¶ Matins: French Muslims are doing what black New Yorkers have been doing for years: sending their children to Catholic schools. Katrin Bennhold reports.

¶ Tierce: I was tempted not to post today — not to add more noise to an already overloaded network. The only thing worth talking about is how to tell working Americans that yesterday’s rejected bailout may be all that stands between them and a credit lockdown that might freeze their everyday lives. (Credit isn’t just a matter of consumer credit debt. It lubricates most commercial relationships as essentially as oil lubricates an engine.) And it’s rather late in the day for that conversation.

¶ Sext: Front-page news, buried on page A6: “Olmert Says Israel Must Leave West Bank.” I didn’t believe my eyes!

¶ Compline: Édouard came across a bit of video that hasn’t been run on any of the major sites that we’ve seen. Chant after me: “The bailout is bullshit! You broke it, you bought it!”

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¶ Matins: The extent of Paul Newman’s philanthropies does not, and ought not to shade by a hair, our estimation of his talent as an actor — which, in any case, needs little boosting. But it’s not a bad thing that he set the bar for matinee idols very, very high. Aljean Harmetz reports (as I suspect she hoped she’d never have to.)

¶ Lauds: Lucky me. I’ve got tickets, for next weekend, to The Seagull, a Chehov play that I vowed I’d never see again ever after the last time, which was an adaptation, as, in fact, have been all the Seagulls that I have seen. Next Sunday, I’ll see it for the first time straight, and what an introduction: Kristin Scott Thomas as Arkadina.

¶ Tierce: Memo to financiers: Banks ought to be boring! Virginia Heffernan laments the rise of “Shiny Happy Bankers.”

¶ Sext: Meet Nora Dannehy, our latest Special Prosecutor.

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¶ Matins:The other day, someone said — and I  can’t remember who; someday, I’ll be just like Mr Peabody and have a boy who can write these things down — that it isn’t the stocks, stupid, it’s the credit market. The most basic, elemental player in that market is the money market fund, and talking about money market funds (which are really just specialized mutual funds) was all Kathleen did today. Primary Reserve Fund is the first to fall into the water she is hot.

¶ Tierce: Another Friday, another movie. I’m off to see Ghost Town, which is conveniently playing across the street. Meanwhile, Ken Layne reports on a real ghost town. One in the making, anyway.

Then, under cover of darkness, the family leaves. Sometimes they disguise this escape, coming by once a week to change the lights left on and blinds left open, maybe parking an old camper or beat-up car in the driveway. Other times, nobody bothers. The coyotes and vermin knock over the trash cans, a kid’s bike with training wheels is grown over with the invasive weeds that love dead bulldozed desert.

Have a good weekend, everyone — hold on tight!

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¶ Matins:  I was worried about voting machine chicanery — I hope that it’s clear by now that Republican Party operatives will stop at nothing, short of outright putsch — but I’m dismayed to see that the states with the most foreclosures — and thereby address-less, disqualified voters — are either solidly Democratic or important swing states.

¶ Lauds: Louis Menand writes about Lionel Trilling, The New Yorker. As current cultural history, it doesn’t get any better.

¶ Tierce: As regular readers know, I was never a partisan of either Democratic Party contender for the nomination. I could see the appeal of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and both were clearly cut of presidential timber. Right now, though, I’m wishing that the lady had gotten the job, and the lead Times editorial this morning will tell you why. Hillary is more of a leader than anyone anywhere currently on the scene.

¶ Sext: We can only hope that Ronald Fryer will turn up something interesting in his “rigorous” study of theories of education.

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¶ Matins: Among all the dumb things that Wall Street has been up to in the past 25 years, James Surowiecki reminds us of one that I’d forgotten: the folly of going public.

¶ Lauds: Andy Borowitz nails it:

Given that Internet porn is the only fundamentally sound engine of the American economy…

¶ Prime: My friend, George Snyder, author of 1904, has been tinkering with a new blog, No Talking Cure. Yesterday’s imposing entry has stuck with me.

