Kate Atkinson’s ‘Groundhog Day’ Fiction

Gareth McConnell for The New York Times

Kate Atkinson

Imagine having the gift (or the curse) of continually dying and being reborn, so that you relive segments of your life again and again, differently each time, going down various paths and smoothing out rough areas until you get it right and can move on. Imagine, too, that you are not conscious that this is happening, but experience it as intermittent déjà vu, a sometimes-inchoate dread, an inexplicable compulsion at sudden moments to do one thing rather than another.

Kate Atkinson's Shrewdest Plot Tricks

A brief history of the author's narrative schemes, from time travel to dreaming up an entire novel from the title of a favorite Dickinson poem.

This is not an original artistic conceit, obviously. A century ago, the book "Strange Life of Ivan Osokin" depicted a young man who is given a chance to relive his life and correct his mistakes in 1902 Moscow. And in "Groundhog Day," Bill Murray is forced to repeat the same wretched day, and listen to the same wretched Sonny and Cher song, in Punxsutawney, Pa., until he becomes a better person and wins over Andie MacDowell. But in "Life After Life," her eighth and latest novel, the British writer Kate Atkinson has taken these notions — what if practice really did make perfect, and what if we really could play out multiple alternate futures — and put them through the Magimix, pumped them full of helium, added some degrees of difficulty and produced an audacious, ambitious book that challenges notions of time, fate and free will, not to mention narrative plausibility.

Atkinson's work suffers from a bit of brand confusion, which partly explains why it hasn't caught on in the U.S. as it has in Britain. She does not write about vampires or werewolves or women exploring their inner goddesses with a little sadomasochistic sex. Nor does she continually produce variations on a theme or even variations within a genre. Her writing is funny and quirky and sharp and sad — calamity laced with humor — and full of quietly heroic characters who offer knowing Lorrie Moore-esque parenthetical asides. ("I think in brackets; I do my own asides to myself," Atkinson said.) She writes critically admired family sagas that are not really family sagas; crime novels that are not really crime novels; and now, in "Life After Life," to be published in the U.S. next month, a science-fiction novel, in the loosest possible sense, that is nothing of the sort.

Atkinson's true genius is structure. Her books wend forward and backward, follow multiple stories from multiple points of view, throw dozens of balls up in the air — but always conclude with loose ends tied up, so that everything makes sense. Her first novel, "Behind the Scenes at the Museum," published in 1995, intersperses the linear narrative of the heroine's life with a series of chapter-long explanatory "footnotes" that fill in the back stories of various glancingly mentioned relations and events, painting an intense portrait of a big, messy British family in the first three-quarters of the 20th century. The book seemingly came from nowhere to win a major literary prize in London, instantly establishing Atkinson as a singular voice while generating grumbling among more established (male) writers. The novel also displayed what have become staples of her work: big complicated plots and joyful experimentation with form. One of Atkinson's novels has three different beginnings. Another, set over three days, has four main characters. A protagonist in another spends a good portion of the book in a coma.

Atkinson cannot really articulate how she creates these elaborate structures. Although she used a Moleskin storyboard to keep track of the acrobatic chronology in "Life After Life," she generally does not formally map out her plots. Instead, many of her books start as ideas, or as challenges to herself — characters or thoughts that dare her to put them in stories. Sometimes they begin with the title itself, as in "Started Early, Took My Dog" (2011), which came from an Emily Dickinson poem and which required only that she include a dog and make her hero a Dickinson fan. With "Life After Life," Atkinson knew she wanted to write about the London Blitz, but she also wanted to experiment with a protagonist who constantly dies and is reborn, and she wanted to examine whether someone in that predicament could actually alter the course of history. Could her heroine — brave, tragic Ursula Todd, born in 1910 to an ordinary family in an ordinary English county — somehow stop World War II?

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The Epic Ups and Downs of Peter Gelb

Erik Madigan Heck for The New York Times

Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera with the sopranos Anna Netrebko, left, and Deborah Voigt.

