Like the lady said… We had never heard of Gene Sharp until reading about him in Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s story this morning. No matter; we’re instant fans of any specialist in non-violent resistance.

Based on studies of revolutionaries like Gandhi, nonviolent uprisings, civil rights struggles, economic boycotts and the like, he has concluded that advancing freedom takes careful strategy and meticulous planning, advice that Ms. Ziada said resonated among youth leaders in Egypt. Peaceful protest is best, he says — not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. “If you fight with violence,” Mr. Sharp said, “you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon, and you may be a brave but dead hero.”

David Leonhardt‘s piece on the importance of cities generally and the impact of de-urbanization on Egypt in particular climaxes with an eye-popping figure.

A 35-year-old urban Egyptian man with a high school education who moves to the United States can expect an incredible eightfold increase in living standards, the researchers found. Immigrants from only two countries, Yemen and Nigeria, receive a larger boost. In effect, these are the countries with the biggest gap between what their workers can produce in a different environment and what they are actually producing at home.

No wonder 19 percent of Egyptians told Gallup (well before the protests) that they would move to another country if they could. Mr. Clemens says that for every green card the United States awarded in a recent immigration lottery, 146 Egyptians had applied

So one of the tasks facing Mr. Mubarak’s successors will be creating places within Egypt where Egyptians want to move, much as Indian workers have flowed into Bangalore and Brazilian workers have flowed into Rio.

There’s an exciting movie to be made in the story of Ahmed ElShabrawy, an Egyptian entrepreneur who managed to puncture the Mubarak régime’s Internet shutdown.  

With the streets unsafe because of marauding bands of looters, he decided to risk having a driver bring $7,000 in satellite equipment, including a four-foot dish, from Cairo, and somehow he was connected internationally again by Monday evening.

Steeling himself for the blast of complaints from angry customers — his company also provides texting services in Europe and the Middle East — Mr. ElShabrawy found time to post videos of the protests in Mansoura on his Facebook page. But with security officials asking questions about what he was up to, he did not dare hook up his domestic subscribers.
Then, gingerly, he reached out to his international customers, his profuse apologies already framed in his mind.

The response that poured in astonished Mr. ElShabrawy, who is nothing if not a conscientious businessman, even in turbulent times. “People said: ‘Don’t worry about that. We are fine and we need to know that you are fine. We are all supporting you.’ ”

Scientists have discovered that low-grade bullying among social rivals is far more common in high schools than the thuggish kind. The battle for popularity may not break bones, but it becomes more unpleasant as contestants approach the top of the tree — only to disappear, according to Tara Parker-Pope, among the top two percentiles.

“At the very top you start to see a reversal — the kids in the top 2 percent are less likely to be aggressive,” Dr. Faris said. “The interpretation I favor is that they no longer need to be aggressive because they’re at the top, and further aggression could be counterproductive, signaling insecurity with their social position.

“It’s possible that they’re incredibly friendly and everybody loves them and they were never mean, but I’m not so convinced by that, because there are so many kids right behind them in the hierarchy who are highly aggressive.”

Over all, the research shows that about a third of students are involved in aggressive behavior. In another paper presented last year, Dr. Faris reported that most teenage aggression is directed at social rivals — “maybe one rung ahead of you or right beneath you,” as he put it, “rather than the kid who is completely unprotected and isolated.”

It occurs to us that social bullying is a kind of vaccine that renders inoculated adolescents immune to the worst ravages of adult envy and jealousy. There might be something good to say about high school, after all.

We can’t think what the Times is up to, publishing William Glaberson’s “A Legal Manual for an Apocalpytic New York.” It’s not that readers ought to be protected from awareness of such dismal reckonings. But if we’re going to be told how the courts are preparing to deal with quarantines and evacuations and worse, let’s hear the news in a more interactive forum. or at least in a context that encourages reflection and preparation instead of panic.

Perhaps the point of the story is to show that the courts don’t really know what they’re doing.

But the guide also presents a sober rendition of what the realities might be in dire times. The suspension of laws, it says, is subject to constitutional rights. But then it adds, “This should not prove to be an obstacle, because federal and state constitutional restraints permit expeditious actions in emergency situations.”

