audience with Republican governor Mike Foster. "When they told me he was 24, I wasn't very interested," Foster says. But in person Jindal won him over, and Foster hired him on the spot. "Most people who border on genius," Foster says, "they're not too personable. But he's personable."

That combustible mixture—high-caliber smarts and higher-caliber ambition—combined with a smooth, polished demeanor, has fueled Jindal's rocket-ship rise through Louisiana politics. Jindal calls himself a "policy wonk at heart"; ask him about an issue and you'll hear all 31 points of a 31-point plan. "I want to be the most boring but most effective governor," he says. "My wife says I have the boring part down." But it's a decidedly (Bill) Clintonesque brand of wonkiness: suffused with the gleam of personality and devoid of lecture-hall drone.

The only hiccup in Jindal's career came in 2003, when, after parlaying a $400 million deficit at Health and Hospitals into a $220 million surplus, he launched his first campaign for governor. "We had no polls, no fund-raising, no experience," Jindal says. Those weren't his only disadvantages: "He was Ivy League–educated, and he'd spent almost his entire career in government," says Jeffrey Sadow, a political science professor at LSU-Shreveport. "And he looked different from just about everyone in the state." Jindal's campaign tried to mitigate that last point by printing BUBBAS FOR BOBBY bumper stickers, but the redneck vote went elsewhere and Jindal lost, albeit narrowly. Only a few weeks later, he relocated his family to the New Orleans suburb of Kenner and announced he was running for the open congressional seat there. He won 78 percent of the vote.

"That includes David Duke's old district," Foster notes, dismissing suggestions that Jindal's ethnicity is a factor. Jindal rarely plays up his heritage, despite the fact that 40 percent of his campaign contributions for the 2003 election came from Indian-Americans in Louisiana and elsewhere. "He's kept his distance from the Indian-American community," Rao says. "Not one mention of maybe the music his parents listened to, or the food that he ate growing up—nothing."

As a political tactic, this has its benefits. "My grandparents, they're real old-school, and they didn't vote for Jindal the first time around, because of his ethnicity," a self-proclaimed racist ("I can't help it, man, that's the way I am") told me in the bar of McCain's Baton Rouge hotel. But it's apparent that many "old-school" white voters have set aside their qualms about sending a brown-skinned man to the governor's mansion—both the self-described racist and his grandparents cast their ballots for Jindal in 2007. "I'll tell you," he said, explaining his vote, "Jindal's just not your typical African-American."

What he is, for the moment, is a juggernaut. Recent statewide polls show him with a whopping 77 percent approval rating. His focus has been on streamlining the state government's dysfunctional machinery and passing ethics reforms. It's not sexy stump-speech material, but even a Democratic firebrand like Brazile admits that Louisiana is benefiting from Jindal: "Bobby might prove that boring or bland is better," she says. It's difficult, in fact, to find anyone who will talk trash about the governor. Calls to Democratic lawmakers and New Orleans' normally voluble mayor, Roy Nagin, went unreturned. The Louisiana Democratic Party responded to the request to discuss the governor with a curious preemptive "no comment." As Sadow says, "If he's got an Achilles heel he hasn't revealed it yet."

"If there is a criticism of Bobby," says Mike Foster, "it's that he hasn't stayed in a job long enough." Which brings us back to John McCain, and Jindal's inclusion on the senator's short list of potential running mates. Pundits suggest Jindal would be the ideal choice to neutralize Obama, both because of his youth and because of the fact that he, too, offers voters the chance to pull the lever for a barrier-breaking candidate. Jindal would also prop up McCain's conservative bona fides: He's opposed to abortion even in cases involving incest or rape, supports teaching intelligent design, voted in Congress for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a heterosexual institution, voted to seal the U.S.-Mexico border with a fence, and has been a staunch supporter of the war in Iraq. It's easy to foresee his becoming, to crib from Robert Penn Warren, "a boy wonder breathing brimstone" on the national stage. So easy, in fact, that it seems more a matter of when than if. "[He's] the model for Republican victory," Rush Limbaugh has said, calling Jindal "the next Ronald Reagan."

Predictably, Jindal is brushing off the VP talk ("I'm sincere," he says, "I've got the job that I want"), but his actions—flying to Los Angeles to appear on The Tonight Show, weekending with McCain and the other VP short-listees at McCain's Arizona ranch—show he's interested. Some say this is where his ambition may get the better of him. "If he wanted to destroy himself politically," Mike Foster says, "he would take that job. The people of Louisiana would be extremely disappointed." Sadow concurs, saying it would be "inconceivable" that Jindal would accept an invitation to run with McCain. "There hasn't been a losing VP candidate who's come back to win the presidency since 1920," he says.

If washing out is on Jindal's mind, he's not revealing it. "My biggest fear is we'll run out of time before we get everything done," he says, as we fly back to Baton Rouge from Monroe in the governor's helicopter. "These are generational decisions we're making. This state has the opportunity to make massive changes." He speaks of capital-C change with such optimistic fervor that I warn him he sounds like Barack Obama. With Louisiana below us, a vernal sheet of green threaded with muddy rivers, Jindal grins at the comparison. "Look," he replies, "I disagree with many of his positions, but I still get goose bumps listening to him speak. He's bringing a very positive message to the race."

If Jindal, whether of his accord or McCain's, doesn't end up on the Republican ticket, maybe this is the matchup to imagine: Bobby Jindal, the brown-skinned son of immigrants, running against Barack Obama, another brown-skinned son of an immigrant, in 2012. Jindal launches into the story of meeting Obama at the State of the Union speech in 2005. The senator introduced himself to Jindal, then a congressman. "I know who you are," Jindal replied. Immediately, Obama offered some flattering words and Jindal responded teasingly, "Yeah, but you won't say that to the TV cameras." "Yes I would," the senator said, calling his bluff. "Why don't you do a campaign commercial for me?" said Jindal, playing along. "He said 'I'll do it.' You just can't fake that kind of earnestness," says Bobby Jindal, sounding awfully earnest himself.

Share your thoughts on the Republicans' secret weapon. Sound off in our comment section below.

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REPUBLICAN

Ann Coulter

If there were a fire and you had to choose between your collection of rare Juggs magazines and your collection of rare Winchester rifles, you're pretty sure you'd just burn to death.

