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His daughter, Ruby Cramer, said he died of complications from lung cancer at Johns Hopkins University Medical Center.

Mr. Cramer was born on June 12, 1950, in Rochester, N.Y. He went to Johns Hopkins University as an undergraduate and later studied at Columbia University's Graduate of Journalism. He worked at The Baltimore Sun before joining The Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s, where he was a Middle East correspondent from 1977 to 1984. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1979 for his reporting there.

He went on to write for Sports Illustrated, Rolling Stone and Esquire, where in 1986, he wrote an article, "What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now?," about the iconic baseball player. The article, which seemed to strip Mr. Williams bare and reconstruct him anew in the eyes of his fans, became a hallmark of sports journalism.

"It was often said Ted would rather play ball in a lab, where fans couldn't see," Mr. Cramer wrote. "But he never blamed fans for watching him. His hate was for those who couldn't or wouldn't feel with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage, or sorrow." But Mr. Cramer will be most remembered for "What it Takes," a 1,000-page, vigorously researched tome that delved into the passions, idiosyncrasies and flaws of George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other candidates as they fought for the presidency in 1988.

As he reported for the book, he spent time with the candidates' family members, college roommates and sometimes even their elementary schoolteachers.

He became close with the candidates themselves and in some cases forged friendships that endured after the election. Mr. Biden later gave him tips on fixing up an old farmhouse that he purchased in Maryland, he said in a 2010 interview with Politico.

"He made no bones about the fact that he became friendly with the people he reported on," said his longtime friend Stuart Seidel, an editor at National Public Radio. "He liked Joe Biden and Bob Dole and both Bushes. He did not feel compromised by allowing himself to get close to them. He did not see himself in a confrontational reportorial role — he was telling a story."

The book begins with Mr. Bush, then the vice president, throwing out the first pitch at a Houston Astros game in 1986.

"He'll be cheered by 44,131 fans — and it's not even a risky crowd, the kind that might get testy because oil isn't worth a damn, Houston's economy is down the crapper, and no one's buying aluminum siding," he wrote. "This is a playoff crowd, a corporate-perks crowd, the kind of fellows who were transferred in a few years ago from Stamford, Conn. You know, for that new marketing thing (and were, frankly, delighted by the price of housing), a solid GOP crowd, tax-conscious, white and polite."

The book is in many ways the product of a bygone era, before quote approval and a micromanaged press corps, and when minute-by-minute coverage of a presidential campaign or anything else was a technological impossibility.

In a 2011 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Cramer described political journalists in his day as wielding real power, a contrast with now, when campaigns can seem to hold reporters at their mercy.

"Even if you had the wherewithal to embarrass a reporter, there was no mechanism to do it," Mr. Cramer said. "And in most cases, you might as well save your breath because the reporter had no shame anyway."

"What it Takes" received poor reviews, and sales were initially poor. Fellow journalists were also slow to see its value. Disappointed, Mr. Cramer never again wrote as prodigiously about politics. Rather, he turned his attention to other interests. He wrote a biography about Joe DiMaggio and returned to the Middle East for a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Mr. Cramer lived in Chestertown, Md., with his wife, Joan Cramer, who survives him. He was previously married to Carolyn White, with whom he had his daughter, Ruby Cramer.

In the first meeting of the season between the teams, the Celtics, playing without the suspended All-Star point guard Rajon Rondo, let it be known that despite a sub-.500 record entering Monday night's game at Madison Square Garden, they are still a team to be reckoned with this season.

Three minutes into the fourth quarter, Anthony, who had a miserable night shooting (6 of 26) and Garnett each were hit with technicals for pushing and jawing with one another. On several previous possessions, Anthony and Garnett had banged in the low post and barked at one another when the whistle was blown.

While neither was ejected, the exchange was a flash point for an intensely played final quarter.

For the final eight minutes, the Knicks and the Celtics traded one momentum-swinging basket for another. The crowd was on its feet for much of the quarter, and with Paul Pierce hitting key baskets and engineering the offense in place of Rondo, the Celtics prevailed, 102-96.

Afterward, Anthony immediately left the court, went past the team's security guards and into the tunnel designated for the opposing team, something he had not done all season. Inside the tunnel, a frustrated Anthony yelled and cursed at a number of Celtics, including Garnett. Anthony had to be pulled away by teammates and redirected to the Knicks' locker room.

"It's the heat of the battle," Garnett said. "Guys go back and forth. He's trying to get his team to go. I'm trying to get my team to go. Both teams are colliding. Not to mention it's the Knicks and the Celtics. That's what it is, man."

Coach Mike Woodson and Knicks players would not comment on the incident.

Pierce scored 8 of his team-high 23 points in the fourth quarter. He also made a quick pass into the paint for an assist on Avery Bradley's basket which gave the Celtics a 98-93 lead. He put the game out reach in the final minute on his signature step-back jumper over Tyson Chandler hit nothing but the net as the shot clock expired. On his way back on defense, Pierce blew a goodbye kiss to the crowd.