When there is not enough medicine for everyone in an emergency, it notes, there is no clear legal guidepost. It suggests legal decisions would most likely involve an analysis that “balances the obligation to save the greatest number of lives against the obligation to care for each single patient,” perhaps giving preference to those with the best chance to survive. It points out, though, that elderly and disabled people might have a legal claim if they are discriminated against at such moments of crisis.

That is almost the opposite of news. On a “news you can use” scale, this report rates a 0.5.

The sale of Arianna Huffington’s collaborative Web site to AOL has induced a rash of overdue head-scratching. This morning, David Pogue wonders if Twitter is such great idea after all.

It will be interesting to see how the legions of unpaid bloggers at The Huffington Post react to the merger with AOL. Typing away for an upstart blog — founded by the lefty pundit Arianna Huffington and the technology executive Kenneth Lerer — would seem to be a little different from cranking copy for AOL, a large American media company with a market capitalization of $2.2 billion.

(And it’s going to seem very different to some other media companies. The Huffington Post has perfected the art of — how shall we say it? — enthusiastic aggregation. Most of the news on the site is rewritten from other sources, then given a single link to the original. Many media companies, used to seeing their scoops get picked off by HuffPo and others, have decided that legal action isn’t worth the bother. They might feel differently now.)

Perhaps content will remain bifurcated into professional and amateur streams, but as social networks eat away at media mindshare and the advertising base, I’m not so sure. If it happens, I’ll have no one but myself to blame. Last time I checked, I had written or shared over 11,000 items on Twitter. It’s a nice collection of short-form work, and I’ve been rewarded with lot of followers … and exactly no money. If and when the folks at Twitter cash out, some tiny fraction of that value will have been created by me.

There is no good reason for not metering traffic for micropayments. You may heard of an amazing inventrion that keeps track of gazillions of computations: the “digital computer.”

On a hunch, the Times asked “an expert in online search,” Doug Pierce, to look into “search engine optimization” at JC Penney, which was placing the department store’s links at the top of Google searches for all sorts of things. The upshot was that Google performed a “manual action” to undo Penney’s contractor’s black-hattery. The report, by David Segal, was the weekend’s best long read.

The links do not bear any fingerprints, but nothing else about them was particularly subtle. Using an online tool called Open Site Explorer, Mr. Pierce found 2,015 pages with phrases like “casual dresses,” “evening dresses,” “little black dress” or “cocktail dress.” Click on any of these phrases on any of these 2,015 pages, and you are bounced directly to the main page for dresses on JCPenney.com.

Some of the 2,015 pages are on sites related, at least nominally, to clothing. But most are not. The phrase “black dresses” and a Penney link were tacked to the bottom of a site called nuclear.engineeringaddict.com. “Evening dresses” appeared on a site called casino-focus.com. “Cocktail dresses” showed up on bulgariapropertyportal.com. ”Casual dresses” was on a site called elistofbanks.com. “Semi-formal dresses” was pasted, rather incongruously, on usclettermen.org.

There are links to JCPenney.com’s dresses page on sites about diseases, cameras, cars, dogs, aluminum sheets, travel, snoring, diamond drills, bathroom tiles, hotel furniture, online games, commodities, fishing, Adobe Flash, glass shower doors, jokes and dentists — and the list goes on.

Some of these sites seem all but abandoned, except for the links. The greeting at myflhomebuyer.com sounds like the saddest fortune cookie ever: “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.”

A few years ago, we perused a slim tome on the subject of Search Engine Optimization — and decided that there was not much that SEO could honestly do for us. Claire Cain Miller’s look at how cleverly SEO techniques are put to work at The Huffington Post merely confirmed this judgment — possibly because we have never been quite sure just who Christina Aguilera is.

The ultimate prize for most Web publishers is loyal readers who go directly to their site, without passing through a search engine. They are more likely to visit on a regular basis and stick around.

Some Web publishers say that these days, the most effective way to build that following is to find readers on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, an approach known as social media optimization. That could improve the quality of articles, they say, because the best way to get links on Twitter is to write a story people want to share with friends.