Most mornings Peter Gelb, the 59-year-old general manager of the world's most prominent opera company, rises between 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. The elegant Upper West Side duplex he shares with his wife is four blocks from Lincoln Center. He puts on a bathrobe and pads downstairs to the kitchen, where he turns on his La Pavoni espresso machine with the hand-levered piston that allows him to feel, amid all he can't control at the Metropolitan Opera, that he can at least control the quality of his coffee. He fixes a skim-milk cappuccino with two shots of espresso, eats a banana and then sits down in his home office, where the walls are decorated with autographed scores by Verdi, Puccini and Shostakovich and the shelves are filled with hundreds of CDs, including some by his great-uncle, the renowned violinist Jascha Heifetz. Gelb himself has no particular musical gift, but his ability to remain alert while attending 280 or so opera performances and rehearsals a year on apparently very little sleep qualifies him as a virtuoso of some sort.

After checking overnight box-office totals and other automated reports, Gelb typically uses the predawn hours to telephone agents, artists and opera impresarios in Europe and Japan. But this morning in late October, only months after his most difficult season — a season of scathing reviews that indicted him for accenting spectacle over cohesive drama and various other felonies having to do with his taste, temperament and sensitivity to criticism — he has decided to overhaul a script. Any underling could handle the job of rewriting remarks for the soprano Sondra Radvanovsky when she introduces the Met's "Live in HD" broadcast of "Otello" in two days, but Gelb is an unabashed micromanager, and the Met's "Live in HD" broadcasts didn't become his capital achievement because he let somebody else make the coffee.

So he opens his laptop. The stakes will be high the afternoon of the show, he notes. Johan Botha, the tenor playing Otello, has been out with a cold and will be making a comeback in front of 4,000 opera fans in the house and another 250,000 watching in movie theaters around the world. Better call them "discerning" — 4,000 discerning opera fans in the house. He types some more stuff about adrenaline and taking vocal risks, and now he needs only a line to wrap things up. He recalls a phrase he heard years ago in Italy when he was representing classical artists and producing music documentaries, one that conveys the backstage intensity of an opera house as the curtain is about to rise. It pretty much sums up life at the Met — for the performers and for the man in charge, in need of a comeback himself after a bitter, bruising year. "As we say backstage: In bocca al lupo. Into the mouth of the wolf."

The job of Met Opera general manager is as iconic in its way as mayor of New York or manager of the Yankees. By any standard, Peter Gelb, now well into his seventh season, has established his tenure as among the most significant in the Met's 130-year history. Giulio Gatti-Casazza saw the company through the stock-market crash and the depths of the Great Depression. Rudolf Bing delivered it to its new home at Lincoln Center. Gelb has guided the opera company into the digital age and has put an art form long associated with aristocratic privilege on a more populist footing.

Annual new productions at the Met have nearly doubled; geriatric demographic trends have been arrested, if not reversed; fund-raising is setting records. The Met now has a 24-hour channel on SiriusXM radio; an iPad app; education programs in more than 150 schools in 21 states; subsidized tickets; free dress rehearsals. When Gelb became general manager in 2006, the number of subscribers surged and the percentage of sold-out shows rebounded off historic lows. Subscriptions and the percentage of house seats sold have tailed off in the past few years, and the Met recently had to roll back last season's 10 percent ticket-price increase, but these negative box-office trends have been offset by the growth of the audience for the Met's "Live in HD" broadcasts, which Gelb initiated and which last season drew 2,547,243 viewers in 54 countries.

"Peter's record of achievement and ambition is unparalleled — I think he's saved the Met from brontosaurusdom, and I say that as someone who has been going to opera since 1958," says André Bishop, who as artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater has joined Gelb in establishing a commissioning program for new operas and musical-theater pieces.

