In totalitarian regimes, some people take huge risks for the freedom to be themselves; in this democracy, some people take huge risks for the freedom to be someone else — a celebrity.

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The Gosselin family in a scene from Season 5 of the reality show “Jon and Kate Plus 8.”

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Crashers Met Obama; Secret Service Apologizes (November 28, 2009)

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Fame has a spellbinding power in American society, the one thing that can trump wealth, talent, breeding and even elected office. Reality shows and social Web sites like Facebook long ago knocked down the barriers that kept ordinary people trapped in obscurity. And instant renown is nothing if not democratic.

Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple who sneaked into the Obamas’ first state dinner on Tuesday night, are loopy, through-the-looking-cam versions of those East Germans who tried to climb over the Berlin Wall and flee Communism during the cold war: the odds are bad and the risks are real, even deadly, but a foolhardy few do make it through.

The Salahis are now famous, or at least infamous, and they have not yet suffered any serious consequences for their security breach at the dinner in honor of the prime minister of India. The Virginia arrivistes — they promote wine, polo and themselves — had larger ambitions than just meeting and greeting President Obama and Michelle Obama, which they did with impunity, and hobnobbing with the Bidens and Rahm Emanuel. They apparently donned black tie and red and gold sari to raise Mrs. Salahi’s chances of making the final cut for the reality show “The Real Housewives of D.C.” (Camera crews followed the couple this fall but a full cast has not yet been announced.)

And in all likelihood, the stunt that drove a dumbfounded Secret Service to apologize, infuriated the Department of Homeland Security and stunned the nation did the trick. Bravo has not yet said it would drop the dashing blond Mrs. Salahi; Larry King has already booked her for his show. The Washington social climbers had a plan, even if it was lunatic and dangerous. So did the father who pretended that his son was trapped in a runaway balloon, and in much the same reality-show fevered way, so did Jon and Kate Gosselin when they ripped their marriage apart on camera.

Richard and Mayumi Heene, the parents of Falcon, the so-called Balloon Boy, were not as lucky as the Salahis. They briefly held cable news in their thrall last month, but after the local Colorado sheriff concluded that the 50-mile balloon chase was a fake, Mr. Heene pleaded guilty to a felony charge of falsely influencing the authorities and faces jail time. But even that may turn out to be worth it to the Heenes, amateur storm chasers who appeared twice on ABC’s reality show “Wife Swap.”

One of the letdowns of fame nowadays is that precisely because it is so easily and widely bestowed, it grows ever more fleeting and faint. Perhaps because they were pitching their own science-based reality show to production companies, the Heenes took absurd chances, behaving like addicts recklessly chasing the next high. Their television projects are apparently stillborn, but that doesn’t mean the Heenes — or the Gosselins or the Salahis — will never be heard from again.

Even bad or addictive behavior has its own reality niche, notably in the sanitarium soap operas of Dr. Drew Pinsky, the star of “Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew.” Not everyone on his shows shakes off a drug, alcohol or sex habit, but a few do briefly revive their B-list careers.

Long before reality television came along, fame turned some people crazy and some crazy people sought fame. The insane sometimes do horrible things to get attention: John Hinckley Jr. said he shot Ronald Reagan to impress the actress Jodie Foster; Mark David Chapman told his first parole board hearing in 2000 that he shot and killed John Lennon to get noticed. (“I was feeling like I was worthless, and maybe the root of it is a self-esteem issue,” Mr. Chapman said, according to the transcript. “I felt like nothing, and I felt if I shot him, I would become something, which is not true at all.”)

Reality television didn’t create a new psychiatric illness, but it did give a platform to the nutty and marginally disturbed. And that is still a relatively new disorder.

The Secret Service is a security force entirely devoted to protecting the president and his family from assault and assassins; it is not trained to screen for people who will risk arrest and breach every safety barrier — and sense of social decorum — for something as mundane and flimsy as media attention.

Now they know.

For Thanksgiving dinner, what side dish would you prefer to accompany your turkey — a serving of well-marinated conflict over how much or how little you eat, or some nice, fresh criticism of your cooking skills?

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As families gather around the country this week to celebrate Thanksgiving, many of them are bracing for the intense emotions of the holiday meal. The combination of food and family often brings out longstanding tensions, criticism and battles for control. Simple issues like cooking with butter or asking for seconds are fraught with family conflict and commentary.

