David Becker ought to resign his post as SEC General Counsel before you even have the chance to read this.

Both SIPC and Mr. Picard, the trustee for the Madoff estate, have proposed that the customers who withdrew funds before the fraud was uncovered should be allowed to keep only as much money as they put in. Initially, the full commission agreed and approved that approach in early 2009, according to the two people briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Becker joined the commission in February that year. By spring, he began meeting with lawyers for Madoff customers seeking a different formula. They wanted to let longer-term investors keep more money than those who had money with Mr. Madoff for shorter periods. Mr. Becker apparently dismissed arguments that investors were entitled to the amounts Mr. Madoff had listed on their final statements.

In the summer of 2009, Mr. Becker did reverse the commission’s earlier decision, however. His legal staff came up with a new proposal to reflect the length of time the money was invested, and the commissioners approved it at the end of the year. Some at the agency who worked with SIPC expressed dissent about the change, according to the people briefed on the deliberations.

Stephen P. Harbeck, the chief executive of SIPC, confirmed that his investor protection unit and the S.E.C. had initially agreed that victims should be able to keep only the money they had originally put into the Madoff firm. “Then they refined their opinion,” he said on Monday, referring to the S.E.C. He said that he did not know who had pushed for the change.

The S.E.C.’s definition, Mr. Harbeck said, would benefit anyone who withdrew more money from their Madoff accounts than they had put in. Mr. Becker’s family would be among them.

You might think that running an excellent public school in a town with property taxes that approach the US median income would be something of a breeze, but you’d be overlooking the updraft of rising expectations. Bronxville’s golden goose is having a harder time laying the right kind of eggs.

In Bronxville, 86 percent of the typical $43,000 property tax levied by the village goes to the school system, particularly to educate the growing grade school population. For the parents of these children — moving here in many cases from New York City — $43,000 is less than they would spend to put two or three children in a private school.

Adding to the pressure, younger couples, including the Pulkkinens, are buying their homes from empty-nesters, who often sell to escape the rising tax burden. Mary C. Marvin, the mayor, says this exodus is accelerating.

In a village covering one square mile, with a static population of 6,400 people, the elderly once constituted nearly 20 percent, but that proportion is steadily dropping. Most important, these empty-nesters paid substantial property taxes without swelling the school population.

“You want the taxes to be something these older people can pay,” the mayor said, “because when they sell, they sell to families with children, and the children cost more to educate than the taxes their parents pay.”

A book that hasn’t yet been published, The Origins of Political Order, is already stirring up very favorable buzz for its author, still the object of much misunderstanding for his first big title, The End of History.

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it. “You have to be bowled over by the extraordinary breadth of approach,” said Arthur Melzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University who invited Dr. Fukuyama to give lectures on the book. “It’s definitely a magnum opus.”

Dr. Melzer praised Dr. Fukuyama’s view that societies develop politically in several different ways, followed by selection of the more successful, rather than marching along a single road to political development. “It’s the kind of theory situated between the hyper-theory of Marx or Hegel and the thick description that certain anthropologists and historians aim at,” he said.

Georg Sorensen, a political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, also called the book a magnum opus, saying that it provides “a new foundation for understanding political development.” It is neither Eurocentric nor monocausal, but provides a complex, multifactor explanation of political development, Dr. Sorensen said. “In terms of discussing political order this will be a new classic,” he said.

Dr. Fukuyama burst into public view in 1989 with his essay “The End of History,” a title widely misunderstood to mean that no major turning points in history would occur in future. In fact the essay concerned the evolution of human societies and the belief by Hegel and Marx that history would be fulfilled when the ideal political order was achieved — the liberal state, in Hegel’s view; communism, in Marx’s.

Let’s all shed a tear for ousted, “martyred” patriarch Iranaeus of Jerusalem, a prisoner in his own apartment (which he won’t leave lest he be denied re-entry by his successor and “nemesis,” Theophilus). Not. Iranaeus was ousted from his life-tenure position in the wake of allegations of shady real-estate deals involving long-term leases of church-owned properties in the Old City (arguably Palestine) made to “fronts for a Jewish settlers group.” The moral of the story? Greeks Go Home! There are enough difficult tribal sortings in Jerusalem without the exotic import of Greek clergymen.

For many local members of the church, the goings-on in the patriarchate, particularly the land issues, have merely confirmed long-held grievances.

“The problem is that the patriarchs come from Greece,” said Khaled Ikhleif, a Palestinian taxi driver from Bethlehem in the West Bank. “They are foreign, not Arab, and they do not understand our problems.”

