¶ Janet Maslin gives Ben Mezrich’s new book, Sex on the Moon, a review that seems both doting and frosty. Yes, Mezrich writes cinema-friendly page-turners. But perhaps it’s time for him to confine his literary effort to scenarios that don’t take an age to read. If the passage that Ms Maslin quotes is any indication, Mezrich ought to leave his paintjobs to the cinematographer.

Nowadays Mr. Mezrich displays the confidence of someone on a roll. He no longer pretends to be telling true stories. He fakes and pads so excitably that his own tricks are better than his characters’. What is “an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes”? Mezrich snow. What is “thick and dark and ominous, like the intertwining ropes of an immense fishing net cast across the sky, swallowing up every inch of visible air, obscuring everything, even the muted glow of the nearly full moon”? A Mezrich cloudy night. What is “Hollywood’s next big thing?” Mr. Mezrich himself, according to this own Web site.

We don’t think that we’d have liked David Fincher’s The Social Network more if we had read the book of the same title.

¶ The assassination of Ahmed Wali Karzai, one of Hamid Karzai’s six brothers, has dealt the Afghan president a body blow at a very inconvenient time, to say the least.  Alissa Rubin writes, “Without his brother, who gave the president the assurance that he could count on the political and economic backing of at least a quarter of the country — the south — Mr. Karzai’s government appears increasingly adrift.” Her report goes on to catalogue the very serious problems — a blizzard of election fraud and impeachment charges fluryying between the president and Parliament, and the corruption-induced failure of the major banks — that make Taliban-style austerity look functional, however undesirable.

¶ Joseph Berger fills in the background on the other night’s fire story. The fire itself, it seems, will be ruled accidental, which is good to hear. And the building is insured. We knew that Kehilath Jeshurun and its affiliated Ramaz school had lost a lot of money to Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but we didn’t know about the rabbinical dynasty that has overseen the synagogue since 1906 (Hankel Lookstein, the incumbent, is the great-grandson of Moses Zevulun Margolies, the rabbi whose initials gave the school its name). We wish the congregation a speedy recovery. 

¶ We have been thinking about Zahi Hawass lately. He has been Egypt’s peppery and grandstand-prone minister of antiquities for some time now — meaning, during the Mubarak régime — and we’re not surprised to see that he remains tenaciously in office. (What we didn’t know is that he has licensed a line of clothing that features his ageing Indiana Jones style.) Will guilt by association put an end to his autocracy? Or will — much the same thing — public weariness force his retirement? Mr Hawass claims that, because he is appointed, not elected, “the question of public support is not relevant to my position.” Perhaps he has been breathing too much of the bad air in the pharoahs’ tombs.

¶ William Yardley writes about the closing of the Washington State tourism office, and explains that the state’s name has been a problem ever since 1853, when lawmakers were concerned that Columbia would cause confusion with the federal capital. You can’t make this stuff up! ¶ Michael Powell writes about politics in New Jersey, which we already knew to be screwed up, but still. He uses the term “purely medieval“ in a sense different from the one in which we apply it to American politics; we see the Middle Ages as a time of weak central power and the corresponding proliferation of small but obstinate jurisdictions; to Mr Powell, it means — well, we think that the word that he wants is “Renaissance.”

¶ Never having visited the Barnes Museum, formerly in Merion, Pennsylvania and slated to reopen in Philadelphia, we were appalled by what we saw on the Times‘s virtual tour of several rooms, hosted by Randy Kennedy. It is shocking to think that the bad taste of a private collector has been respected for more than fifty years. Dr Barnes expressed his bad taste not in his collections of fine French paintings and African carvings but in the manner of displaying them, which, in our view, submerges them in unintelligible clutter while draining away the possibility of aesthetic pleasure. It is nothing less than barbaric to permit dead hands to interfere with the imaginative lives of the living.

¶ We’re cheered to read that Labour Party leader Ed Milliband has “declared war on Rupert Murdoch.” The easy winner of any right-minded person’s Most Loathsome Human prize, Mr Murdoch is all that holds us back from full-throated opposition to the death penalty.

