¶ Matins: Nate Silver peruses two recent polls on the tea-party constituency, calling the results “more interesting than surprising.” (fivethirtyeight; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Lauds: We wonder if Anne Midgette was thinking of our favorite diva, Sondra Radvanovsky, in mind when she penned the parenthesis toward the end of this paragraph. (Washington Post)

¶ Prime: Larry Summers will leave the White House (National Economic Council director) when Larry Summers leaves the White House. Discussion of the matter now is interesting only because it throws the question of his fitness to serve in the first place into high relief.

¶ Tierce: At The Bus Ride, six views of the iPad, only one of them (Cory Doctorow’s) negative. Michael Arrington, at Tech Crunch, is waxes particularly effusive. (The Bus Ride via MetaFilter)

¶ Sext: Choire Sicha reviews the new issue of Architectural Digest — really the only way that such a publication can be borne. Gerard Butler’s not only on the cover but all over it. (The Awl)

¶ Nones: In a reversal of previous policy, Thailand’s Prime Minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva has declared a state of emergency in Bangkok. (BBC News) At the LRB, Jonathan Kurlantzick explains that Duncan McCargo’s new book about Thai problems, Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand is very aptly titled. It would appear that few Thais sense a genuine urge to hold their country together.

¶ Vespers: Ruth Franklin pokes through the politeness with which we pretend to respect critical responses that are contrary to our own. When critics differ she feels, one is likely be correct, and the other mistaken. We don’t agree, but the argument is an interesting one. (The New Republic; via The Morning News)

¶ Compline: At The Gloss, Elizabeth Spiers ruminates on what genetic testing tells her about her place in her adoptive family. (via kottke.org)

¶ Matins: Pushing back the age of evidence for social stratification, archaeologists have begun to study Ubaid cultural remains (prior to 4000 BCE) in northern Syria. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: In what might seem a rather desperate, latter-day argument, Rachel Campbell-Johnston makes an interesting appeal for bold religious patronage of the arts. (Times UK; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Without coming out saying so (how disappointing), Tyler Cowen points out that the debate about financial regulation has to shift planes, from the discussion of particular policies to a reconsideration of regulatory agencies themselves, and how they are staffed. This is what needs to be changed first.

¶ Tierce: Laura Miller (somewhat predictably and for predictable reasons) likes her iPad. A good part of it seems to be “less is more.” (Salon; via Arts Journal)

¶ Sext: The hoot of the week, without question, is Anthony Lane’s review of Clash of the Titans, in The New Yorker. We can think of nothing in the writer’s highly entertaining oeuvre to compare with his assessment of actor Sam Worthington.

¶ Nones: George Friedman reconsiders the failed-state argument about Mexico, and makes an important point: although lots of money pours into Mexico via the trade in illegal drugs, the lately notorious violence is largely confined to the northern frontier of the nation, far from Mexico’s heartland. (RealClearWorld).

¶ Vespers: Adam Gallari makes an appealing case for Booker finalist Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: Amy Cunningham writes very thoughtfully about the wisdom of humility, as experienced by the Poor Clares and as understood in Zen Buddhism. (In Character; via The Morning News)

¶ Matins: There’s money in them thar drugs: economist Jeffrey Miron calculates the likely tax revenues that would be collectable if cocaine and marijuana were legalized. (NPR; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: Nige discovers the Southgate station of the Piccadilly Line, one of several designed by Charles Holden. (Nigeness)

¶ Prime: Felix Salmon suggests tolling the Cross Bronx Expressway.

¶ Tierce: Tyler Cowen likes his iPad, but “most of all it feels too valuable to take very far from the house.”

¶ Sext: They say that youth is wasted on the young, and the contributors to The Bygone Bureau show exactly how and in what ways this is true. Tim Lehman, for example, was sufficiently hooked by Magic: The Gathering to dream of winning a tournament.

¶ Nones: Jeffrey Gettleman writes about the collapse of sovereignty in post-Cold War Africa. (Foreign Policy; via RealClearWorld)

¶ Vespers: Translator Marian Schwartz notes that contemporary readers are more accepting of “foreignness.” (Globe; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: Thomas Byrne Edsall writes about the growing “Obama Coalition,” in The Atlantic.

