Thanks to an overzealous decision by a yahoo judge, masterpieces held by Russian museums won’t be visiting the United States. We hope that the Chabad Lubavitchers are happy about that.

In recent years the organization has taken its case to court in the United States, and on July 30, 2010, Royce C. Lamberth, a federal judge of the United States District Court in Washington, ruled in favor of the Chabad organization, ordering Russia to turn over all Schneerson documents held at the Russian State Library, the Russian State Military Archive and elsewhere.

Russian officials, saying that an American court had no jurisdiction, had refused to participate in the proceedings. And after Judge Lamberth’s decision, the Russian Foreign Ministry denounced it as a violation of international law. The ministry said an American court had no right to get involved in a case concerning Russian assets on Russian soil.

Russian cultural officials reacted more slowly, but by autumn they began warning Russia’s state-controlled museums that any artwork lent to the United States was at risk of being seized by the American authorities to force Russia to abide by the decision.

It figures. The Securities and Exchange Commission nets the federal government about $300 million in fees and fines, after its own expenses), but it is so poorly organized that, according to GAO audits, “basic accounting continually bedevils the agency responsible for guaranteeing the soundness of American financial markets.” Is this what “starving the beast” comes down to?

“It’s almost as if the commission is being set up to fail,” said Harvey L. Pitt, who was S.E.C. chairman from 2001 to 2003 and who now is chief executive of Kalorama Partners.

Dodd-Frank did authorize a doubling of the commission’s budget, to $2.25 billion, over the next five years — without providing the money for it. It also authorized the commission to spend as much as $100 million beyond its operating budget for new technology systems.

Ms. Schapiro said that buying new technology was crucial because it helped to attract specialists in mathematics and financial systems that the S.E.C. needed to help police the rapidly evolving financial markets.

“It’s very hard to attract great people if they think that there’s not going to be the opportunity to use technology to get the job done, which can make us so much more efficient,” she said.

It’s a pity that Edward Wyatt’s story doesn’t offer an explanation of where the SEC’s budget bloat — its funding doubled during the first GW Bush administration. Money isn’t everything; it can’t solve problems by itself, especially if administrators (such as former Chariman Christopher Cox) are not interested in solving them.

In an important development, pepperoni is showing up on artisanal pizzas. Julia Moskin reports.

“Purely an Italian-American creation, like chicken Parmesan,” said John Mariani, a food writer and historian who has just published a book with the modest title: “How Italian Food Conquered the World.” “Peperoni” is the Italian word for large peppers, as in bell peppers, and there is no Italian salami called by that name, though some salamis from Calabria and Abruzzo in the south are similarly spicy and flushed red with dried chilies. The first reference to pepperoni in print is from 1919, Mr. Mariani said, the period when pizzerias and Italian butcher shops began to flourish here.
Pepperoni certainly has conquered the United States. Hormel is the biggest-selling brand, and in the run-up to the Super Bowl this Sunday, the company has sold enough pepperoni (40 million feet) to tunnel all the way through the planet Earth, said Holly Drennan, a product manager.
Michael Ruhlman, an expert in meat curing who is writing a book on Italian salumi, doesn’t flinch from calling pepperoni pizza a “bastard” dish, a distorted reflection of wholesome tradition. “Bread, cheese and salami is a good idea,” he said. “But America has a way of taking a good idea, mass-producing it to the point of profound mediocrity, then losing our sense of where the idea comes from.” He prefers lardo or a fine-grained salami, very thinly sliced, then laid over pizza as it comes out of the oven rather than cooked in the oven.

Our own preference is for prosciutto and no tomatoes. How we miss Loui Loui!

Medieval monarchs quarreled with territorial grandees and local customs to raise armies and taxes in a struggle for state power that it took the French Revolution (and an end of monarchy) to win. Who knows what corresponding trauma will end the conflict between the United States’ laws and the special interests that work hard to neutralize them. Joe Nocera in the Times: 

Arguably, the United States now has a corporate tax code that’s the worst of all worlds. The official rate is higher than in almost any other country, which forces companies to devote enormous time and effort to finding loopholes. Yet the government raises less money in corporate taxes than it once did, because of all the loopholes that have been added in recent decades.

{snip}

The problem with the current system is that it distorts incentives. Decisions that would otherwise be inefficient for a company — and that are indeed inefficient for the larger economy — can make sense when they bring a big tax break. “Companies should be making investments based on their commercial potential,” as Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University, says, “not for tax reasons.”

A corporation that isn’t paying roughly a third of its profits in taxes is cheating the body politic that nourishes it.

According to Jenna Wortham’s report, the world of online publishing is getting closer to sustaining itself financially — and without advertising. Richard Ziade’s Readability is set to offer apps that distribute micropayments to publishers.

