From the obituary (penned by Margalit Fox)of Arthur Lessac, legendary voice coach, who died earlier this month at 101: a tough way of dealing with a tough beginning.

Mr. Lessac was born in Haifa, at the time in Palestine, on Sept. 9, 1909. His original surname is unknown: throughout his adult life, he neither used nor mentioned it. He had no wish, his family said, to utter the name of the parents who had left him to his own devices when he was very young

At 2, he sailed with his birth parents to the United States. Their marriage soon dissolved, and they put him in the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society Orphan Asylum in Pleasantville, N.Y., where he would spend most of his childhood.

At about 12, working for the summer as a delicatessen delivery boy in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he befriended a family on his route, who were named Lessac. They took him in for a while, and with their blessing, he took their name.

So far, it’s a case without names. An investigation into narcotics trafficking inadvertently opened a window on a much broader corruption problem, and one that is arguably more serious; for while cops dealing drugs is a very bad thing, making traffic summonses issued for moving violations disappear exposes the public to dangerous drivers.

It is not clear if any of the officers under investigation received bribes or gifts for fixing tickets.

“From what I understand, it was taking care of friends, basically,” a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said. “Friends and relatives.”

The official who was briefed said that fixing tickets “is a way of delegates to maintain their status or popularity with the police officers they represent.”

As always, this systemic corruption shows that there is a problem with the system. Law enforcement officers aren’t getting the message that they and theirs will be held to a higher standard of conduct.

Matins

¶ At Koreanish, Alexander Chee concludes a wandering entry with an arresting and very disheartening assessment of the decadence of current democratic leadership worldwide. 

And that really is the other point to make—the problems in the US are the problems in the world, really—few countries if any are inoculated from being subjects to a global financial elite that has figured out how to make money from firings and layoffs, foreclosures, highspeed computerized stock trades and stockpiled cash. Yes, I could move to about 60 other nations and receive socialized medicine, for example (one bright spot—soon may be able to add “Vermont” to that list of places), but wherever I go, this elite is indifferent to these crises, and no longer needs the good will or even the general population in order to be rich. They make money off each other, in brutal raids and corporate takedowns. They’ve manipulated the markets to the extent that we need their good will in order to survive them. It’s as if they decided 30 years ago that the creation of a middle class was a mistake, and they’re pulling up the gates.

Our only cold comfort is that the oligarchy is a patched-together international affair that lacks natural coherence.

Lauds

¶ The enviably satisfying life of Charles Rosen, pianist and writer. (Also, French teacher at MIT.) Mr Rosen’s current preoccupation (he is 84) is the way that Mozart and Beethoven had of veing unconventionally conventional. “The public always demand something original, and then they resent it when they get it.” (Guardian; via ArtJournal) ¶ At Slate/FT, Jackie Wullschlager talks to “elusive billionaire,” purveyor of luxury goods, and art collector extraordinaire François Pinault, a self-made Breton who now sponsors two museums of new art in Venice. Takeaway: channel the emotions that you suppress in your ruthless business dealings into a passion for art collecting. As we said, “self-made.” ¶ Felix Salmon explains why Andy Warhol is not only the most successful modern artist but the best investment (or is that the same thing?) — twenty-odd years after his death. Liquidity, darling. ¶ At the Guardian, Simon Jenkins waxes impatient with “modernist nonsense” about ruins, and urges us to be more Victorian about them, fixing them up and restoring them for use instead of treating them as sacrosanct untouchables. (via Arts Journal)

Prime

¶ Although it’s billed as the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Bretton Woods conference sounds like the Same Old Same Old. Simon Johnson reports that a consensus of attendees holds that Goldman Sachs would be bailed out if it were in trouble. Politicians have given up on two fronts: cuttting down its size (and with it its riskiness), and raising its capital requirements. Capcha! (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ What with that budget adaptation of Atlas Shrugged going the rounds, Ayn Rand is back in the news, and who better than Maria Bustillos to examine Rand’s lunatic ethos, which, as she demonstrates with the example of Alan Greenspan, leads inevitably to hardening-of-the-brain. (The Awl)

