The free flow of financial credit — our everyday lives depend upon it — is a confidence game. It may be honest, but it’s still a game, one in which nobody knows everything about anybody else’s cards. Ignorance is not only part of the game, it’s the secret of its success. That’s why we’re sorry that a glaring light has been thrown on the Federal Reserve’s discount window, a behind-the-scenes operation that contributed to economic stability merely by existing. Bankers knew that it was there if they needed it; they didn’t need to know who was lining up at it.

Unless we’re persuaded otherwise, our position is that, during the credit crisis that heated up in 2007,  the discount window was a bulwark standing between the nation and its financial collapse. We’re sorry to see that its actions are now being scrutinized for political impropriety when,  as even one critic admits, the partial disclosures that the Fed has had to make pursuant to a court ruling do not support conclusions one way or the other.

Charles Calomiris, a finance professor at Columbia University who has studied discount window lending during previous crises, said the Fed had not released enough information for the public to determine whether some of the recipients were propped up inappropriately and should have been allowed to fail more quickly.

“Do we know whether the Fed did that? No, we don’t,” he said. “But the Fed has become more politicized than at any point in its history, and I do worry very much that a lot of Fed discount window lending may just be part of a political calculation.”

We sense that this Times article, by Binyamin Appelbaum and Jo Craven McGinty, does not provide a full context for evaluating the reported inuendo.

We applaud Joe Nocera for pointing out who’s really responsible for the fact that General Electric’s tax department is a profit center.

Is G.E. one of the companies that lobbies for the active financing exception? You bet it is. As Willens nicely puts it, “They are taking advantage of a loophole they helped create.”

But G.E. has also taken the next obvious step: It has managed, over time, to shift billions of dollars in profits from its U.S. income statement to its overseas income statements. Wouldn’t you know it? Most of their profits are also financing related. There is nothing illegal or even unethical about any of this. It’s Congress — the same Congress that is now screaming bloody murder about the deficit — that has paved the way for G.E.’s tax creativity.

We would go further. Who’s really responsible? Any voter who responds to paid political advertising, that’s who.

In response to the announcement by Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith that the City will be in-sourcing jobs from outside contractors — itself a response to last week’s revelations about City Time — the Times rounded up some experts, and as far as we can tell most of them only seem to speak the same language. For sheer rigor, the remarks of Cornell city planner Mildred Warner were a standout.

Rigorous quantitative analysis of every published study from around the world of water delivery and garbage collection (the two most commonly privatized services at the local government level) finds no statistical support for cost savings under privatization. Economic theory would predict this result. Private firms have incentives to reduce quality to enhance profits. Hence careful monitoring is required. But monitoring is expensive and it requires continuing knowledge, within government, of how services are produced.

Many public services are natural monopolies. In these cases, monopoly provision is cheaper than competition. But monopolies require public control. Even in services which initially experience competition, a competitive market erodes after the initial contract. Fully 75 percent of contracts are given to the incumbent without rebidding. For most local government services the average number of alternative providers is less than two. Only one third of the 67 most common local government services have two or more alternative providers in the market. So in many cases, all privatization does is substitute a private monopoly for a public one. There is more potential for public control over a public monopoly.

We’d like to keep an eye on efforts by  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood efforts to coordinate safety programs for oil and gas pipelines — currently a morass and a welter tied up in a Gordian knot. We’re not optimistic that the initiative will accomplish much on its own, but it may serve to highlight the antagonisms of transmission companies on the one hand and federal, state, and local authorities on the other, and let’s not forget about us.

Mr. LaHood said he had met with the executives of major natural gas companies to discuss better surveillance of pipelines and a new replacement schedule.

Cynthia L. Quarterman, the administrator of the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, said her office did not have the authority to order replacement of pipes unless it found an “imminent hazard.” And, she said, pipes only had to be “fit for service.”

“There is no hundred-year deadline for any piece of pipe,” she said, although companies “have to assure it’s been operated and tested appropriately.”

But Mr. LaHood said “the point of this is to get everybody around the table and say, O.K., another 100 years in the ground is not going to cut it. We’re trying to work with all the stakeholders to reach a conclusion.”

Mr. Swift, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said: “Part of the problem is there hasn’t been a focus on the replacement schedule, what we do with these 50 or 70 years down the line. People are aware it’s aging, but it’s a process we didn’t plan for gracefully.”