“Asking someone to pay 45 cents to read an article may not be a big deal, but no one wants to deal with that transaction,” he said. Marco Arment, an adviser to Readability and the creator of Instapaper, a service for saving and reading online articles, made a version of his Instapaper app that will essentially be Readability’s mobile component. Mr. Arment said he thought the most likely customers for Readability’s pay service were “online power readers.”

“It’ll be the types who buy print magazines even though the same articles are online for free, just because they want to support the publication,” he said.

“On the Web, it’s not that people aren’t willing to pay small amounts for things; it’s that there is no easy way to pay,” he added. “If a service like Readability comes along and makes it easy, I think people will be willing to pay.”

[snip]

Mr. Benton of the Nieman Journalism Lab said that the interest in these services was driving “an increasing realization among publishers that not all customers are created equal, and some will pay for different experiences without advertisements.”

Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Slate Group, the online publisher owned by the Washington Post Company, said Slate had not talked to Readability but would “be happy to cash their checks.” Mr. Weisberg added that “if the numbers became meaningful, we’d of course want to negotiate” a deal.

They said it couldn’t be done.

On the vexed subject of “stability,” words of great good sense from Senator John Kerry.

The awakening across the Arab world must bring new light to Washington, too. Our interests are not served by watching friendly governments collapse under the weight of the anger and frustrations of their own people, nor by transferring power to radical groups that would spread extremism. Instead, the best way for our stable allies to survive is to respond to the genuine political, legal and economic needs of their people. And the Obama administration is already working to address these needs.

At other historic turning points, we have not always chosen wisely. We built an important alliance with a free Philippines by supporting the people when they showed Ferdinand Marcos the door in 1986. But we continue to pay a horrible price for clinging too long to Iran’s shah. How we behave in this moment of challenge in Cairo is critical. It is vital that we stand with the people who share our values and hopes and who seek the universal goals of freedom, prosperity and peace.

For three decades, the United States pursued a Mubarak policy. Now we must look beyond the Mubarak era and devise an Egyptian policy.

And a shot of real realism from David Brooks.

First, the foreign policy realists who say they tolerate authoritarian government for the sake of stability are ill informed. Autocracies are more fragile than any other form of government, by far.

In other words, the modern democratic world has no room for junior Kissingers.

Across, the river, in the Little Egypt part of Astoria, the locals exhibit a progressive grasp of American foreign policy.

Today, there are at least 10 mosques in Astoria, several Arabic newspapers and a flourishing cultural scene that is attracting young hipsters from Manhattan. The 2006-2008 American Community Survey found that roughly 14,000 Egyptians were living in New York City, though community leaders say the actual number is higher since some are undocumented.

For some of the Egyptian-Americans of Astoria, who have long prided themselves on their assimilation into American life, the events in Egypt have tapped into divided loyalties. Many expressed support for “Barack Hussein Obama,” revered by many in the Arab world for his outreach to Muslims. But they also chastised him for what they described as his tepid rebuke of Mr. Mubarak and for American hypocrisy in the Middle East in general.

Mr. El Sayed was emphatic that he identified with both the protesters on the streets of Cairo and the man in the White House. “The U.S. has always supported tyrants, look at the shah, look at Saudi Arabia, we even supported bin Laden. So in Egypt we are now playing the same game by supporting Mubarak,” Mr. El Sayed said as he prepared his mother’s recipe for baba ghanouj, a dish of mashed eggplant. “But I would give my life for this country. We Egyptians here are American, and proud of it.”

But others said their patience with Washington was being tested. “Why doesn’t Mubarak appoint Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to his new Cabinet since they are the ones who are saving him?” asked Hani Abdulhamid, 30, a filmmaker originally from Aswan, in southern Egypt. “They say he isn’t a dictator because he works for them.”

For those not lucky enough to emigrate to the United States, radical Islamism just might be the only response to American-suppolrted tyrannies.

We applaud Ross Douthat for reminding us how foolish it is to act according to principle in foreign affairs.

The memory of Nasser is a reminder that even if post-Mubarak Egypt doesn’t descend into religious dictatorship, it’s still likely to lurch in a more anti-American direction. The long-term consequences of a more populist and nationalistic Egypt might be better for the United States than the stasis of the Mubarak era, and the terrorism that it helped inspire. But then again they might be worse. There are devils behind every door.

Americans don’t like to admit this. We take refuge in foreign policy systems: liberal internationalism or realpolitik, neoconservatism or noninterventionism. We have theories, and expect the facts to fall into line behind them. Support democracy, and stability will take care of itself. Don’t meddle, and nobody will meddle with you. International institutions will keep the peace. No, balance-of-power politics will do it.