Tierce

¶ Facts and Figures: Jonah Lehrer reports that the Allen Institute for Brain Science has established a 94% similarity in gene expression among human beings — making us all only 6% different, to put it facetiously — and, even more startlingly, that 82% of our genes are expressed somewhere in the brain. (The Frontal Cortex) 

Sext

¶ Simon Doonan’s Note on Camp (he has but one) is cheeky but accessible. He claims to be the child of camp parents. When was the last time you heard Sontag referred to as “Sue“? (Slate) ¶ Erin Carver, who resolved to sample religions this year, attends a meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and, perhaps because she didn’t see any quaking, contemplates a return visit with something like enthusiasm. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ At Bidoun, Curtis Brown meditates on the author of The Eternal Male, a sometime Anglophone schoolboy in Cairo called Michael Demitri Chalhoub who, among other things, bullied Edward Said. This would be Omar Sharif. (That’s “Omar” as in “Bradley,” by the way.) A fascinating page. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Nones

¶ To the extent that it alerts naive American technophiles to the fact that societies other than our own may have very different priorities and purposings for social networks, Niall Ferguson’s “Mash of Civilizations” is useful. But dismissing those other societies as “enemies of freedom” — when in fact they have a very, very different idea of what freedom means — is simply wrongheadedly simplistic. (Newsweek; via Real Clear World) ¶ Once upon a time, CIA officials retired from their profession; since 9/11, they’ve been taking their expertise to private contractors. Julie Tate covers this depressing but unsurprising development at the Washington Post. (via The Morning News)

Vespers

¶ Until last week, we had never heard of Peter Mountford. Now we’re in the middle of his engaging debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Gregory Brown turned us on to it at The Rumpus; at The Millions, Caleb Powell interviews the author — who has a piece of his own at Speakeasy.

The hero/anti-hero of my novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, is tasked with trying to trying to find a monetizable angle on the 2005 Bolivian election for his new employer, a small unscrupulous (fictional) hedge fund called The Calloway Group. The mission is just a test. As the fund manager puts it, “In Bolivia, if you screw up, it won’t hurt us…you’re flying a worthless Cessna, not one of our gold-plated seven-forty-sevens.”

In the first chapter, Gabriel attempts to obtain a copy of Bolivia’s Article IV Report—the IMF’s completely candid assessment of a country’s economic outlook. Countries with especially dour prospects (like Bolivia in 2005) often keep their A-IV Reports under lock and key. Gabriel’s mission is pulled directly from a nearly-identical experience I had in Ecuador in late 2000, when I spent the better part of a month trying to chase down the IMF’s recent (but classified) A-IV Report on Ecuador for my then-employer, a small (now defunct) think tank.

¶ “On its own terms, sex is information.” This startlingly Gleickian claim appears in Alexander Chee’s tribute to James Salter’s sex writing, as virtuosically displayed in the classic A Sport and a Pastime, from which many enticing quotes are drawn. (The Paris Review; via The Morning News)

Compline

¶ Nothing on David Cay Johnson’s list of “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes” will be unfamiliar to regular readers, but Mr Johnson’s tempered outrage is encouraging. “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.” (Willamette Week; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ At City of Sound, amazing photographs by Dan Hill of the Linked Hybrid, a complex of buildings in Beijing, which basically comes off as the background of Eraserhead only in color. ¶ “This has been going on since Ronkonkoma.” (@ The Awl) ¶ Bent Objects, @ Brain Pickings. ¶ Canal Street subway interchange, much reduced, @ The Best Part.

Noted

¶ Getting Byrned. (GOOD) ¶ Tyler Cowen is in Brasilia. (Marginal Revolution) ¶ A selection of Vreeland Memos, @ Letters of Note.

Floyd Norris considers Europe at an interesting tipping point: now that the bankers and their regulators have decided what must be done, voters may refuse to ratify the plans.

There is a risk over time that democracy will lead Europe to splinter. Germans are angry about having to pick up the bill for bailouts of other countries, which is one reason the German government felt called upon to insist on that “strict framework.” Others are resentful of the enforced austerity.

If European economies somehow grow enough, those resentments may not matter much. But if not, voter anger may intensify and demand that something change. Maybe the Germans will want to cut off their prodigal neighbors. Maybe the neighbors will decide they would be better off with a new currency and without overbearing demands for austerity that prevent recovery. In either case, populist politicians demanding the demise of the euro might win elections. The fact that European law does not allow for such a possibility would make the situation messier, but in the end voters would have their way.