Matins

¶ Tyler Cowen divides humanity — past and present, if not future — into two “coalitions,” the rulers and the ruled. The rulers usually disagree among themselves, but they close ranks in union against uprisings of the ruled. This is good so far as it goes, but his placement of “modern Americans,” as a lump, among the rulers scrathes our complaisance. Surely there is a problematic third group, “the couch voters,” who want all of the benefits of power but shirk its responsibilities — especially the responsibility of assessing televised propaganda. (Marginal Revolution)

Lauds

¶ Brian Dillon write about Roland Barthes so movingly that we came to feel that Barthes died of despair. The ostensible subject of the essay is his last book, Camera Lucida, “probably the most widely read and influential book on the subject” of photography. (Guardian; via The Morning News) ¶ Although Andrew Searle’s talk of “crisis” is annoying, his “Drain in Spain“ assessment of the visual arts in Catalonia, Galicia, and elsewhere seems well-informed, at least about one side of the story. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ They’re teaching Mad Men over at Regis High School. (Speakeasy)

Several universities like the University of California, Berkeley and Northwestern have incorporated the series into their media studies curriculum, producing essay anthologies and holding academic conferences. Regis is helping to  lead the way for high schools to take on the show and use it as a lens to view history.

Prime

¶ Felix Salmon has the sense to call what’s going on in Brazil — sorry; we’re talking about Adam Ross Sorkin’s gee-whiz piece in today’s Times, “In Brazil, No Room For Leverage at Buyout Firms” — venture capital, not private equity. ¶ Simon Johnson berates Spencer Bachus for claiming that Elizabeth Warren has been acting beyond her CFPB powers; but Yves Smith berates liberals for rushing to Ms Warren’s defense.

The key leverage point in this fight is not Warren; she’s become part of the problem. The leverage point is the attorneys general. Thus campaigns like CrimesShouldn’tPay and Credo’s “Jail Wall Street Crooks“, which organized calls to push the AGs to reject the settlement talks and to investigate the banks, are on the right track. Left-wing efforts to rally behind this Administration should be assumed to be wrongheaded until proven otherwise.

¶ While we agree with Robert Reich that the American economy’s health is not improving, but getting worse, we question the wisdom of his cold-water tone. “I’m sorry to have to deliver the bad news, but it’s better you know.” To the extent that economics is a confidence game, this is not helpful. We also believe that scolding is ineffective unless it is focused upon one individual or very small group of individuals. Scolding “Washington” is fatuous.

Tierce 

¶ Jonah Lehrer writes about the neuropsychopharmacy of the near-miss — and how casinos exploit this otherwise positive bit of wiring to our detriment. (The Frontal Cortex) ¶ At I, Cringely, an I-told-you-so note addressed to the TEPCO executives who dithered about plutonium containment at Fukushima.

Sext

¶ Laura Frey Daisley gave up snark for a month. She may just give it up, period. (Slate; via The Morning News)

Not giving voice to my flinty little put-downs also eliminated that weird guilt where you wonder if the person somehow heard you or found out what you said. I also stopped suspecting that anyone might be saying harsh things about me.

¶ Skiles Hornig writes about the desk that her husband would like her to get rid of, because an ex gave it to her. But it’s where she writes. (The Rumpus) ¶ At Salon, Drew Grant considers the dust-up over Big Al’s review of Jacqueline Howett’s self-published Kindle book, The Greek Seaman, and wonders about “people who have nothing to do all day than get into fights about grammar.” Big Al’s Books and Pals, a site that reviews indie fiction, was certainly given a boost.  

Nones

¶ David Rieff has a long piece in The New Republic about the foolishness of dismissing Mexico as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. We hope that it will spark meditation, in thoughtful minds, about the idiocy of the American gun and drug laws that have inevitably nurtured the cartels that, Rieff fears, may brutalize Mexican society. (via The Morning News) ¶ Even Omar Ali, revisiting the topic, dismisses talk of Pakistan as a “failed state” à la Pakistan. What worries him now is the governments flirtation with a Chinese alliance. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Yan Xuetong has some interesting things to say about the revival of Confucian values in Chinese political discourse; we didn’t know, by the way, that the Chinese navy had dispatched ships to evacuate Chinese nationals from Libya. (Project Syndicate; via Real Clear World)

Vespers

¶ Not exactly timely — perhaps the LRB wanted to herald the novel’s publication in paper — Pankaj Mishra’s excellent review of Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad places the book on very high ground and then considers its contents from an international point of view. There are many standout lines. “But there is no theoretical reason why abstraction should be incompatible with storytelling…” is one. Here’s another:

Remarkably for a writer of her generation (she was born in 1962), Egan seemed like an expatriate, looking back with biting irony at her fellow Americans and their insufficiently examined expectations of wealth, comfort, beauty and fame. 

