“A chain of marital events” has come to an end: Elizabeth Taylor has died, aged 79. From the end of Mel Gussow’s long and cheerful obituary:

Ms. Taylor was often seen as a caricature of herself, “full of no-nonsense shamelessness,” as Margo Jefferson wrote in The Times in 1998, adding, “Whether it’s about how she ages or what she wears, she has, bless her heart, made the principles of good and bad taste equally meaningless.”

Increasingly, Ms. Taylor divided her time between her charitable works (including various Israeli causes) and commercial enterprises, like a line of perfumes marketed under her name. She helped raise more than $100 million to fight AIDS.

[ snip ]

Married or single, sick or healthy, on screen or off, Ms. Taylor never lost her appetite for experience. Late in life, when she had one of many offers to write her memoirs, she refused, saying with characteristic panache, “Hell no, I’m still living my memoirs.”

Census data indicate that the population of Detroit has fallen by 25% in the past decade, making it the first American city to cross and then retreat from the million mark. While the collapse of Detroit is certain to be regarded by some observers — economists, mostly, we expect — as a benign development, reflecting the free choice of thousands of former residents, we don’t see much that’s creative in the destruction of a major city’s hopes for the future.

The question now is the degree to which the most recent census figures will discourage those who have invested in Detroit and continue to try to make a go of it.

“Obviously it’s going to be a blow,” Mr. Metzger said. “All of us are kind of shocked, but it means we have to work that much harder.”

With more than 20 percent of the lots in the 139-square-mile city vacant, the mayor is in the midst of a program to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings. But for many, the city already seems hollowed out.

“You can just see the emptiness driving in,” said Joel Dellario, a student at the College for Creative Studies. “I’ve been in and out of this city my whole life, and it’s just really apparent.”

We believe that a lot of things went wrong in Detroit, and that Americans need to know a lot more about what happened there. We pray that the city will find redemption in the hands of astute historians.

You might dismiss what Bryn Mawr undergraduate Jennifer Cook says about Shakespeare as callow, but to deny its pertinence would be foolish. The world is slowly tipping toward those for whom the Internet is more familiar than the contents of any book, and nothing less than a reorganization of knowledge is inevitable. Assistant professor Katherine Rowe’s remark about the rapidly-closing gap between the new fluency and the old is sparkling.

Many teachers and administrators are only beginning to figure out the contours of this emerging field of digital humanities, and how it should be taught. In the classroom, however, digitally savvy undergraduates are not just ready to adapt to the tools but also to explore how new media may alter the very process of reading, interpretation and analysis.

“There’s a very exciting generation gap in the classroom,” said Ms. Rowe, who developed the digital components of her Shakespeare course with a graduate student who now works at Google. “Students are fluent in new media, and the faculty bring sophisticated knowledge of a subject. It’s a gap that won’t last more than a decade. In 10 years these students will be my colleagues, but now it presents unusual learning opportunities.”

As Ms. Cook said, “The Internet is less foreign to me than a Shakespeare play written 500 years ago.”

John Tierney’s report, “Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice,” was much more interesting the first time. How can you talk about free will and its opposite number, determinism, without calling in James Gleick on chaos and randomness? Oh, well. We do agree that belief in free will is good for your health; plus, we’re apparently hard-wired for it. We also think that “free will” is a semantic dustball that science inherited from philosophy.

At an abstract level, people seem to be what philosophers call incompatibilists: those who believe free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything that happens is determined by what happened before, it can seem only logical to conclude you can’t be morally responsible for your next action.

But there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

Does that sound confusing — or ridiculously illogical? Compatibilism isn’t easy to explain. But it seems to jibe with our gut instinct that Bill is morally responsible even though he’s living in a deterministic universe. Dr. Nichols suggests that his experiment with Mark and Bill shows that in our abstract brains we’re incompatibilists, but in our hearts we’re compatibilists.

“This would help explain the persistence of the philosophical dispute over free will and moral responsibility,” Dr. Nichols writes in Science. “Part of the reason that the problem of free will is so resilient is that each philosophical position has a set of psychological mechanisms rooting for it.”

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion — a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

We never watched Big Love, and we were always mystified that anyone would want to watch a show about polygamy. Ew! But Ginia Bellafante’s recessional opened our eyes a bit.

Perhaps nothing is less sexy to the prototypical thinking woman who watches HBO than the sort of man he represented, someone blind to his own subversions and immune to ambivalence. During the course of the series many women told me that they had stopped watching “Big Love” after a few episodes because polygamy as a notion was just too distasteful. This might be translated to mean that Bill Henrickson didn’t seem to have the right to all of the sex he was getting — not the way Don Draper, by virtue of his emotional afflictions, has the right on “Mad Men.” Women forgive the demonstratively tortured but never the brutally dull “nice.”