While Egypt simmers, we are happy to see the byline of John Eligon in the newspaper; he’s the reporter whose snappy dispatches made the Astor Trial such fun to read about. Now he has a new case: lowlife criminal Kenneth Minor claims that he was merely assisting in the suicide of motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker when he stabbed him in the front seat of his automobile. Oh, and that his post-mortem visit to an ATM machine with Locker’s bank card was to collect payment for services rendered. Everybody laughed at the time, but subsequent investigation suggests that the deceased was engaging in insurance fraud. Now, two years later, the matter has come to trial. Question is: will Mr Minor be allowed to avail himself of the assisted-suicide defense, which would lower the charge against him from second-degree murder to second-degree manslaughter. And the other question is: does it matter?

The law reserves assisted-suicide charges for cases in which a person takes a passive role in someone’s suicide, prosecutors say. An example would be providing the gun that a man uses to kill himself.

[snip]

But Mr. Gotlin said New York law did not explicitly say that someone’s actions needed to be passive in order to be considered assisting suicide. Either way, he said, it should be up to the jury to determine whether Mr. Minor’s actions were passive.

Over the past four decades, 16 people in New York have been arrested on accusations of assisting suicide, according to the State Department of Criminal Justice Services. And in that time, only 11 have been convicted of it.

Whatever happens, Mr Eligon will makes us want to find out what happens next.

We haven’t read anything about Black Swan that’s more acute than Alistair Macaulay’s deconstruction of Darren Aronofsky’s film; it’s a rare writer who can fix ambivalence with such clarity.

To these negatives ballet brings many positives: energy, responsiveness to music, discipline, teamwork, idealism, interpretative fulfillment. Not so “Black Swan.” It’s both irresistible and odious. I was gripped by its melodrama, but its nightmarish view of both ballet and women is not one I’m keen to see again. As a horror movie, it’s not extreme. As a woman’s movie, however, it’s the end of the line.

Most depressingly, Nina is just not a great role. She’s too much a victim — the film makes her helpless, passive — to be seriously involving. Though she enjoys triumph, we never see the willpower that gets her there, just the psychosis and the martyrdom. It’s the latest hit movie for misogynists.

“The Red Shoes” (1948) — to which “Black Swan” owes so much — actually had more psychological depth. Its ballerina heroine found both fame and love, and her torment came from choosing between them. That’s a highly ambiguous attitude toward ballet — she cannot permanently reconcile dance and love — but you can see why it inspired thousands of girls to take up the art. The “Black Swan” idea of ballet is narrower: obsession, torment, inadequacy, paranoia, delusion.

Those things aren’t absent from ballet (or womanhood or life). And so Nina’s interior and exterior lives here spin together into a compelling vortex.

We share Mr Macaulay’s hope that Black Swan will be sending lots of viewers back to Swan Lake.

We’re glad that we don’t belong to the Century Association, because we should have had a very hard time deciding how to vote on reciprocity with London’s Garrick Club. The Garrick does not admit women — neither did the Century, until state law obliged it to do so in 1988 — and female members of the New York Club cannot enter its premises unattended by a male member. After a great deal of hooing and hahing, a majority of Centurions voted to terminate reciprocity — clearly the correct decision in the long term. But where we actually live and work is in the short term, and we can well understand why Marion Seldes, a Centurion who wouldn’t have any trouble finding escorts, will miss the chance to haunt the Garrick’s “romantic” precincts. However! Our mind might have been made up for us if we had overheard the following intemperate outburst:

Inside the club, tensions grew. Several female members described fraught exchanges with male counterparts. “Who do you think you are,” a male member asked one of them, “telling me what I can do?” It felt, one member said, as if some in the club were relitigating the original decision to admit women, who now constitute a quarter of its ranks.

Further evidence, if it is wanted, that clueless boors continue to walk the corridors of power will be found in Raymond Hernandez’s dismally delicious story about resigning Congressman Christopher Lee — to whom it apparently never occurred that a prospective inamorata might employ Google to spare herself some heartache. Serves him right: the lady asked, and told.

Today’s prize for Rank Disingenuousness goes to Steven Behar, who is in litigation with Silvercup Studios about his appropriation of the name for a nearby hotel and his registration of a domain name.

Mr. Bahar, who is also known as Steven Baharestani, maintained in a telephone interview that he was not thinking of the bakery or the studio when he chose the name for his hotel.

