Mary Williams Walsh‘s front-page story about “state bankruptcy” reminded us of the combination of dithering leadership and intransigent special interests that brought the ancien régime to its knees in 1789 (curiously, the first full year of governance under our current Constitution).

House Republicans, and Senators from both parties, have taken an interest in the issue, with nudging from bankruptcy lawyers and a former House speaker, Newt Gingrich, who could be a Republican presidential candidate. It would be difficult to get a bill through Congress, not only because of the constitutional questions and the complexities of bankruptcy law, but also because of fears that even talk of such a law could make the states’ problems worse.

Lawmakers might decide to stop short of a full-blown bankruptcy proposal and establish instead some sort of oversight panel for distressed states, akin to the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which helped New York City during its fiscal crisis of 1975.

Still, discussions about something as far-reaching as bankruptcy could give governors and others more leverage in bargaining with unionized public workers.

“They are readying a massive assault on us,” said Charles M. Loveless, legislative director of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. “We’re taking this very seriously.”

[snip]

Many analysts say they consider a bond default by any state extremely unlikely, but they also say that when politicians take an interest in the bond market, surprises are apt to follow.

Public-sector workers versus municipal bondholders: a hardly unimaginable fight that no one seems to want to be bothered to imagine.

We can’t decide if Anthony Tommasini‘s talk of “making the cut” — as he puts together his list of top-ten classical composers — is silly or just plain odious. Here we find him struggling to make a decision about Chopin, about whom he writes very well.

Chopin, the most original genius of the 19th century, is a good example. Striving for greatness was the last thing on his mind. Chopin had his own select list of past greats he revered, topped by Bach and Mozart. And he loved bel canto opera, especially by that melancholic melodist Bellini.

But the Beethoven symphonic imperative that hung over and intimidated his fellow composers meant nothing to Chopin. He did not care about writing large, formal works, certainly not symphonies. Even his Second and Third Piano Sonatas (the First is an early work), though astounding, are completely unconventional. Chopin respected his composer colleagues, but he was not especially interested in their work. He was a pianist who composed. To him there was no distinction between the activities. And he seldom performed piano works by other composers.

Beethoven consciously strove to be great, even titanic, and he thought he was. His legacy is defined by intimidating bodies of symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas and more, now canonic. How does an individualist like Chopin “rank” in comparison? Chopin’s ethereal nocturnes, poetic ballades, audacious scherzos, aptly titled impromptus and lacy waltzes often sound like written-out improvisations.

It seems to us that Chopin’s success at honoring Bach and Mozart (and Scarlatti) while remaining outside the shadow of Beethoven is reason alone to place him in the pantheon — a pantheon built to honor however many great composers there are, not an arbitrary “top 10.”

A former national security adviser on China, Kenneth Lieberthal, when asked by the Times about the results of the meetings between Presidents Obama and Hu, said that it was pretty much all rhetoric. ““But at least new rhetoric is better than nothing.”

Both leaders should also reap domestic political benefits from their meeting. Mr. Hu’s enhanced stature, American analysts say, should help him tamp down political forces that have driven a more aggressive foreign policy and hamstrung relations with the United States and China’s Pacific neighbors in the last year.

Mr. Hu and China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, “realize this assertiveness based in the last year on nationalism and the belief that the U.S. is declining has gotten them into deep trouble,” said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the dean at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a State Department and Pentagon official in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Mr. Nye was in Washington for a luncheon with Mr. Hu at the State Department. “They think a summit which could be played as a success can give them ammunition to quiet down this rumbling below in the ranks.”

For his part, Mr. Obama comes away from the visit with a new reputation for toughness in his China policy, something that is likely to please conservatives and some liberals alike.

“Area President Whistles Happy Tunes.”

Sam Sifton on Lyon, which opened in the old Café de Bruxelles space on Greenwich Avenue, under the auspices of an owner of the late, lamented La Goulue.

The restaurant is warm and welcoming, already more a neighborhood draw than a publicist’s undertaking, with celebrity sightings limited to Michael Moore and a war reporter or two. You might see young professionals crushed into a corner, catching up (“You’re moving to Elkhart? Where is that, Illinois? Indiana?”) or literary people polishing their eyeglasses in pairs as they talk about art. No fewer than three tables one recent night were populated by women eating salad and talking about the economy, everyone slugging down wine.