“Big Love” arrived in 2006, the pre-Obama age, and the series was served up as a chewy slab of sirloin for the network’s liberal audience, offering in Henrickson a character bound to infuriate as he seemed to enjoy an Esalen-era sex life without having to concede to the philosophies and politics that might attend it. The series always made “the principle” — the ostensibly religious foundation for the Henricksons’ living arrangement — vague enough to feel entirely suspect if not absurd. Tony Soprano was an appealing avatar of Clintonian compartmentalization and appetite. Henrickson was a distinctly Bush-era counterpart, forever unquestioning and wed to his certainties. His righteousness, merely annoying at first, became increasingly repellant as the series progressed and his hypocrisies mounted.

That he was partially redeemed in the final hour, granting his first wife, Barb, the religious autonomy she craved, seems peripheral to the larger matter of his actual death. In the end the series chose to affirm the idea that families must exist, as much as they can, as democracies. In an epilogue depicting the Henricksons 11 months after Bill’s death, we see the women existing as a kind of contented, collectivist sorority, with the youngest wife, Margene, finally pursuing her dream of medical volunteer work abroad as she guiltlessly leaves her children behind with her sister wives.

Literally speaking, a disgruntled and out-of-work neighbor — a casualty of the recession and his own traditionalism — shot Bill Henrickson. A mainstream Mormon, he explicitly resented Bill’s heresy and implicitly couldn’t stomach his virility. This was a man who couldn’t care for his lawn or even a single wife as Bill simultaneously bed-skipped his way through three marriages. Figuratively, though, it was all of us who pulled the trigger, all of us who could never really give over our sympathies to a man who seemed to get way more than he deserved. The dictator had to go.

More than ten years on, great progress has been made at MIT, where two reports conducted in the late Nineties revealed a number of gender inequality issues among professors. The school has done just about everything that it can do to eliminate disparity. The stubborn remainders are more broadly “societal,” reflecting prejudices that persist even among the most talented Americans. Men are still prepared to make almost any sacrifice for their families other than actually caring for them.

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

While women on the tenure track 12 years ago feared that having a child would derail their careers, today’s generous policies have made families the norm: the university provides a yearlong pause in the tenure clock, and everyone gets a term-long leave after the arrival of a child. There is day care on campus and subsidies for child care while traveling on business.

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

Matins

¶ Sarah Firisen doesn’t say anything that we haven’t said a proverbial thousand times, but her exasperation with public education in the United States has a rousing edge that put a spring in our step. We’re very glad that she brings up Finland and Singapore and South Korea, because we believe that most public-school teachers ought to be recent honors graduates of the nation’s top colleges and universities, “giving back” two or three postgraduate years. (3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Meanwhile, at The Atlantic, three writers cope with the Tiger Mom phenomenon and its afterglow. Sandra Tsing Lo concedes that Amy Chua makes her feel like a slouch, and quotes a “report” on owls by her eight-year-old that, even she has to acknowledge, is “terrible”; Caitlin Flanagan just about sticks her tongue out, in “The Ivy Delusion,” and scolds that she has been issuing warnings about Tiger Mom-ism for ages (“I know a lot of social workers who would be very interested to learn of a 7-year-old forced, as Lulu once was, to sit at the piano, apparently for hours, without water or even a bathroom break.”); Christina Schwarz reflects on Robert Paul Smith’s newly reissued 1957 best-seller, Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing, and reminds us that children believe that adults should be seen little and heard less.

Lauds

¶ Woody Allen talks to the Guardian about his loved ones. “They love me and are supportive in a meaningful way but they are very critical of what they would euphemistically call an eccentric. Although they think it’s worse than an eccentric, it really is much more like an idiot savant.” We know people who still won’t see his movies because of the scandal (almost twenty years old!). We’ve only seen You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger once, and we found it — dark. But we’re going back for Naomi Watts. ¶ Arthur Laurents has withdrawn permission for Barbra Streisand to star in a film of Gypsy. The reason he gives may not be the real one, but we applaud it, and its source, Stephen Sondheim. (Hartford Courant; via Arts Journal)

He recently spoke with the musical’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, who asked Laurents why he wanted to allow the film project to happen. “He said, ‘What is the point of it?’ And I said, ‘They have this terrible version with Rosalind Russell wearing those black and white shoes.’ And then Sondheim told me something that he got from the British — and it’s wonderful. He said, ‘You want a record because the theater is ephemeral. But that’s wrong. The theater’s greatest essence is that it is ephemeral. You don’t need a record. The fact that it’s ephemeral means you can have different productions, different Roses on into infinity.’