Scott Esposito refers us to Luc Sante’s rave review, in BookForum, of Geoff Dyer’s new book, a collection of previously published essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition. Sante calls Dyer “a first-class noticer,” but complains about some items that he calls “dutiful.” Scott disagrees, at least with regard to the piece on Atonement, which he calls “ ingenious argument for a work you never would have expected him to get behind in a million years.” One mans gatherum is another’s omnium.

Compline

¶ Walking around the Old Town of Hannover, Justin E H Smith is drawn to make an arresting comparison, in an off-the-cuff entry entitled “When Buildings Stopped Talking To God,” between ancient Sanskrit inscriptions that are thought to have been addressed to the gods (not to mortals) and modern advertisements, which also “seem to be of no place.” (3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ Happy Talk, Part Deux. (via MetaFilter)

Noted

¶ KMZT-FM returns to Los Angeles; experimenting with non-classical-music formats didn’t work. (LA Times; via Arts Journal) ¶ Richard Florida teases out some unsurprising but not uninteresting correlations between passport ownership and happiness, &c. (Atlantic)

Narendra Modi, the demagogue who runs the Indian state of Gujarat, has banned Joseph Lelyveld’s new book about Gandhi, even though it has yet to be published in India.

“The writing is perverse in nature,” Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, said of the book after the ban. “It has hurt the sentiments of those with capacity for sane and logical thinking.”

India’s law minister, M. Veerappa Moily, said on Tuesday that “the book denigrates the national pride and leadership,” which he said could not be tolerated. Officials “will consider prohibiting the book,” he added.

[snip]

In the interview Mr. Lelyveld said the information about Gandhi’s relationship with Mr. Kallenbach was not his own discovery and was never intended to be the main focus of his book.

“All I can claim is that I dealt with that material more extensively with an eye to the general public than anyone previously,” Mr. Lelyveld said. “But it’s not a central preoccupation. My book is about Gandhi’s struggle for social justice, not his intimate relationships. But he was a complicated man, and the two are linked.”

We couldn’t decide which story seemed most noteworthy, so we’re snipping bits from three items in the Times.

First, Paul Krugman on the Republican Party’s “Mellon Doctrine.”

Here’s the report’s explanation of how layoffs would create jobs: “A smaller government work force increases the available supply of educated, skilled workers for private firms, thus lowering labor costs.” Dropping the euphemisms, what this says is that by increasing unemployment, particularly of “educated, skilled workers” — in case you’re wondering, that mainly means schoolteachers — we can drive down wages, which would encourage hiring.

There is, if you think about it, an immediate logical problem here: Republicans are saying that job destruction leads to lower wages, which leads to job creation. But won’t this job creation lead to higher wages, which leads to job destruction, which leads to …? I need some aspirin.

For the resolution of this conundrum, we refer Mr Krugman to the piece by Motoko Rich piece in the Business section, “Many Low-Wage Jobs Seen as Failing to Meet Basic Needs.” Pay particular attention to the disparity between official poverty lines and the actual costs of a half-decent life.

The study, commissioned by Wider Opportunities for Women, a nonprofit group, builds on an analysis the group and some state and local partners have been conducting since 1995 on how much income it takes to meet basic needs without relying on public subsidies. The new study aims to set thresholds for economic stability rather than mere survival, and takes into account saving for retirement and emergencies.

“We wanted to recognize that there was a cumulative impact that would affect one’s lifelong economic security,” said Joan A. Kuriansky, executive director of Wider Opportunities, whose report is called “The Basic Economic Security Tables for the United States.” “And we’ve all seen how often we have emergencies that we are unprepared for,” she said, especially during the recession. Layoffs or other health crises “can definitely begin to draw us into poverty.”

According to the report, a single worker needs an income of $30,012 a year — or just above $14 an hour — to cover basic expenses and save for retirement and emergencies. That is close to three times the 2010 national poverty level of $10,830 for a single person, and nearly twice the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

The Mellon Doctrine, you see, contemplates a future with more poor people! Which makes perfect sense in an era in which, as Floyd Norris points out, bankers believe that they should not have to assume risks on mortgage loans.