Mr. Ikhleif was attending epiphany celebrations at Qasr al-Yahud, a spot on the Jordan River where Jesus was said to have been baptized. The site, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is in a border area surrounded by minefields. After a procession and a ceremony led by Theophilos, pilgrims immersed themselves in the opaque, khaki-color water, momentarily oblivious to all dissension and discord.

While we wait for the tech boys at the Times to weigh in, there’s the almost tongue-tied rave by Janet Maslin that appears in today’s paper. 

The segments of “The Information” vary in levels of difficulty. Grappling with entropy, randomness and quantum teleportation is the price of enjoying Mr. Gleick’s simple, entertaining riffs on the Oxford English Dictionary’s methodology, which has yielded 30-odd spellings of “mackerel” and an enchantingly tongue-tied definition of “bada-bing” and on the cyber-battles waged via Wikipedia. (As he notes, there are people who have bothered to fight over Wikipedia’s use of the word “cute” to accompany a picture of a young polar bear.) That Amazon boasts of being able to download a book called “Data Smog” in less than a minute does not escape his keen sense of the absurd.

As it traces our route to information overload, “The Information” pays tribute to the places that made it possible. He cites and honors the great cogitation hives of yore. In addition to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Mount Rushmore of theoretical science, he acknowledges the achievements of corporate facilities like Bell Labs and I.B.M.’s Watson Research Center in the halcyon days when many innovations had not found practical applications and progress was its own reward.

“The Information” also lauds the heroics of mathematicians, physicists and computer pioneers like Claude Shannon, who is revered in the computer-science realm for his information theory but not yet treated as a subject for full-length, mainstream biography. Mr. Shannon’s interest in circuitry using “if … then” choices conducting arithmetic in a binary system had novelty when he began formulating his thoughts in 1937. “Here in a master’s thesis by a research assistant,” Mr. Gleick writes, “was the essence of the computer revolution yet to come.”

Stacey Isaacson, by all human reports, is a fantastically gifted and effective teacher. But let a couple of dodos at the Tammany Courthouse “measure” her performance, using a formula out of RubeGoldberg, and you’ll “discover” that she’s really “worse” than 93% of her colleagues!

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.
The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

Experience with the bureaucratic mind suggests that the “statistical model” becomes more onerous as the performance of students rises.

Matins

¶ If you want to lose our attention, just offer us a list of ten things. If we’re very bored, we may give it a glance, just to see how silly you are and probably to laugh at your expense. If Bob Cringely hadn’t been so entertainingly upset by a 24/7 list of the ways in which Americans “waste money” (ie, make discretionary purchases), we’d never have learned that there’s somebody out there who things that dry cleaning is optional — remind us not to sit next to that person! ¶ Abdul Fattah John Jandali, 80 and flourishing in Nevada, talks about his biological son, the guy who brought you the iPhone. (Ya Libnan; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Lauds

¶ At the Guardian, Mark Prescott asks, “Opera reviews: why does no one write about the music?” Actually, music critics write about almost everything but the music, for the simple reason that writing intelligibly about music is just about the hardest thing in the world to do. With regard to opera, though, we’re living in an era of silly, director-led “conceptions” of familiar classics that, in our view, clutter the stage and get in the way of the singing — but provide critics with nifty copy. ¶ Helen Mirren compares Michael Parkinson (whose 1975 “sexist interview” with the actress remains a must-see) with Russell Brand, who, she tells the Guardian, likes women, and not a lot of men do.” Having played Prospero, she now wants to play Hamlet. ¶ Nige reminds us of the death of Eric Blore, foretold in the pages of The New Yorker by Kenneth Tynan.

Prime

¶ We used to think that Jamie Dimon was the one reputable banker on Wall Street. Simon Johnson’s story about the folly of banks paying dividends right now (thus reducing their capital) mentions Mr Dimon’s “theory of excess capital,” which sounds like the sort of thing that a powerful man can make others listen to, nodding approvingly — but still crazy. (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ Whatever your opinion of Keynesian fiscal theory may be, there’s no question that Tyler Cowen identifies the functional problem that, Clinton-era good fortune aside, has bedeviled its implementation:

The technocratic Keynesian recommendation was to run deficits in bad times and surpluses in good times. But except for one stretch during the Clinton administration, this notion has been broken since the early 1980s. In the United States, at least, Keynesian economics has failed to find the necessary political institutions to enact and sustain a wise version of the theory.