DEMOCRAT

Stephen Colbert

After the last three-hour argument over the difference between kitsch and camp, you and your roommate decided to hug it out over some Captain Beefheart records.

REPUBLICAN

Bill O'Reilly

You've always had a fire in your belly. In fact, you were the only kindergartner with a bleeding ulcer.

DEMOCRAT

Arianna Huffington

Of course you're a real liberal! The outdoor lighting at your Nantucket estate runs on solar—and you buy Fig Newmans.

INDEPENDENT

Chris Matthews

Getting caught cheating on your LSATs hasn't stopped you from believing the world owes you a living.

REPUBLICAN

Sean Hannity

"Hey, honey, after you fold my shirts could you bring me a beer and blow me before the Steelers game starts?"

DEMOCRAT

Alan Colmes

"Hey, honey, after I wash your car can I go to Jamba Juice with Glen if I'm back in time for Desperate Housewives?"

INDEPENDENT

Wolf Blitzer

You once called out someone else's name while making love to your wife. Even worse, that name was "John Adams."

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There was a time not so long ago that when you asked a colleague how he was doing he'd likely reply, "I'm good, thanks." He might not actually have been good at all, but he would have kept that to himself.

Now, in the age of the mortgage meltdown and mass layoffs, he'll probably offer the answer that's become the default comeback for white-collar guys who want to demonstrate they've got it all—the career on an upward curve, the remodeled townhouse, the hot wife, and the privately educated kids. He'll say, "I'm so tired."

"It's the first thing that comes out of someone's mouth when you ask them how they're doing," says Matthew Moss, 34, a creative director at a marketing agency in Portland, Oregon. "'Oh, I'm exhausted.' The first thing you think is 'Oh, this guy is tired, which means he's probably been working really hard.' Or 'They're full of shit.'"

Mostly, it's the second one. When you walk into a colleague's office and he's sitting there rubbing his eyes and stifling yawns, dropping a Venti latte cup into a wastebasket and hollering at his assistant to bring him another Red Bull, do you think, Wow, what an overachiever!? No. Because he's the guy who puts on the same show at meetings, trying to bleed extra credit from an average performance—Can you believe I pulled this off despite my obvious exhaustion?

"I think people use tiredness as a defense mechanism," says Paul (who asked that his last name not be used), 30, a vice president at an investment bank in Manhattan. "If you're staying till three in the morning you must be doing something very important, right?"

It doesn't actually matter what you're doing. No one believes you—much less cares. The three-day stubble, the slack jaw, the really . . . long . . . pauses . . . between words—to observers it's all white-noise whining. Mr. I'm So Tired thinks his cartoonish fatigue is demonstrating his dauntingly high station in life. It isn't.

"People use tiredness as a proxy for effort," says Steve Gravenkemper, an organizational psychologist at Plante & Moran, a consulting and accounting firm based in Detroit. "They say, 'Gee, I tried real hard even though I didn't get the result, and you can see that by my exhaustion.'"

Andy (not his real name), a 27-year-old analyst at a hedge fund in Manhattan, says the long hours that he and his colleagues work mean that there's low tolerance for status tiredness, because everyone is fatigued.

"It's like, 'Yeah, I popped two Lunes last night at 4 a.m.—and I was in at the office at six,'" he says. "It's really absurd."

Maybe it's that other symbols of social standing—the summer house, the SUV—are now so commonplace that they've lost their value. Or it could just be that to use tiredness as an emblem of status is to enter the realm of the intangible. No one knows what you did after you left the office, or whether you actually feel the way you're behaving. And the significance of the fatigued act is lost on them anyway. They're too tired to care.

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Our exclusive video of Bale's cover shoot with photographer Steven Klein

At the end of a warm spring day, as rays of amber sunlight flash off the ocean and the first early-evening drinkers begin to gather, Christian Bale arrives at a bar in Santa Monica. He's wearing a baggy blue shirt, untucked, khaki pants, and New Balance sneakers. A black baseball cap is pulled low over his eyes, and the beginnings of a beard bristle along his jaw. He attracts little attention.

Apparently, despite having recently starred in a series of successful movies—including 3:10 to Yuma, The Prestige, and the lucratively resurrected Batman franchise (the second installment, The Dark Knight, comes out in July)—Bale stills finds it easy to go unrecognized. The Welsh-born actor, 34, has had only a few days' formal training as an actor, in YMCA workshops as a child. But in the decades since he made his film debut in 1987, when, at 13, he starred in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun, he's developed an uncanny ability to disappear into roles.

Some of his transformations have been infamously extreme—losing 60 pounds to play the guilt-racked skeletal protagonist in 2004's The Machinist, for example; others have been less demanding, like adopting an aggressive way of walking to play a Gulf War veteran in Harsh Times. His intensive approach hasn't changed, despite the birth of his daughter (Bale and his wife, the former producer Sibi Blazic, were married in 2000), whom, at six months, he took deep into the Thai jungle while he worked on Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn. And his presence at the center of a vastly profitable series of superhero pictures isn't indicative of a shift in attitude either. "I've never believed in being an 'indie' actor versus a 'studio movie' actor—I've always liked the idea of doing all of it," he says. As the sun sets, he sips from a bottle of Japanese beer. "I've always had," he admits, "a slight sense of wanting to swim upstream."

What did you think when you first saw yourself in the Batsuit?
I was standing on the back lot where they were creating the suit, and I had a few minutes to myself, staring up close in the mirror, just thinking, "This isn't going to work. I'm claustrophobic, I can't breathe, I'm getting a headache already, and this is all going to go very badly."

What persuaded you otherwise?
I just said to myself, "Breathe deeply for a few minutes. Try this out. Don't run around yelling and making an ass of yourself trying to pull the whole thing off." I wasn't going to get it off by myself. It takes three people. I just had flashes of what an asshole I would feel like saying "Well, I wasn't able to play that character, because I panicked every time I got in the suit."

Bale in the theatrical trailer for The Dark Knight, out July 18, 2008

You've played a wide variety of characters, but very few of them have been happy-go-lucky. Are you attracted to darkness?
Certainly I have no attraction to misery. I don't intentionally go for dark. The only thing I would unequivocally say is that I have never had any interest in romantic comedy—I just couldn't do it. I think I'd be terrible. And I think it's an oxymoron, anyway. I've never found any of them funny.