Mr Murdoch is of course not responsible for the expansion of his evil media empire. That is the doing of dozens cowed politicians and regulators and millions of heedless “consumers.” That’s why he will embody, long after he is gone, a failure of democracy nearly as malignant as Germany’s Nazi misadventure.

¶ Jeffrey Gettleman writes about the inauguration of Africa’s 54th country, South Sudan, from its capital city, Juba. One can only wish that South Sudan’s sovereign chances were better: the new nation, facing serious internal divisions as well as the long-standing enmity of the North, must spend more on security than on social services. Even the bright side — lots of oil — is not, given oil’s history elsewhere, very bright. We freely admit that this would be just another news story to us were it not for the indelible impact of Dave Eggers’s novelization of the experience of Valentino Achak Deng, What Is the What. That book made South Sudan an intensely distinct part of our world. (Another book that did the same for another, hitherto off-the-map part of the world is Thomas Goltz’s riveting Azerbaijan Diary.) 

¶ We wish that whoever edited Rachel Minder’s story about Spain’s stolen babies had seen to let us know why we’re reading about it today. What, precisely, is the news? It’s a journalistic quibble, perhaps, but we pose it because the story is so awful. How long has it been going on, and what is being done about it? The Times report answers the first question: for decades. But it leaves the more worrisome question open. What is being done, it seems, is precisely nothing, nothing beyond a morass of lawsuits, in which parents and children charge nuns and hospitals with the atrocious crime of informing new parents that their newborns have died, while spiriting off the babies, actually quite healthy, to purchasers — all in compliance with the evil “righteousness” of Franco’s fascism. What the old state did, the new state must rectify. Saddling individuals with the burden of resolving their terrible losses is almost as heinous as the underlying crimes. The news ought to have been that the Attorney General is consolidating all suspected cases, which, sadly, it isn’t.

¶ Although the story is ongoing and long from over, the embarrassment of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire by further discoveries of News of the the World phone hacking — more disgusting than the first round in that celebrities and royals have been replaced by the victims of violent crimes and their families — appears to be reaching a possibly critical turn. The real issue for Murdoch & Co is full ownership of Sky Broadcasting, which may be blocked by Parliamentary outrage. (It ought to be blocked for any number of better reasons.) The Conservative-led coalition may be at risk as well, because Prime Minister David Cameron is a personal friend of Rebekah Brooks, the former NotW who may be forced to fall on her sword. Mr Cameron is also a beneficiary of Murdoch support for all things (w)r(o)i(n)ght. The irony is that Murdoch’s print publications contribute very little to his empire’s bottom line.

¶ On our next visit to the Museum, we’re going to spend a few minutes with the Cy Twombly paintings — assuming that they’re still hanging in the Lila Acheson Wallace galleries. Twombly, who died at Rome, claimed a kinship with Poussin that we have a lot of trouble making out, but no matter; we like his big, dreamy canvases best of all the midcentury splashers’.

¶ Well, maybe not: Otto von Hapsburg, who has died two years shy of his centenary, and briefly the Austro-Hungarian crown prince, is survived by a younger brother, Felix — as well as a clutch of offpsring that includes two great-grandchildren (lucky man!). But when Dr von Hapsburg finally abdicated his claim to the vanished throne, in 1961, it was not assumed by anyone else. The erstwhile prince devoted his life to pursuing a high-minded and less personally invested version of his imperial family’s ambitious but generally benign project of unifying all of Europe. As Holy Roman Emperors, and then as the rulers of the reduced but still vast Dual Monarchy, the Hapsburgs were a steadfast counterweight to the deadly sectarian and nationalistic trends that, finally prevailing in the mid-Twentieth Century, taught Europeans the importance of a common union.

¶ The budget problems of Wilmington, North Carolina, according to a discouraging story by Kevin Sack in this morning’s paper, are slow-mo rather than catastrophic, so perhaps city leaders and others will have the leisure to reflect on how affairs might be managed differently, specifically by channeling the currently dissipated reserves of post-adolescent labor — superfluous to the private sector — into temporary public service. Mr Sack is to be commended for articulating the relationship between this story’s many moving parts.