¶ Tierce: Barbara Ehrenreich has said it before, but maybe now people will listen: positive thinking is for dopes.

¶ Nones: Given the size of my — CD collection, I am often asked, “What’s a great disc for a first date?” The question invariably arouses a great blush, because I am so madly tempted to give very bad advice. The “48”. Charles Ives singing “Over There.” (Heard that one, have you?) Dorian Lynskey at the Guardian can’t believe that Debrett’s recommends Sexual Healing.

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¶ Matins: The Chinese milk problem is the second of this year’s challenges to the Way They Live Now. (Shoddy constructions of the schools that collapsed upon students during the Sichuan earthquake back in May was the first.) Flames from the scandal continue to reach higher into the hierarchy. As China grows more affluent, these scandals will probably increase.

¶ Tierce: You’d think that the worst economic disaster since the Great Depression might inspire the Bush Administration to change its ways. Not a bit of it. What we’re getting is a replay to the Iraq run-up. The government’s bailout plan is written in the Key of Panic.

¶ Nones: Have you discovered a great little organic red wine from Chile, Palin Syrah? It used to a big seller at Yield, a hip San Francisco wine bar, but no longer.

¶ Compline: Google Maps now offers NYC subway directions! (via kottke.org)

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¶ Matins: The land of opportunity? Not so much. The Polish community in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is moving out as the gentrifiers move in — back to Poland, though. Kirk Semple reports.

But Poland’s admission to the European Union sharply accelerated that trend, business owners and residents say. They note that the momentum has increased as the dollar has weakened against the Polish zloty, the American economy has faltered and the United States has been more aggressive in enforcing immigration rules. (Similar reverse migrations have occurred recently among other New York immigrant populations whose homeland economies have improved, like Brazil and Ireland.)

¶ Lauds: In “The Art of Darkness,” novelist Jonathan Lethem muses on the mirror that The Dark Knight holds up to the nation.

¶ Prime: Sergey Brin’s new blog, Too, begins with the announcement that he carries the G2019S mutation of gene LRRK2. That’s Genomic for saying that he stands a very high risk of developing Parkinson’s. One can only imagine what it must be like for one of world’s most successful knowledge workers to contemplate the degradation of his brain.

¶ Tierce: Brent Staples writes about “uppity,” “disrespectful” people of color, and how Congressman Lynn Westmoreland (Rep, GA) must have been perfectly well aware of the implications of applying the “U” word to Barack Obama.

¶ Compline: Did you know that Cauliflower Cheese is a British alternative to Macaroni & Cheese? I’m going to give it a try one of these days.

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¶ Matins: John McCain has delivered himself over to the Republican Party handlers whose only objective is a victory for the Party. They’re not taking a chance on Senator McCain (whom they’ve never cared for anyway). No more Mr Nice Guy.

¶ Lauds: Crayons!

¶ Tierce: A while back — at Sext on 10 March, to be exact — I took one of my occasional fliers, and accused today’s right-leaning Federal judiciary of seeking to overturn progressive commercial-law decisions from the early Twentieth Century that underpin our consumer economy. I was teeny-tinily overstating, and if anybody had called me on it, I’d have been obliged to temporize.

No longer. Adam Liptak reports on the so-called “pre-emption doctrine,” a wildly pro-business, anti-consumer principle that is wholly consonant with what we know about Republican Party objectives.

¶ Sext: For seventeen years, Dan Hanna took two self-snaps a day, making one full turn every year. The Time of My Life is stop-action animation with a vengeance! From 31 to 48, Mr Hanna ages very well, but still….  (via kottke.org)

¶ Vespers: Hats off to Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, who is halfway to opening a bookstore in Fort Greene with strong support from the business community, from a $15,000 first prize in a Citibank competition to her business partner, a Random House sales rep.