Michael Caine has talked about the intensity of Heath Ledger's portrayal of the Joker in The Dark Knight. How did you find working with him?
He was incredibly intense in his performance but incredibly mellow and laid-back. Certainly there was this great anarchistic streak to it—just getting dirtier than anybody's envisioned the Joker before. This character has power because he has no limits—absolutely nothing to lose.

The late Heath Ledger on his role as the Joker

How has Ledger's death changed the way you look at the film?
Naturally it was something I wanted to share with him—and expected to do so. And I can't do anything else but hope that it will be an absolutely appropriate celebration of his work.

I've gotten the impression that some of the things you've said about yourself in the past—that one of your grandfathers was a bomber pilot and the other one was a children's magician . . .
. . . I make up. Absolutely. I'm an actor—I'm not a politician. I always kick myself when I talk too much about family, or personal things. I'll enjoy chatting now, and then later I'll regret it.

In the past you've said you sometimes start telling people stories about things you did as a kid and then realize that you never actually did those things.
To be honest, it happens a lot. There are so many things which, even knowing that it was in a movie, I still feel like I've been through. And then I have to really rack my brain to work out "Have I actually been through that in my life?" There are occasions when I've pretended to be in a firefight, and then there are people who have really been in a firefight. Clearly it's absolutely ridiculous, and even disrespectful, to suggest that I understand what that is. And it deserves a very hard smack across the face for any actor to ever suggest that they understand. But the power of delusion is incredibly strong.

As a kid, you moved 15 times in 15 years. Did that make you want to live an unconventional life?
That actually didn't seem so unconventional. It just seemed like that was the way it should be done. I never felt the desire to have an unconventional life—it was more just a recognition that I probably didn't want that other thing.

What other thing?
[Having] no way out. . . . I was always used to being able to pick up and leave.

You were filming Mio in the Land of Faraway in Ukraine when the explosion happened at the Chernobyl nuclear-power plant.
Yeah. We knew something had occurred, because production came to us and they said, "We're done. We have to leave." A month later we were back. We would have somebody with a Geiger counter at every dinner, scanning each plate.

When you were filming Empire of the Sun, did you have a sense that it was the beginning of your career as a movie actor?
I never for a second considered that anybody would watch the movie. I never thought about any consequences of it. I didn't care. I got to go to China, I got to go to Spain. I got to jump around and have planes fly a few feet over my head.

Bale in the trailer for Empire of the Sun

At that age, what were you doing when you weren't acting?
I was living quietly in Bournemouth [England] like any other teenager. Well, I'll rephrase that: Most of the time I was like any other teenager. And then there were times I'd be reminded that some people actually didn't agree with me on that, and felt like I was a little different and didn't really belong. Apparently you become something other than human once you've been in a movie.

Taking the role of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho was widely regarded as career suicide.
Yes. I always enjoyed the idea of self-destructing on purpose, taking something that was important to me—acting—and just becoming unhireable. To test how important it really was for me. [American Psycho] turned out to be the opposite. That brought me much more work.

The infamous business-card scene from American Psycho

What would you have done if things hadn't worked out?
I have no idea. [Laughs.]

There was no plan B?
There never has been, no.

Was there ever a time when you were in danger of not making enough money to support yourself through acting?
I don't believe that there's an actor alive who hasn't been in that position—and in that position many years after people recognize you and have a very wrong impression of what they imagine your lifestyle to be.

Do you remember the last time you were in that position?
[Long pause.] I know absolutely when it was; I'm just trying to decide how comfortable I am talking about it. Certainly . . . what year are we in? 2008? Only going back five years. Absolutely, yeah. House repossession—all that.

House repossession?
Yeah—but I don't want to talk about it anymore.

Have you ever done anything just for the money?
Movies? Um . . . well, I guess there was one particular time—and I won't tell you what it was—but it was following closely on the heels of the other thing that I didn't want to talk about very much. It ended up that I found a great many experiences from it—but the motivation was completely keeping the head above water, yes.

When you made The Machinist, did you intend to lose 60 pounds?
No, there was never that plan. It just took a lot longer to get the money together than I expected, so the [start] date kept getting pushed back. I kept losing more and more weight.

The weight in the script was 121 pounds.
I was standing on these scales and it said 121 pounds. And Brad [the director] came up and moved the little dial up to 135, because he said nobody would believe it. And I said, "Screw you, man. I am 121 pounds!" At a certain point, you do start to lose a sense of quite how skinny you've become. Because it's so slow, it ceases to be a shock anymore. It became "Well, this is me now."

Bale in the trailer for The Machinist

While you were on location for Rescue Dawn, you hung from the skids of a helicopter as it flew over the jungle. What do you think is the closest you've ever come to death while working?
There's a sense of invulnerability when you're making a movie. I've been in situations where things could have gone very wrong. I saw a number of very anxious faces on The Dark Knight when a helicopter came incredibly close to me. I was standing on the corner of the Sears Tower, on the outside, 110 stories up. I felt quite oblivious to it. I was looking at the face of the pilot and just hanging there, not fully aware that the blades were actually just feet from my head.

Which character that you've taken home with you has your wife liked least?
I'd say Jim [the war veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder in Harsh Times]. There were probably not a lot of wonderful memories about him. He's not getting invited back any time soon.

What about the one she's liked the most?
That's quite surprising—any time Trevor from The Machinist wants to come around the house, he's always welcome.

Has starring in a blockbuster had any noticeable impact on your personal life?
I was at the Science Museum in London with my daughter and some of her friends, and they wanted hot dogs. And so I went up to a hot-dog stand and I said, "Can I have three hot dogs?" They said, "I'm sorry, we're closed." And so I started walking away. And then one of them said, "Excuse me, are you Batman?" And I said, "Well, I play Batman." And they said, "Well, here's three hot dogs—on the house." That's pretty remarkable, isn't it?

When was the last time you were mistaken for someone else?
Yesterday afternoon I was sitting somewhere and somebody started chatting. They said they were an agent, and they asked what I do, and I said, "I'm an actor." And they said, "Oh, how's that going for you?" I said, "I think it's all right." And they said, do I have an agent?
"Yes, I have an agent."
"Well, if you ever need any help getting work, give me a call."
So I said, "Thanks very much." I think the best one ever was when a casting director saw me in a hotel lobby and practically ran at me, holding a script: "Thank god I've finally found you! We have this movie that you're perfect for, and this is an amazing coincidence. The director and producer are not going to believe it, that I just bumped into you! We've been talking about how perfect you are for this role for so long! Finally, I met Christian Slater."
"Christian Bale."
"Excuse me?"
"I said, 'Christian Bale.'"
And she went, "Oh, I'm sorry," took the script, and walked away.