“If we had an audiotape of a lot of families talking together, you would hear so much chatter about what other people are eating, who gained weight, who lost weight, who’s eating like a bird, who’s having seconds,” notes Cynthia M. Bulik, director of the eating disorders program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Bulik told the story of a patient whose mother scolded her for not eating her homemade cookies. “You don’t like my cookies?” she asked. As a result, the daughter relented and took a cookie. But when she then reached for a second, her mother scolded her again. “Do you really think you need another one?” she asked her.

In another family, a mother-in-law agreed to show up for Thanksgiving only if she could be assured none of the foods would be prepared with butter. “I’m not doing butter right now,” she said. “If you do butter, I’m not coming.”

Many people have an unhealthy preoccupation with body image or have undiagnosed eating problems that they may then try to impose on others, said Dr. Kathryn Zerbe, professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and a longtime expert on eating disorders.

A Long Island woman, who like others interviewed for this column didn’t want to be named, said she and her family traveled 12 hours by train for a summer vacation gathering with her husband’s family. When her husband asked for seconds, the sister-in-law said there wasn’t any more food.

“There was all this food around, but she had cut us off,” the woman said. “We were just really shocked we were being told you can’t eat any more after coming all this way. We found out later she really controlled food in the household.”

The woman said that in her own family, she faced a different problem: the pressure to eat more. During holiday meals, her son, who has never been a big eater, was constantly pestered about not eating enough. “There was a lot of pressure on him when he would visit my family,” she said. “To try to get him to eat, my mother would say this terrible thing to him. She’d say: ‘You know you want to be a winner. You want to be a winner.’ ”

A Boston physician said that in her household, holiday meals would inevitably lead to a food fight. Her father, a headache sufferer, had quit eating chocolate years earlier and became obsessed with stopping others from eating it, blaming chocolate for causing colds and other ills.

“Both of my grandmothers liked to cook chocolate cakes,” she said. “He would always get angry whenever they would offer him some, and he would not infrequently cause a scene. He would fly into a rage if he thought we had some chocolate.”

People who are overweight are particularly vulnerable to family criticism at holiday time. One person told the story of a mother-in-law who would prepare a huge holiday spread and then berate her overweight daughter for eating it.

“Holiday time is an extraordinarily difficult time for anybody with any kind of food issue,” Dr. Zerbe said. “There are complex family relationships around eating.”

If you know you have a family member with a tendency to criticize what others eat or don’t eat, it might help to speak up about it and set some rules before the meal starts, Dr. Zerbe advised. Make a good-natured announcement that comments about how much or how little someone is eating are off limits, she said.

“Be prepared that the person won’t stop talking about it,” Dr. Zerbe said. “They can’t; it’s a form of control. But you have to battle that intrusiveness by putting up stronger family boundaries. Intervene and intervene again.”

Betsy, a high school teacher in Boston, said she had longstanding issues with her mother-in-law, some of which began after she underwent a Caesarean section. After the delivery, her mother-in-law, a slim woman, brought her only light lunches of lettuce salad, even though she was famished after nursing her baby. “Because of the incision, I couldn’t go down the stairs to the kitchen,” she said. “I called my husband at work, weeping, and asked him to come home and make me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

Betsy said her cousin also complained of holiday meal tension with her own family, so the two devised a strategy to help each other cope. Each made bingo cards, but instead of numbers, the squares were filled in with some of the negative phrases they expected to hear during the meal, like “That outfit is interesting” or “Your children won’t sit still.” As comments were made at the separate family celebrations, each woman would mark her card.

“Whoever fills up a bingo row first,” Betsy said, “sneaks off to call the other and say, ‘Bingo!’ ”

Cambridge, Mass.

TO hear both critics and defenders talk about the fitness of Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, you’d think the most successful Supreme Court justices had been warm, collegial consensus-builders. But history tells a different story. Measured by their lasting impact on Constitution and country, many of the greatest justices have been irascible, socially distant, personally isolated, arrogant or even downright mean.

Stephen J. Field, appointed by Lincoln, once insulted a woman’s romantic past so outrageously from the bench that her husband later attacked him on a train — and was shot dead by Field’s bodyguard. Louis D. Brandeis was famously distant: one of his law clerks recounted working until the small hours of the morning on a challenging opinion; as he slid his draft under the justice’s door, silent fingers pulled it through, with no human acknowledgment of the joint effort.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. could be charming when he wanted — he especially enjoyed conversation with beautiful, titled women — but he could be brutally dismissive as well. He notoriously approved of sterilizing a woman believed to have a low intelligence because, he said, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Anyone’s list of today’s justices with a chance at greatness would include Antonin Scalia, yet this brilliant jurist once called Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s view in an important abortion case “irrational” and “not to be taken seriously” — and that was just what he put in writing.