The Postal Service has issued a “forever” stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty — the one in Las Vegas.

The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.

But the post office is going with it.

“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”

The service selected the image from a photography service, and issued rolls of the stamp bearing the image in December. This month, it issued a sheet of 18 Lady Liberty and flag stamps. Information accompanying the original release of the stamp included a bit of history on the real Statue of Liberty. Las Vegas was never mentioned. The whole mess was exposed by the stamp magazine, which this week ran photographs of both statues.

The rot begins when officials bull-headedly stick with their mistakes instead of falling on their swords in disgrace. That there should be anything at all accidental about a postage stamp (a kind of currency) is horribly worrisome.

Donald Trump’s emergence on the political scene occasions some interesting comment by Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight. He divides Republican presidential candidates into two groups, one of which (the Fairfax Five) has the party establishment’s blessing, while the other (the Factional Five) does not.

For the establishment Republicans, it must feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Just as Ms. Palin’s numbers decline, candidates like Mr. Trump and Ms. Bachmann — who could be nearly as problematic next November — pop up in her place.

As a result, the Fairfax Five are gaining no ground at all on the Factional Five — in fact, the opposite is true. In an average of four polls of Republican voters conducted in November and December, just after the midterm elections, the Fairfax Five collectively held 27 percent of the vote, to 31 percent for the Factional Five. In the three most recent polls, however, the Fairfax Five’s share has declined to 22 percent, while the Factional Five’s — mostly because of Mr. Trump — has risen to 44 percent.

[snip]

I’m not convinced that these markets are underrating the Factional Five, each one of whom has some significant liabilities as a candidate and several of whom may not run. I do wonder, however, whether the sorts of candidates that Mr. Will likes will ultimately have enough Main Street charisma and Tea Party bona fides to win over Republican primary voters, especially in conservative states like Iowa and South Carolina. There is plenty of time left, but at some point, for a candidate like Mr. Pawlenty to prevail he has to at least begin to poll in the high single digits rather than the low single digits, which would suggest he has some flesh-and-blood appeal.

How do you find governors for people who don’t like government?

Acting with tact and a dispatch, an American Air Force team based in Okinawa restored the airport at Sendai, now reopened and under Japanese control.

The situation was quite different after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Then, Tokyo rejected assistance by the United States military, a decision that many Japanese criticized as possibly raising the death toll. This time, Tokyo accepted, and promptly.

[snip]

Within minutes of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, some 1,400 passengers and workers in the terminal suddenly found themselves surrounded by black, churning waves that crumpled parked aircraft like paper toys.

The people were rescued, but the airport seemed a near total loss — until Col. Robert P. Toth, commander of the 353rd Special Operations Group, based in Okinawa, heard of the airport’s destruction. His unit specializes in turning ruined landing strips and patches of empty desert into forward supply bases for American aircraft, but usually in war-torn countries, like Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

“It was clear that opening Sendai Airport was the No. 1 priority, but everyone had written it off,” Colonel Toth said. He approached his superiors with a plan to turn it into a hub for American relief.

Bravo.

The remarkable non-stop life of Sidney Harman has come to an end, cut short by acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 92, less than a year after Harman purchased Newsweek and forged its alliance with The Daily Beast.

At a time when sophisticated hi-fi radio required a tuner to capture signals, a pre-amplifier, a power amp and speakers, Mr. Harman and Bernard Kardon, Bogen’s chief engineer, quit their jobs in 1953, put up $5,000 each and founded Harman/Kardon. It produced the first integrated hi-fi receiver, the Festival D1000.

It was hugely successful, and by 1956 the company was worth $600,000. Mr. Kardon retired, and in 1958 Mr. Harman created the first hi-fi stereo receiver, the Festival TA230. In later years, the company made speakers, amplifiers, noise-reduction devices, video and navigation equipment, voice-activated telephones, climate controls and home theater systems.

In the 1960s Mr. Harman was an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and for a year taught black pupils in Prince Edward County, Va., after public schools there were closed in a notorious effort to avoid desegregation. From 1968 to 1971 he was president of Friends World College, a Quaker institution in Suffolk County. In 1973 he earned a doctorate from the Cincinnati-based Union Institute and University.