¶ There is really no other word for Robert Finch, chairman of the Monarchist League of Canada.

“Many Canadians may think we’re dreadfully boring,” he said. He added that while the royals enjoy a life of great wealth and privilege, it is not without costs to their personal lives.

“The fact that the queen can’t change her hairstyle because she has to look like the person on her money, that’s an example of a big sacrifice,” Mr. Finch said.

We can think of a few qualities that Canadians might think of before getting to “boring.”

¶ If we were inclined to entertain conspiracy theories, we would find it velly intellesting that the prosecution of Daniel Strauss-Kahn “collapsed” within a day or so of Christine Lagarde’s installation as his successor at the IMF. But we’re delighted that she’s got the job, so we’re taking no further notice of odd coinkidinks. We attribute the delay in annoucning that the allegedly assaulted housekeeper’s credibility has all but evaporated to the understandable difficulty of calculating just how how many cubic feet her incarcerated colleague’s 400 pounds of marijuana would fill without accidentally-on-purpose striking a match and succumbing to morbid petrifaction.

¶ In keeping with our governing idea that smaller is better, we applaud the determination of Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland as well head of the once marginal Scottish National Party, to set his country’s course away from Westminster. His conundrum, as observer John Curtice put it, is that his “success as first minister [makes] the case for independence less pressing.”

¶ “The most pronounced development in banking today is that executives have become bolder as their business has gotten worse.” That’s howJesse Eisinger, a ProPublica financial reporter appearing in the Times’s DealBook, begins a politely indignant essay on the federal government’s mollycoddling of big bankers. What the bankers have become bolder about, however, is guaranteeing their infantile behavior, by demanding further protection from downsides and insulation from litigation and freedom from regulation. They want their cake and they want to eat it and then they want another cake! We wish that Mr Eisinger had put it like that, because there is, otherwise, nothing remotely bold about what bankers are up to these days. ¶ But if you really want cheering up, don’t miss Azam Ahmed’s story about Armageddon investing, which involves losing millions every day so that you’ll have gazillions when the markets go to hell, after attack by black swans with fat tails. The worst of it is that something constructive might be done with these assets. We’re only sorry that excitably pusillanimous investors aren’t going to be the only ones who get what they’re paying for.

¶ Don’t get us wrong: we agree that Bernard Madoff’s sustained defrauding of investors was very, very bad. But “extraordinarily evil“? That’s what Judge Denny Chin called it in his decision to sentence Mr Madoff to 150 years in prison. (We’re not sure why this is news two years later, but let that pass.) Quite aside from our discomfort with the idea of “evil” — especially as attached to a person (in the form of an onerous sentence), and especially in connection with a nonviolent crime against property — we have a big problem with the fact that Mr Madoff’s loser-take-all condition. The complete story remains to be told, but from the start it was clear that the Ponzi scheme was hugely enabled by complaisant counterparties at “feeder” funds and at banks — not to mention sophisticated investors who really ought to have known better; not to mention the wilfully stymied enforcers at the SEC. This was a case, moreover, in which it was the emperor himself who made the announcement about his invisible assets. We’re not saying that Bernie Madoff’s sentence ought to be reduced. We’re just saying that, standing alone as it does, it’s unconscionable.

¶ We honor the passing of Margaret Tyzack, one of our very favorite actresses, at the age of 79. We never saw her Martha (in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), but we loved her Lotte Schoen, battling with Maggie Smith’s Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice & Lovage. Plus everything from 2001 to Match Point. What a voice! Tyzack will be much missed!

¶ An inevitable problem has finally arrived: new drugs that extend the lives of prostate cancer patients by months — by two years at most — are going to be very expensive. As a preliminary pushback, Medicare and insurers alike are expected to underwrite the drugs’ expense only if they are used according to the instructions on the label. This restriction will narrow the field of eligible patients. The larger question of affordability is not, for the moment, being addressed. But the issue that will lead to discussion of triage and rationing is squarely in front of us. How much are “marginal” extenstions of life worth — in a world where an one more day of life is “marginal” only for other people? Also unaddressed is the drugs’ actual costs to pharmaceutical companies, an accounting jungle if ever there was one.