¶ Sign of a slow news day: two tabloid-worthy tales on the front page of the Times. The arguably ewwier one is a  report by Timothy Williams on the countrywide thefts of human hair, which “perplexed” law enforcement officials. (You’ll be relieved to know that the hair in question is not attached to human scalps.) Mr Williams ventures, by way of explanation, the new respectability of hair extensions. ¶ More sordid, somehow, is Daniel Wakin’s pickup of an Irish Times exposé of bogus symphony orchestras touring the American heartland under the auspices of Columbia Artists Management, who would undoubtedly staff their class acts with roller derby queens if they thought they could get away with it. A tale of switcheroo immigration manifests in which the members of the Dublin Philharmonic are mostly Bulgarians. (Maybe they meant Lublin Philharmonic.) The Photoshopped image of the “Tschaikowsky St Petersburg State Orchestra” (which they’ve never heard of on the banks of the Neva) is particularly toasty.

¶ Senator John Kerry’s visit to Pakistan appears to have calmed our roiling relationship with that perfidious ally — for the moment. Interestingly, what the Pakistanis appear to have wanted was an assurance that the United States has no designs upon its nuclear capabilities. As usual, Pakistan is thinking about its epic rivalry with India, not about the United States and its problems. ¶ New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has requested “information and documents” relating to mortgage securitization at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Gretchen Morgenson doesn’t tell us why Mr Schneiderman’s move, which seems too good to be true (we’d given up on seeking bankers brought to justice), and which was apparently launched a few weeks ago, is news today.

¶ Less shocking, sadly, than the news of DSK’s downfall, “Your So-Called Education” is nevertheless a great deal more disturbing. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa measured college students at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their second, and upon graduation. 36% of the students failed to gain the equivalent of even one point over their entire undergraduate career. Almost as upsetting, 36% of a smaller group — students who reported spending five hours or fewer on weekly studying — maintained grade point averages of 3.16. This is what consumer-driven education must inevitably lead to: zero product.

¶ So long as the Republican Party is in the grip of plutocratic ideologues, we will never cast a vote for one of its candidates in a national election. In our defense of this arguably simplistic policy, we point to the Supreme Court, which has been reduced to Gilded Age dementia by the appointments of the three Bush administrations. Today’s editorial, “Gutting Class Action,” points to the latest in a long linie of judicial monstrosities. Nor is trhe evil confined to the Supreme Court. Not until 2040 at the earliest will the Federal Bench be purged of right-wing judges — and that’s of course assuming that wingnut-financed Republicans never hold the White House or Congress again.

¶ Although we can’t claim to have been “distracted by flooding along the Mississippi, warfare in Libya or the latest on Newt Gingrich,” we didn’t know about the James Tate Prom Saga until we read about it this morning. Our verdict: “grim-faced” headmaster Beth Smith should be thrown into a Polish space capsule for 1000 hours of community entertainment. ¶ And what, pray tell, is Arthur Newmyer’s lawsuit against Sidwell Friends doing in the pages of the Times? We should have thought that Mr Newmyer is too old to carry on like James Tate, but, sadly not.

¶ Vitaly Borker, the online eyeglasses merchant who couldn’t resist boasting to David Segal  about his deplorable business practises, may be regretting his Iron Curtain cheekiness. Having plead guilty to High Crimes and Naughtiness, he now faces sentencing of up to six years.

¶ What with the piles of books that sprout in every room, we worry about hoarding. Our closets, cabinets, and even the refrigerator are stuffed almost to the point of disorganization. The worst thing about holding on to something because it might come in handy someday is that every now and then it actually does. But we have never given much thought to the children of hoarders, who, it turns out, have some not very surprising tics, such as a disinclination to give parties. The impulse to hoard can lead its victims to choose their clutter over their children. Yikes!