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¶ Matins: At the surgeon’s this morning, I did not even think of asking about the consequences of doing nothing. First of all, it would have been grotesquely histrionic. If you’re dying, maybe it’s all right to say “Let me go.” But my cancer is still stuck on my scalp, from which it will probably be removed without incident.

¶ Lauds: Ben Brantley said something yesterday that threw me for a complete loop:

All artists steal from others. But if the resulting work holds your attention, you don’t consider its sources while you’re watching it.

Wow! Is that ever crazy wrong!

¶ Tierce: I am crazy about Gail Collins.

And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Dang, I wish I’d written that!

¶ Nones: There are a lot of things that I’d like to see parents jailed for permitting, but truancy is probably a good start.

¶ Compline: A recent British survey suggests that parents in only one family in three are reading to children. In my book, not reading to children isn’t just child abuse but antisocial behavior. (more…)

¶ Matins: It’s too bad that this somewhat meandering piece about depression and sadness and the persistent difficulty of deciding how to treat them appeared so soon after the suicide — a depression-related death, by all accounts — of David Foster Wallace and yet does not mention him.

¶ Lauds: When my globetrotting correspondent Gawain wrote to me from Lisbon, retailing the pleasures of that city, I remembered that I had wanted to read The Maias, by José Maria Eça de Queirós. So I ordered it from Amazon, and began reading it yesterday.

¶ Tierce: What percentage of American voters, do you think, is unaware that our diplomatic relations with Venezuela have been severely curtailed? What percentage is aware that Bolivia is falling apart — and that the United States supports (as it does in Venezuela) the losing side? Simon Romero’s brief report in today’s Times shows Bolivia breaking up on several fronts, from oil royalties to drugs.

¶ Nones: While I’m unwilling to waste my time attacking The Infernal Machine — Sarah Palin is doing a dandy job of living up to the nickname that I slapped on her the day she was nominated — but I would be happy to see billboards plastered with her extraordinarily degraded syntax. Has the woman ever finished a sentence? She makes Dubya sound — presidential.

In the current New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch registers an interesting dissonance in Ms Palin’s speech.

Trooper Wooten has admitted to Tasering the boy and shooting the moose, and he was disciplined for these things within the department, but, under the union contract, he could not be fired at the Governor’s whim. (He had been cleared of the threat to Palin’s father, but disciplined for drinking and driving, which he still denies.) It was obvious that this continued to frustrate Palin. She also seemed to forget that you should not talk about your affairs when they’re under investigation. Troopergate was the one subject about which she seemed keen to explicate the details. She wanted to persuade me that firing Walt Monegan had nothing to do with Trooper Wooten; that it was in no way a conflict of interest or an abuse of power. But, as she spoke, she seemed to be saying something else—that her vendetta against Wooten was wholly justified.

But for the true flavor of the Machine’s façon de parler, one turns a few pages back in the magazine, to George Saunders’s “My Gal.” (more…)

¶ Matins: As the financial collapse continues, I rather egotistically wish that I had the time and energy to comb through old Portico pages in search of I-told-you-so’s. Isn’t that stupid. Let’s say I did. Let’s say I foresaw the whole mess, exactly as it’s playing out (which I most certainly did not). So what? A good idea ahead of its time is really just another bad idea.

¶ Tierce: Patrick McGeehan files a lucid report on the environmental impact, so to speak, of Wall Street’s latest melt-down. It will be bad for the city, of course, but it will be worse for the suburbs — which were already beginning to suffer the tribulations of increased oil prices (home heating and gasoline).

¶ Nones: Two funny videos today: The Cult of the Cupcake and Les Misbarack.

¶ Vespers: Notwithstanding the global gloom and doom, Damien Hirst shattered auction records the other night, bypassing his dealer and going directly to the public. Maybe that’s what you do in a crunch. Carol Jacobi writes in the Guardian about how Holman Hunt did just about the same thing in 1866, in the middle of a bank run. (more…)

¶ Matins: Why do we all feel that the failure of Lehman Brothers is so much worse than everything that has happened before, from Black Monday (1987) to the collapse of Enron? Why do we suspect that, this time, the disaster may engulf us?