Curiously, Tyler doesn’t regard this absolutely crucial insight as one worth exerpting in his own afterpost at Marginal Revolution. At least he doesn’t see the political weakness of Keynesian theory to be too obvious to mention. ¶ A True Historie and Account of McKinsey & Co, by Yves Smith! We dropped everything and read to the last word. Our favorite line: the writer’s personal recollection of Citibank in the reign of John Reed. “ I was on the Citibank team, where the client was smart and aggressive but often didn’t apply its energies to the best ends: the joke was that it was a “fire, aim, ready” organization.”

Tierce

¶ All about PKMzeta, the protein that strengthens synapses, thus enhancing memory. At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong tells us how the elimination of PKHzeta — there’s a chemical called ZIP that does the job — erases long-term memories irreversibly. The discovery, made by a team led by Todd Saktor at SUNY Downstate, doesn’t so much answer questions as refine them. One conjecture: PKMzeta enforces the survival of the fittest memories.

Memories are incredibly important, so why are they always teetering on the edge of disappearance? It probably has something to do with flexibility. The vulnerable nature of our memories allows us to easily update our entire network with new information. Without this flexibility, we’d be incapable of learning new things – a flaw that’s just as dangerous as the threat of memory loss.

¶ At HTMLGiant, Amy McDaniel muses anecdotally on favorite authors and ageing — or, in her case, getting older. She doesn’t quite say so, but the suggestion is implicit that, while we do outgrow adelescent tastes, the books that we love in earlier maturity will probably always been dear. (If only we had more time to get back to them!)

Sext

¶ Whitney Carpenter discloses the delightful if sordid truth about her fondness for special notebooks, pens, and other writing paraphernalia (id est: they protect her from having to write) with an understated candor that brings the more unspeakable sexual preferences to mind. (The Bygone Bureau)

Notebooks, as any notebook enthusiast will tell you, have a legacy, and all of that timelessness can weigh on a person. The pressure to do justice to the notebook, to write something as classic and romantic as the paper housing it, is just too much; I can never muster the courage to begin.

But there is something worse than a lot of pristine, untouched notebooks, and that is a lot of notebooks filled with the logorrhea of callow youth. Whitney is right: get rid of the things now! ¶ How delicious: Walter Kirn on Charlie Sheen. It’s almost redemptive, but only almost. We’ve never seen the show about fractions of men, and we can’t imagine tweeting about degraded actors with “very small holes in the center of his pupils where the ‘twinkle’ used to go,” but this entry from the writer’s new blog, Permanent Morning, makes us feel that we’ve had all the possible fun of doing so. “ He is the great Third Person Outside the Room that allows loosely associated strangers interacting on Twitter etc. to engage in synthetic confidential intimacy.” ¶ The ever-bad Dave Bry owes Streit’s Bakery twenty-two cents, the thief. It seems that matzo and camembert go well together, especially if the cracker is a Moonstrip from Rivingtton Street. Also that the bakery isn’t a particularly well-run shop.

Nones

¶ At 3 Quarks Daily, Omar Ali tries to get to the bottom of the Raymond Davis affair: does it signify a spat or a divorce between Pakistan’s ISI and our CIA? The larger importance of his piece lies in its firmly post-colonial thinking. “First of all, it is true that I assume that people in Pakistan have plans and ambitions of their own. I also assumes that the US is not some kind of God-like power.” Indeed, in Mr Ali’s view, the people of Pakistans have less to fear of the Amerricans than of their own “suicidal” elites.

Vespers

¶ Mary Beard is unhappy with a new book about “Elagabalus,” the Roman boy-emperor who reigned for four years from 218 and to whom the most shocking reputation for “decadence” was attached by the fourth century. The author of the new book, a Spaniard with a grandee’s name, Leonardo de Arrizabagala y Prado (we like the hint of acronymic connection to the emperor), has set out to distinguish fact from fiction, and wound up with a long, and in Beard’s view fatuous, list of “don’t knows.” The one story that Harold Nicholson omits from his tut-tutting account of Elegabalus is the one about smothering his dinner guests with rose petals. (TLS; via Brainiac) ¶ At Speakeasy, a taste of Anne Roiphe’s “Memoir of Lus Without Reason”: the glory (gory?) days at The Paris Review, when men wore ties and arm candy.

And then there was alcohol. It is hard to imagine these parties, this world without the clinking of ice in a glass, without the amber liquids loosening tongues, inhibitions, raging ambitions, hiding fears of failure, covering the tracks of depression and insecurity that might otherwise blight the scene. Yes, these were very intelligent and enormously gifted men and they lusted and they argued, they had sex like cave men on the savanna, or so they hoped.