How good do you think you are at being famous?
I don't really understand the question. Because there are people that you would undeniably call famous, and I’m not. You can go to many, many people and say "Christian Bale" and they have no idea who the hell you're talking about. They might have seen a number of my movies, but they'll still have no idea who you're talking about. So I don't think I'm qualified to talk about fame.

However you're dealing with it, you're doing it very well—but I can't really work out how you've managed that.
I can't either. I figure that if it's going well, and I haven't figured it out, well—maybe I shouldn't.

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-By Ian Daly
-Photograph by Pascal Aulagner

The skirmish erupted last March.

It all started when Jeb added two of his old buddies, who knew each other, to his Facebook profile. One of them added Jeb as a friend but didn't add the other person—even though both were on Jeb's friend list. What ensued was a bizarre, jealousy-fueled fracas. Angry posts were left. Hate e-mails were sent. But this drama didn't unfold in a high school. Jeb is a 35-year-old marketing director in New York City. And his friends?

"They're 35 and 36," Jeb says. "They both had great jobs, both had two children—but then all of that was completely forgotten and they were back to sophomore year. It was total regression."

Sadly, stories like Jeb's are becoming all too familiar. In a few short years, Facebook has leaked out of the college dormitory like some rare tropical disease and has begun infecting grown men in disturbingly vast numbers. The fastest-growing demographic among Facebook's 64 million users is those over 25. More than half of MySpace's 110 million users are older than 35. The hosts, once infected, exhibit a tendency to "superpoke" each other, hyperventilate over friend counts, and share their thoughts about the latest episode of The Hills with hundreds of near strangers—behavior normally associated with teenage girls, not men in the middle of their fourth decade. Somewhere tonight, a man with a successful white-collar career and a family who needs his attention will log on to his MacBook to see who "trout-slapped" him and left him a "zombie hug"—hypnotized by the soft glow of the LCD screen into thinking his online popularity has some kind of bearing on his life.

"I'd say 90 percent of my friends have that silly page, putting 'funny' pictures of themselves half-naked and drunk on them," says Michael Lupo, 26, a marketing director in Manhattan who says he's never given in to their pleas to join them. "There are so many bad attempts at being quasi-famous. These people who have like 10,000 friends? I'm like, 'But they're not your friends—you do realize that. You don't hang out, and you don't know anything about them besides what's on their Facebook page.'"

Sure, it's difficult to resist the allure of a site that everyone with Internet access seems to have embraced with open arms. But that appeal might be worth scrutinizing if the same site causes otherwise judicious adult-male converts to behave like 13-year-old girls.

"There's a sense that you're actually accomplishing something when you're on these sites," says Dr. Jerald Block, an Oregon psychologist who studies Internet addiction. But the truth is, other than the adolescent joys of Scrabulous and Alias trivia, there aren't too many benefits to this site that can't be realized via e-mail and telephone. Take a good, long look at your friend list and ask yourself how many of these people would meet you for a beer—or how many you would actually want to meet for a beer. And did you really want to reconnect with that awkward kid from boarding school who drew battle-axes on his Trapper Keeper?

Of course not, but once you decide to join Facebook don't be surprised if you're no longer in control of your self-image. For Michael, a 24-year-old private-equity associate in Chicago who decided to delete his profile, the promise of social status just wasn't enough for him to make that kind of sacrifice.

"You really don't get to control your own identity on the site," he says. "Other people can put pictures of you up there, tag them, write on your 'wall'—and all of a sudden you've got the one 'hilarious' buddy from high school to deal with, who you love but who maybe doesn't realize that you've got colleagues looking at your profile."

Forty percent of employers say they'd consider Facebook profiles when screening potential employees, according to a 2006 survey conducted by the University of Dayton (some companies have even rescinded job offers after seeing profiles). And we've all heard the stories about high-profile firings that stemmed from bad photo decisions on MySpace—that weatherman in Roanoke, Virginia, who got canned for posting nude shots of himself stepping out of the shower, or Carmen Kontur-Gronquist, former mayor of Arlington, Oregon, who lost her job after posing in her underwear for her profile (her defense—"That's my space; that's why they call it MySpace"—sadly, did not fly). But to object to social-networking wonderlands on these grounds is almost too obvious, the kind of censoriousness that serves only to produce more converts. This is about more than lost productivity and cautionary career tales. What's at stake here is nothing less than the mass infantilization of our culture.

"All my friends said, 'You need to get on there!'" says Lupo. "They're like, 'You can find out what's going on with us any time you want!' I said, 'Well, then I could call you or we can meet up for dinner—you don't need to send me little messages online and poke me.' It's too time-consuming. It's like a 24-hour obsession that you have to update and take care of. Why don't I just get a puppy and take it to work with me all day?"

The conviction that you're somehow missing out if you don't buy in—that you'll be left to wander alone in some kind of pre-technological hinterland—is as misguided as the notion that your ego is tied to the testimonials left on your comment wall. There are far more dignified avenues to regression, and most of these involve actual friends. These sites are the digital equivalents of the high-school cafeteria—except without Rib-b-que Tuesdays. Why the hell would you want to go back?

And while Jeb admits that the little Facebook catfight that consumed two of his friends didn't cause him to delete his profile, he does approach it with a measure of disgust that might be healthy for all of us.

"It's a little ridiculous, isn't it?" he says. "I'm just sort of waiting for everyone to be over it."

Rest assured: If you resist, you will be vindicated. Like the popular kids, Facebook will end up living in a trailer —just down the gravel road from Friendster.

-By Katherine Wheelock
-Photograph courtesy of Landov.

It's not like it wasn't time for an adjustment. As recently as a couple of years ago, the standard American tie was essentially the wide, straight-cut variety that your algebra teacher wore. That model's slim-down began on the runways, driven by nostalgia for a time when men dressed better (for those not steeped in fashion-industry rhetoric, that time was the fifties). From there, it clambered to greater visibility on the necks of spindly rockers: Pete Doherty. Fabrizio Moretti. Ryan Adams. Then, like any epidemic, it spread—to Jude Law. Orlando Bloom. Zac Efron. Even Daniel Craig wasn't immune. At a recent movie premiere, Josh Hartnett had on a tie so borderline-bolo it looked like he was wearing an avant-garde collared shirt with a stripe down the front. The celebrities were followed by packs of knee-jerk adopters—mostly media types. And that's when things went very wrong.