In the early 1970s he created a program to provide employees at his Bolivar, Tenn., automotive parts plant with training, flexible hours and work assignments, stock ownership and other benefits that eased tensions with management and raised productivity. It was hailed as visionary and scorned as impractical. But President Carter was impressed, and made him deputy secretary of commerce. He served in 1977-78

Regrettably, the principled, activist nudists of Barcelona are going to be denied their freedoms by new regulations aimed at the very unprincipled behavior of mass tourists.

Indeed, nudism’s few local proponents are themselves divided. Just Roca, 56, a specialist in sexology who participated in Mr. Tunick’s mass photo, quit Mr. Ribas’s association over “philosophical differences” about nudity and founded his own group called Aleteia, a rendering of the Greek word for truth. Nudist beaches and camps, common enough in Spain, he said, “are born of a culture that says being dressed is normal — I say nudity is the natural situation.”

Mr. Roca compares the campaign against nudity to a parallel proposal to ban the wearing of the Muslim women’s veil, often called the burqa, in public places, as several nearby cities in the Catalonia region have done and as the Barcelona City Council is considering. Mr. Roca called both measures forms of segregation. “It’s like ‘No Negroes,’ ” he said. Just as politicians fear that a burqa-clad woman has something to hide, he said, “they imagine an undressed person has something to hide, too.”

Guy Reifenberg, 37, whose travel agency, Kokopeli, organizes adventure tours, said that the proposed sanctions were less a crackdown on nudity than a way to rein in the excesses of mass tourism, which is currently swamping Barcelona.

“The city’s afraid of the kind of tourists it’s attracting,” said Mr. Reifenberg, a native of Israel who has lived here for six years. These tourists, he said, go for “cheap alcohol, partying, hanging out in the street, and not spending money.” As a result, the city’s business community — hotels, restaurants, bars and retail outlets — has put pressure on the mayor, Jordi Hereu, a Socialist who faces an uphill battle for re-election in May.

After thirty years of inconvenience, Fordham University and the New York Botanical Garden find themselves once again on Southern Boulevard in the Bronx. The ill-considered renaming of a stretch of roadway after a dentist and local historian, Theodore Kazamiroff (accent the first syllable, if you can), has been reversed.

When the street was renamed for Dr. Kazimiroff, he said, the City Council went a step beyond an honorary designation and legally renamed the road. “Part of the problem was they never really consulted a lot of folks, including the U.S. post office,” Mr. Muriana said. “So the post office for years refused to recognize the Kazimiroff name and wouldn’t deliver mail.”

The Botanical Garden, which also supported the change, lists its address as 200th Street and Kazimiroff Boulevard, which resulted in daily phone calls from befuddled visitors, garden officials said. GPS devices had trouble, too. “They’d have to spell Kazimiroff perfectly accurately, including Dr. Theodore,” Mr. Muriana said.

But Lloyd Ultan, the current Bronx historian, dismissed the idea that the address had proved confusing, calling those charges spurious.

“What was asserted was that nobody could find Dr. Theodore Kazimiroff Boulevard, which I find hard to believe,” Mr. Ultan said.

Still, Dr. Kazimiroff remains an obscure figure to many Bronx residents.

“I’d say most people here don’t even know him,” said Kathleen A. McAuley, a director at the Bronx County Historical Society, which, as it happens, Dr. Kazimiroff founded in 1955.

We hold that changing street names from the top down is a Soviet-style wickedness. We wouldn’t have our Major Deegan any other way, even if we don’t know who the hell he was! (But don’t bring back Anderson Field.)

At the beginning of the liturgical year in November, American Catholics will celebrate the Mass in language much closer to that of the Latin rite that was displaced almost forty years ago, in the wake of the second Vatican council. Will the laity’s response be as skittish as the clergy’s has been?

“The first time I saw some of the texts, I was shocked,” said the Rev. Richard Hilgartner, who as executive director of the American bishops’ Secretariat of Divine Worship is overseeing the introduction of the new missal in the United States.