And yet if plenty of people are over the moon about the changes, plenty of others are keening arias of Internet rage and indignation. This, after all, is opera, opera in New York, not some dainty pastime like professional hockey, and the stage is crowded with grumbling members of the old guard who aren't renewing subscriptions, disenchanted reviewers, vendors of vitriol on blogs like Parterre Box, self-described "opera queens" bristling at the loss of beloved productions and even old-fashioned letter writers like the one who recently sent Gelb a hand-scrawled note saying: "You are an uneducated disgrace to the Met. Resign now!"

The cast of critics includes some classic connoisseurs like Joe Pearce, a retired banker in Brooklyn, who first got hooked on opera at 12 when he heard Mario Lanza singing in the film "The Great Caruso" and now, at age 74, has 60,000 records, is the president of the Vocal Record Collectors' Society and can make a case for why any of the four broadcast recordings of Giovanni Martinelli singing at the Met from 1938 to 1941 puts every other performance of "Otello" to shame. In a post last year on The Times's Web site, Pearce said he wondered whether Gelb understood the difference "between his true opera-loving audience and the happening-seekers he would convert" and dismissed as nonsense the idea that new meaning could be found in great works of art "through semi-Eurotrash reimaginings by third-rate theatrical minds." The bigger issue, he told me — bigger than any one opera-company general manager — is the decline of vocal artistry. "Singers are no longer being trained to act with their voices like they used to do," he said. "Now they act with their bodies."

Chip Brown is a contributing writer for the magazine. He last wrote about the oil boom in North Dakota.

Editor: Sheila Glaser

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: March 21, 2013

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the year the Metropolitan Opera's recent production of Richard Wagner's Götterdämmerung had its premiere. It was 2012, not 2010.

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The 6th Floor Blog: Is There Such Thing as a Cucumber Allergy?

Melanie Thernstrom's article about conquering food allergies prompted 350 comments from readers. Many wrote in to share what foods they or their loved ones are allergic to. Sizes of the foods correspond to the frequency with which they were cited.

Are you allergic to anything as common as peanuts or as surprising as cumin? Write about it in the comments section.

This graphic will appear on the Reply All page in this weekend's magazine.

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Mark Bittman and Sam Sifton’s East-Over Feast

We went looking for spring, Mark and I, down in Charleston, S.C., a stunning city, rich with history both sad and ecstatic, in a region that offers a tremendous bounty of fresh ingredients and regional flavors. We had the vague idea of a holiday feast for the season — one that was grand and nondenominational — that would help banish memories of winter. The hitch was that we had only about eight hours to shop and cook before a dozen people showed up to eat with us in a marvelous old house off the Battery.

This is nice work if you can get it. Mark and I tried to pull off a similar task last winter in Brooklyn, and now, as then, our plans solidified as we shopped. There is a great lesson in that for the home cook: buy what's fresh, what makes sense for the season and what looks good, then cook it simply. We found amazing local greens and decided to make a composed salad, in part to highlight their beauty and in part to show how little you need to do to great ingredients. We found good lamb and decided to cook it two different ways, braised and grilled, to bring different textures and flavors to the plate — and also to nod to the role of the paschal lamb in Jewish and Christian springtime traditions. (One of the oldest synagogues in America was built in Charleston in the 1840s. But owing to our obsession with country ham, some of our dishes were hardly kosher.) We bought local grits to celebrate the region; likewise, rice and shrimp and pecans.

When we got back into the kitchen, we sketched out our menu on paper, then figured out what we needed to start on first, what could come later and what we needed to do at the very last minute. Then we threw out almost everything that required work at the very last minute. The last thing you want when you're cooking a big feast is a lot of complicated work at the end.

This plan allowed for some simple work — a long-cooked rice pudding from Mark and some biscuits from me, as a lamb shoulder bubbled away on the stove. We braised some root vegetables in butter. We whisked up some grits. We cleaned up as we went. And we kept an eye on a single goal: to give each dish the time that it needed, in the hope that it would all come out right at the end.

Thankfully, it did. Here's how we pulled it off — and how you can, too. SAM SIFTON

THE PLAY-BY-PLAY

S.S.: Charleston is a serious food city with a lot of good restaurants specializing in local ingredients. I thought the groceries would be good if we went to where the chefs shop.