Anthony was not efficient; he scored 20 points but shot 2 of 10 in the fourth. J. R. Smith led the Knicks with 24 points.

The Knicks (23-11) trailed by as 80-72 with 11 minutes remaining and could never take the lead in the fourth quarter.

Even without Rondo, Coach Mike Woodson knew the Celtics were going to compete.

"They have a lot of pride in that locker room," Woodson said before the game. "They've had injuries, but Doc's teams are always well coached and they play hard every night. They might not be having the season they expected, but to me they are still one of the premier teams in the East."

The Celtics (17-17) did play with pride and they were impressive on offense without Rondo as they shot 52.7 percent from the floor. The also held the Knicks to just 16 points in the third quarter.

Unlike previous years, the Knicks have a comfortable lead over the Celtics in the Atlantic Division in the month of January. The Knicks entered the game holding a seven-game lead on the Celtics.

The absence of Rondo, the Celtics' best player, continued a trend this season for the Knicks as they have faced many opponents who were without their star. The Philadelphia 76ers played without Andrew Bynum (bruised right knee). The Dallas Mavericks did not have Dirk Nowitzki (right knee surgery) or Shawn Marion (sprained left medial collateral ligament). The New Orleans Hornets did not have Eric Gordon (sore right knee) and their top draft pick Anthony Davis (stress reaction left ankle). Even in the Knicks' first game against the Magic, Orlando was missing Jameer Nelson (groin), Al Harrington (knee surgery) and Hedo Turkoglu (left hand).

The Knicks won all of those games.

But when the final buzzer sounded, the Celtics had made a statement and Anthony was not happy.

REBOUNDS

Iman Shumpert is getting close to being cleared by the Knicks' medical staff to participate in full-contact scrimmages. The medical staff tested the strength in Shumpert's left knee Monday before the game. He is expected to be cleared later this week. "I feel like I can pretty much do everything," Shumpert said Saturday. "I'm just young and I want to play. If I feel any pain, though, I'm not going to do anything." Throughout the season, Shumpert has been rehabilitating from his left knee surgery in May. He sustained his injury last season in Game 1 of the first round of the Eastern Conference playoffs against the Miami Heat when he twisted his knee, which resulted in him collapsing to the floor as he tore the anterior cruciate ligament and the lateral meniscus.

Between the late 1980s and the late 2000s, Dr. Hayne had the field of forensic pathology in Mississippi almost to himself, performing thousands of autopsies and delivering his findings around the state as an expert witness in civil and criminal cases. For most of that time, Dr. Hayne performed about 1,700 autopsies annually, more than four for every day of the year and nearly seven times the maximum caseload recommended by the National Association of Medical Examiners.

During the past several months, in courthouses around Mississippi, four new petitions have been quietly submitted on behalf of people in prison arguing that they were wrongfully convicted on the basis of Dr. Hayne's testimony. Around 10 more are expected in the coming weeks, including three by inmates on death row.

The filings, based on new information obtained as part of a lawsuit settled last spring, charge that Dr. Hayne made "numerous misrepresentations" about his qualifications as a forensic pathologist. They say that he proposed theories in his testimony that lie far outside standard forensic science. And they suggest that Mississippi officials ignored these problems, instead supporting Dr. Hayne's prolific business.

For many around the state, the Hayne era is considered to be over and any problems fixed. In 2008, amid growing controversy, the state severed ties with Dr. Hayne, who to this day insists that he was treated unfairly. Mississippi officials have since shown almost no inclination to review his past cases.

The recent lawsuits suggest that in only a limited number of cases did a verdict most likely hinge on Dr. Hayne's testimony. But without any systematic review, it remains a question as to what that number may be.

"There are hundreds of cases that have to be reconsidered," said Dr. James Lauridson, a former state medical examiner in Alabama, who provided an affidavit in one of the recently filed cases. Dr. Lauridson said Dr. Hayne was an extreme example of a familiar problem: a forensic analyst with inadequate training who was given far too much deference in the courts.

"After you do that long enough, your initially shaky opinions become way out of the mainstream," Dr. Lauridson said. "That is what happened to him."

Dr. Hayne was sidelined by state officials after his analyses — and those of one of his close collaborators — led to several murder convictions that were later overturned or thrown out. But he insists that his work has been intentionally distorted by critics.

"I don't think I was treated fairly," he said last month at his house in a gated community overlooking the Ross Barnett Reservoir. "Is that the way you treat people after 20 years of working like a dog?"

A physician and pathologist, Dr. Hayne, now 71, began performing autopsies in Mississippi in the late 1980s. He served briefly as interim state medical examiner though he was not, as state law required, board certified in forensic pathology. From 1989, when he left the interim post, to 2010, the office of medical examiner was unfilled for all but five years. Dr. Hayne, working as a private contractor, almost single-handedly picked up the slack.