Today’s writers seem a more cautious lot, less interested in some macho image that must be projected against an imaginary screen and perhaps they are less admiring of Hemingway and his giant fish than their elders.  Feminism, endless wars, a society in turmoil, civil rights, may have saved the current crop of writers from the long nights of their predecessors. But I’m sure the new crop of writers  have their own way to tumble down, to make their lives hard, and the sight probably isn’t pretty either.

But what is certain is that talent does not protect and that the drive to be an artist may set your hair on fire causing first degree burns. This is what happened with these writers before the height of the sixties and the sexual revolution would bring the rest of America into the party. This happened when I was very young and didn’t understand that a sleeping child’s breath on your neck is worth far more than any novel and that wild drink is not an answer to any inner yearning and that Art is fine but only one of the Mistresses of happiness and sometimes She is cruel in her demands.

¶ In an excellent essay at The Millions, Gabriel Brownstein surveys the field of “Jewish fiction,” only to give David Henry Hwang the last word: “ He talked of friends, fine playwrights with unspectacular careers, who had never been categorized, and said, look, that’s why they never took off.  You need to get categorized in order to succeed.” Surely this is not the old-fashioned business of categorizing and pigeonholing. Rather, it’s a kind of tagging.

Compline

¶ JR Lennon puts his finger (unintentionally, perhaps) on what makes us uncomfortable about writing programs — the (to us) meretricious patina of academic rigor. Teachers can do no more than grade a moment of excitement that may or may not turn out to be durable — no one can say.

If you ever wonder why creative writing classes often seem to be graded rather generously, this is the reason.  Everything is a gray area.  Nothing can be judged out of context.  There are no things you can’t do, and there are no things that always work.  There are only…things.  An infinite number.  And they can be arranged in an infinite number of ways.  It’s enough to make me think my job might actually be…difficult.

We’re all for writing programs. And we can see why calling them a kind of school is probably the easiest way to fund them, and to bring togetther But we have completely outgrown any faith in the product of writing programs. (Ward Six; via HTMLGiant) ¶ At Slate, Farhad Manjoo denounces the “snoots” who complain wheneverNPR devotes an iota of attention to the likes of Michael Jackson or Justin Bieber (plantinum- and chrome-plated junk, both of them). We agree that complaining is unattractive: we don’t listen to NPR anymore. For one thing, we don’t have the time! We just learned that we’ve read 155K Google Reader feeds in the past two years — lots and lots of which featured “Justin Bieber” in the headline. At least we didn’t have to listen! (via The Morning News)

Have a Look

¶ Helvetica and the New York City Subway System @ Brain Pickings. ¶ “The Drinking Man’s New Orleans” @ A Continuous Lean. ¶ Marc Giai-Miniet’s miniatures @ The Best Part. ¶ Next time, leave your camera at home: “Most Tourists Take Pictures from the Same Spot” @ The Online Photographer. ¶ Grace Bonney is having a stripes crisis. Help her out @ Design Sponge. ¶ Slam-dunking robot seal, gifted with stereo vision and, of course, great mechanicals. (Discoblog)

Noted

¶ Donald Trump’s loutishness continues unabated. (Joe.My.God)  ¶ The  editors of The Bygone Bureau revisit Pokemon, which all but two were deeply involved with. Darryl Campbell just missed the fad, by going off to high school, and Jonathan Gourlay was already a dirty old man.

Who controls the sovereign wealth fund that Col Qaddafi’s son, Seif, set up a few years ago? Most of it appears to sit in Libyan banks, beyond the reach of Western sanctions.

The fund’s nominal head is Muhammad H. Layas, perhaps Libya’s most experienced international banker. He has had a leadership role in institutions including the Libyan Arab Foreign Bank, the only bank allowed to conduct international business during the imposition of United Nations sanctions against Libya; British-Arab Commercial Bank, a London-based wholesale bank now majority owned by Libya; and the Arab Banking Corporation, a Bahrain-based bank also majority controlled by Libya.

But while he was the titular head, bankers who have had dealings with the fund say that the real power was wielded by Mustafa Zarti, a close friend of Mr. Qaddafi whose title is deputy chief executive.

Brash and with an “in-your-face” style, according to people who dealt with him, Mr. Zarti went to school with Mr. Qaddafi in Austria. He is also his partner in a tuna farming enterprise, R. H. Marine Services, on the west coast of Libya.

Bankers who dealt with Mr. Zarti said he fancied himself quite a deal maker — very much taken with glossy Wall Street names like Goldman Sachs — and was known for his impulsive and unsuccessful investment decisions, like investing in Royal Bank of Scotland before it was bailed out.

We especially liked this part: “People who worked closely with the fund said that its inner workings were largely a mystery as bureaucratic inertia and lack of investment expertise kept it from being more active.”