Small banks especially seem to think it is a birthright for them to make money on mortgages without suffering any ill effects if the loans go bad. They argue that they did not cause the last crisis, so they should not have to suffer now.

The founders of many of those little banks — now long dead — would never have thought it possible that such a right could exist. Now it is defended as critical to saving the housing market.

What ought to have been a blessed event is turning into one that will leave a bad smell. Will you wait to buy your copy of The Pale King, the posthumous novel by David Foster Wallace, at your local independent bookstore, where it’s supposed to go on sale on 15 April? Or will you click your way to more immediate possession at Amazon’s or Barnes & Noble’s Web sites?

Amazon and Barnes & Noble were selling the book on their Web sites on Wednesday, long before many bookstores would receive copies. Nicole Dewey, a spokeswoman for Little, Brown, part of Hachette, said the official on-sale date for the book was March 22, but the publication date — when the book is available everywhere — remained April 15. (A countdown clock on the Hachette Web site ticks away the days, hours and minutes until April 15.)

“I don’t really understand the confusion,” Ms. Dewey said. “This happens all the time. There’s nothing unusual about it.”

It was a distinction lost on many bookstores, who erupted in protest on Wednesday when they heard that Amazon was already selling the hotly anticipated book.

“Outrageous,” said Zack Zook, the general manager and events coordinator at BookCourt, an independent store in Brooklyn. “If stuff like this keeps happening, booksellers are going to start suing publishers.”

In the mean time, we’re reading Suicide, by Édouard Levé, a French writer who killed himself after handing in the manuscript.

Publicity consultant Alan Oxley and Institute for Liberty president Andrew Langer claim that it’s just a coincidence that the Institute is advocating tariff repeals that would be favorable to Mr Oxley’s client, Asia Pulp and Paper. We’d like to think that Tea Partiers would withdraw from their association with the Isntitute upon learning of its thoroughly un-populist campaign, but we can’t bring ourselves to believe that Tea Partiers are quite bright enough to see through the slick.

Tariff-free Asian paper may seem an unlikely cause for a nonprofit Tea Party group. But it is in keeping with a succession of pro-business campaigns — promoting commercial space flight, palm oil imports and genetically modified alfalfa — that have occupied the Institute for Liberty’s recent agenda.

The Tea Party movement is as deeply skeptical of big business as it is of big government. Yet an examination of the Institute for Liberty shows how Washington’s influence industry has adapted itself to the Tea Party era. In a quietly arranged marriage of seemingly disparate interests, the institute and kindred groups are increasingly the bearers of corporate messages wrapped in populist Tea Party themes.

In a few instances, their corporate partners are known — as with the billionaire Koch brothers’ support of Americans for Prosperity, one of the most visible advocacy groups. More often, though, their nonprofit tax status means they do not have to reveal who pays the bills.

Mr. Langer would not say who financed his Indonesian paper initiative. But his sudden interest in the issue coincided with a public relations push by Asia Pulp & Paper. And the institute’s work is remarkably similar to that produced by one of the company’s consultants, a former Australian diplomat named Alan Oxley who works closely with a Washington public affairs firm known for creating corporate campaigns presented as grass-roots efforts.

Jan Gordinier writes about Bon Yagi, “An East Village Ambassador for Japanese Cuisine.” Mr Yagi owns 11 restaurants in the East Village, and has committed a portion of their profits to Red Cross relief in Japan.

If you have a fondness for Japanese food, especially the unpretentious street grub and lunchbox fare that are a common part of day-to-day life in Japan, it’s likely that you’ve patronized one of Mr. Yagi’s 11 restaurants.

[snip]

All of them joined a growing list of restaurants, including JoJo, SD26, Telepan and Mercer Kitchen, in the Dine Out for Japan Relief campaign, which planned to give to the Red Cross — 5 percent of their profits was suggested — from March 23 to 30.

New York has no Japantown, per se, but in his quiet, deliberate way, Mr. Yagi has dedicated himself to building just such a culinary and cultural vortex, casting himself as its mustachioed Buddhist godfather, reverently known as Yagi-san.

“He’s kind of a pioneer,” said Chikako Ichihara, the president and chief executive of Azix, a marketing and consulting company that helps promote Japanese food and culture. “He brought real Japanese food to New Yorkers.”