¶ A reporter from Chicago, Blair Kamin, takes a look at the Dallas Arts District, which remains very much a work-in-progress so far as the people part is concerned.

Prime

¶ Edward Hugh projects the economic consequences of the earthquake/tsunami disaster in Japan, and surmises that it may mark an era — the end of the “Modern Growth Era,” a period somewhat paradoxically opened by another catastrophe, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.¶ At The Economist, we learn about a 2002 study showing that the “bonus” effect of natural diasters (rebuilding invigorates the economy, &c) does not occur when the upset is “geological.” (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ Meanwhile, Joshua Brown talks about his small-cap Japanese ETF investments, which have been doing nicely. We couldn’t follow his remarks about Sell Stop Limit orders, but we’re assured by experts that they’re not nonsense. (The Reformed Broker) ¶ Felix Salmon rehearses the reasons against sending relief money to specific countries; better to trust the discretion of organizations such as Médecins sans frontières.

Tierce

¶ Bob Cringely brings good tidings of the Toshiba 4S (Super Safe Small and Simple) nuclear reactors, just right for a substation near you.

4S reactor cores are like nuclear building blocks, built on a factory production line and transported by truck to be installed 30 meters under the ground. Each 4S puts out 10 megawatts of electricity or enough for 2000 Japanese homes. Following this path means the lost 1000 megawatt reactors will need 100 4S’s each to replace them or a total of 1200 4S reactors. 4S’s are fueled at the factory, put in place to run for 20 years then returned to the factory for refueling. They are sodium-cooled and pretty darned impossible to melt down. If the cooling system is compromised they automatically shut down and just sit there in a block of sodium.

¶ For those who still think in terms of conventional nuclear power plants, Yves Smith concludes her piece, “Is Nuclear Power Worth the Risk?” with another question: “And if you argue against it, what energy/economic strategy do you recommend in its place?”

Sext

¶ How nice it is, as Confucius might have said, when one blogger whom we follow writes about another. Kyle Minor recently read all of Alexander Chee’s Koreanish, falling into it as if it were a book — a book without an end; a book with its end in its beginning. ¶ Bess Levin does a jerk a favor and lets him go nameless in her high-larious response to an article entitled “Sexless and the City.” You have to wonder what paid journalists are being paid to do, exactly. (Make Viagra-popping editors feel better about ageing?) “Capitalism has replaced sex”? Nate Freeman must be new to this — any “this” you care to specify. (Dealbreaker) ¶ Felix Salmon enumerates the ways in which good blogging beats traditional journalism.

The main impact I think is the way that blog reporting can iterate. In traditional media, you report the story and then you publish it; with blogs, you can start with something much less fully formed and then come back at it over time in many ways and from many angles. Every print journalist knows the feeling of publishing a story which is read by great sources who then provide lots of really good information which would have been great in the original piece. Bloggers don’t worry about that: they just put up a new post, or an update.

Blogs can also geek out in a way that traditional journalists can’t. There’s no space constraint online, and so if I want to spend 5,000 words writing about vulture funds, or a reporter at HuffPo wants to spend 4,000 words getting into the weeds of regulatory reform, they can. Or look at the Ars Technica reviews of every new Macintosh operating system. That kind of material can be incredibly popular, but it just doesn’t work in print. Blogs have a reputation for being superficial, but they can also be much more detailed and accurate than traditional journalism. Not to mention the fact that they’re often written by genuine experts in their fields, rather than by journalists.

Nones

¶ In The New Yorker, David Remnick urges the Obama Administration to stop waiting for Benjamin Netanyahu to have his Nixon moment regarding a Palestinian state. We’re all for that. What surprised was the bit toward the end about the “unforeseeability” of the Palestinian crisis ‘way back in 1967.

One of the myths of Israeli history is that only a few intellectuals on the left could see, in the wake of the 1967 war, that a prolonged occupation of Palestinian lands would be a moral and political calamity. In fact, records of the first cabinet meeting after the war show that the Justice Minister, Yaakov Shimshon Shapira, said, “In a time of decolonization in the whole world can we consider an area in which mainly Arabs live, and we control defense and foreign policy? . . . Who’s going to accept that?”

What’s surprising is that such a “myth” could ever have taken root.