¶ They say that Nicolas Sarkozy is not happy about La Conquête, a new movie that’s about him — “the story of a man who wins power and loses his wife.” The film opens nationally and at Cannes next week, along with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a film in which Carla Bruni, the president’s current wife, has a small role. Ms Bruni has plead pregnancy as her excuse for missing the film festtival. ¶ Princess Chulabhorn Walailak, the youngest daughter of Thailand’s ailing King Bhumibol thinks that flattering coverage of royal family news ought to be given ten more minutes of daily air time. We can only imagine what her father’s subjects think about that, because unflattering coverage of the royal family is prohibited by law. Somsak Jeamteerasakul, a history professor who spoke out against princess (on the Internet), has been charged with violating the country’s draconian laws forbidding lèse majesté. ¶ Manuel Zelaya is going home, sometime soon, to Honduras. How we’ve missed him!

¶ It took the whole length of the story for Jesse McKinley to mention the bitter child-custody battle that might have disturbed the unnamed son of neo-Nazi Jeff Hall enough to make him shoot his father dead. What this story is doing on the front page of the Times is beyond us — unless, that is, it’s another Idiocracy alert. ¶ Westie gangleader Jimmy McElroy died recently in prison (sentence: “forever and a day”) but got a nice send-off Holy Cross, just off Times Square, occasioning an hommage à la manière de Joseph Mitchell by Jim Dwyer. ¶ Omar bin Laden and three of his brothers have “lashed out” at President Obama for killing their unarmed father. In a statement that, if not quite politely phrased, was presumably politely delivered, Mr bin Laden reminds us that he disavowed his father’s violent undertakings; by the same token, he feels that his father ought to have stood trial. We agree, although we’re glad for Barack Obama’s political career that  that is not what happened. What we’d really like to see is the complete destruction of Pakistan’s military resources. We paid for it, after all, and it would send a message to other potentially perfidious allies.

¶ Doreen Carvajal ends a bittersweet story about the chuetas of Majorca — Jewish families that pretended to be Christian in response to the Inquisition (which burned three of them alive in 1691) but that didn’t fool the neighbors, who taught their children a taunting rhyme containing fifteen surnames, including that of (did you know?) Joan Miró — with the rather ouchmaking news that 78-year old Bernat Pomar has recently undergone conversion to Judaism, if you know what we mean by that.

¶ Although there’s not much real news in today’s Times, there are lots of interesting items about personal technology, such as the really very intriguing story about the Polara golf ball, which is dimpled in a directional manner that reduces slices and hooks. It’s also “illegal” — not permitted in official tournaments. The substrate of the story is an anxiety about making the pastime attractive to young man who are inclined to play in cargo shorts and whose sense of the rules is flexible at best. Will golf develop a hardball/softball divide? ¶ After months of dithering, Condé Nast and Apple have finally come up with a subscription model for The New Yorker. Not that we’re excited. The great thing about the print issue is that you don’t need a connection to read it. And while the online archives make it unnecessary to stack unread issues or even to clip favorite articles, you still have to type out anything that you want to copy — cutting and pasting are not enabled. Makes you feel like it’s the Middle Ages! ¶ Further proof that it was the tablet, and not the personal computer, that would save trees (because reading a tablet involves the same body moves as reading a book) is forthcoming in Martha White’s story about Ativ Software, an outfit that packages conference materials in a tidy app. (Sell Staples!) ¶ Facebook 2.0: in which the Zuckerberg competes with a crowd of “anti-oversharing” alternatives.

¶ Whatever you think of Paul Krugman and his insistence upon the priority of jobs creation (we’re inclined to agree), there’s no disputing his account of the deficit, which we note particularly because he places responsibility for the ballooning of our national debt entirely upon the shoulders of “the elite.” The Bush tax cuts, the Iraqi misadventure, and the recession were all the doing of powerful cliques who now, because they can, blame ordinary Americans for “wanting something for nothing.” We wish that Mr Krugman would resort to different terminology: “elite” is now a cant word that means little more than “powerful people whom I don’t like.” ¶ Here’s hoping that Dominique Browning will galvanize American mothers (and fathers) and create an effective demand for thoroughgoing regulatory reform on the product-safety front. There can be no unguided free markets in anything pertaining to infants.