“But the more time I’ve spent with it, the more comfortable I became with it,” he said. “The new translation tries to be more faithful to the Scriptures, and a little more poetic and evocative in terms of imagery and metaphor.”

“But the more time I’ve spent with it, the more comfortable I became with it,” he said. “The new translation tries to be more faithful to the Scriptures, and a little more poetic and evocative in terms of imagery and metaphor.”

Father Hilgartner said, “We know that people aren’t going to understand it initially, and we’ll have to talk about it. I’ve said to priests, we will welcome and crave opportunities for people to come up and ask us about God. It’s a catechetical opportunity.”

In other reactionary news, “scholars are sifting” through the official condemnation of Quest for the Living God, by Fordham University theologian Sister Elizabeth A Johnson.

Because prosecutors withheld ten pieces of exculpatory evidence, John Thompson spent 18 years in prison, 14 of them on death row. A jury verdict against the prosecutor’s office that would have awarded him a million dollars for every year that he spent facing the death penalty was recently overturned by the Supreme Court’s reactionary majority.

I don’t care about the money. I just want to know why the prosecutors who hid evidence, sent me to prison for something I didn’t do and nearly had me killed are not in jail themselves. There were no ethics charges against them, no criminal charges, no one was fired and now, according to the Supreme Court, no one can be sued.

Worst of all, I wasn’t the only person they played dirty with. Of the six men one of my prosecutors got sentenced to death, five eventually had their convictions reversed because of prosecutorial misconduct. Because we were sentenced to death, the courts had to appoint us lawyers to fight our appeals. I was lucky, and got lawyers who went to extraordinary lengths. But there are more than 4,000 people serving life without parole in Louisiana, almost none of whom have lawyers after their convictions are final. Someone needs to look at those cases to see how many others might be innocent.

If a private investigator hired by a generous law firm hadn’t found the blood evidence, I’d be dead today. No doubt about it.

If only these really were the End Times — of the conservative decadence in the United States.

While the beleaguered employees of Gannett, the publisher of USA Today and many local newspapers, suffer widespread layoffs and furloughs, the boss, Craig Dubow, is doing very nicely, thank you. David Carr simmers.

In announcing that Mr. Dubow would receive a hefty package, double the previous year, Gannett hardly shied away from part of what was driving the award: “The company achieved substantial expense reductions through a variety of efforts, including continued centralization and consolidation efforts and salary freezes, positioning the company for growth as economic conditions improve.”

Ken Doctor, an analyst at Outsell and the author of “Newsonomics,” suggested that Gannett is mostly in the business of managing entropy.

“There has not been a lot of strategy other than cost-cutting to maintain profits and some small bets in digital that have not had any significant impact yet,” he said.

While their approach may be lacking in imagination and long-term strategy, Mr. Dubow and his team can be credited with being prudent in difficult times. Prudent, except when it comes to their own compensation.

We are itching to say that such a class of clueless privilege has not walked the earth since the days of the ancien régime, but we’re feeling pretty clueless, too. How can this sort of thing go on and on and on?

Matins

¶ At the LRB, David Runciman reviews two books about politics and finance and, in the process, speaks truth to sloth. The gravest problem of democracy is that the majority of citizens refuses to shoulder its burdens. In exchange for mandatory tax collection, the people reserve the right not to learn what’s really going on in public affairs.

Hacker and Pierson recognise that it has become bad manners to point this out even in serious political discourse. But it remains the truth. ‘Most citizens pay very little attention to politics, and it shows. To call their knowledge of even the most elementary facts about the political system shaky would be generous.’ The traditional solution to this problem was to supplement the ignorance of the voters with guidance from experts, who would reform the system in the voters’ best interests. The difficulty is that the more the experts take charge, the less incentive there is for the voters to inform themselves about what’s going on. This is what Hacker and Pierson call the catch-22 of democratic politics: in order to combat what’s taking place under the voters’ radar it’s necessary to continue the fight under the voters’ radar.

Lauds

¶ Buzz Poole gives The History of American Graffiti such an enthusiastic review that we wonder how this vibrant art form — but an art form much closer to writing and to architecture than it is to the visual art that hangs on the wall of a museum — might be detached from its associations with vandalism. (We never knew — or perhaps we forgot — about tagging cross-country freight trains) The review extracts commentary attesting to the positive impact that graffiti had on erasing racial barriers among the writers. (The Millions) ¶ What’s all this about information overload? At HTMLGiant, M Kitchell complains about being unable to find ANYTHING on the Internet about a fave filmmaker, Frans Zwartjes.