Vespers

¶ At the tender age of 69, Paul Theroux contemplates the autobiography, and shivers. The only literary one that he approves of is Trollope’s, and look what that did to the celebrated novelist’s reputation! Nobody read Trollope for decades! Theroux finds a more practical model in Dickens. (Smithsonian; via MetaFilter)

The more I reflect on my life, the greater the appeal of the autobiographical novel. The immediate family is typically the first subject an American writer contemplates. I never felt that my life was substantial enough to qualify for the anecdotal narrative that enriches autobiography. I had never thought of writing about the sort of big talkative family I grew up in, and very early on I developed the fiction writer’s useful habit of taking liberties. I think I would find it impossible to write an autobiography without invoking the traits I seem to deplore in the ones I’ve described—exaggeration, embroidery, reticence, invention, heroics, mythomania, compulsive revisionism, and all the rest that are so valuable to fiction. Therefore, I suppose my Copperfield beckons.

¶ Charles-Adam Foster-Simard writes about binge-reading Henry James for a course in the UK, making us glad that we are no longer young. Although his piece bears signs of binge-writing, it’s clear that our reader has gathered the essentials, and is now prepared simply to enjoy Henry James. He also provides yet another indication that Colm Tóibín’s The Master — which we read after we knew all about James — is an effective and alluring portal to James’s great novels. ¶ Also at The Millions: Lydia Kiesling doesn’t argue the point; she just comes out and says that Lolita is “the ne plus ultra of the novel form.”

Compline

¶ At The Best Part, designer Jason Dean makes an important plea, and cautions his colleagues against fashioning Japan-relief posters from disaster porn. “As poster designers, it is our duty to create something that functions beyond a simple depiction of a disaster and inspires empathy or even action on the part of the audience.” Well said! ¶ Richard Crary rambles, but we’re always glad to ramble with him, because the beginnings of his ideas are like buds in March. On him, they look good. Now he explains why his blog is called The Existence Machine. The following passage, from the end of the essay, is perhaps a bit over the top — people are always saying “capitalism” when they mean something else, something that doesn’t have a name — it has the rawness of a fine spring day.

I resist the strong tendency in this tradition to see life itself as the misery. I wish rather, writing as the father of a beautiful little girl, to celebrate life. It is, at times, easy to do that. All I have to do is be in her company for a few minutes, and life is great. Life is great. But it doesn’t take long, when away from her, when commuting, when reading about the problems of the world, to despair about the future world that awaits her. And I thus write with sadness and anger as I consider, as I often must, the death cult that is capitalism, its continued encroachment on and destruction of the natural world, and the immanent disaster “into which science has led us and abandoned us”.

¶ Andrew Woolner, from Yokohama, reminds us that, even in Japan, the world has not come to an end. (A Perfect Lover Has No Memory; via Mnémoglyphes)

Have a Look

¶ Kottke.org turns ten. ¶ 650 Quilts (@ Design Observer) ¶ Boris Smelov’s photographs. (ARTCAT)

Noted

¶ One world traveler’s list of Philippine quirks. (via Marginal Revolution) ¶ “A Century of Meat” — chicken used to be special. (NYT) ¶ Gordon Lish Bibliography. (HTMLGiant)

General Motors has announced that it will be closing a light-truck manufacturing plant for want of Japanese parts that the recent catastrophe (time to name earthquakes, guys!) has made unavailable. In retrospect, it seems idiotic to depend exclusively for the supply of any single part on factories located in lively seismic zones.

An average vehicle has about 20,000 parts and depends on thousands of suppliers, and the sudden loss of any one could be enough to stop production, Mr. Hoffecker said.

“It’s a real scramble for everybody,” he said. “It could be a chemical plant that got hurt that supplies material to make plastic that goes into a door panel that goes to someone.”

For parts that are shipped by boat to North America, shortages could take about a month to materialize. But for lightweight, high-value parts like microchips that travel by plane, problems could crop up much faster.

G.M. declined to identify the parts in short supply at Shreveport or their manufacturer. A person with direct knowledge of the situation said just one part was involved and it was also used in other G.M. models built elsewhere in North America. G.M. is diverting parts that would have gone to Shreveport so it can continue building models that are more important or in shorter supply, said this person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and so spoke anonymously.

When will George Grayson be lead off in chains? Maybe he won’t be — maybe the president of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation hasn’t done anything wrong — but one thing’s for sure: there’s more to the story that Joe Drape reports in today’s Times (“Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them“). The foundation posted a $1.2 million deficit in 2009, and it has not been making payments to the stables that care for the horses, as a result of which many thoroughbreds are emaciated, and some have died.

“I was being emotionally blackmailed to lower my per diem, and was the subject of retribution because I questioned the care of the horses,” said Mrs. Hurst-Marsh, who is owed $10,000.

When Gayle England, whose farm in Stroud, Okla., is also highly regarded as a special-care facility, complained not only of the chronic slow pay but the general lack of regard for the farms and the horses, 26 T.R.F. horses were taken from her.