"People like Thom Browne helped our eyes adjust to the smaller lapel, the tighter suit, and the skinny tie," says Tommy Fazio, men's fashion director at Bergdorf Goodman. "But I see some guys on the street now and it's like, 'He's wearing a shoestring!'"

"At some point, you have to figure out what works for you," says Band of Outsiders founder Scott Sternberg. "You have to say, 'This makes me look like a human pear' or 'This thing on my neck makes it look like my head's about to explode.' When my dad's friends request ties, they're getting three-inch tips.

I don't want them rocking skinny ties in Dayton, Ohio."

To be fair, it's not just middle-aged Midwesterners who can't pull off the anorexic tie. Contrary to what its ubiquity suggests, it doesn't look that good on most men.

"The guys wearing it in the beginning were the canaries in the coal mine," designer Michael Bastian says. "But then it just became 'The skinny tie equals cool.' If you've got the whole Joey Ramone thing going on, that's one thing, but if you have on a going-to-work suit, it doesn't work. You have to follow through on your swing."

Besides, anything taken to extremes eventually becomes unseemly. The chunky tie of a decade ago needed a sensible Weight Watchers plan, not an ephedrine-laced diet drug.

"It's really about proportion," Bastian notes. "The guys with the enormous lapels and the super-skinny ties—they didn't get the memo." And those are the guys you can blame when, inevitably, the fashion Tilt-A-Whirl tips and ties get fat again—faster than a no-carb fanatic on an Entenmann's binge—and the only ties you can find are nipple-spanning numbers in oversize plaid.

-By David Amsden
-Photograph by Norman Watson

In most respects, John Cusimano's life is perfectly normal. He is a dude from Long Island, 40 years old, with a law degree. He has shaggy, semi-feathered brown hair and a permanently benign expression—"he's the opposite of someone who stands out in a crowd. He spent his high-school days collecting classic-rock records, fiddling with guitars, dreaming of rock stardom, and playing in a little garage band. "We called ourselves the Cringe," he says, "because the music kind of made you cringe." They were terrible, yes, but after Cusimano got older and moved to Manhattan, and even later as he started working at various law firms and got engaged, he never stopped believing that maybe, just maybe, the day would come when he could take the Cringe to the next level. There's nothing odd about this. There are plenty of grown men in the world who cling to adolescent dreams, no matter how ridiculous or unattainable they may be.

All of that brings us here, to a nightclub in lower Manhattan called the Annex, where the peculiarities of Cusimano's life begin to reveal themselves. "Hey, everyone, we're the Cringe!" he announces, standing in the middle of a small stage, staring out at a crowd that seems to consist entirely of (a) friends and family of John Cusimano and (b) friends and family of the group that played 10 minutes ago. The Cringe could be any struggling band in any dingy bar in New York, except for the fact that standing a few feet from the stage is the band's most die-hard supporter, Cusimano's wife, who happens to be one of the most famous women in America. That would be Rachael Ray, the peppy, raspy-voiced, 39-year-old Food Network star, a fiery comet of middlebrow ambition who spun a simple idea—30-minute meals! —into a lifestyle empire. She has a magazine (Every Day With Rachael Ray), numerous best-selling cookbooks (Rachael Ray 365: No Repeats—A Year of Deliciously Different Meals, for one), a line of cookware, lucrative endorsement deals (with Dunkin' Donuts and, at one time, Burger King and RJR Nabisco), a syndicated talk show (Rachael Ray), and two vehicles on the Food Network (30 Minute Meals and $40 a Day). Being married to such a woman—and having a day job as unofficial manager of her enterprises—has obvious benefits. What other guy could hire Saturday Night Live's drummer and a former guitarist for the French electro-pop group Air to play in a bar band that makes no money?

But such perks come with a price. Since the fall of 2006, the Ray-Cusimano union has had a number of cameos in the tabloids, beginning with reports of Cusimano's unorthodox infidelities—a woman named Jeannine Waltz claimed he paid her to spit on him and rub her feet in his face—which were followed by anonymous murmurings of marital strife and, finally, talk of an ugly divorce involving an obscene payout for Cusimano (National Enquirer: rachael ray $500 million divorce). The couple have repeatedly denied the rumors— "John and I are happily, grotesquely, blissfully married!" Ray declared on her talk show last November—but the peculiar nature of the allegations left a residue. Cusimano found himself cast as an alpha woman's beta boy, a shady kept man, a submissive gold digger. "My initial reaction was shock," he says. "But I guess it's an occupational hazard, you know? The more I get used to my position, I just kind of roll my eyes and say, ‘Whatever.' If this is the worst thing I need to contend with, I'll be okay." A short pause. "We'll be okay."

Regardless of whether there was truth behind any of the talk, the gossip was seen by many as irresistible proof that beneath Ray's perky exterior there pulses a twisted heart of darkness. But if tonight's show at the Annex is any indicator, the rumors of trouble in paradise are groundless—Cusimano wields his own unique power over his wife. As he performs what he describes as "rock and roll with a punk edge"—strutting around onstage and executing an endearingly earnest dive into the drum set—Ray appears enchanted. She shakes her hips, yelps, buys drinks for friends, blows her husband kisses (she has her cell phone set to play "My Hero" by the Foo Fighters whenever Cusimano calls). At one point Cusimano prefaces a song with a little story of connubial bliss: "So the other day I was sitting on the couch watching TV with my wife—I think you all know who she is (hi, honey!)—and anyway, we were sitting there and this song came on and she said, ‘God, that's beautiful, who is that?' and I was like, ‘It's Elton John,' and anyway" —he looks adoringly at his wife—"this song is for you, honey." After a rendition of "High Flying Bird" that brings to mind a hardworking wedding band, Ray runs toward the stage and wraps her arms around him.

"I love you, honey!" she says, and plants a kiss on his lips.