But history makes fools of us all. We make deals with dictators, and reap the whirlwind of terrorism. We promote democracy, and watch Islamists gain power from Iraq to Palestine. We leap into humanitarian interventions, and get bloodied in Somalia. We stay out, and watch genocide engulf Rwanda. We intervene in Afghanistan and then depart, and watch the Taliban take over. We intervene in Afghanistan and stay, and end up trapped there, with no end in sight.Sooner or later, the theories always fail. The world is too complicated for them, and too tragic. History has its upward arcs, but most crises require weighing unknowns against unknowns, and choosing between competing evils.

We wish that America, given its pathetic losing streak since 1945 (and, no, we did not win the Cold War), could lurch likewise.

Matins

¶ At Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok endorses the ethical sentiments of economist Ed Glaeser, who writes in a somewhat self-congratulatory way about the “respect” shown by liberal economists to individuals when they allow them to make their own decisions about such controversial actions as selling their organs. “Economists like John Stuart Mill thought that all people were able to make rational choices, that trade not coercion was the best route to wealth, and that everyone should be counted equally, regardless of race.” This is either blinkered or naive — blinkered, we suspect. How can anyone be so naive as to think that an uneducated woman, wholly dependent upon the men in her family for her material needs, would not be vulnarable to all manner of low-level extortions, culminating in an effectively arranged marriage? That’s why we go for blinkered. When Mill speaks of “all people,” he means “all heads of households,” the only people whose decisions naturally matter to economists. The trick for us is to allow the heads of households to follow their self-interest, while protecting members of their families from their petty tyrannies — in a way that does not give rise to two or more legal classes. ¶ “Questions About Heaven.” We have the answer: heaven is an incredibly infantile concept. God forbid! (The Awl)

Lauds

¶ Righteously scoffing at the prospect of a new opera about, of all things & people, Anna Nicole Smith (who was who, exactly? No — don’t remind us), Adrian Hamilton explains the power of grand opera in a few succinct sentences that anybody can grasp. (Independent; via Arts Journal)

Opera’s unique justification as an art form is that it uses the greatest of all musical instruments, the voice, to express the most fundamental drive of all society, the human emotion. At its grandest, as in Verdi, it can set the voice of the individual against the great swirl of events as expressed in the music. At its most intimate it can, as with Mozart, portray the frailty and humour of man by setting music not just to support the voice but to comment on and even contradict it. Music can make you feel what you want to feel – pride, pity or patriotism – but opera can also make you sense what you don’t want to – the dangerous yearning for a new beginning in Wagner’s Parsifal, sympathy for a witch in Handel’s Alcina, admiration for a philanderer in Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

¶ We’re not sure why Eric Freeman entitled his Awl entry about The King’s Speech “The Dark Side of Oscar Bait,” because the whole point of the piece is how well the film presents the stammerer’s agonies. Mr Freeman knows what he’s talking about: he share’s George VI’s affliction.

Prime

¶ Yves Smith dismantles Joe Nocera’s comparison of the recent housing bubble to the “tulip mania” that erupted in the Netherlands in 1636. First, she reports recent research that alters the picture first presented by Charles McKay a century and a half ago. Second, she challenges the claim that the housing bubble was the root of the recent financial crash; in Yves’s view, the housing bubble was no more than the ignition that detonated a larger, worldwide mass of imprudent gambles — risks by and large taken on by “sophisticated” professional investors, not the “men in the street” alleged to have paid too much for tulips and houses. A must-read for clear thinkers. (Naked Capitalism) ¶ Have we been saying this for years or what?: Health care costs must be dealt with before health care payments can be addressed. Thanks to Atul Gawande and Donald Marron, we’re getting closer to a mainstream understanding of that point.

Tierce

¶ We confess that our weakness for virtual explorations of the Mandelbrot Set severely challenges our ability to evaluate a new claim that partition numbers are predictable — that they follow patterns that mirror the Mandelbrot Set’s structures. That, and the fact that we’d never even heard of partition numbers before, and couldn’t tell you one useful thing about imaginary numbers  (which is what the Mandelbrot Set is made up of, no?) means that we have no business noting this development. (Wired Science) ¶ In Boston, an outfit called Gym-Pact will arrange for you to be penalized if you don’t show up for your appointed workouts. “Honey! I saved hundreds of dollars, and I lost forty pounds!” Somehow this reminds us of Sid Caesar: “Why don’t we not go to Paris and save a thousand dollars?” (GOOD)  ¶ Without the help of Gym-Pact, Carrie Fisher lost 4.8 pounds! That should get her to San Miguel de Allende at least! ¶ Carol Tavris reviews Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender, a book that includes a delicious “romp through the fields of neurosexism.” Our favorite example of a difference without importance: the toy choices of four year olds, a/k/a “the gender police.” (TLS; via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ Yet another reason for anticipating with pleasure the day when private automobiles no longer make sense: songbirds are singing at night because they can’t be heard during daylight. We do, however, hope to hear a real, live nightingale before we die. (Nigeness)

