From a memo distributed in September, 1996, to conservative radio talk-show hosts by Rich Galen, director of political communications for Newt Gingrich. Aside from his dabblings in nonlinear dynamics, the House Speaker is otherwise well known for his rather breathless recommendations for Alvin Toffler's book of generalist prognostications, The Third Wave, among other objects of his erudition.

There is a relatively new branch of science called Chaos Theory. A common illustration of this theory is the phenomenon of a butterfly that flutters its wings in Argentina and ultimately causes a thunderstorm in New Jersey.

But another part of the theory holds that a complex system will change, well, chaotically. To take the butterfly-to-storm example, you will not be able to predict, with any degree of precision, when lightning will form and strike within that storm. One second there will be no lightning, and the next second the sky is bright. Chaos.

Or suppose you take a wineglass and begin to squeeze its upper rim. If you continue to apply pressure, at some point the glass will break. The system will collapse entirely and instantaneously. A half hour prior to the glass breaking, an observer would say that he was looking at a glass. He would not be able to tell you he was looking at a potential pile of shards.

What does this have to do with the presidential campaign? My strong impression is that there will come a time, sometime between now and November 5, when the Clinton campaign, like the glass, will entirely and instantaneously collapse. One moment it will be a campaign, the next moment it will be unrecognizable.

That's why we don't have to be frightened by the current Dole-Clinton poll numbers. At some point the poll numbers are going to shift entirely and instantaneously. After that happens, every observer will realize that the Clinton campaign is no more. Reporters constantly ask me how Dole can come back. I tell them that no amount of polling about the status of that glass half an hour before it collapsed changed the fact that it did, indeed, collapse.

Noting that Bob Dole was twenty-three points behind in the polls, Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson correspondingly told his group, "In my personal opinion, there's got to be a miracle from Almighty God to pull it out, and that could happen." As for himself, the night before his defeat Mr. Dole made a hopeful appeal to the memory of Harry Truman's 1948 surprise victory and left it at that.

On June 3, 1996, the New Yorker published a similarly reasoned appeal to nonlinearity. Malcolm Gladwell posited that the recent and unexpected free-fall decline in New York City's crime rate was not necessarily due to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's aggressive policy of punishing petty crime—using James Q. Wilson's "broken-window" theory of community breakdown as a model—but rather to a new theory that used epidemiology as a metaphor. Under this theory, crime is viewed as analogous to a medical epidemic that disappears suddenly and unpredictably only after it has run its course, seemingly impervious to direct treatment. Social pathologies may be determined by seemingly unrelated "tipping points"—plausibly relevant variables often referred to sarcastically by critics as "root causes." If social programs designed to affect these tipping points produce unsatisfactory results, Gladwell suggests that spending just a bit more may "tip" the variables the other way to produce excellent results—because the results can be expected to be nonlinear. Gladwell suggests parenthetically that this may rescue the tarnished image of modern liberalism, also remarking cattily that Gingrich, along with the rest of the new Republican congressional majority, could not be expected to possess the intellectual resources to appreciate the implications of such an advanced, innovative idea.

And finally, Boston Globe staff entertainment writer Jim Sullivan profiles rock legend David Bowie, February 9, 1997. In the article, Sullivan gently chides Bowie for a pretentious comment he made in an interview the previous year, in which he described himself as "a populist and a postmodern Buddhist surfing my way through the chaos of the 20th century." But apparently, Mr. Sullivan couldn't help sharing some deep thoughts of his own about chaos:

A mathematician might look at Bowie as a musical equivalent of fractal mathematics, where chaos is created through something called "amplification via interation," in which the outcome of a system is fed back to the system itself.

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