Add the scent of Gauloises, a dog or two under the tables, and we might be down the street from the Hôtel de Ville, and not from poor, dark St. Vincent’s, waiting for its fate. Lyon is that close to soaring.

[snip]

Restaurants are central to the process by which nature becomes a form of culture. At their best they are where we go to experience, and celebrate, the transformation.

As Mr Sifton says, Lyon isn’t there yet, but we’ hope that management is listening.

David Leonhardt‘s overview of the “jobs slump” makes for dispiriting reasons, because describing the problem in economic terms infuses the discussion with helpless passivity. The root of the problem is social and political: the United States has become a country in which too many powerful people feel no less entitled to be rich than medieval aristocrats felt entitled to be privileged. Not only that, but too many ordinary Americans dream of becoming rich and powerful.

Policy makers could also help the unemployed by spreading economic pain more broadly among the population. I realize this idea may not sound so good at first. Who wants pain to spread? But the fact is that this downturn has concentrated its effects on a relatively narrow group of Americans.

In Germany and Canada, some companies and workers have averted layoffs by agreeing to cut everyone’s hours and, thus, pay. In this country, average wages for the employed have risen faster than inflation since 2007, which is highly unusual for a downturn. Yet unemployment remains terribly high, and almost half of the unemployed have been out of work for at least six months. These are the people bearing the brunt of the downturn.

Germany’s job-sharing program — known as “Kurzarbeit,” or short work — has won praise from both conservative and liberal economists. Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, has offered a bill that would encourage similar programs. So far, though, the White House has not pursued it aggressively. Perhaps Gene Sperling, the new director of the National Economic Council, can put it back on the agenda.

Kurzarbeit is a great idea, and it may take hold here, eventually — but probably not because it eases any pain.

We refer to American television audiences, deemed unready for a miniseries about the Kennedys that, like any miniseries, has a story to tell and grants itself artistic license to do so. Dave Itzkoff‘s report is probably about as clear as this murky business permits.

The announcement by History in December 2009 that it was planning to show “The Kennedys” was a major step for it into scripted programming. It came at a time when History, a cable channel owned by A&E Television Networks, was shedding its reputation for musty war documentaries in favor of red-blooded reality shows like “Ax Men” and “Ice Road Truckers.” The move was meant to bring History prestige, as well as to establish a connection to the “Kennedys” producer Joel Surnow, an Emmy Award-winning co-creator of the Fox series “24” and outspoken political conservative.

But on Jan. 7, History announced that it would not broadcast “The Kennedys” after all. It said, “After viewing the final product in its totality, we have concluded this dramatic interpretation is not a fit for the History brand.” Starz, FX and Showtime also passed on the project. “The Kennedys,” produced by Muse Entertainment, a Canadian company, and Asylum Entertainment in the United States, is scheduled to be shown in the coming months in 30 countries, including Canada and Britain. DirecTV, a subscription satellite television service, has expressed interest in showing the mini-series in the United States but said on Monday that it had not yet seen it.

The cryptic statement from History seemed to reflect criticism that dogged the project for months, even before it started production. In February a group of historians organized by a liberal filmmaker, Robert Greenwald, issued a condemnation based on early drafts of scripts obtained by Mr. Greenwald. These historians said the scripts contained factual errors, fabrications and more than a dash of salacious innuendo. Among the critics was Theodore C. Sorensen, the longtime adviser and speechwriter to President Kennedy. (Mr. Sorensen died in October.)

This quibbling over degrees of trash is incredibly fatuous.

Despite huge alterations in the window dressing, we see little difference between Ashley Parker‘s account of the Washington feed warriors who get up at four in the morning to keep their powerful bosses informed and the sociology of courtly life outlined decades ago by Norbert Elias.

Mr. Maldonado, 26, is one of the dozens of young aides throughout the city who rise before dawn to pore over the news to synthesize it, summarize it and spin it, so their bosses start the day well-prepared. Washington is a city that traffics in information, and as these 20-something staff members are learning, who knows what — and when they know it — can be the difference between professional advancement and barely scraping by.

“Information is the capital market of Washington, so you know something that other people don’t know and you know something earlier than other people know it is a formulation for increasing your status and power,” said David Perlmutter, the director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Iowa. “So any edge you can use to get stuff faster, earlier, better or exclusively is very important.”