By his own count, he performed as many as 1,700 autopsies some years, in addition to having his own pathology practice. Dr. David Fowler, the chief medical examiner in Maryland and a former chairman of the standards committee for the National Association of Medical Examiners, called the number "beyond defensible."

Dr. Hayne said that state-appointed medical examiners simply did not have his motivation as a fee-based contractor, nor his work ethic. "How many autopsies could they do?" he said. "They could do one or 500, they get paid the same amount. Is there any incentive to do a heavy load?"

That incentive is at the heart of the challenges filed on behalf of prisoners in recent weeks, most of them by the Mississippi Innocence Project. The cases in those filings are not clear cut, and in all of them there is circumstantial evidence suggesting guilt and innocence. But Dr. Hayne's testimony was key.

In one case, Dr. Hayne performed an autopsy of a young boy and concluded he had been suffocated. Some weeks after the boy was buried, his 3-year-old brother told the police that he had been killed by his mother's boyfriend. Officials exhumed the body, and Dr. Hayne had a cast made of the boy's face. By comparing his initial notes of face wounds with the cast, Dr. Hayne testified, he found it probable that the boy had been suffocated by a large male hand. The boyfriend was convicted.

"I saw a very similar case like that on 'Law & Order: SVU,' " said Dr. Andrew M. Baker, the president of the medical examiners' association and chief medical examiner for Hennepin County, Minn. "I've never heard of it in real life." Dr. Baker said not only was the technique unheard of but so was the ability to speculate from those sorts of wounds about hand size or gender.

Dr. Hayne suggested he was just being innovative. "Maybe we should have published," he said upon being reminded of the case.

The Innocence Project has been trying to examine past cases in which Dr. Hayne's testimony was pivotal, as state officials have shown no inclination to order a formal review. (Radley Balko, currently a reporter for The Huffington Post, has also investigated numerous cases.)

In 2009, Dr. Hayne sued the Innocence Project for defamation, and last spring the group paid him a $100,000 settlement. Innocence Project officials cited insurance reasons, though Dr. Hayne's lawyer hailed it as a vindication.

But in preparing to combat the suit, lawyers for the Innocence Project said they uncovered new information. They said they found details about Dr. Hayne's academic record and qualifications that significantly contradicted his own accounts, often given under oath.

They also found a 1992 proposal concerning Dr. Hayne drafted by a senior state official. Dr. Hayne was performing 80 percent of the state's autopsies, the memo said, and would most likely continue to do so even if a new medical examiner were appointed. The state could save on salaries and office costs by giving Dr. Hayne the title, but letting him continue to charge $500 per autopsy as a private contractor.

Though the plan was shelved, and the office remained unfilled for most of the next 15 years, Dr. Hayne maintained his high-volume business and was eventually allowed to use the title of chief state pathologist.

Tucker Carrington, the director of the Mississippi Innocence Project and a professor at the University of Mississippi Law School, said this arrangement explained why Dr. Hayne was allowed to dominate the field for so long.

"What Hayne did was act as anyone would have predicted, which is not as an objective pathologist but someone who is in the marketplace," Mr. Carrington said. "The state gave him this opportunity and gave him his blessing."

That blessing was revoked in 2008, when, despite some opposition, Mississippi's public safety commissioner removed Dr. Hayne from a list of approved forensic pathologists. The state hired a chief medical examiner in 2010.

But many coroners and district attorneys remain staunch defenders of Dr. Hayne and his work; for years, some point out, he was the only pathologist available.

"I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't like Hayne, but from a prosecutor's standpoint I don't know anybody who didn't like him," said John T. Kitchens, a former district attorney and circuit court judge. "He was always so helpful and useful to law enforcement. And he worked all the time."

In a conversation that ranged from the fall of the Roman republic to the folly of the Vietnam War, Dr. Hayne remained unbowed. He said that his analyses never strayed outside the acceptable norms of science, that he testified without an agenda and that his findings were either being deliberately misinterpreted or unfairly conflated with the erroneous work of others.

"I think they were thorough, complete and withstood the test of time," Dr. Hayne said of his reports.

Dr. Lloyd White, who was Mississippi's state medical examiner from 1989 to 1992, said the problems concerning Dr. Hayne, while extreme, were rooted in the nature of the system in which he worked. Such problems, he said, are not unique to Mississippi, and are able to persist because scientific testimony is too often viewed with uncritical reverence and because the people affected by its misuse usually have little support or sympathy.

"I had a prosecutor one time tell me, 'These guys may not have done it but they're bad guys and they have to go to prison,' " Dr. White said. "The whole thing kind of rolls downhill from there. And in the interim you can't help but wonder how many people ended up in prison who didn't get a fair trial."

But much of the work at the Naraha-Minami Elementary School, about 12 miles away from the ravaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, tells another story. For eight hours a day, construction workers blast buildings with water, cut grass and shovel dirt and foliage into big black plastic bags — which, with nowhere to go, dot Naraha's landscape like funeral mounds.