M.B.: GrowFood Carolina gets vegetables from farms within 120 miles and sells them to local restaurants and supermarkets. The greens — kale, mustard, collards — were ultrafresh. So we decided to make them into a salad with buttermilk dressing.

S.S.: Then we saw sweet potatoes that were the size of W.N.B.A. basketballs and decided to make sweet-potato fries.

M.B.: They had those beautiful carrots and parsnips that were thinner than pencils. You never see that! So we decided to braise them.

S.S.: Shrimp and grits is this iconic Charleston dish, but I was a little worried about cooking clichés.

M.B.: Still, they were pretty nice-looking shrimp — head on, recently live, flash-frozen. We knew we could use them for something.

S.S.: I was obstinate about getting country ham — a ham that's salt-cured, smoked and aged forever (and hard to find in New York). And Mark and I agreed that lamb, which you find in all monotheistic religions, was the perfect protein for this feast.

M.B.: We knew that we wanted to start the dinner with a passed appetizer of biscuits and ham with a dollop of this mayonnaise that David Chang serves at Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York. And small glasses of bourbon. We also ended up using the ham in the grits. The folks at Husk, an excellent restaurant in town, where we ate the night before, told us to buy Geechie Boy grits, which we picked up at the Piggly Wiggly.

S.S.: One of the things about Southern casual-restaurant cooking is this concept called "meat and three" — you go to a restaurant and order a protein, and you get these three vegetable sides. We were trying to do a meat and three in two ways — one for Passover, another for Easter.

M.B.: One preparation was a play on tsimmes , a traditional Jewish casserole. I figured I'd take all these North African and Middle Eastern flavors and throw them in a pot with a lamb shoulder and braise the hell out of them. It achieved perfect tenderosity without a lot of work.

S.S.: The other lamb dish was inspired by an old Easter favorite: lamb with mint jelly. We had a boneless, butterflied leg, and I grilled it on a Weber in the yard. We'd bought a bunch of pecans and pecan shells, which we added to the fire. Just as the fat was beginning to render and the thing was starting to flare, I put the top of the grill on and the pecan smoke really, really got into the meat.

M.B.: A mint jelly would have been terrific, but I was thinking of it as a mint chimichurri.

S.S.: Mark also had this idea to do a rice pudding that we would serve as dessert with pecan tartlets. That was the best call of the day.

M.B.: The rice pudding cooked for three or four hours, very low, at about 200 degrees.

M.B.: At around 3, Sam was panicking that we were running out of time.

S.S.: I took 20 minutes off, walked around the block. And there's a lesson in that for people doing dinner parties. That short break helped a lot. I came back focused and ready to finish.

M.B.: I sat down, and I did start drinking bourbon, which I thought was quite helpful.

S.S.: We cooked the shrimp on the stove with olive oil and paprika, salt, pepper, garlic and lemon. We served it as an appetizer with the salads.

S.S.: I think that grilled lamb was the biggest success of my day. The biggest disaster, which took three or four hours to unfold, was a demi-glace made from Cheerwine, that red soda from South Carolina, which I thought I could use for a whipped cream. But Mark said, "I won't eat that whatever you do with it." It tasted like the worst cough syrup. I threw it out.

M.B.: Thank God. So when are we going to do this again?

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The 6th Floor Blog: A San Francisco Classic: Vesuvio’s Bohemian Coffee

I had to tell people to stop. After I put out an informal call for San Francisco bar recommendations for this month's Drink column, I simply couldn't visit the dozens of bars that people suggested. I'm sure I had to omit some of your favorites — chime in and let me know what those are — but 20 bars in four days was all I could manage. This time.

And that's not only because San Francisco has such an abundance of terrific, distinctive bars of many kinds; it's also because some of them are so inviting they make you want to linger. So it was the afternoon I wandered into Vesuvio Cafe. Nestled on a corner just across Jack Kerouac Alley from City Lights, the celebrated bookshop co-founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Vesuvio is a model of Beat-era bohemian charm. (Yes, Kerouac drank there, and so did Neal Cassady.)