For Mr. Maldonado, who said that “the information wars are won before work,” that means rising early to browse all of the major newspapers, new polling data, ideological Web sites and dozens of news alerts needed to equip his bosses with the best, most up-to-date nuggets.

We wish that we’d known about “713 to 212,” a jazz festival centered on musicians who studied at Houston’s High School for Performing and Visual Arts; we didn’t even know that the 92nd Street Y has a Tribeca branch!

Beginning at that time Jason Moran, the pianist from Houston’s Third Ward who’d moved to New York in 1993, was getting around all kinds of normative ideas about jazz style and repertory, but he didn’t isolate himself from the jazz tradition. He swiped inspiration from all over the place — visual art, film, the music of spoken conversation in foreign languages — but also played with Greg Osby and Sam Rivers and Charles Lloyd and Wayne Shorter. He was having it both ways. If asked what formed him, he’d talk about his teachers, and that would lead him to talk about Houston and the school he attended for three years there: the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts.

Then, in a steady rollout, you noticed other young musicians from that same school, most of whom had studied with the same teacher, Robert Morgan. The drummers Eric Harland, Kendrick Scott, Chris Dave and Jamire Williams. The trombonist Corey King. The guitarist Mike Moreno. The pianists Robert Glasper and Helen Sung. The trumpeters Leron Thomas and Brandon Lee. The bassists Burniss Earl Travis and Mark Kelley and Marcos Varela. If you looked a little beyond jazz, you saw Josh Mease and Alan Hampton, putting crazy chord sequences into something like folk-pop, and Bryan-Michael Cox, who was writing and producing for R&B stars.

All but one of them came to the 92nd Street Y’s TriBeCa branch on Friday and Saturday nights for an event organized by Mr. Moran called “713 to 212: Houstonians in NYC.” (The exception was Mr. Cox, scheduled to participate but unable to make it out of Atlanta in time.) Dr. Morgan, affable and energetic, was there too, talking in a preconcert panel discussion on Saturday. So were some Houston players of older generations: the tenor saxophonist Billy Harper, the trumpeter Ku-umba Frank Lacy, the drummer Michael Carvin, the trumpeter Tex Allen, the guitarist Melvin Sparks.

Our usual source for information of this kind has been very busy lately. For just over a year, in fact.

Dr Martin Luther King was an honorary New Yorker.

In the summer of 1964, after the shooting of a 15-year-old by an off-duty police officer touched off riots in Harlem, Mayor Robert F. Wagner invited Dr. King to New York on a peace mission (one made slightly more complicated by the fact that some black leaders resented that the mayor had invited Dr. King without consulting them). Later that year, one week after he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, Dr. King was proclaimed an honorary New Yorker by the mayor who presented him with the Medallion of Honor at City Hall.

In a speech (see below) found in the La Guardia and Wagner Archives at La Guardia Community College by Steven A. Levine, the coordinator for educational programs, the mayor recalled their conversation the summer before at Gracie Mansion.

“During the most explosive moments of the civil rights revolution in this country, while the urge to violence seemed to be running like a fever through the land, the voice of Martin Luther King sounded clearly above the turmoil of fear and fright — saying that violence, vandalism and destruction were not the way,” Mr. Wagner recalled.

“But when the vital questions were asked, ‘What is the way?’ and ‘Where is the way?’ and ‘What are the means and the ends of the way?’ he knew the answers and spoke the answers.”

Matins

¶ Tyler Cowen ticks off a list of the factors that make France a “highly dynamic and performative economy.” Item Number One: “ The French elite work very hard and are educated very well.” We could not agree more heartily, and if we have any purpose in the world it’s to prick members of the American/Anglophone elite into recognizing the importance of a rigorous education and the value of cooperative industry. Tyler also mentions what he terms “the prevailing norms of status competition” twice. We turn this around anc call it “the importance of setting a good example.” We are inclined to agree that the choice of acceptable examples in France is regrettablylimited; we believe that living happily, generously, and attentively can be attained in many different ways.  ¶ Don’t miss Jeremy Waldron on the political virtues of hypocrisy, at the LRB. The piece is behind the paywall, unfortunately, but that’s a good reason for buying a copy of the Review or, better, suscribing. In our view, it’s one of the three indispensable magazines, the others being The New Yorker and the NYRB. We’ll have more to say about hypocrisy during the week.