Sext

¶ James Ward takes a jaundiced view of a British ad campaign that seems to rest on a weird internal Schadenfreude. You may feel guilty about giving tourists bad directions, but you won’t feel bad about eating our low-fat chips! James is right: it’s wrong-hearted and -headed to infuse a pleasure with the consciousness of not doing some wicked thing that we’ve done in the past. Quite aside from the monstrosity of giving deliberately misleading directions. (Except, of course, for that great episode in 2 Days in Paris. (I Like Boring Things) ¶ Hallie Bateman writes about being mistaken, in high school, for “shy.” Whereas in fact she was determined never to speak unless it was “absolutely necessary.” Distinctly un-American! (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ “Fun to read” — Frédéric Filloux is writing about the Guardian and the Times, vis-à-vis Le Monde. We’ve been wanting to send a similar message to the good folks at The Nation, which has become an extraordinarily penitential experience.

Nones 

¶ Are we ready to talk about Egypt? The inestimable William Pfaff is: “Uprisings, From Tunis to Cairo.” (NYRB) ¶ “Gordon Reynolds’s” account of Cairo’s Friday. It’s a happening place — too much so for our reflective comments. We could make all the obvious criticisms of yet another failed oligarchy, but the only thing that matters is what happens next, and it hasn’t. (The Awl) ¶ The forgotten Christianity of the East, brought to life by Philip Jenkins. (Armarium Magnum)

Vespers

¶ While we agree as a matter of course that Orhan Pamuk is right to deplore the resistance of Anglophone literary life to translations from other languages, we also agree with Claire Armitstead, who disputes Pamuk’s claim that English and American critics “provincialize” him by observing (correctly, in our view) that the Turkish writer’s novels are “rooted in their particular social context” — which is what makes them the imaginative magic carpets that they are (at least for Anglophones!) (Guardian; via Arts Journal) ¶ Speaking of the Jaipur Literature Festival (where Mr Pamuk made his complaint), Karan Mahajan has a very intriguing piece about William Dalrymple at Bookforum, “The Don of Delhi.” And here we thought that Mr Dalrymple was a study-wuddy. Unh-unh. He’s a baronet’s grandson and the descendent of a Scots adventurer who got to be known as “the biggest liar in India.” Mr Dalrymple, who runs the Jaipur festival, is as colorful as his Mughal and Company subjects. ¶ A cheerful look at the JFL at Globe and Mail.

¶ Meanwhile, when it comes to selling books, and not just sellebrating them, Sir Basil Blackwell said it all in 1935. Bookselling is indeed a timeless business. (The Age of Uncertainty).

Compline

¶ At The Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson worries about what we call the Blinder Prospect, after Princeton economist Alan Blinder, who blithely forecasted it several years ago in Foreign Affairs. In “Davos: Two Worlds, Ready Or Not,” Johnson points out the “cognitive dissonance” (we’d call it hypocrisy) that allows flourishing CEOs to disavow responsibility for public health while claiming benefits from the public weal. If unchecked, this leads to a world populated by rentiers and their employees. ¶ The Humble Student of the Markets illustrates the point with some clear and distinct infographics. ¶ What doesn’t help in this murky environment is cultural anti-elitism, a confusing smoke-screen behind which the power elite pull the strings. At Brainiac, Josh Rothman makes a valiant attempt to deal with the chewing-gum qualities of the term “elite”; clarity would be too much ask for. ¶ Ancient History: AO Scott addressed the problem of cultural elitism in the middle of January. (via The Rest Is Noise) ¶ Jason Kottke reminds us of a great mission statement that expresses everything that’s good about entrepreneurship — and, by implication, how far the titans of Davos are from embodying it.

Have a Look

¶ TJB has a look at Hollywood’s own Rose Bertin, Edith Head. (Stirred, Straight Up, With a Twist)

¶ Der Rosenkavalier turns 100. (MetaFilter)

¶ A clip from Enthiran: have you heard of this Indian film? Well, you have now. (MetaFilter)

¶ The Gentleman’s Directory. (A Continuous Lean)

¶ The Hydraulic Escalator. (For Firefighters) (BLDGBLOG)

¶ Duncan Gray. (Find the Beethoven!) (3 Quarks Daily)

Noted

¶ Marilyn analyzes Sigmund (inter alia). Can this letter be for real? It’s certainly very readable, and we didn’t spot not one single typo! (Letters of Note)

¶ John Williams writes that Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule “charms and befuddles.” (The Second Pass)

¶ Ongoing corona research. Sun. Beer. Penis. (Discoblog)

¶ We hate to admit it, but Choire Sicha’s Learn-to-Love-Flying program is the only one that will ever work. (The Awl)

¶ Elegant Variation. Maîtrisez-le. (Daily Writing Tips)

The Times has taken the nomination of an openly gay lawyer, J Paul Oetken, to the Federal Bench as an occasion to revisit the aborted nomination, last year, of Daniel Alter, a matter that gets more coverage in Benjamin Weiser’s story.