As soon as I claimed a bar stool, the thing I love most about leisurely afternoons in bars started right up: lively conversation among strangers. The guys to my left — one a local, one a visitor — were happy to tell me all about their favorite bars. The guy to my right, fresh from a job interview, had plenty to say about contemporary fiction.

And behind the bar, Janet Clyde, one of Vesuvio's owners, was the perfect hostess: joining the conversation, guiding me to another favorite local saloon — and sharing the recipe for the cafe's signature drink, the Bohemian Coffee. It looks perfectly innocent, just like a coffee — but it has a kick. A perfect pick-me-up for a cool, foggy evening by the bay.

Vesuvio's Bohemian Coffee

To a heatproof glass add:

Two parts Disaronno Originale
One part brandy
Strong coffee to fill

Garnish with a lemon twist.

I'll be posting more drink recipes from San Francisco throughout the week. Is there a cocktail you strongly associate with the Bay Area? Please share your favorites and recipes.

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Becoming the All-Terrain Human

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Kilian Jornet, who has won dozens of mountain footraces up to 100 miles in length and six world titles in Skyrunning.

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe's roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex'd climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he'd just won the local turkey trot.

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Jornet "is not normal," his mother says. "My mission is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no."

Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.

So what's next when you're 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world's most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what's possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn't been skied before in winter.

But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Chamonix, France, is a resort town wedged into a narrow valley at the foot of Mont Blanc, just over an hour's drive southeast of Geneva. For those who adore high mountains, the place is hallowed. The Rue du Docteur Paccard is named for one of the first men to ascend Mont Blanc, in 1786; millionaires are tolerated, but mountain men are revered. The valley is Jornet's home for the few months each year when he is not traveling. I met him there on a stormy morning in December, when he drove his dented Peugeot van into a parking lot at the edge of town, stepped out and offered a shy handshake. He is slight and unremarkable in the deceptive way of a Tour de France cyclist — he's 5-foot-6 and 125 pounds — with the burnished complexion of years spent above the tree line and a thatch of black hair that, when sprung from a ski hat, has a slightly blendered look.

As we drove to and from Valle d'Aosta in Italy, where he would train that day, Jornet told me in soft-spoken English (one of five languages­ he speaks) how he first stunned the small world of elite ultrarunning. It happened at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, the most competitive ultrarunning event outside the United States. (An "ultra" is any race longer than a marathon.) In 2008, when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek, perhaps the sport's most well known star, while setting a record for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif (which happens to include 31,500 feet of uphill climbing, or the equivalent of 25 trips to the top of the Empire State Building). "It was a revelation and a coronation at once," Runner's World magazine later wrote. Then Jornet won again the next year (and again in 2011).

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The 6th Floor Blog: A ‘Sham Procedure’ Leads to Disappointing M.S. News

"The question can't be answered without a sham procedure."

Dr. Aaron Miller, director of clinician affairs at the Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis at Mt. Sinai Hospital in New York, was speaking to me in his cramped office on East 98th St. one night late in 2011. I was researching my article for the magazine, "The Zamboni Effect," which was published last October.

The "question" was whether there was any truth to the theory put forth by Dr. Paolo Zamboni, an Italian vascular surgeon who'd begun researching multiple sclerosis after his wife was contracted it: that M.S. isn't an immune-mediated process, as neurologists like Miller have believed — and gathered substantial evidence to support — for decades, but is instead related to blockages of the main veins draining the neck. Zamboni called it chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency, or CCSVI, and much of the M.S. patient community has been excited by the news. The month before interviewing Miller, at a meeting of the world's M.S. researchers and clinicians in Amsterdam, I saw him make a presentation on the spread of positive reports from CCSVI patients. Some travel far and wide and pay as much as $11,000 for surgery in hopes of correcting the condition and improving their M.S., one of the most damning diseases to strike patients, and one of the most vexing to researchers.