¶ Tierce: Floyd Norris on lax financial regulation:

Those who were complaining, only months ago, that excessive regulation was making American markets uncompetitive, had it exactly wrong. It was a lack of regulation of the shadow financial system and its players that allowed this to happen. The regulators might not have gotten it right if they had tried to put limits on leverage, or assure that it was clear what risks were being taken, in the world of derivatives and securitizations. But deciding not to even try, and assuming that risks traded secretly would somehow end up in the hands of those most able to bear them, reflected ideology, not analysis.

¶ Sext: Read about Palisade Prep, a new public high school in Yonkers, funded in part by the Gates Foundation, that aims to send every student to college.

Rosa Kastsaridis, whose 15-year-old son, Frank, is a ninth grader at the school, said the available counseling was an important factor in her decision to take a chance on a promising — but untested — school.

“I graduated from the Yonkers school system 17 years ago and wasn’t able to get a scholarship because the guidance counselor at that time was not educated enough to help me,” she said.

¶ Compline: Today’s one of those days when reading about the horreurs du jour through the elegant francophonie of Jean Ruaud’s Mnémoglyphes is like a comfort from the Psalms.

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¶ Matins: Midnight finds me unprepared with an interesting link, so I have to go with this nonsense, which I link to as such. (Laff riot!) I’ve been chatting with a friend about the election, more and more convinced that the United States is a broken wheel, an idea that will never work again.

¶ Lauds: I knew about Stella, but not about Mary, who, like her mother, Linda Eastman McCartney, is a photographer. I came across her name at the Guardian site, where she talks about her best shot (below).

¶ Prime: Feeling jazzy? Dreaming of kidney beans? Well, then, download some Mad Men-inspired wallpaper. (via kottke.org)

¶ Tierce: David Gonzalez writes about the “morality” of double-parking — the theory being one of justification by acclamation: “everybody does it.”

¶ Vespers: Boy, do I need to lie down! I’ve just scrolled through all fifty-four pairs of New York’s then-and-now photos showing recent changes in local streetscapes. (via kottke.org)

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¶ Matins: Lucy Q Denett, former associate director of revenue management at the Minerals Management Service, the government’s second-best source of revenue after taxes, was frank with investigators — up to a point:

But the report quotes Ms. Denett repeatedly telling investigators such things as “obviously I did it and it doesn’t look proper” and that in retrospect she had made a “very poor” decision. She also told them that “she had been preoccupied with a very stressful personal issue at the time,” which the report did not spell out.

Justice (Dept of) has already decided not to prosecute. Charlie Savage reports.

¶ Lauds: What a concept: a clutch of readable novels is up for the Man Booker Prize. That would exclude Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence.

¶ Tierce: In the Times, this anniversary morning, a few then-and-now photographs of notable structures that are no longer backdropped by the Twin Towers.

What do you see first when looking at the old photographs on the left? Almost certainly not the intended subjects. One of the pictures is meant to show the Woolworth Building. Another is of the Brooklyn Bridge. The third is supposed to depict Division Street.

Well, the thing is, I do see the Woolworth Building. It is in every way a more meaningful building than the lost towers, which achieved significance only in destruction.

¶ Sext: Queens University Belfast will be offering a course called “Feel the Force: How to Train in the Jedi Way.” Won’t Mum and Dad be glad to hear about that! That old lunchbox will be great for lugging mobile, iPod and other kit to class.

¶ Compline: Jean Ruaud reports that his cousins in Houston are staying put. So is my sister, in Port Aransas. The other day, she wrote to say that she’d be evacuating the next morning at six. Carol, if you can read this, our prayers are working!

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¶ Matins: Ms NOLA was kind enough to slip me a link to Leon Wieseltier’s magisterial call to brawn, yet another mandarin voice urging liberals to sock it to ’em. If only we knew how! — even as we digest Mr Wieseltier’s fine talk (and it is fine!) of “the teleological suspension of the ethical.” Who knew that the thickest plank in the Republican Party platform had such a fancy name?