More than a year and a half since the nuclear crisis, much of Japan's post-Fukushima cleanup remains primitive, slapdash and bereft of the cleanup methods lauded by government scientists as effective in removing harmful radioactive cesium from the environment.

Local businesses that responded to a government call to research and develop decontamination methods have found themselves largely left out. American and other foreign companies with proven expertise in environmental remediation, invited to Japan in June to show off their technologies, have similarly found little scope to participate.

Recent reports in the local media of cleanup crews dumping contaminated soil and leaves into rivers has focused attention on the sloppiness of the cleanup.

"What's happening on the ground is a disgrace," said Akifumi Shiga, chief executive of Shiga Toso, a refurbishing company based in Iwaki, Fukushima. The company developed a more effective and safer way to remove cesium from concrete without using water, which could repollute the environment. "We've been ready to help for ages, but they say they've got their own way of cleaning up," he said.

Shiga Toso's technology was tested and identified by government scientists as "fit to deploy immediately," but it has been used only at two small locations, including a concrete drain at the Naraha-Minami school.

Instead, both the central and local governments have handed over much of the 1 trillion yen decontamination effort to Japan's largest construction companies. The politically connected companies have little radiological cleanup expertise and critics say they have cut corners to employ primitive — even potentially hazardous — techniques.

The construction companies have the great advantage of available manpower. Here in Naraha, about 1,500 cleanup workers are deployed every day to power-spray buildings, scrape soil off fields, and remove fallen leaves and undergrowth from forests and mountains, according to an official at the Maeda Corporation, which is in charge of the cleanup.

That number, the official said, will soon rise to 2,000, a large deployment rarely seen on even large-sale projects like dams and bridges.

The construction companies suggest new technologies may work, but are not necessarily cost-effective.

"In such a big undertaking, cost-effectiveness becomes very important," said Takeshi Nishikawa, an executive based in Fukushima for the Kashima Corporation, Japan's largest construction company. The company is in charge of the cleanup in the city of Tamura, a part of which lies within the 12-mile exclusion zone. "We bring skills and expertise to the project," Mr. Nishikawa said.

Kashima also built the reactor buildings for all six reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, leading some critics to question why control of the cleanup effort has been left to companies with deep ties to the nuclear industry.

Also worrying, industry experts say, are cleanup methods used by the construction companies that create loose contamination that can become airborne or enter the water.

At many sites, contaminated runoff from cleanup projects is not fully recovered and is being released into the environment, multiple people involved in the decontamination work said.

In addition, there are no concrete plans about storing the vast amounts of contaminated soil and foliage the cleanup is generating, which the environment ministry estimates will amount to at least 29 million cubic meters, or more than a billion cubic feet.

The contaminated dirt lies in bags on roadsides, in abandoned fields and on the coastline, where experts say they are at risk from high waves or another tsunami.

"This isn't decontamination — it's sweeping up dirt and leaves and absolutely irresponsible," said Tomoya Yamauchi, an expert in radiation measurement at Kobe University who has been helping Fukushima communities test the effectiveness of various decontamination methods. "Japan has started up its big public works machine, and the cleanup has become an end in itself. It's a way for the government to appear to be doing something for Fukushima."

In some of the more heavily contaminated parts of Fukushima, which covers about 100 square miles, the central government aims to reduce radiation exposure levels to below 20 millisieverts a year by 2014, a level the government says is safe for the general public. But experts doubt whether this is achievable, especially with current cleanup methods.

After some recent bad press, the central government has promised to step up checks of the decontamination work. "We will not betray the trust of the local communities," Shinji Inoue, the environment vice minister, said Monday.

There had been high hopes about the government's disaster reconstruction plan. It was announced four months after the March 2011 disaster, which declared Japan would draw on the most advanced decontamination know-how possible.

But confusion over who would conduct and pay for the cleanup slowed the government response. It took nine months for the central government to decide that it would take charge of decontamination work in 11 of the heaviest-contaminated towns and cities in Fukushima, leaving the rest for local governments to handle.

In October, the state-backed research organization, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency, announced that it was soliciting new decontamination technology from across the country.

By early November, the agency had identified 25 technologies that its own tests showed removed harmful cesium from the environment.

A new system to trap, filter and recycle contaminated runoff, developed by the local machinery maker Fukushima Komatsu Forklift, was one of technologies. But since then, the company has not been called on to participate in the state-led cleanup.

"For the big general contractors, it's all about the bottom line," said Masao Sakai, an executive at the company. "New technology is available to prevent harmful runoff, but they stick to the same old methods."

The Japanese government also made an initial effort to contact foreign companies for decontamination support. It invited 32 companies from the United States that specialize in remediation technologies like strip-painting and waste minimization, to show off their expertise to Japanese government officials, experts and companies involved in the cleanup.

Opinions on the trip's effectiveness vary among participants, but in the six months since, not a single foreign company has been employed in Japan's cleanup, according to the trip's participants and Japan's Environment Ministry.