Cusimano and Ray live in a downtown Manhattan apartment that is notably modest for a woman Forbes estimates earns $6 million a year. "Rachael would kill me if she knew I was showing you the place this messy," Cusimano says one afternoon while giving a tour of the four very narrow floors; the place has the feel of multiple studio apartments stacked on top of each other. He shows off what he calls "our Vegas room" (a nook with a card table and poker chips), the roof deck ("great for martinis in the summer"), and one of the bathrooms, which is Asian-themed, with glass tiles ("Rachael let me pick the design"). Finally, there is the kitchen—a startlingly minuscule one. "People are always shocked that our kitchen is so small," Cusimano says, tapping a mini-fridge that looks like it belongs in a dorm room. "They think, Rachael Ray is a big-time chef! How can she work like this? But you know what? This is all she needs. It's amazing what she can do in here. She cooks us dinner most nights. She likes nothing better than to be in her pajamas, cooking, with a glass of wine, at home with her dog. It helps her relax."

In the sun-splashed living room, Cusimano points out a framed poster for Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her, signed by the Spanish director. "Almodóvar is her favorite director," he says, adding that his first "alone date" with Ray was going to see the movie. (The first date, he explains, was a group one that included Ray's mother and several close family friends: "It was straight out of The Godfather, basically.")

"Yeah, it's kind of funny," he says. "We met at a birthday party back in 2002. Literally the minute I met her a bachelor friend turned to me and said, ‘Dude, you're fucking done.' I remember one of our first conversations was about food. She asked—maybe she was testing me—but she asked if I liked to cook. I said, ‘Yeah, last night I got some tilapia, deglazed it with cilantro and Negra Modelo beer.' She probably thought I was gay, but that wasn't the case, obviously."

At the time, Ray was on the cusp of morph-ing into the anti–Martha Stewart conqueress she is today. "She just had a show on the Food Network, which I'd never seen," says Cusimano, who was then providing legal counsel to a struggling independent-film company and playing on and off in the Cringe. But soon her show took off, the book deals started coming (they haven't stopped), Oprah called (Ray's frequent appearances on the show led to a partnership with Winfrey and King World Productions for her own syndicated talk show), and Cusimano found himself as entwined with Rachael Ray the brand as he was with the human; they got married in Italy in September 2005. Somewhere in there, Cusimano had an epiphany: "I was like, ‘Do I want to lose money in independent film or make money in the Rachael Ray business?'"

Today, Cusimano plays a somewhat nebulous role in the Rachael Ray franchise. Unlike Martha and Oprah, Ray has yet to consolidate her businesses into one company; she is contracted talent—with CBS and the Food Network for the television shows, with Reader's Digest for the magazine, with knife and cookware manufacturers for the products. Cusimano, who works from home, doesn't collect a salary; he is co-owner of their nascent production company, Watch Entertainment, which he hopes to build into something like Oprah's Harpo Productions, though at the moment they have only one full-time employee.

One of the things he likes about the work is that it gives him ample time with his band. Since 2004, the Cringe have released two albums, neither of which sold particularly well, despite an appearance on Ray's talk show. ("Different demographics, I think," Cusimano says.) The group's latest effort, Tipping Point, has received from online music magazines reviews ranging from the vicious ("Oh, baby, this is one hot smoking turd of an album") to the slightly more kind ("Everything on this album you've heard before from someone else—and most likely you've heard it done better"). But like the gossip, this does not have any discernible effect on Cusimano's demeanor. He's an optimist. A guy having a good time. But don't get him wrong: He takes his day job seriously.

"Oh, I'm intimately involved with every aspect of the company," he says one day, standing inside a massive white-walled loft where his wife is being photographed for the packaging and ad campaign for a new Rachael Ray product. "It sounds clichéd, but every day is kind of different. I mean, maybe I'm at a photo shoot like this, making sure everything goes smoothly. Or maybe I'm looking over contracts. Or merchandising deals. I'm really the one who does all of that. I work real hard. If people want to be in the Rachael Ray business, they have to talk to me—"

"Honey!" his wife screams suddenly. "Honey, I need you!"

Today's shoot is for a product that, for the moment, remains top secret. Suffice it to say that the couple's pit bull, Isaboo, is involved. Cusimano is on hand because he has a special bond with the animal, whom he drops off every morning at Biscuits & Bath, a "doggy spa and gym."

"Can you get her to stay still?" Ray asks.

Cusimano sighs. "Excuse me for a sec," he says, heading over to his wife.

-By Simon Dumenico
-Photograph by Matthew Monteith

Valentine's Day, of all things, for Timothy Ferriss to realize he had a man crush. "I was setting up a lunch with a friend of mine," says the 30-year-old entrepreneur, who lives in San Jose, California, "and he suggested that Thursday. I agreed, but then he wrote back, 'Oh, I completely forgot it was Valentine's Day—I don't know if you have plans to keep.' So I wrote back, 'Uh, well, that's why I asked you. You're my Valentine's date!'" Ferriss was joking with his friend; both are straight. "But then," he says, "it turned into this ha-ha, like, shoulder-punching exchange, where we were very awkwardly expressing that, yeah, we're cool dudes, we like each other—let's hang out. It was like a requited man crush."

Ferriss, who's become something of a cult figure since the publication of The 4-Hour Workweek, his best-selling self-help book for terminal multitaskers, created a novelty T-shirt with the words I MAN CRUSH YOU on it after that Valentine's Day epiphany. (He sells the shirts on his website.) The point of the tee, he says, is to help guys show their friends that they "love them, but in a Platoon way, not a Brokeback way."

Homosexuality, of course, used to be known as the love that dare not speak its name—until, thanks to the gayification of pop culture, it became the love that wouldn't shut the hell up. Now the man crush (a heterosexual male's feelings of platonic love for another man) and the bromance (when those feelings are reciprocated) are coming out of the closet in a major way. This has been brewing for a while (remember those "I love you, man" Bud Light commercials?), but it reached a high point in the already-classic drunken exchange in last year's Superbad (which also coined bromance), in which Seth tells his buddy, "I just love you. I just wanna go to the rooftops and scream, 'I love my best friend, Evan!'"

The fact that some guys now not only admit to same-sex infatuations without suffering a paralyzing identity crisis but announce them amounts to a seismic cultural shift. Until recently, if a heterosexual dude wanted to reveal something about his inner self, the safe (i.e., non-gay-seeming) option was to take a stand about, say, The Killer versus Hard Boiled. Now he can hold forth about his taste in men.