"There's too much variability in M.S.," Miller would tell me later, "and too much potential for a placebo response in important areas for which there are little objective measures, such as pain and fatigue," to know whether patients were really being helped by the surgery or whether they were subject to, well, the Zamboni effect. The sham procedure, the surgical equivalent of a placebo drug, was the only way to answer the question.

Today at the American Academy of Neurology's annual conference in San Diego, patients will get an answer. Dr. Robert Zivadinov of the University of Buffalo, who has published studies indicating CCSVI is real but not M.S.-specific, will present results of the first of several studies on CCSVI surgery at the highest level of evidence: comparing outcomes in patients who had the procedure recommended by Zamboni, and the "sham procedure" Miller referred to. (Zivadinov and I also met in Amsterdam.)

His results? According to the randomized, double-blind control trial — some subjects had the real surgery, others went under the knife but didn't get the operation, and neither the patients nor the scientists evaluating the results knew who got which — the procedure "failed to provide any sustained improvement," Zivadinov and his colleagues write.

"We were disappointed and surprised," Zivadinov told me over the phone on Friday. "It's very discouraging. We thought it would go the other way, or else we wouldn't do the study — you do the study to try and help the patient."

Zivadinov cautioned that the study was small, and looked at patients just six months after the operation. (Patients I spoke to in the course of my research said they'd felt better the next day, so it seems unlikely the 12-month follow-up Zivadinov and Siddiqui intend to perform will show improvements.) Even self-reported, subjective measures showed no improvement. The study has not been published because it's so recent.

Oddly, not only did the procedure not help but there was also increased disease activity in patients whose veins were opened the most. Zivadinov enrolled in the study patients with high disease activity; he said that could be a factor in this puzzling result. "Or," he told me, "it could be that reopening the veins is exacerbating" their M.S. — the opposite of what Zamboni posited. Given the small size of the sample, this could just be a random quirk. "However, one thing is clear," Zivadinov told me. "Patients should not have this type of treatment outside of controlled, blinded, carefully done clinical trials."

Adam Gottschalk, the CCSVI patient profiled in the article, said to me via Internet chat that his feelings about the Zamboni treatment "have not changed one bit. I still have all the great benefits. I don't know about others, but these improvements are demonstrable and definite."

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Eureka: Who Lives Longest?

A Swedish baby born in 1800 had a life expectancy of just 32 years. We know this because Sweden was one of the first countries to keep extensive records of births and deaths and, by 1800, had a reliable national system that allowed this morbid statistic to be calculated. That baby's life may sound nasty, brutish and short, especially for a nation advanced enough to keep such detailed records, but before you imagine 19th-century Swedish teenagers suffering the regret and ennui of midlife crises, consider this: that same year, a 20-year-old Swede could reasonably expect to live another 37 years.

Life expectancy is an average, and it fluctuates with age as the risks we face change throughout our lifetimes. Both those facts make it a frequently misunderstood statistic. High infant-mortality rates depress the figure substantially. This can lead contemporary observers to the false conclusion that most humans died quite young, even in the not-so-distant past. (Were you ever told, as a petulant teenager, that you'd have been considered middle-aged in medieval Europe?)

" 'Life expectancy' is this term that entered public lingo without public understanding of what it really means," says Andrew Noymer, associate professor of public health and sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Our hypothetical Swedish baby's 1832 expiration date is, of course, nothing of the sort. It's a way of expressing, statistically, that lots of babies and small children were dying in 19th-century Sweden. By simply surviving childhood, a young Swede could expect a relatively long life — and if he was lucky, a proper midlife crisis.

But so could Fred Flintstone. In the last decade, scientists have concluded that humans have lived into older adulthood since 30,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic (part of the era more commonly known as the Stone Age). Michael Gurven, a professor of anthropology at U.C. Santa Barbara who has studied modern hunter-gatherer and horticultural tribes, found that people in these societies who survived childhood lived about as long as 19th-century Swedes did — into their 50s and beyond. His work is one clue that suggests Enlightenment Age Europeans could have had the same longevity as our ancestors who painted caves and hunted the woolly mammoth.