"Japan has a rich history in nuclear energy, but as you know, the U.S. has a much more diverse experience in dealing with the cleanup of very complicated nuclear processing facilities. We've been cleaning it up since World War II," said Casey Bunker, a director at RJ Lee, a scientific consulting company based in Pennsylvania that took part in the visit.

"There was a little of, 'Hey, bring your tools over and show us how it works.' But they ultimately wanted to do it themselves, to fix things themselves," Mr. Bunker said. "There didn't seem to be a lot of interest in a consultative relationship moving forward."

Japanese officials said adapting overseas technologies presented a particular challenge.

"Even if a method works overseas, the soil in Japan is different, for example," said Hidehiko Nishiyama, deputy director at the environment ministry, who is in charge of the Fukushima cleanup. "And if we have foreigners roaming around Fukushima, they might scare the old grandmas and granddads there."

Some local residents are losing faith in the decontamination effort.

"I thought Japan was a technologically advanced country. I thought we'd be able to clean up better than this," said Yoshiko Suganami, a legal worker who was forced to abandon her home and office over two miles from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. "It's clear the decontamination drive isn't really about us any more."

Most of the clients at Ms. Suganami's new practice in Fukushima city are also nuclear refugees who have lost their jobs and homes and are trying to avert bankruptcy. She said few expect to ever return.

Her lawyer, Robert N. Shapiro, confirmed her death. She lived in Manhattan and Marblehead, Mass.

Beginning in 1963, as the first full-time architecture critic at an American newspaper, she opened the priestly precincts of design and planning to everyday readers. For that, she won the first Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, in 1970. More recently, she was the architecture critic of The Wall Street Journal.

"Mrs. Huxtable invented a new profession," a valedictory Times editorial said in 1981, just as she was leaving the newspaper, "and, quite simply, changed the way most of us see and think about man-made environments."

At a time when architects were still in thrall to blank-slate urban renewal, Ms. Huxtable championed preservation — not because old buildings were quaint, or even necessarily historical landmarks, but because they contributed vitally to the cityscape. She was appalled at how profit dictated planning and led developers to squeeze the most floor area onto the least amount of land with the fewest public amenities.

She had no use for banality, monotony, artifice or ostentation, for private greed or governmental ineptitude. She could be eloquent or impertinent, even sarcastic. Gracefully poised in person, she did not shy in print from comparing the worst of contemporary American architecture to the totalitarian excesses of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin.

"You must love a country very much to be as little satisfied with it as she," Daniel Patrick Moynihan, later a United States senator from New York, wrote in his preface to a 1970 collection of Ms. Huxtable's writings, "Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard?"

It was the first of several books whose titles alone conveyed her impatient, irreverent tone. These included "Kicked a Building Lately?" (1976) and "Goodbye History, Hello Hamburger" (1986).

Though knowledgeable about architectural styles, Ms. Huxtable often seemed more interested in social substance. She invited readers to consider a building not as an assembly of pilasters and entablatures but as a public statement whose form and placement had real consequences for its neighbors as well as its occupants.

"I wish people would stop asking me what my favorite buildings are," Ms. Huxtable wrote in The Times in 1971, adding, "I do not think it really matters very much what my personal favorites are, except as they illuminate principles of design and execution useful and essential to the collective spirit that we call society.

"For irreplaceable examples of that spirit I will do real battle."

Actually, there was no mistaking what Ms. Huxtable liked — Lever House, the Ford Foundation Building and the CBS Building in Manhattan; the landmark Bronx Grit Chamber; Boston's City Hall; the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington; Pennzoil Place in Houston — and, even more delectably, what she did not.

"The new museum resembles a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops," she wrote in 1964 about the Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle. Her description came to be synonymous with the structure itself, "the lollipop building," and was probably more familiar to New Yorkers than the name of the architect: Edward Durell Stone.

The long-abandoned gallery has since been substantially altered as the Museum of Arts and Design. It might be argued that Ms. Huxtable's lollipop epithet helped doom preservationists' later efforts to save the original facade. But Mr. Stone's romantic brand of monumental modernism was never to her liking.

"Albert Speer would have approved," she said in 1971 about his Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, linking Mr. Stone indirectly to the Nazis' chief architect. "The building is a national tragedy. It is a cross between a concrete candy box and a marble sarcophagus in which the art of architecture lies buried."

This was a far cry from the fawning coverage of new buildings that Ms. Huxtable deplored in the newspapers of the 1950s. And it was welcomed.

Ada Louise Landman was born on March 14, 1921, to Leah Rosenthal Landman and Dr. Michael Louis Landman. She grew up in Manhattan in a Beaux-Arts apartment house, the St. Urban, at Central Park West and 89th Street, and wandered enthralled through Grand Central Terminal, the Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum.

She attracted notice in The Times at an early age with her stage-set designs for Hunter College productions of "The Yellow Jacket" in 1940 and "H.M.S. Pinafore" in 1941. After graduating from Hunter in 1941, she attended New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. But her most treasured academic home was probably the Avery Architectural Library at Columbia University.