Prime

¶ At Triple Crisis, Mark Blyth offers an interesting essay about the dangers of “intellectual capture” and the “consensus” that the financialization of the American economy is a good thing. (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ All about Coudal Partners, the makers of Field Notes, and how they got into the business of working for themselves. Timing is everything: in 2001, who knew where the Internet was going? (Signal vs Noise; via The Morning News) ¶ Robert Cringely considers the Engadget defections in light of Thorstein Veblen, noting, “When it comes to information there is no such things as conspicuous consumption and none of us are ever information-rich enough.” (That’s one way of looking at information overload.) ¶ Felix Salmon ponders the Larry Gagosian effect. Is the famous dealer the film on the bubble?

In the short term, that’s good for the contemporary art market: Larry simply won’t allow it to collapse, so it won’t. But in the longer term, as we all know, the longer that bubbles inflate, the nastier their bursting turns out to be.

Felix also surmises that Mr Gagosian is as rich as many of his clients.

Tierce

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about how tests fail. They don’t last long enough, would be one way of putting it. (Wired Science) ¶ If you’re still wondering about James Gleick’s The Information, Richard Wirick’s quick but resonant review, at The Second Pass, may be the one that gets you to read it.

Sext

¶ At Slate Bill James asks why America is so much better at nurturing great athletes than great writers. When the silt finally settled, we were left with the feeling that when a sportswriter decides to talk about Shakespeare, he gets to say any old thing. (via MetaFilter)

We don’t genu­inely need more literary geniuses. One can only read so many books in a lifetime. We need new athletes all the time because we need new games every day—fudging just a little on the definition of the word need.

¶ If you’re not chuckling by the time Adam Robinson tells you the title of his forthcoming opus, you need a humor tuneup. We particularly liked the sentence in which Adam compares a writer whose books you cannot buy at Amazon (yet) to that Kilimanjaro guy.

Nones

¶ Tim Parks looks at some new books about the ongoing malaise of Italy, where everything is great in spite of itself, or vice versa; as always it’s his own observations as a thirty-year resident that bring the history to life. Here he makes the city-states that emerged in the later Middle Ages sound like teams competing in a league. (The New Yorker)

Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Rome were aware that Italy might eventually be considered a territorial unit, and did everything they could to avoid being swallowed up in it: they were, as Graziano comments, “too weak to absorb others, too strong to let themselves be absorbed.”

¶ At the Guardian, Seumas Milne applauds David Cameron’s acknowledgment that the British Empire left behind “many of the world’s problems.”

Of course, the colonial legacy is only one part of the story, and Britain’s is only one of the colonial empires whose baleful inheritance can be felt across the world. But the failure in modern Britain to recognise the empire for what it was – an avowedly racist despotism, built on ethnic cleansing and ruthless exploitation, which undeveloped vast areas and oversaw famines that killed tens of millions – is a dangerous encouragement to ignore its lessons and repeat its crimes in a modern form.

What’s needed are not so much apologies, still less declarations of guilt, but some measure of acknowledgement, reparation and understanding that invasions, occupations and external diktats imposed by force are a recipe not for international justice but continued conflict and violence, including against those who stand behind them.

Vespers

¶ In this week’s must-read piece, Maria Bustillos goes through David Foster Wallace’s papers at the Ransom Center in Austin, and is surprised to find a comprehensive library of thoughtfully annotated self-help best-sellers, by the likes of John Bradshaw and Alice Miller. Reading of Wallace’s efforts to cut himself down to size, to live as if he weren’t the recipient of a “genius” grant, is heartbreaking and at the same time damning of America’s leveling tendencies. It were better to have taught him how to be great. (The Awl) ¶ John Jeremiah Sullivan reviews The Pale King at length, at GQ, praising the late writer as a failure in Faulkner’s sense (“our splendid failure to do the impossible”). but that comes at the end, after a great deal of immensely sympathetic comment.