Mr. Alter declined to comment on Thursday, but told The New York Law Journal in October that his nomination appeared to have run into trouble because of “certain false attributions” to him of statements that he denied making.

The Washington Blade had earlier reported that Mr. Alter, while working for the Anti-Defamation League, was quoted in a news service article as recommending against merchants using “Merry Christmas” instead of a more generic greeting and in remarks in a magazine suggesting the group favored legal challenges to the use of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Mr. Alter told The Law Journal: “Neither of the quotations attributed to me are accurate or in any way reflect my personal reviews.” The White House has declined to comment on the issue.

Last summer, 66 of his former colleagues in the United States attorney’s office wrote to Mr. Schumer, urging the senator to fight for his nomination.

A fasten-seatbelts warning to Mr Oetken?

The murder of David Kato, in his own home and by someone whom he knew, reminds us that, in Uganda as elsewhere in Africa, homophobia is encouraged and even legitimated by evangelical christianists from the United States.

The Americans involved said they had no intention of stoking a violent reaction. But the antigay bill was drafted shortly thereafter. Some of the Ugandan politicians and preachers who wrote it had attended those sessions and said that they had discussed the legislation with the Americans.

After growing international pressure and threats from a few European countries to cut assistance — Uganda relies on hundreds of millions of dollars of aid — Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, indicated that the bill would be scrapped.

But more than a year later, that has not happened, and the legislation remains a simmering issue in Parliament. Some political analysts say the bill could be passed in the coming months, after a general election in February that is expected to return Mr. Museveni, who has been in office for 25 years, to power.

Surely this dabbling in foreign affairs gives grounds for rescinding 503(c)(1) status.

Thanks to Amy Chua, for making “Mom, You’re One Tough Art Critic” a bit more newsworthy- and less slow-news-day-looking than it is.

Ms. Hanff is always on the lookout for “exceptional” drawings. But this entire batch would soon be archived in the rubbish bin. “I’m not sentimental about those at all,” she said. “It’s my job to avoid raising a hoarder, and I’m leading by example.”

But Elisabeth has been known to fish her drawings out of the trash and present them to her mother. “I’ll say, ‘Oh, thank you,’ ” Ms. Hanff said. “We’ll have a discussion. I’m not callous. But once she turns away, often I’ll toss it out again.”

Elisabeth’s creative work, it should be noted, can be found all over the house. (At this point, her 2-year-old sister, Charlotte, doesn’t claim as much wall space.) Elisabeth started embroidering last year. And her grandmother gave her a grown-up watercolor set. In a vaguely Dadaist spirit, Elisabeth used a floret of broccoli to paint the pointillist color study that hangs in her bedroom.

“I do think my kids are awesome,” Ms. Hanff said. “I tell them how great they are. But we’re not going to build an addition on the back for every piece of crayon art they’ve ever done.”

An addition might be cheaper than years of analysis. (We’re kidding!)

Happy Mozart’s Birthday!

It would have been nice of Sarah Lyall to give us some idea of how long the Labor peers can keep at their filibuster to prevent voting reform in Britain.

“It’s never been like this before, with such a palpable sense of anger,” said Baroness d’Souza, convener of the cross-bench peers, who have no party affiliation. “I believe that if this isn’t resolved quickly, what we’re seeing is the beginning of the unraveling of the House of Lords.”

The bill would trigger a referendum May 5 on whether to change the way election votes are calculated, and it would redraw Britain’s parliamentary boundaries, reducing the number of seats in the House of Commons to 600, from 650. The coalition government wants it, because it would fulfill the Liberal Democrats’ pledge to enact voting reform, and because the Conservatives would benefit from the boundary changes.

Labour is resisting because, while it supports voting reform, it vehemently opposes the redistricting proposal. The measure must become law by Feb. 16 in order for the May 5 referendum to proceed, and Labour is determined to delay the bill so that it misses the deadline.

Much as we detest the sound of chitchat on the street — when we’re not wearing our own sound-blocking Nano, that is — we squarely support the right to bear cell phones. We think that laws intended to “protect” pedestrians from vehicular injury by prohibiting the distraction of music and conversation has it exactly wrong.

But some outdoor exercisers who rely on music for a boost see the proposals as little more than a distraction for law enforcement officials. “Chasing down the runner who has his headphones in instead of chasing down the driver who’s been at the local pub sounds like they’re trying to pick the low-hanging fruit,” said John Wiant, 43, a runner from Newport Beach, Calif.