Last month, some of the horses in the worst shape were taken from other foundation farms and returned to the Hurst-Marsh farm and Ms. England. In fact, one of the 14 horses moved to England’s farm with the help and funding of the Mellon Estate had to be put down.

“They were making their administrative payroll this whole time, but the horses they were suffering,” Ms. England said. “They need to be held accountable.”

Mr. Terry, a Mellon estate trustee, said he still does not know what went wrong.

The sesquicentennial of Italian unification is coming up. What’s often overlooked is that unification was really more of an eviction: the Austrians were thrown out, and the Pope was put in his place. Italy remains a congeries of distinct regions, each one the center of the world — except for the ambitious ones who leave. Silvio Berlusconi is the perfect symbol of the meaninglessness of “Italy” as anything more than the name of a peninsula.     

In 1911, Italy celebrated the 50th anniversary of unification by inaugurating the hulking Victor Emmanuel Monument in central Rome. (It also invaded Libya, the start of 40 years of bloody colonial rule.) In 1961, for the 100th anniversary, Italy was riding high in an economic boom.

This time around, as the country gears up for fireworks, concerts and special exhibitions — and kicks off a four-day weekend, with public offices and schools closed starting Thursday — the mood is different. Italy is facing economic difficulties, political scandals, brain drain, and once again problems with Libya, its largest supplier of natural gas.

In a fictive letter to the editor in the Turin daily La Stampa on Sunday, the humorist Massimo Gramellini assumed the guise of Italy. “The person writing to you is an old and unpredictable lady who as her birthday approaches feels overcome by a melancholy anxiety,” he wrote.

How we wish the Tea Partiers would get on the bus, instead of trying to wreck it. There’s nothing that this country needs more than popular concern for effective regulation. But when you consider the regulatory baackground (or lack of it) behind last weekend’s casino bus disaster, it’s hard not to share the TP’s cynicism about government.

Federal guidelines limit passenger-bus drivers to 10 hours behind the wheel, within a 15-hour work day, and bus carriers face a fine if violations are discovered. But the hours, recorded in a handwritten logbook, are easily falsified, and even outstanding violations are often ignored: World Wide Travel, the operator whose bus crashed in the Bronx, had been cited several times by regulators for problems with its logs.

At Foxwoods on Monday, a driver for World Wide Travel was preparing for a nap in his bus’s front passenger row. The driver had arranged a blanket and several small pillows atop a knapsack; later, he opened an overhead compartment to reveal a stash of blankets. “You see my bed?” he said with a smile.

[snip]

Federal law is nearly silent on qualifications for the job: for the most part, anyone with a state-issued commercial driver’s license is eligible. Carriers are expected to obtain medical certificates from their drivers and occasionally test for drug and alcohol use; a spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the industry’s regulator, said that the responsibility for administering those tests fell to the business, not the state, and that violators could face fines.

Some skeptics wonder if discount bus companies, which are rarely unionized and have only a few employees, end up with castoffs from more reputable places.

Jeff Gordinier visits Alex Ott, a former bartender from Germany who has gone on to bigger and better-smelling things in the cool-hunting area.

For him, sorcery begins at home. Beneath a mounted surfboard in his apartment is the nook where Mr. Ott, who studied organic chemistry during his younger years at the Braunschweig University of Technology, likes to tinker.

It’s like a dorm-room version of a laboratory, complete with a microscope, a bouquet of pipettes and a spice rack crowded with essential oils “worth about $2 million,” he claimed. He even has a gas mask. “When you work with some oils, they’re very strong,” he said. “They’ll burn your nostrils.”

Mr. Ott’s curiosity about the mood-altering potential of various aromas and ingredients led to an immersion in “Meaningful Scents Around the World,” a dense 2006 book by Roman Kaiser that explores the chemical properties of unusual scents and flavors, from “watermelon snow” algae in the Swiss Alps to pine resin in Italy to Cordyceps sinensis, the prized “caterpillar fungus” of China. “I was hooked,” said Mr. Ott, who became so obsessed with bark extracts and botanicals that he now owns a signed copy of the tome. “It explained everything about volatile molecules, your brain, your olfactory bulb, memories. The juices and herbs and spices that I choose come from the studies that I’ve done.

“There are people who do research and read books, and then there are people who just do cosmopolitans and sling drinks, and they know nothing about these things. They’re more entertainers. Bartenders should never be people who come up with cocktails, because they have no education.”

How quaint, that somebody interesting doesn’t live in Brooklyn.

Jim Dwyer’s column about executive pay at regional hospitals underscores the need to take a fresh look at the idea of the “task force.” Tasked with recommending spending and service cuts throughout the hospital system, which is broadly supported by state and local taxes, a force composed of industry consultants made sure that the seven-figure salaries paid to top executives were kept off the negotiating table.