¶ Michael Kimmelman meditates on the fiftieth anniversary of the Eichmann trial, causing us to meditate on the ineffable transformation of the present — now — into “history.” Hannah Arendt would be unpleasantly surprised to learn that her theory of totalitarianism was richly grounded in the Zeitgeist — but so it seems to have been. We’re also reminded of Jonathan Littell’s sharp portrait of Adolf Eichmann in Les Bienveillantes — nothing banal about him!

¶ Even more regrettable, in our view, than the CUNY board’s yielding to Jeffrey Wiesenfeld’s opposition to granting the author of Angels in America an honorary degree is the bizarre assertion by Valerie Lancaster Beal, one of the trustees, that she doesn’t know who Tony Kushner is. “I don’t know his issues,” she is reported to have said. We only wish that we were surprised to discover that the governance of an important institution of higher learning is shouldered in part by such an uninformed person. We have no idea what degree of remediation would equip Ms Beal to perform her duties to CUNY, but Mr Wiesenfeld is as beyond the pale as he charges Mr Kushner with being, and his resignation ought to be demanded immediately.

¶ Elisabeth Bumiller writes about Team 6, the crème de la crème of Navy SEAL units that allows no margin for error. If not exactly unsung, these heroes stay out of the limelight, at least until they retire. Interestingly, these paragons of fitness are about ten years older than average servicemen — mature judgment is one of their precious skills. ¶ We agree with President Obama’s decision to withhold photographs of the dead Osama bin Laden, especially after LiveLeak got scammed.

¶ That David Barton is considered by anyone, much less former presidents of the United States, to be a reputable historian is surely a grave indictment of the academic establishment. If it’s pretty clear that the self-taught, Christianist Mr Barton doesn’t really “do history,” it’s also evident that there’s something that the professionals aren’t getting right, either.  ¶ And let’s remember what Dave Eggers and Ninive Clements Caligari had to say about not blaming underpaid and undersupported teachers when we decide what to do about American students’ pervasive ignorance of the nuts and bolts of “civics.”

¶ Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan, has called upon Libyan strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi to step down. As symbolic gestures go, this is an important one, but some sort of material follow-up will be required to strengthen Turkey’s position as a “regional power broker.” ¶ The pros and cons of Chinese direct investment in American industry always pit realism (take the money) against idealism (it’s tainted money!). We’re inclined toward the realism espoused by the Asia Society’s Orville Schell.

¶ The drop is slight, to be sure, but it’s the first ever (all right, in twenty years): the percentage of American households with television sets declined from 98.9 to 96.7. It’s pathetic to be cheered by such small change, but we can’t help it. Even if the same content can be viewed on computer screens, the interaction is entirely different. ¶ A martyr, not a a suicide: Football star Dave Duerson was right to shoot himself in the heart: his brain, sent by his family at his request to a clinic at Boston University, reveals the onset of chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the players association, said in a telephone interview that Duerson’s having C.T.E. “makes it abundantly clear what the cost of football is for the men who played and the families.”

So, we Americans were right all along: Osama bin Laden was living in Pakistan, even though that country’s government insisted that he wasn’t. Given the size and fortified character of the Abbottabad compound, apparently built for the terrorist in 2005, it is impossible to believe that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence was genuinely unaware of his presence. As Simon Tisdall writes at the Guardian,  the discovery that climaxed in the death of bin Laden “is an enormous and dangerous embarrassment for Pakistan’s government.” We would underscore Mr Tisdall’s use of the present tense.

We Americans also seem to be treating the event as a championship victory. Score one for us! The fact that the operation against bin Laden involved the surprise invasion of an uneasy ally’s territory was not deemed important enough for a headline in today’s print edition of the Times — although Jane Perlez’s online analysis generally accords with Mr Tisdall’s. “With Bin Laden’s death, perhaps the central reason for an alliance forged on the ashes of 9/11 has been removed…” This is the real news, and it is momentous in every way. The military and intelligence officials whose cooperation made the capture of Osama bin Laden deserve every kind of praise as well as the nation’s gratitude. But we see no call for jubilation.