Lauds

¶ The all-too-familiar conflict of artists and nationalists is simmering in Hungary. Conductor Adam Fischer (whose recordings of Haydn symphonies ought to be in your library) alerted journalists in Brussels to the seriousness of intrusions by the current conservative government into artistic affairs, which extends to tolerating anti-Semitic atttacks on pianist András Schiff, who has announced that, as a “persona non grata” in Hungary, he has no plans to revisit his native land, much less perform there. The great European experiment that remains to be undertaken is the decoupling of nationalist impulses from the exercise off sovereignty; short of that, “Europeanism” is just a lot of well-intentioned chatter. (Independent; via ArtsJournal)

Prime

¶ A tale of two temperaments: Floyd Norris’s scolding reproof to Charles Schwab & Company boils into outrage in Felix Salmon’s pages. Mr Norris has a reluctance, not shared by Mr Salmon, to accuse Schwab of lying, but it’s hard to know what else to call the fine-print borne mendacity of Schwab’s sales literature. No doubt that good people at Schwab expected, just like everybody else, that the market would continue to boom, and that nobody would mind; just as bankers confected huge volumes of mortgage-backed securities in order to minimize the appearance of risk, so Schwab sliced and diced the meaning of “maturity.” ¶ At The Baseline Scenario, Simon Johnson shows that Goldman, Sachs is far more suave at “misdirection.” Then he goes on to point out the increasingly apolitical cast of regulators and economist who argue that banks too big to fail are too big to be permitted.

Tierce

¶ At Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait notes that Salon has removed “an antivax hit piece” from its archives. Better, he suggests — and we couldn’t agree more — to leave the story in the archives, embedding it with links to stories that got the the anti-vaccination fraudernaut right from the get-go. ¶ We thought of Adam Fenwick-Symes when we read that European Commission tax officials have declared that lighting installations by Dan Flavin and Bill Viola’s video installations ought to be taxed as appliances instead of as art. This is molto dumb! Josh Rothman reminds us that the Customs Court here in New York was persuaded to reach the opposite conclusion vis-à-vis Brancusi’s Bird in Flight.

Sext

¶ Rebecca O’Neal writes about her hobby: requesting samples from consumer-products manufacturers.

In a good week, I’ll get over a half dozen samples: diapers and baby formula for my niece, magazine subscriptions, pads and tampons (!), laundry detergent, shampoo, conditioner, lotion, perfume, post-it notes, pens, vitamins, calendars, mouse pads, ziploc and trash bags, dog food, medicine, human food (mostly grains and instant beverages: health food bars, cereal, tea, coffee, protein supplements), calendars, subscriptions to Rouge, Ebony, and American Baby magazines, toothpaste, stickers, key chains, bumper stickers, condoms, and lube — pretty much all the things a single gal could need. And plenty of things I have no use for: a year’s subscription to MotorBoating and Dime magazines, anti-ball chafing salves, and, of course, the Dependsâ„¢

If you want to get things faster, she advises, write to retailers instead of manufacturers. Procter & Gamble, not surprisingly, has a subscription setup, so that you have to ask only once! Ms O’Neal recycles most of her loot among family, friends, and a neighborhood nursing home. If we ever decide to stop buying books but miss receiving all the packages, we’re going to remember this pastime! (The Awl) ¶ The greatest thing about our friend Eric (or so we feel right now) is that he will come out and admit to having wanted to change his name to “Eric Sèvres-Babylone” when he first passed through that station of the Métro. We’re so glad to hear that he had a good time in Paris, se débrouillant with the best of them. (Sore Afraid)

Nones

¶ In the Times Magazine, Paul Krugman prognosticates about the Euro, which is going to make life very difficult for the overheated peripheral economies of Greece, Ireland, and Portugal, and also for Spain and Italy, as they attempt attempt deflation as to prices and wages without, however, being able to adjust their Euro-denominated indebtedness. Mr Krugman outlines four options: toughing it out; debt repudiation; withdrawal from the Euro Zone; and, least likely of all, “revived Europeanism.” We confess to being cranks on the subject; we believe that each local economy ought to have its own currency. (An idea that we got from Jane Jacobs.) We’re also intrigued by the parallel currencies in Renaissance Florence that Tim Parks describes in Medici Money. One way or another, local economies and the global economy must be connected by adjustable gears, not by bolts.