A proposal to allow public financing for only the first $1 million in wages for an executive died before it even reached the task force. “It was classic how it was killed,” said Judy Wessler, director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System, an advocacy group that had suggested the limits.

“We submitted the proposal in writing, met with the state staff members about it, then testified for our two minutes at a hearing,” Ms. Wessler said. “Then in the written summary of all the 4,000 proposals, they twisted the wording of ours so that it would be impossible to implement. Then they said it was not viable, so it wasn’t even put up for a vote.”

State officials acknowledged that the proposal had been drastically changed from its original meaning, but did not explain how that happened. In an e-mail exchange provided by Ms. Wessler, Jason A. Helgerson, the state’s Medicaid director, apologized “for not having had the time to do all we wish to do.” Mr. Helgerson was not available for an interview on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.
The subject of executive wages would have been familiar to the task force, many of whose members came from the health care industry. One had worked as a consultant for Mount Sinai Medical Center, which received $250 million in Medicaid and paid its chief executive $2.7 million in 2008. A co-chairman of the task force, Michael Dowling, was paid $2.4 million in 2008 by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which received about $220 million from Medicaid.

It’s nonsense like this that, sooner or later, brings on the likes of the Tea Party.

We’re having a day of doctoring today, so we can’t be at our desk. But we’d really like to know why the Op-Ed piece by Susan Engel isn’t a news story. It’s the most interesting thing that we’ve read about education in years — despite its unfortunate title, “Let Kids Rule the School.”

The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn’t bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn’t want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, “Yeah, I think that’s what they call learning.”

One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: “I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing.” They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the seniors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges.

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

Peter Applebome’s column about the projected demolition of Lands End, the Long Island estate that inspired Scott Fitzgerald to dream of the unattainable Daisy Buchanan and her doomed admirer, is almost as poignant as The Great Gatsby itself.  

Perhaps 500 of the grandest mansions have already been knocked down, said Monica Randall, who has chronicled the era and its architectural heritage. So the demolition of Lands End is just one last domino falling from a long-gone era. And yet, the gravitational pull of Gatsby’s world endures, undimmed.

Dan McCall, a professor emeritus at Cornell University, taught the book for 40 years. He marvels at the hold Gatsby still has on students. On the one hand, he said, with its hypnotic prose, its layers of longing for money, status, reinvention and love, it’s still channeling the American experience. “It’s not an antique to them, it’s never gone out of style the way some books I teach.” On the other hand, he said, Gatsby’s evocation of the American dream has an innocence and passion that are impossibly distant, like astral material from a lost galaxy. “Gatsby’s dream, the way he’s so devoted to it, that’s not something you find much in this economy, at this time. I think it’s breathtaking for kids in college. It’s an America they haven’t heard about from their parents.”

Of course, Gatsby’s dream was built on deceit and illusion. The Roaring ‘20s ended in the Great Depression. Fitzgerald burned out and died at 44.

Matins

¶ Doug Saunders writes about the “catalyst class,” a growing lower-middle class with no ties either to local elites or to their radicalized opponents. Another way to describe them: angry first-time apartment owners who want open and fair business conditions. They threw Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt, and they’re increasingly mobilized in China. We should know these people. They were the ones who brought democracy to North America.” (Globe and Mail; via Real Clear World) ¶ Kwame Anthony Appiah’s review of the new Montaigne books by Sarah Bakewell and Saul Frampton includes the most excellent description of the liberal cast of mind that we have ever come across: it is “compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge.” (Slate; via Arts Journal)

Lauds

¶ We agree with Justin Davidson, who believes that James Levine ought to retire from his leadership role at the Metropolitan Opera. “But even if he’s in fine fettle for the anniversary gala on May 1, the time has come to make him conductor laureate for life and hand the keys to someone else.” Mr Levine has built a great orchestra, which will now go on being a great orchestra for years to come, just as the Philadelphia Orchestra did after Leopold Stokowski handed it over to Eugene Ormandy in the Thirties. (New York; via Arts Journal) ¶ Jimmy Chen is such a funny man that we read his praise of Giorgio Morandi with eyebrows arched — cocked, Jimmy might say. Apparently there’s a Daren Wilson who paints slightly inaccurate copies of Morandi. Something to think about!  (HTMLGiant)

Prime

¶ Yves Smith cuts through all the blah-blah about how difficult it is to prosecute banking dereliction cases. She has found just the provision of Sarbanes-Oxley for the job, and it’s aimed at holding the top people responsible for risk management and other grown-up duties, and she believes that prosecuting a few Lehman alums would be a good start. Write to your prosecutor! ¶ Tyler Cowen serves up lists of the common misjudgments of left- and right-wing economists. (A pox on the lot of ’em!) ¶ For Ezra Klein, one list is enough. We like the last two items. Nobody does know what “stochastic” means, and (more importantly) economists don’t spend enough time arguing with people who aren’t trained economists. Do they spend any? (via The Morning News)