In Arkansas, an avalanche of criticism on Tuesday led a legislator to withdraw a proposal that would have banned pedestrians from wearing headphones in both ears. Other lawmakers have tried to strike some sort of balance between public safety and the gravity of the offense.

It just occurred to us that, taking the example of Venice, Manhattan’s car-rental business could be consolidated at the Port Authority depots, capturing all inbound private cars. That would clear the island for professional drivers, much like airline pilots. Pedestrians would have nothing to worry about

Behavioral researcher Paula Niedenthal was on the phone with a Russian reporter, talking about her research on facial expressions.

“At the end he said, ‘So you are American?’ ” Dr. Niedenthal recalled.

Indeed, she is, although she was then living in France, where she had taken a post at Blaise Pascal University.

“So you know,” the Russian reporter informed her, “that American smiles are all false, and French smiles are all true.”

“Wow, it’s so interesting that you say that,” Dr. Niedenthal said diplomatically. Meanwhile, she was imagining what it would have been like to spend most of her life surrounded by fake smiles.

No wonder sitcoms are so popular! Actors, at least, know how to fake a real smile.

We are big fans of French finance minister Christine Lagarde — she sounds like a genuine mother superior, someone who really knows how to get things done. Or, failing that, to sound like she does. You can bet that, this time around, the stress test of PIGS banks is going to be substantive, and that there won’t be any loose talk about “harmonization.”

Before the related issue of restructuring the mountain of bad debts at European banks can be addressed, Ms. Lagarde said, European countries need to conduct meaningful tests on the health of their lenders’ balance sheets. Such stress tests have been carried out twice during the current crisis but failed to win investor confidence. Since the last round, published in July 2010, further problems have emerged, notably at Spanish and Irish lenders. The results of the latest tests are expected to be published in June.

“We will test banks in a very comprehensive manner and a more credible fashion than we did last summer,” she said. “We need to improve the overall credibility of the process, and that includes communication, range, scope, a combination of bottom up, top down quality control.”

She argued that in France, at least, there is no sense that taxpayers are losing out as government bail out their banks without asking bondholders to take write-offs, known as haircuts. Paris set up facilities to help its banks in 2008 and 2009, but it was not on the scale of the assistance required in countries like Ireland and Britain. “My taxpayers are quite happy because they have collected fees — or, rather, interest rates — and they haven’t paid anything.” she said, adding that investors in many euro-zone countries had already been losing money without a coordinated restructuring.“Ask the Anglo Irish shareholders if they’ve taken a hit or not,” she said, referring to the debt-laden Irish lender, which has proved an Achilles’ heel for the economy of that country.

Gerritsen Beach seems about as far from our part of the world as it’s possible to go — and still be part of New York City. You can’t get there on a subway, but that’s true of many neighborhoods. There’s a volunteer fire department — I have no idea how unusual that is, but it seems odd. But what gets me is this story, from the blog GerritsenBeach.net, about teenaged hooligans locking patrons in a laundromat that’s owned by a Chinese woman; they do this “at least once a day” for the fun of winding her up. NYPD does not appear to be much of a presence in Gerritsen Beach.

Reading a spate of recent blog entries, however, we came across nothing to do with Tim Stellon’s story about Daniel Cavanaugh, the man behind the blog, and the trouble that he’s in with neighbors who would prefer that the larger world continue to ignore goings-on in their enclave.

At 8:48 the next morning, he posted “No Police Response Despite Massive Damage by Local Teens.” It included more than a dozen photos of the offending youths, along with images of public Facebook profiles. Status updates described pelting the police and breaking bus windows.

Two days later, when the property owners’ association held its monthly meeting, the audience railed against Mr. Cavanagh.

In a video of that meeting posted on the blog Sheepshead Bites, Renee Sior-Cullen — whose son had been shown on Mr. Cavanagh’s blog — said the boy was just a 12-year-old trying to impress his older brothers. Ms. Sior-Cullen also charged that what Mr. Cavanagh did with her son’s Facebook posts was criminal.

“It is illegal for a grown man to take a minor’s post and copy it and repost it,” said Ms. Sior-Cullen, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

Ms Sior-Cullen is worthy of Melissa Leo’s Alice, in The Fighter.

Gretchen Morgenson is shocked, shocked to report that $132 million in “taxpayer money” has been spent on the defense of three former Fannie Mae executives in myriad lawsuits. A stark paragraph in her piece (reeking of editorial insertion) reminds readers that such indemnification of legal expenses is perfectly — if regrettably — normal. It is perhaps too much to expect of a civil servant functioning as an “acting director” to ask Edward DeMarco to rock the bloat.  

Richard S. Carnell, an associate professor at Fordham University Law School who was an assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial institutions during the 1990s, questions why Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and others, given their conduct detailed in the Housing Enterprise Oversight report, are being held harmless by the government and receiving payment of legal bills as a result.