Vespers

¶ Once you’ve heard Gary Shteyngart read, you see him for the entertainer that he is and claims to want to be; reading him on the page is a diminished experience of his mordant critique of American despair. (His word for that despair is “complacency,” the complacency that ensues when you no longer care about anything anymore.) We don’t want to suggest that this dependence, for full effect, on soundtrack makes Shteyngart a less literary figure, but we don’t know what else to suggest, either. His interview with Alex Shephard at Full Stop is a delight. (via 3 Quarks Daily) ¶ In a grand long read at the Guardian, Laura Miller singles Shteyngart out (along with Jennifer Egan) as a rare fictionist who writes about the impact of the Internet on daily life.

Compline

¶ Kyle Minor meditates on the inappropriateness of politically-correct controls in literary life. He’s thinking, of course, of the expunging of the “N-word” from a new edition of Huckleberry Finn — a misguided but harmless editorial decision, in our view, at least so long as there are accurate edition of Mark Twain’s strange book. The simple truth, as Kyle clearly sees, is that people think of themselves in politically incorrect ways that can’t be captured without recourse to the proscribed vocabulary. But what’s needed is a signpost at the gate of literature that warns readers not that they might encounter offensive language but that they’re joining a community of human beings, many dead and many yet to be born, who test life against the imagination (their own and others’), and that they’ll be expected to keep their voices down until they understand that project. ¶ Elsewhere at  HTMLGiant, Kyle interviews Elizabeth Harris, a translator from the Italian whose authors, Giulio Mozzi and Marco Candida, sound worth getting to know; and writes movingly of the comfort to be drawn in hard times from uncomfortable books:

The contemplation of death is for some people this great terror, and the best reading is often full of the contemplation of death, and so they stave off the contemplation of death by choosing the lostness of a contemplation of the contemplation of death.

Have a Look

¶ “So You Found Something Cool on the Internet…” (Rosscott, Inc; via Brain Pickings)

¶ Mieke Meijer @ The Best Part.

¶ La Tour Montparnasse. (Mnémoglyphes)

Noted

¶ Yves Smith’s “must-read” list, and why she doesn’t think much of NPR’s. (Naked Capitalism)

“Please Don’t Misinterpret My Inflammatory Remarks.” (The Bygone Bureau)

On our next visit to the Bay Area, we hope to have the time for a trip to Mountain View, to see the Computer History Museum there. Although, if we wait long enoujgh, we may not have to go father than Palo Alto, where, we foresee, a Frank Gehry building will house the collection.

“We are living through the time of transition, from there being no computers anywhere to there being computers in everything that we touch,” said Leonard J. Shustek, a venture capitalist and chairman of the museum’s board. “We owe it to the future to preserve the artifacts and stories of how that happened.”

Housed for two decades in Boston, the immense and growing collection of hardware, tech trinkets and ephemera was moved in 1996 to Silicon Valley, where it occupied various makeshift locations and served as a go-to place for technology insiders to reminisce about the heady, built-in-the-garage computer era.

Much of that history is reflected in a new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2,000 Years of Computing,” which includes items like the first disk drive, I.B.M.’s hulking Ramac from 1956, Apple’s early personal computers like the Apple II, robots, the first arcade video games, a stack of Google’s earliest computer servers and even a table-size computer sold by Neiman Marcus in 1969 to store recipes for busy housewives.

Republicans and big-bizmos are blowing their tops, now that they’ve been denied permission to do the same to West Virginia. “Agency Revokes Permit for Major Coal Mining Project.”

The boldness of the E.P.A.’s action was striking at a time when the agency faces an increasingly hostile Congress and well-financed business lobbies seeking to limit its regulatory reach. Agency officials said that the coal company was welcome to resubmit a less damaging mining plan, but that law and science demanded the veto of the existing plan.

Environmentalists welcomed Thursday’s decision. But the mining company and politicians in West Virginia expressed fury, saying the action was an unprecedented federal intrusion, an economic catastrophe for the state and a dangerous precedent for all regulated industries.

The project would have involved dynamiting the tops off mountains over an area of 2,278 acres to get at the rich coal deposits beneath. The resulting rubble, known as spoil, would be dumped into nearby valleys, as well as the Pigeonroost Branch, the Oldhouse Branch and their tributaries, killing fish, salamanders and other wildlife. The agency said that disposal of the mining material would also pollute the streams and endanger human health and the environment downstream.

We hope that Jonathan Franzen will issue a statement. (In the form of a New Yorker essay.)