Out of school, she was hired by Bloomingdale's to sell a furniture line with works by Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames. "Many young architects and designers made the obligatory tour of the rooms," she recalled. "One of them noticed and married me."

That was L. Garth Huxtable, an industrial designer. He took many of the photographs that illustrated his wife's books. The couple also collaborated in designing tableware for the Four Seasons restaurant, which opened in 1959 in the Seagram Building. Mr. Huxtable died in 1989. Ms. Huxtable left no immediate survivors.

Ms. Huxtable was assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art from 1946 to 1950. She was a Fulbright fellow, studying Italian architecture and design in 1950-52, and a Guggenheim fellow in 1958. She had also begun writing for architectural journals.

In 1958 she addressed a broader audience in The New York Times Magazine with an article criticizing how newspapers covered urban development. "Superblocks are built, the physiognomy and services of the city are changed, without discussion," Ms. Huxtable wrote. "Architecture is the stepchild of the popular press."

Five years later she was invited to become a critic by Clifton Daniel, then assistant managing editor of The Times. Though architectural commentary was not new — a line could be traced largely through magazines to the 19th century through Aline B. Saarinen, Lewis Mumford, Montgomery Schuyler and others — Ms. Huxtable was being asked to write full time for a general-interest newspaper.

"At first she turned him down, saying daily journalism would disrupt her private life," Nan Robertson wrote in her 1992 book "The Girls in the Balcony: Women, Men and The New York Times." "Daniel looked elsewhere, assiduously, but in his own words, 'I couldn't find anyone better than she was.' "

Ms. Robertson said Ms. Huxtable followed in the tradition of the foreign affairs columnist Anne O'Hare McCormick: "so good they could not be ignored by the men who ran the establishment, and so personally assertive that they would not be ignored."

For her part Ms. Huxtable said The Times made a "brave gamble" in the "belief that the quality of the built world mattered, at a time when environment was still only a dictionary word."

Feared by some architects, loathed by some developers and not universally admired by scholars, Ms. Huxtable was nonetheless "a darling of the public," Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman wrote in "New York 1960," published in 1995.

Her exacting standards were well enough known to be a punch line for a New Yorker cartoon by Alan Dunn in 1968. It shows a construction site so raw that only a single steel column has been erected. A hard-hat worker holding a newspaper tells the architect, "Ada Louise Huxtable already doesn't like it!"

In 1969 the Pulitzer Prizes were expanded to include an award for distinguished criticism or commentary. The first, in 1970, was split by the judges between Ms. Huxtable for criticism and Marquis W. Childs of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch for commentary. She was the second woman, after Mrs. McCormick, 33 years earlier, to win a Pulitzer for The Times. In 1973 she was the second woman ever named to the Times editorial board. (Mrs. McCormick had been the first.) She was succeeded as the daily architecture critic by Paul Goldberger but continued to write about architecture in a Sunday column. She left The Times when she was appointed a MacArthur Fellow in 1981.

In her wake, architectural criticism became a staple at big newspapers and grist for subsequent Pulitzer Prizes.

"Before Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture was not a part of the public dialogue," Mr. Goldberger said in 1996.

Ms. Huxtable was the author of 11 books. "Four Walking Tours of Modern Architecture in New York City" (1961), included a characteristic critique of the Pan Am Building, which was then being built directly behind Grand Central. (It is now the Met Life building.)

Rather than aesthetics, Ms. Huxtable focused on how the tower would alter the scale of Park Avenue, adding "an extraordinary burden to existing pedestrian and transportation facilities." She continued, "Its antisocial character directly contradicts the teachings of Walter Gropius, who has collaborated in its design."

When The Times named her a critic, Ms. Huxtable was working on a six-volume series on New York City architecture. Only the first volume, "Classic New York: Georgian Gentility to Greek Elegance," was published, in 1964.

In it, she extolled not just lovely Greek Revival temples but also mongrelized houses from the early 1800s. "They rank as 'street architecture' rather than as 'landmarks,' " she said. "Their value is contrast, character, visual and emotional change of pace, a sudden sense of intimacy, scale, all evocative of the qualities of another century."

Her interest in preservation did not make her an enemy of modernity. In "The Tall Building Artistically Reconsidered: The Search for a Skyscraper Style" (1984), Ms. Huxtable said the glass curtain-wall skyscraper, epitomized by the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, offered "a superb vernacular, probably the handsomest and most useful set of architectural conventions since the Georgian row house."

What infuriated her were "authentic reproductions" of historical architecture and "surrogate environments" like Colonial Williamsburg and master-planned communities like the Disney Company's Celebration, Fla. "Private preserves of theme park and supermall increasingly substitute for nature and the public realm, while nostalgia for what never was replaces the genuine urban survival," she wrote in "The Unreal America: Architecture and Illusion" (1997).