He’s maybe the only notoriously “difficult” writer who almost never wrote a page that wasn’t enjoyable, or at least diverting, to read. Yet it was the theme of loneliness, a particular kind of postmodern, information-saturated loneliness, that, more than anything, drew crowds to his readings who looked in size and excitement level more like what you’d see at an in-store for a new band. Many of Wallace’s readers (this is apparent now that every single one of them has written an appreciation of him somewhere on the Internet) believed that he was speaking to them in his work—that he was one of the few people alive who could help them navigate a new spiritual wilderness, in which every possible source of consolation had been nullified.

¶ At The Millions, Rebecca Rego Barry writes about Nicholson Baker, libraries, and discards — heartbreaking, infuriating, and in this time of transition to new information technologies, inevitable. Just as more work is being done, in this age of digital photography, in the archaic techniques of Nadar, Fox Talbot and others, so it will be, we hope, with books, as more people value the information that can’t be digitized.  

¶ We hope that readers will be encouraged by Stephen Dodson’s review to pick up a copy of Ward Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric; we trust that the book will set their tongues and pens in flight. (The Millions)

Compline

¶ In “The Windsor Knot,” Jonathan Freedland tries to guess just how close the Firm is to barreling over the waterfall’s edge.

Figures from Visit Britain, the British tourism agency, showed that tourism to the country declined in the banner royal years—by 15 percent in July 1981, just as Charles and Diana were wed in picturebook fashion, and by 8 percent in July 1986 when Andrew married Sarah Ferguson. The more visible the Windsors were, the more foreign visitors chose to give Britain a wide berth.

Have a Look

¶ Felice Cohen makes her 90-square-foot apartment seem positively enviable. (via MetaFilter) ¶ Bureaucrats at work. (Brain Pickings) ¶ Jimmy Chen produces The Catcher in the Rye, starring Eminem. (HTMLGiant) ¶ How Venice Works. (via MetaFilter) ¶ Replaced Mona Lisa. (@ GOOD) ¶ Photographer Drew Kelly. (@ The Best Part)

Noted

¶ Tyler Cowen’s choices for The Great Gatsby‘s equal in successive decades: The Grapes of Wrath; Farewell, My Lovely &c. Ultra-strange but strangely interesting. (Marginal Revolution) ¶ Palytoxin, the world’s second-deadliest poison. You may have some in your aquarium! (Not Exactly Rocket Science) ¶ Twenty-five things about Terry Teachout. (About Last Night) ¶ William Gass: Five books that every critic ought to have on hand — nice work if you can get ’em! (Critical Mass)

Clyde Haberman’s last NYC column. Has it been only sixteen years? Mr Haberman’s city voice was and is ageless.

Certain themes recurred in NYC:

Hate-crime laws, for example, essentially punish thought deemed impure by adding prison time for certain acts that are already crimes. The steady expansion of state-sponsored gambling lifts dollars from the pockets of those who can least afford it. The rejection of civilian trials for terrorism suspects is a capitulation to fear. The knee-jerk cancellation of political activity every Sept. 11 makes a mockery of the chest-thumping about how the terrorists didn’t win. Democracy took a severe pounding when the mayor and the City Council overrode the expressed will of the people to give themselves third terms.

And the Catch-22s of bureaucracy make the mind reel. A man named Marc La Cloche was taught how to be a barber while in a New York prison on a robbery conviction. After his release, the same state then denied him a license to work his trade because he had been in prison.

NYC focused on all those subjects more than once. At last sight, hate-crime laws are intact, state-sponsored gambling continues to expand, terrorism suspects are headed for military tribunals, politics is still taboo on Sept. 11 and the mayor is well into his shaky third term. As for Mr. La Cloche, he died without ever getting his barber’s license.

So much for the power of the press.

While everyone wonders how Mayor Bloomberg could have been such an idiot &c about Cathleen Black, an unidentified observer suggests that any third term will be structurally dubious. 

From outside City Hall, meanwhile, veterans of Mr. Bloomberg’s inner circle say that the dynamic between the mayor and his deputies appears to have changed in unhealthy ways since his first two terms, following the departures of some senior officials.