¶ Matins: At Oktrends — you wouldn’t have believed this if we’d mentioned yesterday — some fascinating graphs (including an animated one!) demonstrate, ahem, that Democrats are never, ever going to show the kind of solidarity lately shown by Republican congressmen. Also: the Democratic Party is too big. Yes, we knew all that, but you’ve got to see the graphs!

¶ Lauds: Nina Munk goes over the Metropolitan Opera’s finances in the new Vanity Fair. Not a pretty picture. Will Peter Gelb’s spending today save tomorrow’s audiences? But what we especially liked was this snippet from opera non-person Luc Bondy, who devised last fall’s fiasco production.

¶ Prime: The funny thing about reading Felix Salmon on Netflix is that he sounds exactly like Jonah Lehrer on Costco, which we referred to yesterday — only without the lingo. 

¶ Tierce: More than we ever knew about Angkor Watt, the “hydraulic city.” Dendrochronologists, examining ancient fir trees in nearby Vietnam, have pinpointed catastrophic droughts that finished off the already tottering Khmer empire. (Discovery; via MetaFilter)

¶ Sext: We can’t tell quite how it worked, but John Warner, of TMN‘s Tournament of Books ran a service that advised readers what their next book ought to be, given the past five that they’d read. The comment thread is interesting in many ways, but our favorite is the slice-of-life look at other people’s choices. We’ve actually read a few of those! Here’s Kevin Guilfoile’s two cents.

¶ Nones: If there’s one thing that Belgium’s Flemings and Walloons can agree on (and there can’t be two), it’s probably that the burqa ought to be illegal in public. A parliamentary committee has just passed such a prohibition, which will come to full vote in weeks. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: At Maud Newton, James Hynes discusses some of the day-in-the-life novels that he read in preparation for writing his own contribution, the amazing Next.

¶ Compline: What is it about the book that that beautiful woman over there is reading, that’s making her look so dreamy? Well, sorry to pop your balloon, but it’s not about the book. The lady is a book model.

¶ Matins: The religious women who, by swallowing their concern about abortion, did so much to push health-care reform through enactment are not being replaced; new novices tend echo the conservatism of their male counterparts. Is this the twilight of the activist nun? Noreen Malone is afraid so. (Slate; via The Morning News)

¶ Lauds: It’s nice that everyone can take a good-enough picture, but not for professional photographers, who are watching their business model drown in the sea of inexpensive stock images. Reading Stephanie Clifford’s report in the Times, it’s impossible to tell whether we’re in a crazy transitional moment (one that professional photographers will learn to make work for them) or looking at the future.

¶ Prime: A tour d’horizon of the more interesting econoblogs, posing as a solicitation of manuscripts from the likes of Jeff Miller, Bess Levin, and Mark Cuban: “Ten Financial Bloggers Who Should Write Books,” by James Altucher. We love the appeal to Tyler Durden. (WSJ; via Abnormal Returns)

¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer “excites the NAcc,” “inhibits the insula,” and explains why you can go broke saving money at Costco.

¶ Sext: Margaret Atwood, looking for all the world like a close relation of HM the Queen, discusses her Twitter, which she says is rather like “having fairies at the bottom of your garden.” (We wonder how many of her followers can hum along on that one.) (NYRBlog)

¶ Nones: We spotted two pieces about politically-motivated suicide in yesterday’s Times. There was the Op-Ed summary of a study of Chechen terrorist suicides — 42 incidents since 2000. Then there was Lydia Polgreen’s report on political suicides in southern India, many of them apparently prompted by the delay in forming Telangana, India’s 29th state. Both sets of cases support the Chechen study’s principal finding.

However appalling suicide and terrorism are, they demonstrate that nations often forget to earn their sovereignty.

¶ Vespers: Poet August Kleinzahler goes to rehab — as a therapist! At the Tufted Knolls Behavioral Facility, run by the august Dr Horst Himmelfarb, he runs a little workshop.