Floyd Norris comments on the good news about employment.

But for now note that the last time the unemployment rate fell 0.9 percentage points in three months was in 1983. That was when the economy finally started to rise rapidly after the early 1980’s double-dip recessions.

An important point to remember is that almost every economic statistic has been looking up, with the notable exception of the jobs figure. Now it seems to be falling in line.

A Happy International Progress Day to you and yours!

Some clueless young persons who have founded an elite organization, the Native Club, were evidently unaware that the first rule of such associations is supposed to be a ban on publicity. No talking to the Times!  The second rule — anybody can rent a room at the Plaza — to to occupy a building to which you can deny entry by non-members.   

Membership parameters have also loosened. It’s no longer restricted to people who understand that the soft-shell crabs are the thing to order at Swifty’s. The group now includes musicians from the Lower East Side, a painter on the Upper West Side, even folks who hail from far-off lands like Connecticut (you can be an “honorary member” if you’re born outside the city, so long as you display the Native mind-set, Mr. Estreich explained).

Larger parties, like the one at the Plaza, amount to rush parties, where candidates are brought for inspection. A counsel of 14 administrators functions like a Sutton Place co-op board and decides whom to admit.

For the inner circle, there are also private parties, drawing 25 or so to members’ East Side town houses or art-filled SoHo lofts. No one talks about the rituals at those events. “That’s where we burn lambs,” joked Freddie Fackelmayer, a member who wears his hair in a dramatic swoop of forelocks — call it the Fop Flop — familiar from a thousand Ralph Lauren ads.

As everyone knows, American working women earn less than their male counterparts. Gail Collins, not a hawker of pie in the sky, suggests why that may change.

Americans are so used to the fact that women are capable of doing anything that we hardly ever discuss it. It’s been a long time since the leader of NASA said “talk of an American spacewoman makes me sick to my stomach.”

A change that happened later, and the one that’s going to be driving the future, is that women’s ability to succeed in their work life is now a matter of concern for both sexes. The turning point for American women really came on the unknown day when the average American couple started planning their futures with the presumption that there would be two paychecks. In a country where no one has real power without a serious economic role, we entered a time when, whether we liked it or not, all hands were needed to keep the economic ship afloat. Even women who get the opportunity to stay home when their children are young have to be ready to jump back into the work force if their partner is suddenly laid off.

A while back, I was visiting a college in Connecticut where most of the students were the first in their families ever to go beyond high school. I was talking with a group of young men and women, and I asked the men how many of them felt it was very important that their future wife be a good earner.

All of them raised their hands.

When we were young, the position of symphony orchestra conductor was an appointment for life, and holding more than one post was uncommon. We’re just saying.

If the good old ways had been kept up, then everyone would have been spared the embarrassing tease of the Metropolitan Opera’s James Levine’s health-related absences from his other job in Boston.

Mr. Levine acknowledged that he might have bitten off too much. “From the very beginning I didn’t handle both jobs completely smoothly,” he said. “There was always for me a tightness in the schedule between finishing a group of things here and then having to go right away to another group of things somewhere else.” As a younger, healthier man, he said, he could handle that.

[snip]

Mr. Levine’s health problems sometimes seem to be scrutinized like those of a political leader or pope because he is an enormously influential figure in classical music. He plays a central role in one of the world’s leading opera houses, has the devotion of many major singers and directs one of the top orchestras around.

He has a large fan base and attracts donors. Administrators rely on his leadership to keep their institutions musically excellent. Audience members buy tickets for him, not — at least not yet — for the likes of his substitutes, including Sean Newhouse, an assistant conductor for the Boston orchestra who led Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 last weekend.

If Mr Levine were to die, or to retire altogether from the podium, his reputation as one of the greatest conductors of the Twentieth Century would be secure. Ambition at this stage is unseemly.

Pakistan’s political elite suffered yet another body-blow yesterday, with the assassination of the government’s only Christian minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, gunned down outside his home by thugs in vernacular costume.

In a sign of the retreat of the ruling party on the question of enacting more tolerant laws, Prime Minister Gilani pledged in Parliament earlier this year that the government had no intention of pursuing the reform agenda on the blasphemy laws. An alliance of conservative religious parties showed their strength in the major cities in early February, staging rallies of tens of thousands that called the government lackeys of the United States, and too reliant on a reform agenda. Alarmed by the rising tide of militant sentiments, senior American officials suggested to Mr. Zardari and Mr. Gilani that they make public speeches on the need for tolerance — “Churchillian” presentations, said one diplomat — but the leaders had cited lack of security and fear for their lives.