Almost every Sunday, the Editor takes his grandson on a walk right through the heart of Yagi-san’s empire. He looks forward to taking the boy inside one of the restaurants, one fine day.

Under the direction of Wellington Chen, a new business development district, which hopes to have city authorization sometime this summer, has been formed in Chinatown. One board member calls the project “long overdue.” Indeed, tourism in Chinatown has never recovered to pre 9/11 levels (Chinatown lies in a district adjacent to the site of the destroyed World Trade Center). But change in Chinatown is harder work than it is elsewhere in an already difficult city.

Ownership is the crux of the problem. Wellington Chen, the executive director of the coming business district, now called the Chinatown Partnership, said buildings of all descriptions, including side-street tenements, are owned by “associations” of Chinese business people as well as families, many of whom have owned all or part of a building for generations. Getting all parties to agree to a sale would be nearly impossible, he said, even if all the owners could be located. Assembling multiple contiguous parcels for new construction, like three or more tenement buildings, would be extremely difficult.

“Chinatown is the Wild, Wild West when it comes to finding out who the building owners are,” said Yvonne Chang, a broker with the Kaufman Organization who is marketing leases at a two-story building at 257 Canal Street.

Landmark status on some buildings is another obstacle to development, as is the significant number of rent-controlled and rent-stabilized housing units in the area. Mr. Chen said about 4,200 of the 5,000 apartments in the neighborhood are regulated. Ousting tenants in any of the regulated buildings is out of the question, even though some building owners would like to see them go so they could raise the rent.

Chinese owners also prefer to do business within the Chinese community, another factor that gets in the way of development. “They won’t go far past who they know, and they know everybody,” Ms. Chang said. “They market among themselves.”

We like the air of paradox in Ms Chang’s comment.

Former butler to “Lady Astor” [sic!] Christopher Ely irons one of reporter Michael Wilson’s shirts. You can sign up for Mr Ely’s class at the French Culinary Institute. The question, though, is: do you take the class yourself, or do you send your butler?

Mr. Ely took one of this reporter’s wrinkled shirts and, before he even plugged in the iron, examined a tag in the shirt with a little symbol of an iron with three dots inside. That indicates how much steam to use.

First, he ironed the inside, or back, of the collar, loath to leave one of those thin creases so commonly seen after a shirt’s trip to the cleaner’s. “That’s bad form,” he said, one of many criticisms he has for dry cleaners, who he said are a crutch for New Yorkers and who he flatly accused of ruining clothes. “The most important thing is your collar.”

Next was the button-hole strip of double fabric, and then the button side, face down. “The trick with the buttons, if you want them to lie flat, you lay them on a towel,” he said. The buttons sank into the plush towel, leaving little indentations.

Next, he ironed the tricky shoulder sections, spread over the pointed tip of his board. The iron, hefty in his hand, did more of its share of the work than its $9.99 cousins found in many apartments, with Mr. Ely constantly tugging at the fabric to keep it tight. The best ironing situation, he said, involves plugging in the iron from the ceiling, so the cord stays out of the way.

He paused to lightly spray the shirt from a water bottle. He wears Brooks Brothers shirts, perfect but for the six little pleats — about five too many for Mr. Ely — that adorn the cuffs.

After ironing the cuffs and sleeves, he finished with the front-left panel, the back and the front right. He buttoned and folded the shirt into a tight square that would have looked at home on a department store shelf.

It took about 20 minutes. And it probably looked better than the ironed shirts of a lot of people who pay other people to iron their shirts. And he hopes those people send him their employees.

The Editor remembers following the same procedure, but he can’t believe that he ever spent twenty minutes on a single shirt.

We applaud President Obama for the liberal pragmatism that informs our engagement with the coalition against Libyan tyrant Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Aaron David Miller, a State Department Middle East peace negotiator during the Clinton administration, said Mr. Obama described a doctrine that, in essence, can be boiled to this: “If we can, if there’s a moral case, if we have allies, and if we can transition out and not get stuck, we’ll move to help. The Obama doctrine is the ‘hedge your bets and make sure you have a way out’ doctrine. He learned from Afghanistan and Iraq.”

The nuclear-power industry isn’t the only one that is up for a re-think in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake.

Among the casualties of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake on March 11 were modern communications networks, which proved surprisingly vulnerable. Millions of people in eastern and northern Japan, including Tokyo, lost some or all cellphone service. A total of 1.3 million land lines and fiber-optic links also went dead.