Before the Upper Paleolithic, early humans really did die young, most before their 30th birthdays. Then, during the late Stone Age, there was a significant increase in the number of people living into older adulthood. The scientific and technological advances that made the modern era possible are well known to us, but the Upper Paleolithic was also host to a flourishing of early human culture.

Rachel Caspari, a paleoanthropologist at Central Michigan University, studies the life spans of ancient humans, their ancestors and close relatives — together, known as hominins. In 2004, she and a colleague examined teeth from 768 hominin fossils representing three million years of primate evolution.

Looking at wear and other signs of aging in the teeth, Caspari split the fossils into groups of old and young adults, creating rough approximations of ancient demographics. Examing a span from between 100,000 and 30,000 years ago, Caspari found about four old adults for every 10 young adults. But beginning around 30,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic, this reversed: Caspari counted 20 old adults for every 10 young adults.

This demographic shift coincided with an explosion of cultural production: clay figurines; carvings made of bone, wood and stone; cave art and jewelry making; and complex burial practices. According to Caspari, it was longer human life spans that seem to have made this flourishing possible. Having more time on earth allows our species to progress.

The most recent rapid increase in human life expectancy started around 1880 in Europe, North America and Japan. Now we might be approaching another age of great technological upheaval, as stem cells and gene therapy offer the potential to extend lives to unprecedented lengths. But life expectancy measures only gains that refer to a whole population, and in the United States, rising inequality has become a drag on this most basic measure of human progress.

Currently, life expectancy at birth in the United States is roughly 79 years, and it's the same at age 25, but our gains have slowed considerably. The U.S. ranks 51st in the world for life expectancy at birth. Around 1950, we were ninth. Furthermore, what improvements we do see are not spread evenly across the population. For example, between 1990 and 2008, white women with college degrees picked up three and a half years of life expectancy, while those without a high-school diploma lost five years.

Meanwhile, researchers are experimenting on mice, trying to isolate the mechanisms that cause aging, in an effort to slow (or stop) them. These mice have been injected with stem cells and subjected to various forms of DNA tampering. Perhaps someday, thanks to these mice, we'll be able to extend human life to Old Testament lengths — for those who can afford it. Perhaps not. Scientists disagree about whether there's a biological limit to human life expectancy, but it does seem possible that we're approaching a sort of sociological limit here in the U.S.

Justin Denney, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University, has studied the ways that certain health issues disproportionately affect the most disadvantaged people in this country. For example, he told me other studies have shown that wealthy, well-educated smokers outlive poorer, less-educated smokers, even if you control for the amount of tobacco consumed. The biggest barriers to improving life expectancy in the United States are societal issues, Denney says. You can't get a shot to undo the effects of growing up in a lead- and asbestos-contaminated row house. There's no laser surgery to fix the detrimental effects of generations of chronic stress.

Perhaps one day there will be a stem-cell treatment that can double one's life expectancy by slowing the aging process, making a centenarian as spry as a quinquagenarian. But if such a serum benefits only the few who can afford it, our national life expectancy will hardly budge — it's an average, after all. In 19th-century Sweden, the figure was dragged down by infant mortality. Today in the United States, it grows slowly because of the premature deaths of the less fortunate. Thanks to this vast inequality, even a high-tech fountain of youth would hardly move the needle.

"Look at the countries with the highest average life expectancy," says Denney, referring to places like Japan, Australia, Canada and, yes, Sweden — nations that distribute their health resources more evenly. "Ultimately," he says, "life expectancy is a measure of quality of life."

Maggie Koerth-Baker is science editor at BoingBoing.net and author of "Before the Lights Go Out," on the future of energy production and consumption.

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The 6th Floor Blog: A San Francisco Classic: Vesuvio’s Bohemian Coffee

I had to tell people to stop. After I put out an informal call for San Francisco bar recommendations for this month's Drink column, I simply couldn't visit the dozens of bars that people suggested. I'm sure I had to omit some of your favorites — chime in and let me know what those are — but 20 bars in four days was all I could manage. This time.