Tom Brady was a significant factor in the man crush becoming part of the lingua franca of male bonding. In the run-up to the Super Bowl this year, the square-jawed, Gisele Bündchen-dating quarterback became the go-to man crush for many American men, including viral-video auteur Dave Hoke, whose comic music video "Tom Brady Mancrush" scored more than 100,000 views (on YouTube and Funny or Die) within weeks of its release in January. Hoke traces his man-crush revelation to a Pats press conference after Game 13 last year: "Tom Brady comes out with a cardigan and a tie and jacket, and it's almost like he had his five o'clock shadow trimmed to be the perfect five o'clock shadow. And he had a pocket square. Like, who does that in this era? I turned to my wife and was like, 'You know, listen, I'm not gay. But if I was, this guy would be the guy.'"

Women have long been vocal about girlfriends and celebrity females they think are gorgeous or adorable, but many guys haven't yet arrived at the same point as Ferriss and his Valentine's Day date; they need the relative remove of celebrity to declare a man crush. That's the idea behind mancrush.com, a site that lets its male users vote on the relative crushworthiness of famous dudes living and dead. Eric Vecchione, its founder, got the idea for the site in 2005, during his senior year in college, when he realized that discussing man crushes had become a way for his buddies to relate to one another: "We would be watching a game or a movie . . . and the debates would start: 'Are you man-crushing on Johnny Depp?' Or 'I can't believe you have a man crush on Derek Jeter!'"

According to Geoffrey Greif, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the author of an upcoming book about male bonding called The Buddy System, the rise of the man crush may be bringing guy culture full circle. "The word homosexual didn't even exist until the late 1880s or 1890s," he says. Greif adds that once upon a time, expressing same-sex admiration was the norm among red-blooded frontiersmen who didn't have the conceptual framework to fear that they might be labeled homos. "A lot of the founders of our nation would write letters to their male friends saying 'I can't wait to see you again. I love you; I can't wait to get together with you,'" he says. "Somewhere over the last 125 years, it became no longer okay for a man to present himself that way."

That's the beauty of a modern-day man-crush declaration: It gives a guy a sort of wry shorthand, allowing him to say something meaningful about his masculine ideals without having to actually spell them out. As Ferriss notes, "Male vocabulary is limited when it comes to expressing positive feelings about other men. We've got like three adjectives: cool, awesome, badass. I'll give you an example: There's a guy named Dave Camarillo. He's a professional Ultimate Fighting Championship grappling trainer, and he's also my jujitsu coach. The guy's a total stud. I mean, he's one of the top trainers and jujitsu and judo practitioners on the planet, so the guy's a total badass." He laughs, then adds, "So I have a serious man crush on him, yeah—in the purest heterosexual way possible."

-By Jeff Gordinier
-Photograph by Jason Fulford

Discuss the pop stars' purity in the comment section.

Image credit: Photograph by Jason Fulford

On a quiet Friday morning in a dressing room at Madison Square Garden, the Jonas Brothers hold out their hands to show off their purity rings. Kevin, Joe, and Nick Jonas—the teen-pop trio who stand, at this very moment, on the brink of hugeness—wear the metal bands on their fingers to symbolize, as Joe puts it, "promises to ourselves and to God that we'll stay pure till marriage." Joe is 18. His ring is silver and adorned with a cross. "It actually ripped apart a little bit, just on the bottom, here, but I didn't want to get a new one, because this one means so much to me," he says. Nick, who is 15, says, "I got mine made at Disney World. It's pretty awesome." Kevin, at 20, is the oldest of the three, and while a punk-rock purity ring from Tiffany might represent the ultimate oxymoron, that's exactly what he's going for. His silver vow of abstinence is covered with studs. "It's pretty rock and roll," Kevin says. "It's getting banged up a little bit because of the guitar."

Tonight is Jingle Ball, the Z100 holiday concert that has, over the years, turned into a coronation ceremony for the new superstars of teen America. The brothers grew up in New Jersey, and just a few months ago they were still the kind of guys who would tenaciously call the radio station, trying to win tickets to the Ball. Now they're headlining. By the middle of 2008, the Jonas Brothers just might be the biggest teen band in the country. What's making them massive is not just their skill with sugar-dusted, girl-crazy gobs of pop. No, the Jonas Brothers are bound for bigness because, like Britney Spears and the New Kids on the Block and David Cassidy before them, they have been handpicked to summon all the desire, frustration, and spending power of the great American teen.

Within a few hours the dressing room starts to feel like a bunker. By nightfall, the narrow passageway leading to the room is clogged with chattering, unsupervised clusters of teenage girls in braces and low-slung jeans and UGG boots. Big Rob, the brothers' 395-pound bodyguard, glowers and shoos the girls away, but within minutes they're back, craning their necks, arching their backs, oh my God—ing into their cell phones, glossing their lips, batting their eyelashes, and fidgeting with their all-access passes. Now and then the door opens for a fleeting moment—when the film heavyweight Harvey Weinstein comes by with his daughter and a phalanx of her friends, and when Timbaland, decked out in a fur coat and a crucifix, pays an imperial visit. Each time the door slides open a couple of centimeters, the girls out in the hallway totally lose it and burst into gusts of shrieking.

While Nick concedes that "screaming girls are awesome," he insists that "we always kind of stand for being a role model and trying to make a difference, and I think this"—meaning the decision to wear the purity rings—"is just one of our ways of kind of like being different than everybody else out there." Think about that: Three guys in their hormonal prime—three healthy, handsome gents whose very job is to be besieged by swooning, text-messaging maidens who are finally old enough to attend concerts on their own—have committed themselves, publicly, to a policy of monastic celibacy. At the very same time, movies like Superbad and The 40-Year-Old Virgin are imprinting on a new generation the joyously raunchy mythology of losin' it. If the Osmonds were corn, this manifesto of squeaky-cleanness runs so flagrantly counter to the rock-and-roll ethos that it makes the Jonas Brothers seem like a strain of genetically modified super-corn.

In spite of its faint spritzing of punk, la musique des Jonas is still, of course, bubblegum. For decades now, bubblegum has been the lingua franca of American puberty, and it is the Jonas Brothers' good fortune to specialize in A-grade confectionary at the very moment when global corporations have figured out how to better transform these acts into massive, multi-tentacled beasts of American business.