¶ Compline: James Lovelock, the 90 year-old developer of the Gaia hypothesis, thinks that we’re too dumb to fix the global-warming mess. Without the goad of a catastrophe, at any rate. (Guardian; via MetaFilter)

¶ Matins: Sorting out the ancient but crippling rift on the Left, between the people who listen to Paul Krugman and the people who listen to Noam Chomsky, Michael Bérubé gets it dead right in his final paragraph. (Dissent; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Here’s how we deal with it: when we’re talking to ourselves in the mirror, we follow Chomsky. When we talk to other people with the hope of encouraging them to do something good, we follow Krugman. And we don’t think for a minute that we’re being inconsistent.

¶ Lauds: At a blog that’s new to us, Nail Your Novel, Roz Morris outlines the plot twists that make The Hurt Locker such a fresh film to watch.

¶ Prime: While we were off doing other things, Felix Salmon questioned Henry Blodget’s decision to fire a top writer at TBI. Mr Blodget questioned Mr Salmon’s blog post, &c &c. The matter is of interest to us not only because it involves being paid for what we’re doing, but because what we hope that what we’re doing is what Felix Salmon says that we ought to be doing. Feel free to take issue!

¶ Tierce: Where hair comes from — aside from your head, that is. “The Temple of Do,” at Mother Jones. (via The Morning News)

¶ Sext: How Rob Weir, who teaches college somewhere (?!), deals with the Wikipedia problem on students’ research papers. (Has anybody out there got a copy of Gerald Nosich’s Learning to Think Things Through: A Guide to Critical Thinking Across the Curriculum?) (Inside Higher Ed; via Arts Journal)

¶ Nones: As the Murphy scandal washes over Europe, a “widespread apathy toward all things religious has turned into aggression,” according to Der Spiegel‘s Alexander Smoltczyk. Even Italians are beginning to mobilize.

¶ Vespers: British writer Robert McCrum is working on Globish. If you can read this, you do not have a head start on “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium.” (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ Compline: At dinner last night, there was discussion of David Elkind’s Op-Ed piece about the end of “the culture of childhood,” and we brought up something much nicer to think about on the subject than bullies. From Nigeness:  

¶ Matins: Over the weekend, Times columnists Charles Blow and Frank Rich made one thing clear: the white Christian teabaggers who want “their country” back can’t have it, now or ever.

Like Mr Rich, we’re hardly comfortable with any of this. It makes us worry about what we call “the Searchers Option.”

¶ Lauds: Jazz and rock photographer Jim Marshall died last week. At The Online Photographer, Mike Johnston reviews the monographs, in and out of print.

¶ Prime: When we saw David Segal’s piece in the Times about “Day Traders 2.0: Wired, Angry and Loving It,” we were embarrassed. Is this Brides Magazine, where the same articles get trotted out at periodic intervals? Tyler Durden thinks so.

¶ Tierce: Daniel Lametti’s “How to Erase Fear — in Humans” is unfortunately titled, because it will be a long time before anyone develops a practice for erasing real-life fear in humans. But we find the concept of reconsolidation amazingly on. Every time you remember something, you recreate, reconstitute — reconsolidate — the memory. No wonder &c! (Scientific American; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Sext: The pregnant futurism of the letter R. “Sound poetry“? Headsets recommended. (triplecanopy; via The Morning News)

¶ Nones:  A lament by Ewen MacAskill about the “Special Relationship Partnership” between the UK and the US. (Guardian) 

¶ Vespers:  On the need to believe that Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare: The Economist reviews James Shapiro’s Contested Will. The unsigned review makes at least one important point about the history of literary appreciation. 

¶ Compline: Merrill Markoe, at least, knows where to find a laugh as the country breaks in two. (Speakeasy)

¶ Matins: Whatever critics were calling President Obama prior to this week, they now appear to concur that he’s a capable Machiavellian. Stephen Burt joins the chorus of commentators cited by William Saletan at Slate. (LRB)

¶ Lauds: Alexandra Lange, who teaches architecture criticism at NYU, explains why she’s unhappy with Times critic Nicolai Ouroussoff. Doing so, she lays out a handful of very sound principles to bear in mind when reading almost any critic. (Design Observer)

¶ Prime: If this is the best that Ernst & Young can do to exculpate itself from facilitating the folly at Lehman Brothers, says Felix Salmon, “they really are in for a world Lehman-related pain.”

¶ Tierce: At Wired Science, “6 Ways We’re Already Geoengineering Earth.”