Tierce

¶ Given the choice between fire and ice, we choose ice — when it comes to post-life body disposal. Promessa Organic Burial isn’t offering its services yet (dipping the corpose in liquid nitrogen, then vibrating it into dust, and finishing off by planting a shrub on the remains), but it’s certainly cooler than cremation. (Discoblog) ¶ Zoe Chance, at Harvard Business School, has arrived at some chilling findings: cheaters have self-serving oblivion powers! Especially when they win (undeserved) recognition for their (fraudulent) achievements, cheaters tend to forget about the cheating! Ed Yong reports, at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

This tells us a little about the mindset of people who fake their research, who build careers on plagiarised work or who wave around spurious credentials. There’s a tendency to think that these people know full well what they’re doing and go through life with a sort of Machiavellian glee. But the outlook from Chance’s study is subtler.

She showed that even though people know that they occasionally behave dishonestly, they don’t know that they can convincingly lie to themselves to gloss over these misdeeds. Their scam is so convincing that they don’t know that they’re doing it. As she writes, “Our findings show that people not only fail to judge themselves harshly for unethical behaviour, but can even use the positive results of such behaviour to see themselves as better than ever.”

¶ The editors of the London Review of Books finally got round to assigning Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows — or perhaps Jim Holt was dilatory about submitting his review. No matter; it’s a fine piece, and possibly the best that we’ve read. Although Holt disagrees with Carr on questions of “fluid” and “crystalline” intelligence, he brings up an anecdote by the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré as evidence in support of the proposition that Googling is bad for creativity — whatever that may be.

Sext

¶ Melissa Lafsky finds the new Red Riding Hood to be “face-clawingly terrible” — but instructive withal.Not! “Yeah sure, it’s asking for all kinds of trouble to make teens ignore their sexual urges, we know. But does doing so really give them leave to become sociopathic murderers?” (The Awl) ¶ As the daughter of a lapsed Catholic, Erin Carver naturally wishes that the Mass were still conducted in Latin and in other ways rendered unintelligible. She hides out in the bathroom during Communion, and envies a young couple that has evidently gotten beyond the smells and bells. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ Christine Byrne, who went to culinary school in order to become a better food writer, says a few words about taillage (knife work), and her meditative pursuit of the perfect julienne. (GOOD)

Nones

¶ At The Awl, Brent Cox runs through the pros (obvious) and cons (numerous) of seasteading, which has attracted the interest of Pay-Pay founder Peter Thiel. We expect that it’s only a matter of time before someone rigs up a floating campus of some kind and parks it in calm, sunny waters — not too near to Tonga, though. The whole thing reminds us a bit of Zardoz. ¶ Among the days we never thought we’d see was the one on which we read Judith Butler with pleasure and interest. But it has come. Butler’s essay, “Who Owns Kafka?”, in the London Review of Books, makes the most of the ironies contained in the suitcase of Kafka’s writings that Max Brod didn’t burn as instructed but left instead to a girlfriend, whose two daughters now proposed that it be auctioned off by weight. The essay underscores the black humor implicit in attempts by Israel and Germany to nationalize Kafka’s legacy.

Vespers

¶ John Williams gets round to Allen Shawn’s Twin, and writes about it very sweetly, responding to Neil Genzlinger’s gratuitous Book Review attack. (The Second Pass) ¶ K E Semmel roots for Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time to win a Best Translated Book Award, pointing out incidentally but enticingly how like Richard Ford’s novels it is. ¶ April Bernard laments the all-inclusive centenary collections of Bishopiana that Elizabeth Bishop herself would certainly have prohibited during her lifetime. (New York Review of Books)

A cooler editorial head—deciding that for whatever combined reasons of reticence, manners, oppression, and repression, Bishop simply did not often write well when writing directly about sex and love (as opposed to loss, about which she wrote better than anyone)—would lead one to a different conclusion, one that would continue to support the judgment Bishop herself made, again and again, about what constituted a finished poem.

Compline

¶ When The Reformed Broker (Joshua Brown) turns to Charlie Sheen for help, you know how deep the doo-doo has got to be: “Peak Sheen (or how $10 gas will save the world)” ¶ Here’s a conundrum (if one that is unlikely to come up very often): can a former porn actress have a career as a high-school science teacher? Not if there are boys in the class, it seems; Tera Myers has been outed twice by students who saw the movies that she made when she was a young and broke single mom. Maybe if there’s a really progressive girls’ school out there… (GOOD) ¶ At Slate, David Weigel asks why conservatives hate railroads? And he gets a very intriguing answer from a transportation consultant called Wendell Cox.