Mr. Bhatti had expressed nervousness about speaking out and had shunned public appearances, his aides said. One of Mr. Bhatti’s favorite sayings came from the inaugural address in 1947 of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who declared that Pakistan would not be a theocracy, and all religions would be respected. “I am receiving threats on speaking against the blasphemy law but my faith gives me strength and we will not allow the handful of extremists to fulfill their agenda,” Mr. Bhatti said shortly before his death.

The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that Mr. Bhatti’s killing represented the “bitter fruit of appeasement of extremist and militant groups” in the last several months. It called for an “urgent” reappraisal of the “political cowardice” that had overtaken the ruling party in the government, the Pakistan Peoples Party.

We’re reminded of Omar Ali’s epitaph-in-waiting for Pakistan’s ruling class: “They have armed, trained and encouraged their own executioners in the course of a demented scheme of trying to wrest Kashmir from India while laying the foundation for a mini-empire in central Asia.”

We are totally wowed. Even though we knew something of the polymathy of Natalie Portman, Natalie Angier’s report makes us gasp.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

No wonder we like The Other Boleyn Girl so much.

What do Wal-Mart, Duke University, and the Environmental Protection Agency have in common? They’re three among the thirty founders of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a research institute that will investigate the conditions in which clothing is produced — a complicated business, to be sure (where was that zipper fabricated?). Reporter Tom Zeller cannot entirely conceal the too-good-to-be-true press-releaser quality of this news, but at least it will make an interesting failure, if fail it does.

The coalition’s tool is meant to be a database of scores assigned to all the players in the life cycle of a garment — cotton growers, synthetic fabric makers, dye suppliers, textile mill owners, as well as packagers, shippers, retailers and consumers — based on a variety of social and environmental measures like water and land use, energy efficiency, waste production, chemical use, greenhouse gases and labor practices.

A clothing company designer could then use the tool to select materials and suppliers, computing an overall sustainability score based on industry standards. If the score exceeds the company’s own sustainability goals — or if competitive pressures arising from a consumer label are compelling the company to bring scores down — designers could revise their choices with the tool.

Such a tool is a work in progress. It draws heavily from two earlier efforts — an environmental design tool developed by Nike, and an “Eco Index” begun by the Outdoor Industry Association last year. But these afford only a partial or approximate look at the potential effects of discrete industry segments.

Julie Bosman follows Paris Review editor and Grub Street sex symbol Lorin Stein on a literary debauch.

Money is a running concern. His own salary, around $150,000, is generous by literary-world standards. The magazine’s occasional fund-raisers, subscriber dollars, newsstand sales and private donations provide enough money to cover costs, and an endowment has been untouched since 2006. But Mr. Stein is under pressure not only to raise the magazine’s profile, but to lure more paying customers, relentlessly promote it and its writers, and dream up new ways of getting attention.

Sometimes, that means asking for favors from famous writer friends. At the Harper’s party, he spotted Ms. Smith, looking tall and elegant with her hair swept back.

Mr. Stein pounced. “You and Nick,” he said, referring to her husband, the writer Nick Laird. “I want you to be my guests at the magazine gala.”

She looked skeptical. “So you want my money?”

“No, we want to pimp the two of you,” he said. “You’ll have so much fun. We’ll pay for the baby sitter.”

Scott Shane takes a look at the role of Al Qaeda in the downfall of the Middle East’s autocracies — which, so far, has been “absolutely no role.” Have these upsets consigned militant jihadism to the dustbin, or have they on the contrary worked up some new opportunities for terrorists?

Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.

“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”

Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.
Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

All we can ask is that younger American voices will have a greater role in shaping this country’s responses to events on the fly. At bottom, what’s happening more or less violently in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere is bound to happen somehow or other all over the world, as the surging demographic of young people challenges the status quo not in the spirit of boredom and caprice that bedeviled the late 1960s but rather in the earnest pursuit of meaningful careers. Today’s kids want to grow up.

Matins

¶ Nobody who read James Gleick’s Chaos needs to be told that his new book, The Information, a a must-read. (Brainiac)

For Gleick, the essence of information is abstraction. Information exists where one thing (an idea) is abstracted into another thing (a word). But it’s also important that information be granular – broken down into what Shannon called “bits.” It’s this combination of abstraction and regularity that makes the idea of information so useful. The information age arrived, Gleick explains, not with the alphabet, the telephone, or the internet, but when, after it was “made simple, distilled, [and] counted in bits, information was found to be everywhere.”