“Their duty of loyalty required them to put shareholders’ interests ahead of their own personal interests,” Mr. Carnell said. “Had they cared about the shareholders, they would not have staked Fannie’s reputation on dubious accounting. They defied their duty of loyalty and served themselves. At a moral level, they don’t deserve indemnification, much less payment of such princely sums.”

Asked why it has not cut off funding for these mounting legal bills, Edward J. DeMarco, the acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, said: “I understand the frustration regarding the advancement of certain legal fees associated with ongoing litigation involving Fannie Mae and certain former employees. It is my responsibility to follow applicable federal and state law. Consequently, on the advice of counsel, I have concluded that the advancement of such fees is in the best interest of the conservatorship.”

Matins

¶ At GOOD, Noam Ross asks, “If Everyone Moves to the City, What Gets Left Behind?” His accompanying graphic is a bit less exciting. Although China’s rural population is predicted to drop by half, 2000-2050, the rest of Asia and Africa look to be stable. The thin slice of country-dwellers in Europe, the Americas, and Oceania is expected to drop by about a third. Still, this is an interesting think piece. One thing that goes unmentioned is that rural poverty will probably increase sharply in regions not served by railroads. ¶ Also at GOOD, an important word about elevators, which Alex Goldmark rightly calls the capillaries of urban life.

Lauds

¶ No one is going to be surprised that we wish the Guardian had spoken a little more firmly: “Behind the music: Why music education cuts could be a dumb move.” Could be?  How on earth are talented kids who don’t happen to be rich going to be discovered and nurtured without publicly-funded programs? Scratching our heads about Helienne Lindvall‘s version of this perennial story, we wondered if there’s a positive explanation for why music ed is always the first to go in Anglophone schools: it’s classical, and our natural tradition is vernacular. (Can there be any doubt that English-speaking writers and composers, born no matter where, have generated the richest spectrum of popular song forms?) This is no excuse for failing to educate children in the arts, but understanding the weakness of political support is a start. (via Arts Journal) ¶ In “Link Rot,” Connor O’Brien wants us to bear in mind how easily the whole Internet thing could callapse into a state of 404. Of course we already knew how right he is but his talking about it gave us asthsma. (The Bygone Bureau)

Prime

¶ We’re hoping that Max Chafkin‘s much-talked-about Norway piece, “In Norway, Start-ups Say Ja to Socialism,” inaugurates a truly serious examination of the relation between rates of taxation and prosperity. It seems, offhand, to be the very reverse of what the Reaganauts told us it was. “Socialism” seems a strong word for the Norwegian régime, which tolerates, after all, the likes of coiffeur-queen Inger Ellen Nicolaisen, the “Donald Trump of Norway.” She pays plenty beaucoup taxes, but she still owns plenty beaucoup. We don’t remember plenty beaucoup property rights as a feature of textbook socialism. Chafkin’s piece is a must-read, even though, at the end of the day, there are only five million Norwegians to share all that North Sea oil. ¶ At Weakonomics, Philip touchingly wonders if capitalism might be at an “inflection point,” by which he means (and hopes) that capitalists might see the advantage of taking a longer view than the quarterly. (No doubt, that sounds like socialism!) We quite agree with the point that he makes toward the end of the entry: “I like to support programs that solve problems before they start…” Poor corporate governance is definitely the place where trouble starts.  

Tierce

¶ A recent study correlating two genes with behavioral probability, one with friendship and one with aversion, is almost laughingly preliminary and — literally — precocious. The correlations may have been established, but working out their meanings, much less their mechanics, will take years, if only to amass correlations for hundreds if not thousands of other genes. But the research is probably on the right track, and it will be fought vehemently by people who refuse to recognize free will as an unpredictable distallate of chaotic events, deterministic at the atomic level but not higher up. Patrick Morgan reports at Discoblog. ¶ We’re wondering if there’s a gene that explains why some people get worried about whether one or two spaces follows the full stop. We strongly believe in inserting two spaces between the abbreviation for a state and the ZIP code on an evelope, but that’s not what’s agitating Farhad Manjoo.  We’re having so many problems with the idiocies of Platform WordPress that we don’t feel entitled to venture an opinion. (Slate)

Sext

¶ The bloom is definitely off the rose so far as business blogging is concerned. Ben Bradley, a marketer in Illinois, told Lisa Bertagnoli that blogging “wasn’t a giant time investment, but I’d rather be on the phone with a client.” Plus,  sales calls were whoppingly more effective. (via The Awl) ¶ Leigh Alexander catalogues Five Emotions Invented By The Internet. Unfortunately, they go unnamed. “The need to say something has lapsed and leaves a dim, fatigued sensation in its place. In advanced cases, a sensation approximating ‘headache’ but not as tangible nor identifiable as ‘headache’ sets in.” We think that Alexander must have been reading Oblomov. (Thought Catalog, via kottke.org)