While those interruptions pale in comparison to the human tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami — 27,000 people are dead or missing — the fragility of modern communications has emerged as one of the catastrophe’s sobering lessons.

In a technology-crazed nation where many people were glued to cellphones and accustomed to the Internet’s nearly instantaneous access to information, being cut off has proved disorienting and frightening. Many local governments in the hardest-hit areas, desperate to reach residents with important emergency information, have reached into the past for more tried-and-true means of communication, including radios, newspapers and even human messengers.

Ray Madoff rails against a particularly ghoulish line of traffic in the intellectual property racket: making money from the public images of dead people. Trademarking the deceased is obscene.

Contrary to what the owners of these identities claim, a right of publicity that continues after death does little to protect the reputations of the deceased. American law, unlike that in much of Europe, explicitly and uniformly provides that reputational protections — including libel and slander and the right of privacy — all end at death. The expansion of the right of publicity does nothing to change this.

Instead, it has afforded riches to the heirs of the dead and the companies that represent them. Einstein’s estate has generated $76 million in the last five years. But the dead themselves — particularly those who would have preferred to avoid being marketed as a commodity — may not be so well served.

While people can provide for the postmortem exploitation of their identities, there is no legal mechanism by which they can prevent it. It is a basic tenet of wills law that a person cannot order the destruction of a valuable property interest. Therefore, if Parks had written in her will that she did not want her identity to be marketed, there is a good chance that a court would not enforce those wishes.

We take this occasion to restate our position on intellectual property, which is that it cannot be sold. If you invent something, you can license your idea, but it remains inalienably yours. Your heirs can inherit the right to profit by it (for a limited tiime) but not the right to control its use.

Matins

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Jen Paton writes about the irony of distance — what we used to call “dramatic irony,” wherein the audience at a play knows something that the characters don’t — as a feature of foreign news reporting in the US, and how The Daily Show “‘reproduces, rather than interrogates’ the tropes of ‘conventional news journalism’.” ¶ We agree with Chris Mooney: OpEd pages ought not to be sanctuaries for anti-scientific fantasy. Opinion cannot be stretched to protect outright misinformation, such as the “array of misleading claims” advanced against solid climate science by Jason Lewis in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. (DeSmogBlog.com; via The Intersection)

Lauds

¶ At BBC News, Ian Yongs looks at British arts funding from three perspectives; what they have in common is considerably reduced contributions from the government. It’s no surprise that the tenants of handsome buildings with plenty of naming rights will do better than scruffy anti-establishment theatre companies. Lord Aldington’s suggestion that philanthropists benefit organizations with whom they share “aspirations” takes us right back to the Bourbons! (via Arts Journal) ¶ Simon Heffer, a movie critic who doesn’t get the theatre, writes a nice appreciation of Terence Rattigan, the stiff-upper-lip dramatist whose career took a nosedive when John Osborne & Co hit the West End in 1956, but who won an Academy Award for the Separate Tables screenplay. (Telegraph) ¶ The end of Dan Callahan’s appreciation of Elizabeth Taylor caught our eye. Referring to the magic between Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, Callahan writes, “that’s the way that any consideration of Elizabeth Taylor should end, too, at the height of her beauty, in thrall to a male beauty of equal standing, reaching out to him and to us.” (L)

Prime

¶ Frédéric Filloux captures the awful truth about the paywall at the Times: “Experimenting requires humility, agility, ability to learn from mistakes. Let’s admit it: such traits are in short supply in century-old news organizations that – until recently – thrived on their unchallenged confidence.” (Monday Note) ¶ Since we did indeed miss “The Poindexter Theory” when Joshua Brown ran it the first time, we’re grateful for the re-run. How did economists ever get to be so focal? It must have been the Cold War, which put capitalism right up there with nuclear fission as an vital phenomenon that needed to be understood and controlled. (The Reformed Broker) ¶ Further evidence of the duality of the United States, home of the home free and also of the chumps: everything that Simon Johnson has to say about the bank-dividend handout is just so much plain good sense, but bankers will be allowed to junk up on leverage all over again. (The Baseline Scenario)

Tierce

¶ No Surprise Department: middle schoolers with laptops perform better at math, and they write better, too. Since 2001, Maine has spent $18 million per year making sure that every seventh- and eighth-grader has a laptop. The results in Freeport (home of LL Bean) are pretty staggering: a maths-test pass rate jumped from 50% to 91% during the first eight years of the program. (GOOD) ¶ Never mind the title, “Does the Universe Need God?” This essay by Sean Carroll ends with one of the finest expressions of what science is all about that we’ve ever come across.