¶ We cannot believe that it has been sixteen years since we gave gym mogul David Barton a thought! Did he really get married to Susanne Bartsch in a loincloth way back in 1995? That little boy that the nudieweds held (he was wearing more than a birthday suit, thank goodness) is now approaching graduation from St Ann’s in Brooklyn. How the tempus does fugit! Tim Murphy’s profile would bring it all back, if we’d been there in the first place. ¶ Moby, now ensconced in the Hollywood Hills, is not going bankrupt anytime soon, but he finds it easier to stay off the sauce when he’s not in Manhattan. Sobriety must also have induced the “techno musician,” né Richard Melville-Hall, to answer Joyce Wadler’s probes about his interesting chilidhood — it seems to have distracted her from taking an interest in his relationships (not really). ¶ Bob Morris’s piece about Gotham’s misbehaving canines makes it clear that the brutes are merely acting out their owners’ neuroses. When doggies bite, it’s the lunk at the other end of the leash who ought to be shipped off to rehab. (Same goes when kiddies bite.)

¶ The British consulate in Florence is slated to close, bringing 450 years of English presence in that city to an end. You could take it as a story of mutual deflation: Britain is no longer grand enough to maintain a diplomatic outpost in a city that is not grand enough to require one. Or you could wave a European Union flag. ¶ Maurice Szafran, chief executive at Marianne, surmises that the French press (that is, everybody but him) “is more passionate about the story than the French people are.” What’s he talking about? The royal wedding, of course. Reporter Matthew Saltmarsh sees an opportunity to trot out the names of two pretenders to the French monarchy, Jean d’Orléans and Louis Alphonse de Bourbon. We don’t see why the French shouldn’t be ruled by German princelings just like everybody else. ¶ Looking more than a little spiteful, Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Fire Fighters, has announced the cessation of political contributions, ie political contributions to Democratic candidates, who, in his view, have done precious little for unions. We couldn’t agree more, but also we can’t think of a more naturally Republican Party constituency than America’s firefighters. If they could only repackage their union as a cartel, everything would make sense.

Ross Douthat’s attempt to find a few good things to say about Hell provides us, we see at once, with an ideal exit line. With this entry, we bring to a close the conceit of dressing newfangled World-Wide Web aggregation in the plumage of the canonical hours.

In this sense, a doctrine of universal salvation turns out to be as deterministic as the more strident forms of scientific materialism. Instead of making us prisoners of our glands and genes, it makes us prisoners of God himself. We can check out any time we want, but we can never really leave.

The doctrine of hell, by contrast, assumes that our choices are real, and, indeed, that we are the choices that we make. The miser can become his greed, the murderer can lose himself inside his violence, and their freedom to turn and be forgiven is inseparable from their freedom not to do so.

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s “Inferno,” the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” — that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death … salvation or damnation.”

Stuff (it).

Perhaps because we’re looking forward to August at the beach, we’ve been wishing that the everyday chore of glancing over hundreds of feeds (reading 25 of which is a big job) were more like beachcombing. Henceforth, we’re only going to bend to pick up the items that catch our fancy — some because they’re really unlike anything else; others because they add to our collection. We are no longer going to stalk the strand in search of edification in predetermined topics.

Presumably, the Times writer really did tell Madelyn Pugh Davis, the long-time I Love Lucy writer who died the other day at 90, why they were calling.

In an interview last year for this obituary, Ms. Davis recalled some of the many wacky situations she helped devise for Ms. Ball: standing on stilts, coping with a house overrun by baby chicks, wearing a beard and — a classic — overwhelmed by a warp-speed conveyor belt in a chocolate factory.

“Lucy would do anything we suggested,” Ms. Davis said.

Really?

“The only time she ever said she didn’t want to do something was when she saw an elephant on the set and ran up to her office,” Ms. Davis recalled.

The script called for her to retrieve $500 from under the elephant’s foot.

“Then the phone rang and it was Vivian Vance,” Ms. Davis said. “Vivian said, ‘It’s O.K., I told Lucy that if she didn’t want to do that funny thing, I’ll do it.’ And Lucy said, ‘O.K., I’ll do it.’ So she talked into the elephant’s trunk and got it to lift its foot.”

But then, Davis went to high school (and was in the fiction club) with Kurt Vonnegut. There you go.