¶ Sext: At The Awl, Natasha Vargas-Cooper and Julie Klausner discuss Greenberg.

¶ Nones: Will those 1600 housing units in East Jerusalem prove to have the weight of a fatal straw? (Ethan Bronner, at the Times)

Also interesting in this connection is Michael Young’s piece in the (Lebanon) Daily Star: “Israel is losing the battle of narratives.”

¶ Vespers: A delightful reminiscence of mythologue Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife — Shirley Jackson — by one of Hyman’s thesis students at Bennington, Patricia Highsmith biographer Joan Schenkar. After reading it, you may want to dig out Jackson’s immortal short story, “The Lottery.” (Speakeasy)

¶ Compline: The Editor was recently asked by a friend if he thought that future generations would pity us as condescendingly as we pity, say, medieval folk. “I certainly hope so,” was his optimistic reply. At New Humanist, Sally Feldman surveys an aspect of life that could be a lot more civilized (outside Japan, anyway).

¶ Matins: Phil Dhingra puts a health-insurance agent through his paces. (Philosophistry)

¶ Lauds: In our opinion, the bottom line of Alex Ross’s evaluation of Peter Gelb’s first full season at the Metropolitan Opera is that Mr Gelb is insufficiently interested in music. (The New Yorker)

¶ Prime: Regarding the sale of Gothamist to Rainbow Communicatioins, Felix Salmon digests Nick Denton’s sour grapes.

¶ Tierce: Jonah Lehrer’s essay on dreaming quite acutely puts Freud out of place.

¶ Sext: Book Blog Birthdays: The Second Path recently celebrated its second; The Millions is now seven years old. Meanwhile, at Salon, Laura Miller considers the delightfully pseudo-competitive folly of The Morning News’s Tournament of Books.

¶ Nones: The game between Somali pirates and civilian crews has been ratcheted up a level by the presence on the freighters of private armed guards, a detachment of which killed a pirate last weekend. The story of the MV Almezaan may be more worrying than it at first appears. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Maria Bustillos’s advance review of David Lipsky’s memoir of five days spent with David Foster Wallace in 1996, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is downright invigorating. (The Awl)

¶ Compline: There are no strange maps at this unusual entry at Strange Maps, just a discussion of population density. If the nation were as packed as densely as Brooklyn, which state would it fill? Not a very big one.

¶ Matins: In “Waterloo,” David Frum assesses what the Republican Party really lost in Congress this week, and he sounds a lot like Frank Rich in the process.

¶ Lauds: We just wish they’d give it a name: “New York’s Museum of Modern Art said today it is adding the “@” symbol to its permanent art collection.” (Speakeasy)

¶ Prime: At Abnormal Returns, a note on “the proper time frame to judge the benefits of international diversification” — or of any investing strategy.

¶ Tierce: Sturgeon endangerment update: no joy. (Short Sharp Science)

¶ Sext: Charlie Brooker laments the heartbreak of newspaper abuse. (Guardian)

¶ Nones: Psychiatrist Barbara Schildkrout is not annoyed when her patients take cell calls; on the contrary, she’s attentive to the depths that these interruptions can reveal. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: A study in refraction: Martin Schneider, of Emdashes, writes up a talk given by James Wood on David Foster Wallace. (In our very neighborhood; we ought to have gone!) All the more interesting, in that Mr Wood took Mr Schneider’s post-talk question.

¶ Compline: Jerry Sime’s 1937 photograph, now retailed by Getty under the title “Toffs and Toughs,” shows five boys, two of them top-hatted Harrovians, standing outside Lord’s Cricket Ground; it has become the cliché of class division in England, then and now. Ian Jack deconstructs. (Intelligent Life; thanks to George Snyder)

¶ Matins: A solid editorial at the Times takes the smart view of health-care reform and regards the new legislation for what it is: a beginning.

¶ Lauds: Steve Almond discusses his discovery of the “Music Critic Paradox.”