Robin Pogrebin accompanies Robert Caro to a rehearsal of Robert Moses Astride New York, a new opera by Gary Fagin that was inspired, obvs, by Mr Caro’s big book of 1974, The Power Broker.

To be sure, the musical is considerably less comprehensive than Mr. Caro’s 1,286-page 1974 book, “The Power Broker,” which follows Moses’ career as city parks commissioner and chairman of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority. “Robert Moses Astride New York” moves through major chapters of history in just a few stanzas, and the piece to be performed Saturday is only a sampling of what the composer, Gary Fagin, ultimately hopes will become a full-fledged production featuring additional characters like the neighborhood activist Jane Jacobs and Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Saturday’s concert will feature the Knickerbocker Chamber Orchestra (Mr. Fagin is its music director and conductor), which will also perform classics by American composers like Aaron Copland, Charles Ives, Leonard Bernstein and Bob Dylan.

At a piano rehearsal the other day the work sounded like an opera. It is sung through, performed by a booming tenor (Rinde Eckert), and there are no dance numbers. And Mr. Caro understandably seemed a little self-conscious, seeing it in the intimate setting of a music studio, sitting in a single straight-back chair, with only a reporter and a photographer joining him as audience. Even as Mr. Caro was observing the performance, he was being observed by them, not to mention Mr. Fagin and Mr. Eckert, who were pretty psyched to have him there.

[snip]

“All the time I was writing it, people were saying, ‘Who’s going to read a book about Robert Moses?’ because he was already being forgotten,” he added. “I said, ‘People will read this book, if I can do it right,’ and it mattered to me that the book went on beyond a couple of years. I didn’t want just one generation to know it.

“Now here they are, singing about him. It’s transmuting itself into another form of art. You feel, in a way, you did it, what you set out to accomplish.”

New lines for “New York, New York”: “If I can make Moses sing/I can do anything!”

In our view, nothing exemplifies the anti-social strain of American life more bitterly than the fact that the possession of handguns is debated, much less permitted. Nicholas Kristof reminds us that handguns don’t even make sense as safety features.

A careful article forthcoming in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine by David Hemenway, a Harvard professor who wrote a brilliant book a few years ago reframing the gun debate as a public health challenge, makes clear that a gun in the home makes you much more likely to be shot — by accident, by suicide or by homicide.

The chances that a gun will be used to deter a home invasion are unbelievably remote, and dialing 911 is more effective in reducing injury than brandishing a weapon, the journal article says. But it adds that American children are 11 times more likely to die in a gun accident than in other developed countries, because of the prevalence of guns.

Likewise, suicide rates are higher in states with more guns, simply because there are more gun suicides. Other kinds of suicide rates are no higher. And because most homicides in the home are by family members or acquaintances — not by an intruder — the presence of a gun in the home increases the risk of a gun murder in that home.

We’re hoping that there’s more where Randy Kennedy‘s story came from: we’re already crazy about Mark Landis, the amateur forger who dresses up like a priest and presents small-town museums with “family bequests.”

Unlike most forgers, he does not seem to be in it for the money, but for a kind of satisfaction at seeing his works accepted as authentic. He takes nothing more in return for them than an occasional lunch or a few tchotchkes from the gift shop. He turns down tax write-off forms, and it’s unclear whether he has broken any laws. But his activities have nonetheless cost museums, which have had to pay for analysis of the works, for research to figure out if more of his fakes are hiding in their collections and for legal advice. (The Hilliard said it discovered the forgery within hours, using a microscope to find a printed template beneath the paint.)

The authenticity of art is one of our favorite bugaboos. In truth a work’s authenticity has nothing to do with who made it.

It may seem divinely foreordained that MySpace would wither in the shadow of Facebook’s triumph — now — but Tim Arango‘s story suggests that the old social site might have done better without Rupert Murdoch’s idiosyncratic brand of support.

Mr. Murdoch was an early champion of the site and its founders, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. He would have them to his ranch in Carmel, Calif., for long chats about the future of media, and often intervened personally to help them navigate the News Corporation’s hierarchy so decisions could be made quicker, according to a former executive who demanded anonymity so he could maintain his business relationships.

In 2007, when Mr. Murdoch set his sights on Dow Jones and its prize, The Wall Street Journal, his attention was diverted from what had been his obsession, nurturing MySpace.