Lauds

¶ Megan Lewit knows why Yanks don’t remake Brit comedy very well: “our Anglo friends take their comedy much as they take their tea: black.” Are Americans fundamentally too nice to be hipsters? (The Awl) ¶ We’ve never seen Friday Night Lights, and Kevin Nguyen’s hommage is probably not going to change that, but we read it with great interest just the same. “And maybe that’s the hardest part of selling Friday Night Lights to the uninitiated: it’s a show about football where the football is the least important part.” (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ Dan Callahan’s hot-pressed ode to the neo-noir films of the Eighties and Nineties makes us appreciate the original noirs all the more: watching people smoke cigarettes can be made to be so much more interesting than — well, something with Rachel Ward and Jason Patric called After Dark, My Sweet.

Foley cuts to a shot of Ward’s hands digging into the small of Patric’s back, which is lightly covered with hair. This is an image another movie might not show you; another movie might have made Patric shave that hair on his back, or made Ward cover the lines under her eyes, but After Dark, My Sweet seems to have an almost French appreciation for “flaws” like this and views them as turn-ons.

¶ Jens Laurson sits through Mahler’s Seventh (the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink) and nicely captures the adolescent grandeur of this fuzzy masterpiece, less difficult than the Sixth but more daring and “out there.”

Prime

¶ While waiting to be able to deliver their new plane, the 787 Dreamliner, Boeing executives and engineers must surely be finding the abstract of John Hart-Smith’s brilliantly titled study, “Out-Sourcing Profits: the Cornerstone of Successful Subcontracting,” to be horribly prescient (as well as fantastically readable). They must be wishing that Hart-Smith’s bosses at Boeing, for whom he wrote his cautionary presentation in 2001, had listened. “The point is made that not only is the work out-sourced; all of the profits associated with the work are out-sourced, too.” (via MetaFilter) ¶ Bob Cringely tells us that “the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem isn’t the American startup ecosystem.” The American system is slower and cheaper. (I, Cringely)

Tierce

¶ Yves Smith parses a mailing from a progressive group that’s trying to change JP Morgan Chase’s foreclosure policies — the group wants the bank to be more willing to modify mortgages — and shows how really lame the group’s proposals are. And she makes two suggestions that would probably offer help more effectively to troubled homeowners — and neither of them involve negotiating or pleading with JPMorgan Chase.. (Naked Capitalism) ¶ With slightly more patience, Robert Reich asks for a Democratic Party plan to counter the Republicans’ strategy of dividing the middle- and lower-classes along union/non-union lines (which today is pretty much a public sector/private sector divide.) ¶ Chris Mooney regards the complex of right-wing think tanks as an alternative to academia that’s less intellectually rigorous. “And now, while good liberals worry about academic balance, these think tanks are out there trouncing reality on a regular basis.” (The Intersection) ¶ Testosterone may increase athletic performance, but in the end it’s only going to let traders down — and, come to think of it, any man who’s supposed to be thinking. (Dynamic Hedge @ The Reformed Broker) ¶ Philip Greenspun rightly judges David Brooks’s “answer” to Tyler Cowen’s The Great Stagnation — Brooks argues that young Americans “seek meaning not money” — is unworthy of a Times columnist. ¶ Amy Westervelt reports on a connection between light pollution and cancer — particularly the cancers that require hormones to grow. This is not offered as a scare but as something to think about. Is worrying in the dark better than worrying in front of the computer? (GOOD) ¶ Finally: “Viewers should not have to adjust the volume at every commercial break, and we will work with the broadcasting industry to find an acceptable solution.” Commercials in Canada won’t be so much louder. (CBC News; via Arts Journal)

Sext

¶ Choire Sicha mourns the death of email. “I recently witnessed an entire passive aggressive confrontation occur in the comment sections of other people’s Tumblrs! It wasn’t even taking place on their own Tumblrs! That’s just how distributed conversation has gotten.” What’s Tumblr? <wink> (The Awl) ¶ One of the funniest writers on the Internet, Jimmy Chen, confesses to being “addicted to sad.” Somewhat more problematically, he also uses Vuillard’s The Newspaper to illustrate an essay that concerns his own failure as a painter. Of course we forgive him. Vuillard, after all…  (HTMLGiant) ¶ Dominique Browning is too polite to put it categorically, but although you can’t always respond to a question with the required degree of interest, but you must never, ever dismiss what another person asks as a “bad question,” or as “boring and banal.” These maladroit moves remind us of the old saw that “boring is not where you are, it’s who you are.” ¶ Stephen Sherrill’s spoof of a book proposal actually written by Shrub isn’t the timeliest funny piece in the world, but it’s too delicious to overlook. It reminds us that the late president was what used to be called “affected,” but in an inverse way: a born patrician, he pretended to sound working class. Amazingly if not surprisingly, the gambit succeeded. (GQ; via The Rumpus)