“His administrative style works best when he has really smart people working for him who understand that he’s the leader, and you cover the leader,” said one former aide, who insisted on anonymity to avoid damaging relationships with people still at City Hall. “He’s covering for everybody else. He didn’t have to do it that much in the first or second terms. I just find it so extraordinary that there are so many people he’s having to cover up for.”

The Mayor might have found that he liked the job and wanted to stay on, but the talented team that made him look good in the early days has moved on.

We’re so appetized by Guy Trebay’s sketch of the Sam Green story that we’re totally bummed to read that the inadequately forthcoming book by Joan Tippett is still in the “research” phase. 

“Sam is one of the emblematic figures of the 1960s, in the sense that a 25-year-old man at that moment could become director of the I.C.A. and could do shows that retrospectively we can recognize as seismic,” said Jonathan Katz, a historian and a curator of last year’s “Hide/Seek” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. To Mr. Katz, Mr. Green was a purely Pop creation, a kind of cartoon person whose thought-bubble changed at whim.

“Sam’s greatest strength was sociality,” said Mr. Katz, explaining that “Sam Green could be so much to so many, handsome and charming, gay and straight, serious and frivolous, anything you wanted him to be, he helped engineer the transition from an art world that still turned on the social in the early 1960s to a social world that turned on art. And we still inhabit that world.”

Along the way, though, something happened. Disillusioned by art and academia and ensorcelled by another world, a borderless one whose citizens’ wealth is a passe-partout to unlimited privilege, “Sam sort of lost the thread,” said Jane Tippett, an art historian who is researching a book on Mr. Green.

Perhaps Pop Art was popular when it was for a reason.

Looking into the future, the pessimist pundits of the past used to worry that food production would not keep pace with population growth. But they never imagined why that might be the case when in fact it happened. “Rush to Use Crops as Fuel Raises Food Prices and Hunger Fears,” by Elisabeth Rosenthal.

Each year, an ever larger portion of the world’s crops — cassava and corn, sugar and palm oil — is being diverted for biofuels as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossil fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy to keep their cars and industries running. Cassava is a relatively new entrant in the biofuel stream.

But with food prices rising sharply in recent months, many experts are calling on countries to scale back their headlong rush into green fuel development, arguing that the combination of ambitious biofuel targets and mediocre harvests of some crucial crops is contributing to high prices, hunger and political instability.

This year, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization reported that its index of food prices was the highest in its more than 20 years of existence. Prices rose 15 percent from October to January alone, potentially “throwing an additional 44 million people in low- and middle-income countries into poverty,” the World Bank said.

(Did we tell you that “taking the day off” means helping the Editor with his storage issues! Some break!) Another item that caught our eye over the weekend was a review by Nancy Koehn of Margaret Heffernan’s Willful Blindness.

Writing in clear, flowing prose, she draws on psychological and neurological studies and interviews with executives, whistleblowers and white-collar criminals. She analyzes mechanisms that limit our vision — individually and collectively — and thus jeopardize our safety, economic well-being, moral grounding and emotional wholeness.

Love, ideology, fear and the impulse to obey and conform all play important roles in rendering us blind to the makings of personal tragedies and corporate collapses.

Information overload is also a big factor, especially in our technologically sophisticated age. Ms. Heffernan explains how multitasking and excessive stimulation, combined with exhaustion, restrict what we see and do.

We’re taking the day off, but there’s something from Sunday’s Times. Cornell’s Robert H Frank (whom we call “Luxury Bob” to distinguish him from the author of Richistan) wrote about what he calls the “toil index,” the number of hours that must be worked in order to pay for housing of average quality. Given income inequality, this average keeps climbing out of reach.

The index rejects the standard economic assumption that well-being depends primarily on absolute consumption. Instead, it assumes that the context of that consumption is often far more important. Context matters because the brain requires a frame of reference to make any evaluative judgment.

For example, is a particular family’s house adequate? The answer invariably depends on the quality and size of other houses in the surrounding area.

Rising inequality has shifted the context that governs housing choices. Higher incomes at the top have led the wealthy to build bigger mansions, shifting the frame of reference that shapes demands for those with slightly smaller incomes, who travel in overlapping social circles. The near-rich respond by building bigger houses as well, shifting the frame of reference for others just below them, and so on, all the way down the income ladder.

Have we missed something, or is there a reason why no one speaks of social economics?