“Somebody had suggested that name,” he said. “I’m a tennis player. I immediately thought of tennis, golf, hockey. When you win, you get a silver cup. That’s what I thought of.”

[snip]

As for why he had sought to register the Web address silvercupstudio.com — which does not lead to a live site — Mr. Bahar said his lawyer had told him not to answer questions about that.

James Barron has another Queens-side story, about an Italianate villa surrounded by hulking body shops in Steinway. (It was, in fact, built by George Steinway.) You can see it for yourself on Google Maps; it’s on 41st Street between 19th Avenue and Berrian Boulevard.

We’re pleased, this morning, to learn about social impact bonds, which inject “market discipline” into public welfare, by rewarding investors in measurably successful programs. We like the structural indirection, which de-politicizes the business end of making society better, and the idea of harnessing private investment to a limited time-span (the life of the bonds), after which programs that work can be taken over by the government or, even better, spun off as not-for-profit enterprises suits our vision of post-capitalist commerce.

Antony Bugg-Levine of the Rockefeller Foundation told me it had invested in the project for two main reasons. One, it expected to get its money back and then be able to reuse it. Two, if social impact bonds work, they have the potential to attract for-profit investors — and vastly expand the pool of capital that’s available for social programs.

Clearly, social impact bonds have limitations. For starters, it’s hard to see how private money could ever pay for multibillion-dollar programs like Medicaid or education.

Just as important, the execution of any bond program will be complicated. It will depend on coming up with the right performance measures, which is no small matter. Done wrong, the measures will end up rewarding programs lucky (or clever) enough to enroll participants who are more likely to succeed no matter what.

But whatever the caveats about the bonds, the potential for improving the government’s performance is obviously huge. That’s true in education, health care, criminal justice and many other areas.

The death of Digital Equipment founder Ken Olson has prompted a bit of sniggering; the late entrepreneur dismissed the personal computer as a toy for playing video games that would never find a place in the business world. But as Bill Gates is the first to point out, there would have been no personal computer without DEC’s generation of minicomputers.

Mr. Olsen and his younger brother Stan lived their passion for electronics in the basement of their Stratford home, inventing gadgets and repairing broken radios. After a stint in the Navy at the end of World War II, Mr. Olsen headed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. He took a job at M.I.T.’s new Lincoln Laboratory in 1950 and worked under Jay Forrester, who was doing pioneering work in the nascent days of interactive computing.

In 1957, itching to leave academia, Mr. Olsen, then 31, recruited a Lincoln Lab colleague, Harlan Anderson, to help him start a company. For financing they turned to Georges F. Doriot, a renowned Harvard Business School professor and venture capitalist. According to Mr. Colony, Digital became the first successful venture-backed company in the computer industry. Mr. Anderson left the company shortly afterward, leaving Mr. Olsen to put his stamp on it for more than three decades.

In Digital’s often confusing management structure, Mr. Olsen was the dominant figure who hired smart people, gave them responsibility and expected them “to perform as adults,” said Edgar Schein, who taught organizational behavior at M.I.T. and consulted with Mr. Olsen for 25 years. “Lo and behold,” he said, “they performed magnificently.”

Nothing betrays the adolescent nature of American society — its heedless emphasis on the present moment; its revulsion at the very idea of long-term thinking — than our decaying infrastructure. Not surprisingly, things decay faster in New Jersey, where Hudson waterfront piers and other structures less than twenty years old are crumbling into the river.

Hoboken’s tale is a variation on themes heard around the country — politicians who preferred cutting ribbons on new projects to taking care of old ones, governments that spent their way into debt even when times were relatively good, and new executives taking office and finding that things were much worse than they realized.

There have been similar problems in other towns along the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway, conceived as an unbroken strip from the Bayonne Bridge to the George Washington Bridge, but they have been most pronounced in Hoboken.

“It seems almost criminal that it’s come to this,” said Helen S. Manogue, president of the Hudson River Waterfront Conservancy, which promotes the walkway project. “It seems like nobody allowed for what a brutal environment the river is to build in — not the towns, not the developers, not the engineers.”

If you want to know where all this will be taking us, if we don’t decide to grow up and take responsibility for the future, you can always watch Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.

David Carr laughs out loud at the libel suit brought by Redskins owner Daniel Snyder against the Washington City Paper; he calls the complaint “a kitchen sink of splendors,” which we believe is meant to be taken sarcastically.