“You remember the teleological suspension of the ethical,” Mr Wieseltier writes with absurd optimism. Happily, he does not count upon the strength of our recollections.

¶ Lauds: Although I’m not sure that I’d like to sit through The Fly — now it’s an opera, with music by Howard Shore (Silence of the Lambs) and book by David Henry Hwang (M Butterfly) — I’d sure like to hear it.

¶ Tierce: While Americans struggle to deal with a resurgent but definitely post-Soviet Russia, separatists within Russia take heart from the formal recognition of new breakaway states in the Caucasus. The interesting thing about Ellen Barry’s story is the refrain of “20 years from now.” Nobody’s talking about anything’s happening tomorrow. Instead, the talk is of death warrants and planted seeds. 

“In the long term, they could have signed their own death warrant,” said Lawrence Scott Sheets, the Caucasus program director for the International Crisis Group, an independent organization that tries to prevent and resolve global conflicts. “It’s an abstraction now, but 20 years down the road, it won’t be such an abstraction.”

Mr Sheets is speaking of Russia.

¶ Nones: If JMW Turner’s watercolor of Merton College, Oxford goes missing, I will insist that I know nothing about it. Having just paid my nth visit to the Turner show at the Museum — easily the sixth, I think — I’m beginning to fall in love with a few paintings just as they’re about to wrenched away, but I fell for the Merton watercolor the moment I saw it. Why?

¶ Compline: Thomas P Campbell, a 46 year-old curator of tapestries, will become the ninth director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the start of the New Year. As a card-carrying Old Fart, I’m happier with Mr Campbell than I would have been with Gary Tinterow, the strong and clever curator of — you have to love this tripartition — 19th Century, modern, and contemporary art.

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¶ Matins: Even if you have already come across the Kilkenny letter, I urge you to consider it as a model memorandum that, in an ideal democracy, every voter would be sufficiently informed to compose. Anne Kilkenny is a resident of Wasilla, Alaska, who has known Sarah Palin for many years, and who opposed her attempt to fire the local librarian. She is definitely an “interested” observer. But her letter seems candid and level-headed. Her take on Trig, as well as on some of Ms Palin’s political positions, suggests a scrupulous determination not to demonize. The main thing is that she sat down and composed her thoughts. (via Suz at Large.)

¶ Tierce: As someone who ingested a good deal of LSD back in the day, I read today’s Times report on Salvia divinorum with great interest. The recreational aspect of drug use doesn’t interest me very much anymore, but I remain curious about altered states of mind. Overall, though, the story has me spluttering with rage, at the drug’s troglodyte opponents.

¶ Sext: Thank God for France! Nowhere is pleasure more expertly rationalized. From Le Figaro, a review of Mamma Mia! that talks of Shakespeare and “postmodern irony.”

¶ Nones: How big is New York City? As big as the populations of Idaho (Manhattan), Maine (the Bronx), Nevada (Brooklyn), New Mexico (Queens), and Wyoming (Staten Island). (via JMG > Gothamist)

¶ Vespers: Times columnist Bob Herbert enjoins liberals to hold up their heads. It’s a great idea, but he has no suggestions about what to when the wingnuts start shooting at it.

Troglodytes on the right are no respecters of reality. They say the most absurd things and hardly anyone calls them on it. Evolution? Don’t you believe it. Global warming? A figment of the liberal imagination.

Yes, and that’s the problem. Consider:
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¶ Matins: One thing that I thought about all weekend was how much I agreed with Arianna Huffington about Sarah Palin: Democrats must forget that she exists.

¶ Tierce: Even though you probably don’t want to read about mortgages — especially on a Monday morning —the refreshingly cogent Floyd Norris assesses Feddie Fran.