There has always been a machine behind bubblegum, but what's different now is Disney. The company can, at this point in pop history, catapult an act like the Jonas Brothers to the kind of multimedia ubiquity that's rarely experienced outside the cult of Kim Jong-il in North Korea. "The business side of it has definitely changed," says David Smay, coeditor of the 2001 candy-pop bible Bubblegum Music Is the Naked Truth. "When you have a radio station and a TV station that are aimed at your market, the way Disney does, you can generate a hit band every other year. You can generate the content as well as own the distribution, and you can just pound on that market all day long."

The Jonas Brothers make their CDs for Disney's Hollywood Records. Their singles enjoy perpetual rotation on Radio Disney. Turn on the Disney Channel—the TV home of Hannah Montana and High School Musical—and you'll see the trio's videos and their guest appearance with Montana's Miley Cyrus. Their sugar-rush commercials for Baby Bottle Pop can be seen on ABC Family (Disney owns ABC) and Toon Disney. Toward the end of 2007, the Jonas Brothers built an audience as the opening act on the national Hannah Montana tour; on New Year's Eve they performed with Cyrus as part of Dick Clark's annual Times Square countdown, which was broadcast on ABC.

The Jonas Brothers even have a TV movie in the can—Camp Rock, which will air on the Disney Channel in June, just before their new album comes out on July 8—and whenever the Hollywood writers' strike ends, they'll get back to work on J.O.N.A.S., a Monkees-like TV series with a bubblegum-as-espionage premise. "It's an acronym for Junior Operatives Networking As Spies," Joe says. "We are secret agents, and our cover is that we're a band."

There's some serendipitous truth to that premise. The Jonas Brothers are the sons of Kevin Jonas Sr., a former Assemblies of God pastor and contemporary-Christian musician who now serves as one of their managers; and the Jonas family's original vision was to support Nick, a tousle-haired musical prodigy and a veteran of several Broadway shows, in his quest to break through as a Christian balladeer.

In January 2005 Steve Greenberg became the president of Columbia Records. Greenberg was known for having nurtured other young acts on the highway to hugeness—most notably, in 1997, a fresh-scrubbed fraternal trio called Hanson—and the first thing he did at Columbia was slog his way through a slush pile of demo tapes. "Only one thing really stuck out for me, which was this contemporary-Christian album by Nicholas Jonas," Greenberg says. "It wasn't a very good album. It was a very schmaltzy kind of record. But his voice was so good. I heard that voice and I thought, This is the best young person's voice that I've heard since Taylor Hanson. I've got to meet this guy." Greenberg discovered that Nick had two personable older brothers, and that the three of them had been mulling over the idea of forming an R&B-inflected trio. "They were trying to write songs where they would stand onstage and dance—to be like a boy band," Greenberg says. "And I said, 'This is all wrong! You guys should learn these instruments and you should be a rock band!'"

Greenberg says he burned the brothers a CD of punk songs from the seventies and eighties and rallied them into making a propulsive powder-punk album that would, as with Hanson's Middle of Nowhere, "appeal to young girls but also obtain the approval of critics." The 2006 album was called It's About Time, and its first single, "Mandy," was just chipping through on MTV's TRL when Greenberg was ousted in a management shake-up at Columbia. It's About Time was yanked and deleted from the roster, and the teen brothers were shown the door.

Disney's Hollywood label immediately signed the boys, while others were also hopping the trio's bullet train toward bubblegum destiny. The passageway at Madison Square Garden is filled with them: There's Big Rob, the bodyguard. And Felicia Culotta, the cheerful personal assistant with a Mississippi accent. And Johnny Wright, who managed the New Kids on the Block, and the Backstreet Boys, and, yep, Britney Spears. In fact, nine members of the team that handled Britney after her plaid-skirted 1999 breakthrough, including her bus driver, have offered up their services to the Jonas Brothers. You can't help but think of Team Britney as a pack of investment analysts who have knowingly shifted their allocations from one commodity trending downward to another on the rise. But it is that very name—Britney—that hovers like a cautionary, shorn-headed phantom above any band that wants to rule the fickle hordes of teen America. The Jonas Brothers, says their tour director, Rob Brenner, who worked with Spears for several years, "want to remain grounded. Those of us who have been around a lot have seen what happens if you don't."

Brenner insists that "you're not going to see these guys five years from now on Behind the Music saying 'Where did it all go?' I have permission from them to smack them around if they ever start acting like divas." And it must be pointed out that as they march through their Jingle Ball docket, making the rounds from sound check to meet and greet to press conference to performance, the brothers comport themselves with the kind of gentility and gratitude that we've come to expect from well-trained sound-bite-dispensing Mouseketeers. They take a walk through a frenzied Z100 gift lounge, where they're loaded up with loot while posing for pictures with everything from Bratz dolls to Foxers lingerie, and they pronounce the whole experience awesome.

They've played at the White House and met President Bush—that, too, was awesome. "With our manners, my mom always told us, 'I'm training you for when you sit at the president's table,'" Joe says. "It's really paid off. We try to be nice to everyone." Sure, there are times when some of the girls at the meet and greets can be a little forward, but the brothers have been taught how to handle that. "We've had some interesting situations with some fans, too—ones that will just come up and almost jump on you and be like, 'I love you, I love you!'" Joe says. "I guess the only thing we'd be willing to say is, like, 'Thank you.' It's kind of awkward when they're like, 'Oh, you're so hot!' How do you say anything to that?"

Disney is a machine, and the Mouse House seems to have met its perfect match in the Jonas Brothers. Then again, can a man stay squeaky-clean all the way into his twenties? And at what point does it begin to seem . . . odd? This line of reasoning helps explain why the purity rings are a sensitive topic. Already, Kevin says, bloggers and tabloids have taken to speculating about just how long those chastity vows will hold: "Oh, yeah, that's on a daily basis. People write that it's not true, that we're taking pictures with girls. Of course we take pictures with girls! They're our fans. I had a ring before this one, and I lost it in a wave pool on vacation"—at Atlantis, the deluxe, family-friendly resort in the Bahamas—"and I didn't have a ring on for, like, two, three weeks, and someone took a picture of me and then it was a huge rumor on the Internet." Achieving total awesomeness isn't easy, and when it comes to the preservation of purity, a band of silver makes a precariously slim line of defense.