Nones

¶ Rupa Sengupta muses on the “glocal” dissemination of American “soft power” — its pop-culture leadership. N “The future seems to be about partnerships, not one-way tickets; cross-currents, not hegemonies.” (Times of India; via Real Clear World) ¶ Morgan Meis takes a dry-eyed look at Al-Jazeera’s funding and still concludes that it may be journalism’s best hope — for the time being. (The Smart Set; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Hugh Miles, writing about Libya, reminds us that “Unlike Tunisia and Egypt, Libya has substantial oil wealth and steps have been taken to placate the people by raising salaries and releasing some political prisoners.

Vespers

¶ What ought to be a crashingly unreadable downtown review of a difficult poet becomes, under the touch of Olga Zilberbourg, an intriguing encounter with a reader whom you’d like to know better — even if you “know better.” Here’s the premise: “This is certain: I read Coolidge in the context of my experience, and my experience is grounded in 20^th C Leningrad-St. Petersburg poetry.” You’ll have to teake it from me that the experience is fertile. (HTMLGiant) ¶ Bill Morris, asked to write a blurb for a friend’s book, swallows hard but gets a truly fine essay out of the experience that fingers all the complexities of this dark and undismissible subject. Also, happy ending: he can write a nice blurb with a clear conscience. (The Millions)

Compline

¶ Catherine McNally, a librarian from the Liverpool area, writes a defense of libraries that presents her own branch as a kind of community center for the exchange of information. One wonders how quiet it is,  and how quiet, in this age of headphones, it ought to be. (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ Rick Gekoski wants us to stop talking rot about the virtues of “books” and “reading,” and he quotes an apt line of Philip Larkin: “I should never call myself a book lover any more than a people lover. It all depends what’s inside them.” (Ditto; Ditto)

Have a Look

¶ Spencer Murphy’s “Fallen Empire” project: the “ruins” of a Chinese theme park in Florida. (via The Best Part) ¶ Molly Lewis wants to have Stephen Fry’s child, and her boyfriend thinks it’s okay. She is one talented song-writer. (YouTube; via MetaFilter) ¶ The Beatles — as they’ll be understood a thousand years from now. (Death to the History Channel!) (via Brainiac)

Noted

¶ Now you can make your own Coca-Cola at home. (This American Life; via kottke.org) ¶ Blake Butler writes from Level Zero. (HTMLGiant) ¶ The Weakonomist on “biflation.” (Weakonomics) ¶ Americans with passports; per capita by state (Grey’s Blog) ¶ We are not going to wax sentimental about this story of the last days of Borders; we’d have done the same thing. (I, Cringely)

We’ll be damned: there are Times readers who will be surprised to learn that trial lawyers are a superstitious bunch. Or maybe not; maybe Benjamin Weiser and his editors are just pretending, so that they can share a lot of ridiculous anecdotes.  

“Trial lawyers believe in jinxes,” Mr. Finzi acknowledged from White Plains, where he is defending a man in a murder trial. Along with using his keen judgment and legal skills, Mr. Finzi made clear that he was doing whatever else was necessary.

“I’ve been up here 10 days,” he said earlier this month, “and I’ve had a tuna fish sandwich for lunch every single day.”

But Joshua L. Dratel questioned his colleagues’ adherence to superstition, asking, “If where I ate dinner last night decides the merits of a case, then what’s the point of even trying?”

And Steven M. Cohen, another veteran lawyer, observed, “You certainly wouldn’t want to learn that your heart surgeon or your 747 pilot always wears the same pair of underwear when it’s time to perform.”

Ah, but surgeons and pilots actually know what they’re doing. “Keen judgment” and “legal skills” don’t come into it.

No one does outrage more appealingly than Gail Collins. Her target today is Lone Star governor Rick Perry, who seems hell-bent on creating a populous underclass of unwanted, uneducated, and untrained Texans.

Meanwhile, Perry — having chosen not to help young women avoid unwanted pregnancies and not to pay enough to educate the booming population of Texas children — wowed the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington with his states’ rights rhetoric.

Which would be fine, as I said, if his state wasn’t in charge of preparing a large chunk of the nation’s future work force. Perry used to be famous for his flirtation with talk of secession. Maybe we should encourage him to revisit it.

One thing that the Editor learned during his sojourn in Texas in the 1970s was that many people down there seem to think that they’re living in an independent republic that’s occupied by noisome federales. Maybe it’s time for the United States to withdraw its forces (and its moolah) from the alien corn.