None of this amounts to a “proof” that God doesn’t exist, of course. Such a proof is not forthcoming; science isn’t in the business of proving things. Rather, science judges the merits of competing models in terms of their simplicity, clarity, comprehensiveness, and fit to the data. Unsuccessful theories are never disproven, as we can always concoct elaborate schemes to save the phenomena; they just fade away as better theories gain acceptance. Attempting to explain the natural world by appealing to God is, by scientific standards, not a very successful theory. The fact that we humans have been able to understand so much about how the natural world works, in our incredibly limited region of space over a remarkably short period of time, is a triumph of the human spirit, one in which we can all be justifiably proud.

¶ David McRaney writes an excellent essay on the sunk-cost fallacy, with some intriguing observations about Farmville, at You Are Not So Smart.

Sunk costs drive wars, push up prices in auctions and keep failed political policies alive. The fallacy makes you finish the meal when you are already full. It fills your home with things you no longer want or use. Every garage sale is a funeral for someone’s sunk costs.

Sext

¶ Farhad Manjoo asks about the future of the Internet in the age of smartphone apps. We don’t know what to make of his preliminary conclusions, but we keep our eye on the question, because it seems to us that apps are yet another door closed on interconnectedness. (Slate; via Arts Journal) ¶ At The Hairpin, Edith Zimmerman shares her recipe for gettting to like any foodstuff, no matter how revolting initially. The secret seems to be ingesting in public. ¶ Dave Bry is now apologizing to kids he beat up on when he was a kid himself. Not for the squeamish! Prospective parents may wonder how they can bring children into such a world. We were relieved that no one ever made us eat grass. (The Awl)

Nones

¶ An excellent diagnosis of the American headache that turmoil in the Middle East might turn into a migraine, by Robert Kaplan. Never mind Libya; the viability of Saudi Arabia is the major perplex. Kaplan presents China as a “free rider”; it certainly has a freer hand than our own haphazardly tied ones.  (WSJ; via Real Clear World) ¶ What the so-called “Turkish model” of Islamic normalization looks like to the secularist opposition: “Turkey’s new ‘old Kemalists’,” by Soner ÇaÄŸaptay in Hürriyet.  ¶ The Epicurean Dealmaker reflects on the pleasant fluidity of social life as an expatriate, free of the local “status dance.”

Vespers

¶ Roxane Gay’s celebrated essay on self-publishing, which ought to have been titled, simply, “Don’t.” (HTMLGiant)

If you believe in your writing enough to invest that kind of money, I wonder why you don’t believe in your writing enough to pursue more traditional alternatives or, in the face of rejection, revise your work such that it will, eventually be published.

In the old days, when a book was still an object invested with status, self-publishing embodied a measure of authority that might persuade a stranger to read a book. Those days are over. But we agree with self-publisher Mary Maddox that there is an awful lot of caprice in the land of agents and editors. ¶ Michael Bourne recalls the thrill of reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas as a teenager. Forty years after Hunter S Thompson and Oscar Zeta Acosta drove from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, what does the book have to tell us? How the Sixties died, is what. (The Millions) ¶ J R Lennon’s advice for getting people to notice your books deserves a hat tip: if you’re going to post about your work at Facebook, post your work, not an announcement about it or a report on how well it’s selling. (Ward Six)

Compline

¶ Jim Emerson writes about the old days, when people just went to the movies at any old time, and left when they got to the point where “this is where we came in.” He doesn’t remember them himself however. We don’t, either, although we remember hearing the grownups speak of having done so. Of course we were always tuning in to the middle of movies on television. (Scanners) ¶ Kevin Nguyen considers “lifelogging” — making a digital record of everything. Ah! to be young! Imagine spending a week at a memory spa, where your personal recollections were subjected to correction by implacable files. (The Bygone Bureau)

Have a Look

¶ More great book covers from Coralie Bickford-Smith. (@ Design Sponge) ¶ Appliance anatomy with Brittny Badger (@ GOOD) ¶ My Bad Parent (via MetaFilter) ¶ A real, live Turing machine. (New Scientist)

Noted

¶ Coke Talk (via MetaFilter) ¶ Seven Must-Read Books About Music (Brain Pickings)

Floyd Norris, writing about the trial of Kerry Killinger and other WaMu executives doesn’t come out and say that the Crash of 2008 was the result of a mad game of musical chairs, but that’s what his column led us to conclude. The pursuit of short-term gains appears to have hidden long-term consequences in plain sight.