But four justices in particular, all nominees of President Franklin D. Roosevelt who sat together on the bench, formed the best example of how personal friction can fuel constitutional importance, and of how the roots of greatness may be found in difficult personalities.

The epitome of a great justice with a rough character was William O. Douglas, the liberal who found the right to privacy in the “penumbras” and “emanations” of the Bill of Rights, and thus paved the way for landmark decisions on abortion and gay rights. Douglas was an egotist who barely spoke to his colleagues, loved to vote alone, and once said that his law clerks were “the lowest form of human life.” His personal life was a mess: his divorce in 1953 was the first ever for a sitting justice; he soon followed it up with the second and then the third (each of his four wives was younger and blonder than the previous one). It has never been said better of anyone that he loved humanity and hated people.

Yet Douglas’s extraordinary accomplishment in securing autonomy as a constitutional guarantee can be traced in no small part to his (perhaps somewhat unhinged) search for personal fulfillment. And his early advocacy of environmentalism had much to do with his fondness for spending his time out of doors — alone.

Serving alongside Douglas was another great liberal, Hugo Black, who began his political career by joining the Ku Klux Klan and relying in part on its extensive organization to get himself elected a senator from Alabama. Black then concealed his membership while in Washington, never mentioning it even to Roosevelt. As a sitting senator he was confirmed to the court in less than a week, so by the time the story of his Klan membership became public, he was already in (black) robes.

Soon after, the Klan connection was reported and, pressed by public outrage, Black went on national radio and explained with repulsive precision that “some of my best and most intimate friends are Catholics and Jews,” while among his friends were “many members of the colored race.” When some press outlets — including this newspaper — continued to mention his past, Black’s strong sense of Southern honor was offended, and he bore a grudge for decades.

In the long run, though, it was precisely Black’s desire to absolve himself of the taint of racism that helped him to become a staunch advocate of civil rights. Going back to the original meaning of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause, he insisted that separate could never be equal. As the most stalwart supporter of this position on the court, he pushed hard for desegregation by judicial fiat — even though he knew the South would fight the decision tooth and nail.

Douglas and Black’s particular nemesis was Felix Frankfurter, the liberal law professor turned conservative justice who also had plenty of trouble getting along with his colleagues. Frankfurter thought Douglas was deciding cases to help his vice presidential aspirations, which were live both in 1944 and 1948; he privately called Douglas “the most cynical, shamelessly amoral character I’ve ever known.” Douglas, meanwhile, thought Frankfurter was an unbearable pedant. Instead of speaking to the other justices in their conference, Frankfurter lectured them. Douglas, with characteristic wit, said that Frankfurter’s harangues lasted exactly 50 minutes — the length of a class at Harvard Law School.

The other justices indeed often found Frankfurter overbearing and backbiting. He repeatedly referred to his scholarly accomplishments and to as-yet-unwritten books that he claimed, rather doubtfully, to have in his head. Frankfurter’s greatness, though, grew from his same self-aggrandizing and professorial character. Having developed the theory of judicial restraint while at Harvard, he refused to deviate from it even though his fellow liberals became a majority and began infusing a new spirit of activism in the law. Frankfurter found himself almost glorying in the fact that he had alienated his former allies, and found himself often in dissent, like his two great heroes, Holmes and Brandeis.

Frankfurter’s main ally, loosely aligned with him against Black and Douglas, was Robert Jackson, the founder of the “pragmatic” school of constitutional jurisprudence. Plagued by ambition, Jackson took a year off from the court after World War II to serve as the chief American prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, where he had a lasting impact on the development of international humanitarian law. Yet after he lost his chance to be chief justice — Black communicated to President Harry Truman that he and Douglas would resign if Jackson got the job, and Truman named Fred Vinson instead — Jackson went over the edge. He wrote an open letter, reprinted widely in the press, revealing secret details of the justices’ conferences and accusing Black of maneuvering to help a former law partner in a case that had come before the court.

While the sometimes vicious personal differences among Roosevelt’s appointees may have been unseemly, there is no doubt that personality honed each man’s constitutional worldview, which in combination influenced the nation for good. And ultimately the four were able to come together in Brown v. Board of Education, putting aside deep disagreement when all understood that unity was paramount to achieve desegregation.

But the lesson of their careers — one we should remember before pontificating about what personality Judge Sotomayor “ought” to have — is that great justices need independence and a fierce commitment to constitutional principle. These characteristics can coexist happily with a wide range of personalities, not all of them clubbable. In the end, to be a great justice you don’t need a judicial temperament.