“A lot of this has to do with Euro-envy,” says Cox. “People like to talk about how much better Europe is. I don’t see that their quality of life is better in Europe. The fact is that we live in a dispersed society, and there’s no set of circumstances where people are going to leave cars and take rail transportation.”

But of course the population of the Northeast Corridor — what the Editor calls the Republic of 202, after a highway that threads the region at a distance that’s rarely closer than fifty miles from the Atlantic Ocean — is not “dispersed.” Nor is that of southern Florida; nor that of coastal California. The truth is that there are several mini-Europes in the United States. The thinly-peopled rump of the country looks a like George III.  

Have a Look

¶ Philip IV signs autographs at the Museum. (Improv Everywhere) ¶ Don’t: Barbecue a Water Balloon. (via The Awl) ¶ The body heat cell phone. (GOOD) ¶ Insane asylum plans from the old days. (Object; via kottke.org) ¶ The Australian Voices sing “The Facebook Song.” Must listen (@ Joe.My.God)

Noted

¶ The Grace Coddington story. (Intelligent Life; via The Morning News) ¶ Using Sweaters Better (The Awl) ¶ Why “Q-A-D-D-A-F-I?” (GOOD) ¶ Jennifer Egan wins the National Book Critics Circle Award. Brava! (Speakeasy) ¶ The week in review, summed up by Shakespeare (Where Else?)

Steven Erlanger outlines what the 17 members of the euro-zone spent the day haggling over. The price of Germany’s further cooperation in restoring financial health to the continent will entail chipping away at sovereign powers — as treaties routinely do, but rarely with such broad domestic impact.

The issue that has gotten the most attention is the German-French Pact for Competitiveness, a name chosen for German ears. The intention was to lay down specific commitments to coordinate euro-zone economies — a common basis for corporate taxes for instance, or a common age for retirement — intended to unify policies across the region while raising tax revenue and reducing spending. Wage indexation was to be banned and high deficits punished.

But when the pact was first broached at the European level last month, there was anger from other leaders, who had not been consulted. While the pact might help in the future, it would do nothing to solve the current problems of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Nor, critics argue, does it deal with a looming problem for Germany and the euro zone — huge private debt and shaky banks, including some German state banks. Berlin has resisted serious stress tests of its banks.

Still, on Friday, euro-zone leaders are expected to approve a watered-down version of the pact, negotiated by the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy, that eliminates fixed pension ages and wage indexation and gives states more latitude to reach objectives, with monitoring of compliance left unclear. The main fight is about whether to align corporate tax systems, and if so, how to do so.

What an awful surprise it was, this morning, to turn from the print edition of the Times to its Web site’s headlines. 

Television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The tsunami drew a line of white fury across the ocean, heading toward the shoreline. Cars and trucks were still moving on highways as the water rushed toward them.

The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys, in some places carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields, highways, bridges and homes. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance.

The force of the waves washed away cars on coastal roads and crashed into buildings along the shore. Television footage showed a tsunami wave bearing down on the Japanese coastline near the community of Sendai.

NHK television transmitted aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof of the airport building. The runway was partially submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks. A television commentator called the blaze an “inferno.”

We are grieved.

In our view, it’s a problem of democracy that a man such as Chris Christie can win a powerful public office. What attracts voters to someone so grouchy, impatient and fearful? Does he mirror their own anxieties? If so, why is this an asset? In any case, we doubt that Richard Pérez-Peña’s commendable hounding is going to cramp his style or lower his ratings.

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong. But Peter J. Woolley, a politics professor and polling director at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said there had been no sign, so far, that these issues had much effect on the governor’s political standing.

“People prefer directness to detail,” Professor Woolley said. “People know it’s not unusual for politicians to take the shortcut in public debate, that they’re not academics who are going to qualify everything.”

Some overstatements have worked their way into the governor’s routine public comments, like a claim that he balanced the budget last year without raising taxes; in truth, he cut deeply into tax credits for the elderly and the poor. But inaccuracies also crop up when he is challenged, and his instinct seems to be to turn it into an attack on someone else instead of giving an answer.

It’s a short story, but we’re compulsively re-reading a report by Andy Newman on the arrest (by the ASPCA) of a little boy’s big sister. Monique Smith killed his hamster. ‘Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”’ Okay, her bad. It’s what follows that’s strange.

This was on June 7, 2010. Tuesday night at 7, after a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick.

She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child.

“Evasive and uncooperative”? “Nine-month hunt”? Nurse!