What went wrong? The chief executive, Kerry K. Killinger, talked about a bubble but was also convinced that Wall Street would reward the bank for taking on more risk. He kept on doing so, amassing what proved to be an almost unbelievably bad book of mortgage loans. Nothing was done about the office where fraud seemed rampant

The regulators “on the ground” saw problems, as James G. Vanasek, the bank’s former chief risk officer, told me, but the ones in Washington saw their job as protecting a “client” and took no effective action. The bank promised change, but did not deliver. It installed programs to spot fraud, and then failed to use them. The board told management to fix problems but never followed up.

No clearer demonstration of American wrongheadedness can be made: “GE’s Strategies Let It Avoid Taxes Altogether.” That wrongheadedness extends right to the Times editor who approved the title of David Kocieniewski’s report; because of course it is Congressional cooperation that cuts the mammoth corporation’s tax bill.

The assortment of tax breaks G.E. has won in Washington has provided a significant short-term gain for the company’s executives and shareholders. While the financial crisis led G.E. to post a loss in the United States in 2009, regulatory filings show that in the last five years, G.E. has accumulated $26 billion in American profits, and received a net tax benefit from the I.R.S. of $4.1 billion.

But critics say the use of so many shelters amounts to corporate welfare, allowing G.E. not just to avoid taxes on profitable overseas lending but also to amass tax credits and write-offs that can be used to reduce taxes on billions of dollars of profit from domestic manufacturing. They say that the assertive tax avoidance of multinationals like G.E. not only shortchanges the Treasury, but also harms the economy by discouraging investment and hiring in the United States.

“In a rational system, a corporation’s tax department would be there to make sure a company complied with the law,” said Len Burman, a former Treasury official who now is a scholar at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “But in our system, there are corporations that view their tax departments as a profit center, and the effects on public policy can be negative.”

This isn’t just inequitable; it’s bad for business — unless, of course, you’re in the businss of making money.

Frank von Hippel reminds us that what’s really dangerous about nuclear power plants is a factor located hundreds if not thousands of miles from any reactor: regulatory capture.

Therefore, perhaps the most important thing to do in light of the Fukushima disaster is to change the industry-regulator relationship. It has become customary for administrations not to nominate, and the Senate not to confirm, commissioners whom the industry regards as “anti-nuclear” — which includes anyone who has expressed any criticism whatsoever of industry practices. The commission has an excellent staff; what it needs is more aggressive political leadership.

Fukushima also shows why we need to develop reactors that are more inherently safe. Almost all the world’s power reactors, including those at Fukushima, are descended from the much smaller reactors developed in the 1950s by the United States for submarines. As we saw in the Fukushima accident, they depend on pumps to keep them from catastrophic failure, a major weak point. New designs less dependent on pumps have been developed, but there has not yet been enough research to make certain that they would work effectively

We need a regulatory outlook that would prioritize research into those alterrnate designs!

What Juan Zarate, a Bush Administration official, now calls “a deal with the devil” has not worked out “the way anyone would have wanted it to work out.” The deal in question was the normalization of trade relations with Libya in 2004. Calling Muammar el-Qaddafi “the devil” is excessively complimentary. The dictator is merely a garden-variety kleptocrat with more brawn than brains.

Daniel E. Karson, executive managing partner at Kroll, a risk-consulting firm, recalled in an interview that an international communications company he represented tried to enter the Libyan cellular phone market in 2007. From the outset, Libyan officials made it clear that the foreign company’s local business partner would have to be Muhammad Qaddafi, the eldest son of the Libyan ruler.

“We advised them they would have to go through Muhammad Qaddafi,” said Mr. Karson, who declined to identify the client. “This was not going to be done on the basis of, as they say in retail, price, quality and delivery.” Fearful of going into business with the Qaddafis, he said, the company made no investments in Libya.

Coca-Cola got caught in the middle of a fierce dispute between Muhammad Qaddafi and his brother Mutassim over control of a bottling plant the soda maker had opened in 2005, forcing it to shut down the plant for months amid armed confrontations, a diplomatic cable noted.

What’s really startling is Qaddafi’s attempt to shake down foreign corporations to pay for the Lockerbie settlement.