Sports team owners, a historically entitled bunch — you don’t buy the biggest toys in town unless you feel you deserve them — are particularly sensitive to the tough coverage that goes with owning a sports franchise. And if Mr. Snyder really wanted to quash the City Paper article, the lawsuit didn’t help.
[snip]
The complaint manages to sound both haughty and wounded, suggesting City Paper “crossed every line of ethics and decency.” What the newspaper seems really guilty of is picking a target with a lot of time and money on his hands. It is the off-season, after all.

Let’s just hope that Mr Carr’s laughter dosn’t turn out to look premature.

The United States is much bigger than Europe, with far more moving parts. But that shouldn’t mask the awful resemblances. There are plenty of Ahmed Ezzes in this country; let’s hope that a few of them figure out how not to be scapegoated.

Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt has long functioned as a state where wealth bought political power and political power bought great wealth. While hard facts are difficult to come by, Egyptians watching the rise of a moneyed class widely believe that self-dealing, crony capitalism and corruption are endemic, represented in the public eye by a group of rich businessmen aligned with Gamal Mubarak, the president’s son, as well as key government ministers and governing party members.

We’ve already had our Gamal.

It’s almost too perfect: How Ronald Reagan saw himself, notwithstanding the realities of the situation.

The main voice of reason is that of Reagan’s son Ron, who is interviewed by a swimming pool, describing his father with affection, but also critical distance. He traces his father’s worldview to his success as a young lifeguard, despite his terrible eyesight. (Nearsightedness kept Reagan in Hollywood making propaganda and training films during World War II.)

“He grew up seeing himself as somebody who saved people’s lives,” Ron Reagan says. “I think that carried through into his later years as well, the sort of roles he liked to play in movies. He wanted to be the hero.”

And that yearning to be America’s lifeguard helps explain Reagan’s thinking in the Iran-contra affair, which darkened the second term of his presidency. He denied trading arms for hostages in Iran, then later admitted it in a televised address. The film cites the secret diary of the former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who recorded that when warned that the deal was illegal, Reagan said he didn’t care.

According to trustee Irving Picard’s newly-unsealed complaint against JPMorgan Chase, Bernard Madoff’s principal bankers had their doubts about his activities over a year before his arrest — yet they did nothing beyond limiting the bank’s exposure. 

What emerges is a sketch of an internal tug of war. One group of senior Chase bankers was pursuing profitable credit and derivatives deals with Mr. Madoff and his big feeder-fund investors, the hedge funds that invested their clients’ money exclusively with him. Another group was arguing against doing any more big-ticket “trust me” deals with a man whose business was too opaque and whose investment returns were too implausible.

For much of 2007, the tide was with the Chase bankers designing and selling complex derivatives linked to various Madoff feeder funds. By June of that year, they already had sold at least $130 million worth of the notes to investors, and they sought approval for deals that would have pushed that total to $1.32 billion, the lawsuit asserted.

The committee agreed to increase the bank’s exposure to Mr. Madoff only to $250 million, but by 2008, the bank’s risk management executives were gaining, backed up by suspicions raised by the “due diligence” teams visiting the large hedge funds that invested with Mr. Madoff.

Also juicy: the string of 318 transfers, all in the round number of $986,301, that ought to have set off the bank’s money-laundering alarms.

Thanks to an overzealous decision by a yahoo judge, masterpieces held by Russian museums won’t be visiting the United States. We hope that the Chabad Lubavitchers are happy about that.

In recent years the organization has taken its case to court in the United States, and on July 30, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, a federal judge of the United States District Court in Washington, ruled in favor of the Chabad organization, ordering Russia to turn over all Schneerson documents held at the Russian State Library, the Russian State Military Archive and elsewhere.

Russian officials, saying that an American court had no jurisdiction, had refused to participate in the proceedings. And after Judge Lamberth’s decision, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced it as a violation of international law. The ministry said an American court had no right to get involved in a case concerning Russian assets on Russian soil.

Russian cultural officials reacted more slowly, but by autumn they began warning Russia’s state-controlled museums that any artwork lent to the United States was at risk of being seized by the American authorities to force Russia to abide by the decision.