¶ Prime: If you want to sell your widget globally, James Surowiecki advises you to aim for either luxury or economy, and to steer clear of the the “Mushy Middle” (f/k/a “Big”), a market that may be shrinking even as its profitability dwindles. (The New Yorker)

¶ Tierce: Interesting findings at Johns Hopkins: the common anti-acne medication known as minocycline targets HIV-infected immune cells. (via Joe.My.God)

¶ Sext: Food for thought: Jonathan Harris hears from a friend at SXSW. (Wikipedia on SXSW)

¶ Nones: Last week, Rand Richards Cooper complained about poor RSVP etiquette (online, that is). This week, some responses. Most of them mention a resistance, on the part of an invitee, to commit to one event when (it is alleged) better offers may come along. Phui, say we. Margaret Moore, of Portland, Oregon, has it right: we’re not sure that we’ll be in the mood to go out at all when the date comes round. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Randolyn Zinn interviews Jonathan Dee, author of The Privileges, a book that, ahem, the Editor ought to be writing up (he liked it quite a lot.)(3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Compline: Tom Bissell announces at the outset that he is writing under the gun, having spent the day glued to the subject of his essay, Grand Theft Auto. Not altogether coherent, the page is nevertheless dense with unexpected but lucid sense impressions. (There is also a good deal of ill-digested cocaine.) (Guardian)

¶ Matins: Fault lines deepen in America as the “Tenther” movement gains traction. Joe Jervis reports on gun-law nullification in South Dakota, while the Times considers the reactionary movement more generally.

¶ Lauds: New York’s City Center, built as a Shrine in the Twenties and repurposed in the Forties, is about to be freshened up by Polshek Partnership. (NYT)

¶ Prime: At the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum notes (somewhat testily) that the new Lehman Brothers scandal — the firm was cooking its books while the regulators looked, or could have looked, over its shoulders — has received more comprehensive (and ongoing) coverage in the leading market blogs than in the mainstream prints.

¶ Tierce: At PsyBlog, a review of eight studies of cognitive fluency. A tricky piece.

¶ Sext: A French monoblog devoted to crunches at the Étoile: 2m40 is the height limit for the tunnel that runs beneath the traffic circle. (via MetaFilter)

¶ Nones: In a truly stinky-cheese move, Montenegro has granted (sold?) citizenship to Thai troublemaker Thaksin Shinawatra. Now everybody’s happy? (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: Far from being a recluse, J D Salinger appears to have been a man who, having written what he had to write, simply retired to normal life. Normal for 1950, that is, not for now. (Speakeasy)

¶ Compline: Jeffrey Toobin on John Paul Stevens, in The New Yorker.

¶ Matins: At the end of this very well-titled piece, “Waiting For Something To Turn Up: Europe’s Looming Pensions-based Sovereign Debt Crisis,” Edward Hugh writes a paragraph that describes Americans just as well, even if the foundation of our nightmare is more manifold. (A Fistful of Euros)

¶ Lauds: Anne Midgette writes about the varieties of excellence in artistic performance. (Washington Post)

¶ Prime: The fall of Lehman Brothers (the second fall of Lehman, actually; there was one in the Eighties as well) was marked by a weird offset of desperately shambolic accounting with what Chris Lehman calls a “Foucauldian regime of total marital surveillance.” (The Awl)

¶ Tierce: Both Jonah Lehrer and David Brooks approach Washington from an acutely anthropological angle, in “Personal Narratives” and “The Spirit of Sympathy.” One hopes that the cognitive lesson that both men touch on — with regard to almost anything that you choose to name, the specific/individual and the general/collective trigger entirely different psychological responses — will quickly pass into common understanding.

¶ Sext: The fun thing about Lady Gaga, we think, is the alacrity with which so many writers accept her status as a performance artist worthy of a museum installation — or at least of catalogue-gravity prose. What we’d really like to hear more about is Ms Germanotta’s education, formal and otherwise. How has a young woman come to seem so knowing? Oscar Moalde swoons. (The House Next Door)¶ Nones: Christopher Hitchens on Benedict XVI: predictably but enjoyably sulphurous. (Slate; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Vespers: At The Second Pass, Alexander Nazaryan interviews Donald Pease, the Dartmouth Professor who has just written a Life of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Who knew that Dr Seuss went to Dartmouth? That he drew Jewish caricatures to compensate for having been thought (erroneously) to be Jewish by a Dartmouth fraternity. Who knew? Well, we didn’t.