Ms. Huxtable's last book, in 2008, was "On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change." And her last column, published in The Journal on Dec. 3, concerned the impending reconstruction of the New York Public Library eliminating the central stacks. Typically enough, it was titled, "Undertaking Its Destruction."

Ultimately, however, what animated and sustained her were not the mistakes but the triumphs. As she said of New York City in The Times in 1968:

"When it is good, this is a city of fantastic strength, sophistication and beauty. It is like no other city in time or place. Visitors and even natives rarely use the words urban character or environmental style, but that is what they are reacting to with awe in the presence of massed, concentrated, steel, stone, power and life."

Two series with that Notre Dame defense backed up near its goal line, protecting a single-digit lead. Two series in which a pair of opponents ran straight ahead, up the middle, close enough to the end zone to measure by feet, or inches. Two series that clinched two victories in the final minutes.

For all the reasons Notre Dame arrived back at the national championship — reasons like Coach Brian Kelly and quarterback Everett Golson and linebacker Manti Te'o — none proved as important or overlooked as the work the defense did when it was backed up near the end zone. Notre Dame stopped Stanford there in overtime, inside the 1-yard-line. The Irish also turned back Southern California at the 1-yard-line in their regular-season finale.

Had either of those teams gained that single yard, Notre Dame's magical season would have ended in a series of almosts — almost undefeated, almost B.C.S. title game bound.

Instead, Notre Dame highlighted the art of the goal-line stand, a sequence among the most straightforward and difficult in football. It did so, according to the defensive coordinator Bob Diaco, because of the consistency of its approach.

"The goal-line stands are a function of players knowing clearly exactly what to do, playing with whole heart, whole body, whole mind," Diaco said. "No situation will be too much for us to take on, and no place on the field will we get discouraged, no matter where the ball is placed."

That mentality carried Notre Dame through so many close games this season. It made the difference between a good team and a great one. It was a mind-set, Te'o said, that the Irish lacked in recent seasons.

Notre Dame's ability to stop offenses near the end zone, combined with Alabama's ability to score once its offense closed in, provided an important subplot before the title tilt. The Crimson Tide scored roughly 8 times out of every 10 times it advanced inside an opponent's 20-yard-line. The Fighting Irish allowed opponents inside the 20 only 33 times, and in those instances, they yielded a scant eight touchdowns.

This led Alabama players and coaches to laud the Notre Dame defense throughout the week that led up to the championship game. The offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier labeled the Fighting Irish's front seven the best the Crimson Tide would see this season. Receiver Kevin Norwood even paid Notre Dame the ultimate compliment.

"They're like an SEC defense," he said, in reference to Alabama's conference, known for its tough, physical, stout defenses.

For as long as teams have played football, the goal-line stand has proved to be a game-changer, a brute-force sequence, man against man, power against power, strength against strength, that greatly shifted momentum from a team that is about to score to a team that refused to yield any points.

There is little technical artistry involved, the focus instead on simple concepts and difficult execution. Defensive linemen must get underneath the pads of their offensive counterparts, gain leverage and push the offense backward. They call this setting a new line of scrimmage. Linebackers must fill the gaps behind the linemen. Cornerbacks must cover receivers, should an offense pass, or pinch inside from the edge, wary of a running back leaping over the pile.

The defense cannot expect officials to call many penalties that close, in crucial moments. The sheer mass of bodies in such a confined space makes that difficult, as do the stakes involved.

"It's fight or flight," Notre Dame safety Zeke Motta said. "You have to make this stop. There's no other option. You dream of situations like this your whole life."

Like against Stanford in October. Notre Dame led, 20-13, after it scored first in overtime. Stanford drove to the 4-yard-line. Four times the Cardinal handed the ball to Stepfan Taylor. Four times Notre Dame stopped him short, although in the final instance Taylor inched so close to the end zone that many believe he actually scored.

Across a sunblasted courtyard and up a dingy staircase, another globe — a digital globe — stands in a darkened room. This globe is a shining sphere of light. Children stand awe-struck; adults of a certain age may be reminded of images like Apollo 8's Earthrise photograph, while Tolkien fans of all ages will recall the spherical, swirling "palantír" of Saruman in "The Lord of the Rings" (forged in the days when Middle Earth was still flat).

Until recently, cost and technical limitations have largely confined these modern spheres to institutional settings like science centers. But as technology improves and prices fall, it's growing more likely that a digital orb will someday arrive in a classroom or boardroom — even a living room — near you.

As the name suggests, a digital globe is a spherically shaped display screen. Like the old-school globes once common in classrooms, digital globes vary in size, but a typical model is about 24 inches across. Unlike the globes of your childhood, the image on a digital globe can be changed with the touch of a button. Controlled by a keyboard or tablet computer, a digital globe can toggle between familiar, static images, like the world's political boundaries, topography or vegetation. It can animate complex phenomena, like the formation of weather systems, the effect of global warming on wolverine habitats or the annual pulse of sea ice. It can display the surface of the moon, the churning azure cloudscapes of Neptune or the celestial globe — the night sky.