The calls to Mr. DeWolfe and Mr. Anderson for impromptu beers at a bar near the News Corporation’s Midtown Manhattan headquarters became less frequent, as did Mr. Murdoch’s help in cutting through the bureaucracy.

Another early sign of the culture clash was the News Corporation’s decision — which executives publicly complained about at the time — to move MySpace’s offices from Santa Monica, where employees worked in a loft space and had access to countless restaurants and coffee shops, to a building in Beverly Hills that was originally intended to be a medical facility. There were many fewer restaurants nearby, and employees began leaving work early to eat, and not returning until the next day.

How typically Murdoch, to think that Beverly Hills is cooler than Santa Monica.

At the risk of being irritatingly jocular, that’s what we propose for Anthony Tommasini, if he carries out his threat to drop Haydn from his unnecessary and wrong-headed attempt to compile a “top 10” list of classical composers. Even if, in the process, he’s making useful observations right and left, cramming the essentials of what used to be called “music appreciation” into three paragraphs.

Haydn, who was widely celebrated during the 200th anniversary of his death in 2009, is often called the father of the symphony, as it came to be known. I’d throw in the father of the string quartet and the piano sonata. Haydn was a pioneer in figuring out how to write a sizable multimovement instrumental piece that sounded organized and whole, an entity. The system of sophisticated tonal harmony had developed to the point where a genius like Haydn could figure out how to process themes and manipulate major and minor keys to dramatic effect throughout the many sections of a long work.

Moreover, Haydn was the first great master of what is called motivic development, in which bits and pieces of music — a few notes, a melodic twist, a rhythmic gesture — become the building blocks for an entire symphony in several movements.

Haydn passed on this technique to his recalcitrant student Beethoven, who, for all his notions of having invented himself, was deeply indebted to Haydn. Beethoven took the technique of motivic development even further. If you were going to make a case for Beethoven as the greatest composer in history, you would base it on his ability to make a long work, like the “Eroica” Symphony, seem like a musical monument in motion. For all the episodic shifts and turns of this piece, as it plows through four dramatically contrasting movements, most of the music is generated from a handful of motifs that you hear at the beginning.

But be sure to watch the video in which Tommasini illustrates his notion that the rondo from K 311 reminds him of the back-and-forth between Susanna and Figaro. It’s delightful.

Carlotta Gall‘s important story about age and class divisions between the upper and lower levels of Pakistan’s elite (à propos last week’s assassination of Punjab governor Salman Taseer by one of his own bodyguards) is not to be missed. We certainly hope that the wonks in Washington who are responsible for our biggest foreign-policy headache have some bright ideas!

This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.

Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.

“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”

Is “quiet” a synonym for “silence“? As regards the voices of other people, the answer is elusive. At least among New Jersey Transit riders, a concensus has yet to develop as to whether chitchat, when conducted at “subdued levels,” is noisy.

The rules for the quiet cars ask riders to refrain from cellphone use, disable the sound on laptops and other devices, and maintain low volume on headphones.

New Jersey Transit’s literature concerning the quiet cars, which has been available on trains for the past week, states that “conversations should be conducted in subdued voices,” but many riders are demanding complete silence.

“I think the whole concept of quiet cars is ridiculous,” said Mr. Arbeeny, 44, of Manalapan, N.J. “People are going to talk, it’s human nature. Many passengers, like the woman who told me to be quiet, are misinterpreting the new rules, and it is having the reverse effect in the quiet cars, creating tension instead of quiet.”

This will not be a problem for the commuters of tomorrow, who will board New Jersey Transit with a longstanding preference for texting.

China is so vast that its version of communist capitalism rumbles along in juggernaut faashion, but in relatively tiny Vietnam the tensions and breakdowns that are more or less guaranteed by the attempt, economically, to have it both ways are more difficult to conceal. Inflation is making food unaffordable to many, and one vast state-run entity, Vinashin, is hemorrhaging debt. But foreign investors remain optimistic, and the economy is growing at an annual rate of 7%. 

Still, many foreign investors say they are betting that Vietnam’s legendary work ethic and a history of overcoming adversity will help it get past its latest setbacks.

“There’s no way you can understand Vietnam unless you can see the frenetic activity and the happiness that’s here,” said Peter Ryder, the chief executive of Indochina Capital, an investment company. “It’s one of the reasons the government gets away with its incompetence. After 100 years of war and starvation, people never thought life would be this good.”

Double-digit inflation is indeed preferable to war.