¶ Compline: Glenn Kenny has a good winge about the non-future of (paid) film criticism. (ARTicles; via Arts Journal)

¶ Matins: As mains deteriorate, the American habit of regarding water as a free resource makes repairs politically difficult. 

The root of the problem, in our view, is the Nineteenth-Century earnest devotion to the idea of Building to Last. Building to Update makes for steadier work. (NYT)

¶ Lauds: Jason Clark compares and contrasts two distantly similar shows On and Off Broadway, Geoffrey Naufft’s Next Fall and Alexi Kaye Campbell’s The Pride. (The House Next Door)

¶ Prime: “What Happens if America’s Credit Rating Is Downgraded?” Good things, perhaps. Perhaps just things that won’t happen otherwise. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: While we raise our eyebrows at a few of Sara Firisen’s implications about early education at home and abroad — she skirts the fact that kids elsewhere must work much harder in order to shine (and live in cultures that value slogging) — we think that she’s quite right to dismiss the claim that the pursuit of excellence is “elitist.” (3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Sext:  Speakeasy wants to know: does the Best Actress award doom the winner’s marriage?

¶ Nones: Andrew Sullivan seems surprised by the familiar mode of the Vatican response to the latest outcrop of sexual abuse, this one in the current pope’s former archidiocese.

Surely, the Roman Catholic Church has seen itself as a victim since the days of Nero and Diocletian. (It’s what comes of being married to a crucified saviour.) Not that there hasn’t been some progress. Mr Sullivan won’t be burned alive, or forced to beg papal forgiveness by standing barefoot in the snows of Canossa. (Daily Dish)

¶ Vespers: Luke Epplin, who has lived in Santiago but slept through minor tremors, writes about the Chilean earthquake in literature. (The Millions)

¶ Compline: Hendrik Hertzberg brings us up to date on current bien-pensant thinking about nuclear power. (The New Yorker)

¶ Matins: Once you have clicked through and read today’s link, Harvard Magazine article, entitled “Nonstop,” about pathological overachievers among Crimson undergrads, we strongly urge you to re-read last Friday’s Matins. Together, these pieces convey a sense of the disservice being done to our default elite by the nation’s top schools. As “Nonstop” makes clear, however, the universities are merely responding to a problem that originates with seriously bad parenting — worse, again, among the elite.

¶ Lauds:  Simon Russell Beale — a brilliant man who just happens to be a brilliant actor. (Guardian; via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Sad to say, this is truly a Must Read: Just when you thought that it couldn’t be done, the Epicurian Dealmaker defends investment bankers as purveyors of financial advice! And they said it couldn’t be done.

(Now that we read the fine print, maybe it’s that the EP forgives investment bankers for giving lousy advice.)

¶ Tierce: As a rule, we steer clear of touting pie-in-the-sky announcements at The Daily Office. We know that our faithful readers want results, not hot air! But we were so busy burping today that the charm of a healthy baby on our knee encouraged us to hope that he will grow up in a world with a herpes vaccine. Even though the New Scientist piece is startlingly self-deflating.

¶ Sext: We’re still burping. Joe Jervis breaks the news about Betty White, and we just click right through.

¶ Nones: Karl Rove continues to be an Ugly American. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers:  The Second Pass celebrates its first anniversary with an omnibus of contributors’ paeans to out-of-print books. Here’s Sarah Douglas about her choice, Inside the Art World: Conversations with Barbaralee Diamonstein.

¶ Compline: Tony Judt’s sketches in The New York Review have been must-reads, but we’ve resisted linking to them for want of a decent introduction to the man (and to his dread affliction!), which everyone who knows something about him is far too conceited to admit to needing. New York to the rescue.

¶ Matins: A few days ago, Felix Salmon looked at the Zachary Kouwe plagiarism hoo-haw at the Times and took the opportunity to share an incredibly interesting insight: print media companies still don’t understand blogging. We’ve been chewing it over, and we’ve decided that we do.

¶ Lauds: Fundamentally silly but still full of goodies: Michael Kimmelman on Caravaggio (stop it with the Michelangelo already!) at the Times.