Nones

¶ Meet Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister. James Traub profiles the man from Konya who both intellectually and diplomatically argues for Turkey’s importance in international affairs — not as the “sick man of Europe,” but as quite the opposite, a conciliating power. Mr Davutoglu’s program may have been swamped by the Mavi Marmara incident, and Traub suggests that he may have overestimated Turkey’s importance — a possibility that would not surprise his critics. (NYT)  ¶ Faced with one of Edward Hugh‘s prodigiously comprehensive analyses of economic developments, we glance over the introduction and shoot straight to the conclusion, which in the case of “Turkey’s Audacious Experiment In ‘Post-Modern’ Monetary Policy“ provides a persuasive examination of the factors that have put Turkey on a path that’s contrary to ours (and to Europe’s as well);  beyond that, you’ll get a sense of why the outlook for “young” economies — which unlike ours are not immediately saddled with the problem of ageing populations — is so rosy. (A Fistful of Euros) BTW: How to deal with the problem of ageing populations? Throw open the doors to immigration, that’s how!

Vespers

¶ Rodney Welch writes lucidly and with great pleasure about two of Henry James’s three big late novels — The Ambassadors and The Golden Bvwl — which have at long last appeared in Library of America volumes. (The Millions)

You’re in the company of a writer who sees and imagines in depth. I occasionally thought “Where is he going with this?” but I also thought “I can’t wait to see where he goes with this.” There’s a purpose behind those metaphors – he wants you to see, to visualize the inner life of his characters. He knows how people think, and he has a superb sense of how they reveal themselves, the way looks give away clues, the way people may not even know their own mind until they see another person’s reaction. These novels are set against great geographical backdrops and big fancy homes, but all the action is inside, where people plot, conceal, and create. These novels are broad French comedies and existential mysteries, stories you understand piece-meal, along with the characters, who are feeling and (quite often) thinking their way through.

¶ “So what are we to make of the Major and his minors?” asks Brooks Peters, in an essay at Open Book about the ardent canoeist, naturist, and ephebist, Rowland Raven-Hart, a tall, thin, bearded gent who appears to have had no trouble in the world picking up legions of comely youths to accompany him on his paddlings through Europe and elsewhere. Prepare for Major eye-rolling, is what we make of it.

Compline

¶ Do we value killing? This odd question is posed by philosopher Alva Noë, at NPR’s 13.7. Grappling with the Tucson shootings, Noë argues that emergencies, far from triggering instinctive responses, reveal our values; and that the contingencies of the event determine which values will be revealed. “Why is one man a war criminal, and the other a great soldier? Look to the situations in which they respectively find themselves to answer this.” (via Arts Journal) ¶ Any doubts that American society values killing will be killed by Charles Blow‘s graphic report, correlating firearms possessions with per capita homicides. The United States is in a class by itself, it seems. (Any doubts that handguns have any other purpose than to wound and kill other human beings ought to be cleared up by a moment’s sober and honest thought.) (NYT)

Have a Look

¶ Felicia Honkasolo. (The Best Part)

Noted

¶ “How to Actually Read Things on the Internet.” (My Life Scoop)

¶ Dan Hill’s illustrated account of the Australian floods. (City of Sound)

¶ The Philosophical Novel. By the way, what would David Foster Wallace have looked like had a good barber tended his hair? (NYT)

Holland Cotter captures a moment in New York’s artly life that spun bravely at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in the early Fifties: a collaboration of painting and poetry in which the poetry was arguably the more remarkable partner. But the paintings still gleam, poised beautifully between the bellows of Abstract Expressionism and the banalities of Pop.

And a scene it was: amorous, rivalrous and incestuous; at once an avant-garde and — much like the New York art world at present — an avant-garde in reverse. Poetry was pushing into prickly new territory, while art was revisiting old ground, although with some new moves. What made the situation at Tibor de Nagy distinctive was that almost everyone was collaborating, artists and poets alike.

Remember the context. This was the high moment of Abstract Expressionism, with its image of the heroic artist battling his way alone toward some existential sublime. Set that image against another: O’Hara and Rivers, lovers at the time, sitting knee to knee as they worked on a series of jointly made lithographs, each adding drawings, jokes, notes to friends and poems like valentines.

Or consider the poetry books coming out under the Tibor de Nagy imprint, among them Mr. Ashbery’s first collection, with drawings by Ms. Freilicher, and O’Hara’s 1953 “Oranges,” with hand-painted covers by Hartigan. These weren’t weighty tomes. They were pretty pamphlets, so thin and fragile as to be all but invisible on a library shelf.