¶ Nones: Cake Wrecks goes meta: readers are creating their own disasters! “We ‘read’ your ‘blog’,” says one, highlighting Jen’s pet peeve, inappropriate quotation marks.  

¶ Vespers: Thanks to JR at Mnémoglyphes, I’ve discovered a new blog, Project Sidewalk. Don’t miss the Procrastination Flowchart (with its chuckling plethora of foreclosed alternatives.

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¶ Matins: The frontier of modern humanist research lies in neurobiology, not philosophy. The days of armchair speculation are over: we’re not interested in what ought to be the case (which is all you’ll get out of Plato). Even so, sometimes I think that the researchers don’t quite understand the parameters. In a study announced today, blah blah blah (see below). The part that captured my eye was this:

Experts said the study had all but closed the case: For the brain, remembering is a lot like doing (at least in the short term, as the research says nothing about more distant memories).

How is it possible that anyone, in the age of the computer, doesn’t know that everything is memory. There is no difference between what happened last year and what happened last nanosecond. There is no “other” kind of neural activity, that does not involve remembering.

¶ Lauds: I wish that Jason Kottke had explained a bit after saying that “I could read about con men and tricksters all day.” I believe that he shares my interest in the phenomenon of the con, and is not planning to take up the practice; but it would be nice to be sure, especially as I do rely on kottke.org for a great deal of “my news.”

¶ Tierce: The first paragraph of Stephanie Strom’s story announces Eli Broad’s $400 million gift. The second paragraph outlines what the Broad Institute intends to do in the way of research. Here’s the third paragraph:

The money will be managed by Harvard University’s vaunted investment unit with the goal of turning it into a $1 billion endowment that will ensure the institute’s future and make it one of the wealthiest scientific research centers in the world.

¶ Sext: “All dressed up and nothing to say” — The Telegraph on Keira Knightley in The Duchess. Sukhdev Sandhu’s review. “Knightley looks woefully, painfully thin throughout. It’s hard to listen to what she’s saying when all you want to do is feed her chips.”

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¶ Matins: You have to wonder, how much did it hurt Carly Fiorina to choke out these words:

“This is a well-qualified candidate for vice president and well-qualified to be a heartbeat away from the president,” said Carly Fiorina, a top McCain campaign adviser and former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard.

Without wishing Ms Fiorina any ill, I hope that it hurt a lot.

¶ Tierce: The lead editorial in this morning’s Times highlights the growing weirdness of Republicans: they’re running against themselves. They can do this because, for many of the Party faithful, Democrats and “liberals” are not so much an opposing political faction as a collective bogeyman right out of the Stalinist toybox. What could Mitt Romney meant by “liberal Washington,” if not some spectral equivalent of “international bourgeois financiers”?

¶ Sext: Patricia Storms collects two tales of library crime, at Booklust.

¶ Vespers: Looking for an intriguing, end-of-summer pop movie quiz? Try this one, from Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule. (more…)

¶ Matins: Oh, dear: an all-day lunch. The wonderful afternoon on the balcony has left me rather envying the Spanish gent in the photo. Or perhaps it was emptying all those bottles of wine that did me in.

It wasn’t as though we could have gone to the Oak Room. Not yet.

¶ Tierce: IRS agents are turning to YouTube for evidence of improper pastoral politicking.

¶ Sext: In a curious dispatch, the British Government has pronounced the Irish Republican Army’s ruling council “redundant.” This stops a shade short of official disbandment, and it may not satisfy the Unionists who are currently standing in the way of full devolution from Westminster to Stormont.

¶ Vespers: The charming short films of M Ward, at vimeo. In KUBM, Bennett Miller (Capote) co-directs a film with Judd Apatow (Knocked Up). Not in this lifetime.

¶ Compline: Devin Cecil-Wishing is the son of a friend from undergraduate days who has recently found me. Over the weekend, I received a link to the artist’s site, and I have to say: I want one. Be sure not to miss the lustrous works in the “Miscellaneous” category, one of them an album cover.

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