A digital globe can illuminate the human planet: wars, colonization, the formation of diaspora, modern trade flows or air traffic. It can also help teach math, play games, show movies or serve as a blank canvas for one's inner, spherical artist. Michael Starobin, 44, a multimedia professional and the producer of seven spherical films, says this brave new world is limited by only one rule: "Respect the roundness."

Easier said than done. For centuries mapmakers have tried to smooth a round planet onto flat maps with as little distortion (and controversy: see Mercator, G.) as possible. Makers of globes (including, we forget, Mercator himself) confronted an opposite problem: how to efficiently place or print information onto a spherical surface.

For digital globe engineers, the holy grail remains a spherical computer screen. Edward R. Tufte, the author of "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information," is enthusiastic about the potential of digital globes to remind us of earth's offline realities — "by forgetting about the 3D whole Earth, flatland economic optimizing leads to global pessimizing" — as well as the possibility that a company like Apple will someday soon roll out a Retina-caliber spherical display. Until that happens, digital globes will rely on optical projectors. But how do you project an image so that it lands equally bright, focused and undistorted on the surface of a sphere?

There are various optical solutions. But the broadest distinction is whether the image is externally or internally projected. The market for externally projected globes — e.g., Science on a Sphere, the popular devices installed at around 85 institutional locations — is limited by cost, the fixed nature of the installation and the fact that a viewer who gets too close may find herself contemplating one of the memorable descriptions of the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent, "the shadow of God on Earth."

Rather, the digital globes that may soon break out of the museum use internal projectors. Even then, they cast an imperfect light upon the world. A small portion of the extreme Southern Hemisphere (i.e., around the South Pole, if you've chosen to align the Earth's axis vertically) is blocked by the projector and base. Brightness, while vastly improved, also remains an issue.

Beyond those, the biggest obstacle is cost: around $43,000 for a 24-inch diameter HyperGlobe from iGlobe of Franklin, N.H.; $40,000 for a 32-inch OmniGlobe from ARC Science of Loveland, Colo., or $21,000 for a 24-inch Magic Planet from the market leader, Global Imagination of Santa Clara, Calif.

These prices, though, are falling. Mike Foody, the C.E.O. of Global Imagination, says that he hopes to have education-discounted prices down to $2,500 within a year or two. If he succeeds, that would be within the price point of other high-tech classroom equipment, like interactive whiteboards.

Not every school has been content to wait. Since 2007, the Mayo High School in Rochester, Minn., has used a digital globe in earth science lessons. Lawrence Mascotti, director of the school's planetarium, noted that children today display such confidence with digital media that he regards the globe as a means for teachers to "play" at the students' level, rather than vice versa.

He also finds the sphere a "more democratic" educational tool than textbooks or computer screens. While some children have difficulty with language-based concepts and mental manipulation, the digital globe works for nearly everyone, Mr. Mascotti says. "It's simple. The mind follows the eye."

Digital globes have obvious relevance to earth sciences and astronomy. But their potential in other subject areas is already being exploited. In China, where digital globes have found particular favor in schools, less than half the lesson plans are science-based, said Mr. Foody (in an ironic reversal of globalization's typical tide, around 80 percent of Global Imagination's orders are bound for China). Chinese schools use them mostly to teach social sciences, like the geography of religion and language, and history.

Whether the digital globe is used to teach earth sciences and astronomy or social sciences, the display itself generally represents Earth (or another astronomical body). But Math on a Sphere, a National Science Foundation-financed project, treats the digital globe as a generic spherical screen. In the study's workshops, children use math skills to build and manipulate their own spherical creations. The results — which suggest art as much as math — will be applicable to classroom-based globes, too.

Sherry Hsi, a project investigator at the University of California, Berkeley, observes that however technically sophisticated children today may seem, opportunities to instruct a computer directly are increasingly rare. With Math on a Sphere, children give a computer specific graphical instructions, and manipulate the results live on the "uniquely compelling" sphere. According to Dr. Hsi, many parents have been particularly surprised by the interest their daughters have taken in this literally three-dimensional programming.

Digital globes already appear in the occasional corporate lobby, perhaps an infinitely adaptable replacement for tired time-zone clocks. Upstairs, a digital globe could take on more sophisticated deployments: summarizing sales data or market penetration, say, or resource allocation, or the locations of globe-trotting team members.

It is after hours, though, that digital globes may find the most unlimited potential. If prices bring them into the realm of home use, then a globe may provide a luminous living room centerpiece for adults and an educational tool for children. Think too, of music visualizations, digital aquariums, geotagged vacation photos, real-time flight tracking of your spouse's trip, Risk-style "board" games. Or the mischievous, blinking digital eye that followed trick-or-treaters as they walked up to Mr. Foody's house on recent Halloweens.

When it comes to digital displays, the iPad has set a high bar."High,"Mr. Foody said. "But flat."