And that's not only because San Francisco has such an abundance of terrific, distinctive bars of many kinds; it's also because some of them are so inviting they make you want to linger. So it was the afternoon I wandered into Vesuvio Cafe. Nestled on a corner just across Jack Kerouac Alley from City Lights, the celebrated bookshop co-founded by the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Vesuvio is a model of Beat-era bohemian charm. (Yes, Kerouac drank there, and so did Neal Cassady.)

As soon as I claimed a bar stool, the thing I love most about leisurely afternoons in bars started right up: lively conversation among strangers. The guys to my left — one a local, one a visitor — were happy to tell me all about their favorite bars. The guy to my right, fresh from a job interview, had plenty to say about contemporary fiction.

And behind the bar, Janet Clyde, one of Vesuvio's owners, was the perfect hostess: joining the conversation, guiding me to another favorite local saloon — and sharing the recipe for the cafe's signature drink, the Bohemian Coffee. It looks perfectly innocent, just like a coffee — but it has a kick. A perfect pick-me-up for a cool, foggy evening by the bay.

Vesuvio's Bohemian Coffee

To a heatproof glass add:

Two parts Disaronno Originale
One part brandy
Strong coffee to fill

Garnish with a lemon twist.

I'll be posting more drink recipes from San Francisco throughout the week. Is there a cocktail you strongly associate with the Bay Area? Please share your favorites and recipes.

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Creating the All-Terrain Human

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Kilian Jornet, who has won dozens of mountain footraces up to 100 miles in length and six world titles in Skyrunning.

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe's roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex'd climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he'd just won the local turkey trot.

Levon Biss for The New York Times

Jornet "is not normal," his mother says. "My mission is to make Kilian tired. Always, I was tired, but Kilian, no."

Come winter, when most elite ultrarunners keep running, Jornet puts away his trail-running shoes for six months and takes up ski-mountaineering racing, which basically amounts to running up and around large mountains on alpine skis. In this sport too, Jornet reigns supreme: he has been the overall World Cup champion three of the last four winters.

So what's next when you're 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world's most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what's possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn't been skied before in winter.

But bigger challenges bring bigger risks. Less than a year ago, Jornet watched as his hero and friend Stéphane Brosse died in the mountains. Since then, he has asked himself, How much is it worth sacrificing to do what you love?

Chamonix, France, is a resort town wedged into a narrow valley at the foot of Mont Blanc, just over an hour's drive southeast of Geneva. For those who adore high mountains, the place is hallowed. The Rue du Docteur Paccard is named for one of the first men to ascend Mont Blanc, in 1786; millionaires are tolerated, but mountain men are revered. The valley is Jornet's home for the few months each year when he is not traveling. I met him there on a stormy morning in December, when he drove his dented Peugeot van into a parking lot at the edge of town, stepped out and offered a shy handshake. He is slight and unremarkable in the deceptive way of a Tour de France cyclist — he's 5-foot-6 and 125 pounds — with the burnished complexion of years spent above the tree line and a thatch of black hair that, when sprung from a ski hat, has a slightly blendered look.

As we drove to and from Valle d'Aosta in Italy, where he would train that day, Jornet told me in soft-spoken English (one of five languages­ he speaks) how he first stunned the small world of elite ultrarunning. It happened at the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc in Chamonix, the most competitive ultrarunning event outside the United States. (An "ultra" is any race longer than a marathon.) In 2008, when he was 20, Jornet defeated a field that included Scott Jurek, perhaps the sport's most well known star, while setting a record for the 104-mile course around the Mont Blanc massif (which happens to include 31,500 feet of uphill climbing, or the equivalent of 25 trips to the top of the Empire State Building). "It was a revelation and a coronation at once," Runner's World magazine later wrote. Then Jornet won again the next year (and again in 2011).

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