An October 30 New York Times article by reporter Janny Scott on Sen. Barack Obama's (D-IL) “years in New York City” as a young man reported that "[s]ome say" Obama, in his memoir, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (Crown, July 1995), took “some literary license in the telling of his story.” Scott quoted a July 9, 2005, blog post authored by Dan Armstrong, who, the Times article reported, “worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama's account of the job.” In the blog post the Times quoted, Armstrong wrote: “All of Barack's embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ's temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.” Scott, however, offered no explanation of why Armstrong's analysis of Obama's “larger narrative purpose” should be considered creditable.

From the October 30 New York Times article:

Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job -- work he went on to do in Chicago -- though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn't remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer's prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York -- other people's accounts and his own -- suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama's account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack's embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ's temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong's description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama's. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Armstrong's blog, analyzethis.net/blog, which the Times linked to, appears to be updated only sporadically -- it lists 33 entries since July 2005 -- and is not focused on any specific topic. On July 10, 2005, Armstrong posted an entry titled “Baby Killing is Legal,” which reads, in its entirety:

Now that the Dutch have adopted rules for euthanizing babies, I hope they'll apply them sensibly. It's so annoying when those babies start crying in the airplane cabin. You can't exactly get up and leave the room. I also don't like it when two-year-olds sit in the handicapped seats on the subway. They claim that they can't read the sign, but I don't buy that for a minute.

Armstrong's subsequent entry, from September 18, 2005, was titled “Black People's Names”:

Why is it that only black people are called Jordan? Michael Jordan, Barbara Jordan, Vernon Jordan. And why is it that only white people are called Rockefeller, Rothschild, and DuPont?

On June 9, 2005, Armstrong posted an entry titled “Autism: The Guy Disease”:

Follow this link to try the Autism Quotient test. After taking it, I'm ready to believe that autism is just a special case of being a guy.

The average score is 16.5, and 80% of those diagnosed with autism scored 32 or more. Your score appears to depend mainly on (1) your comfort in social situations and (2) your feelings about numbers, categories and patterns.

Personally, I find license plates fascinating and parties terrifying -- and my score was 30. My wife is the opposite, and hers was 6. I'll bet this chasm is typical. Not only is it men who hail from Mars, but it's also men who build model airplanes, become mathematicians, write software, play the Blackberry ... So it should not be surprising that 10 times as many males as females are diagnosed as autistic.