¶ Prime: What, exactly, is the “national debt” — besides scary-huge, that is? Bruce Bartlett lays it out, and, frankly, we recommend that you skip this part. (Capital Gains and Games; via Marginal Revolution)

¶ Tierce: Laura Miller discusses David Shenk’s explosive new book, The Genius in All of Us: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong, admitting that it left her somewhat shaken. (Salon; via 3 Quarks Daily)

We have always suspected that, in a nation of post-Calvinists, genetic determinism is a naturally compelling misreading of the hard facts.

¶ Sext: Now what? Now that the Oscars have been awarded, what’s a Hollywood blogger to do? Speakeasy asks a couple of writers.

¶ Nones: The pith of Martin Wolf’s provocative Financial Times piece about Germany’s “Eurozone nightmare:”

¶ Vespers: What with Christopher Hitchens stuck in the limelight, we sought relief — and, hoo boy, found it! — in Christopher Tayler’s arch-browed LRB review of the Latest Volume of Clive James’s memoirs, The Blaze of Obscurity: The TV Years.

¶ Compline: Nick Paumgartner’s “The Ski Gods,” a riveting look into the sport’s dark side, lies on the other side of the firewall at The New Yorker, but Christopher Shea comments on two of its major points at Brainiac. First, the invented tradition thing. Second: why no women jumpers?

¶ Matins: Joe Jervis reports a weird but deplorable press release from the Patriots For A Model Utah, announcing proposed legislation to deport homosexuals from the state. However seriously it is intended to be taken, Joe’s concern is not without foundation

¶ Lauds: Eduardo Porter, reflecting on the brief Oscars blackout, wonders if it wouldn’t make sense to pay Disney the seven cents an hour it seems to want, and to stop thinking of television as “free.” It’s a question of how much your time is worth. (NYT)

¶ Prime: Jeffrey Pfeffer outlines a method for tying CEO compensation to company performance. (What? You thought that they were already linked?)(The Corner Office)

¶ Tierce: Why, if the brain is so smart — one of Jonah Lehrer’s readers wants to know why, “if the brain is so smart, why do half of all marriages end in divorce?” Mr Lehrer has some scientific things to say (“We adapt to our pleasures; we habituate to delight.”), but his ultimate authority seems to be Shakespeare. (The Frontal Cortex)

¶ Sext: All about pockets. (BBC; via The Morning News)

¶ Nones: Peter Mair sketches the new political landscape in the Netherlands, where the government collapsed last week on the issue of sending troops to Afghanistan.

¶ Vespers: Jim Behrle tells you everything that you need to know in order to become a celebrated poet “overnight.” It’s as funny as ground glass! (via The Awl)

¶ Compline: Our friend, George Snyder, reflects on the overlooked fact (it suits no one’s ego) that it’s not a good idea to expect your interesting friends to like each other. Case in point: Interior designer Herman Schrijver (1904-1972).

¶ Matins: At 3 Quarks Daily, Richard Eskow posts an extremely thoughtful piece about a technogenic disease, mesothelioma, for which a vaccine appears to be in the offing. Should we congratulate ourselves for finding a cure, or scold ourselves for having unleashed the underlying disease?

¶ Lauds: Here’s why our position on artworks more than one hundred years old is firmly socialist: “Michelangelo letters up for grabs as Renaissance archive goes up for sale.” (Guardian)

¶ Prime: Robert Shiller urges us to reconsider the national preference for home-ownership, taking care to understand the preference as a cultural product, not an economic calculation. (NYT)

¶ Tierce: Jeremy Dean considers the strategy of playing hard to get. (PsyBlog)

¶ Sext: At The Awl, Choire Sicha has a few words about Elinor Burkett. (Nice, linked words!)

¶ Nones: Reading Tom Downey’s report on the Chinese phenomenon of “human-flesh searching,” we can only be grateful that Mao Zedong did not live to exploit the Internet. (Times Magazine)

¶ Vespers: Silje Bekeng writes drolly about the Jante Law and contemporary Norwegian literature. (n + 1; via Three Percent)

¶ Compline: At Speakeasy (which is, after all, a blog run by the Wall Street Journal), Gerard Baker reflects, in a Tacitan undertone, on the absence of political comment during this year’s Academy Awards presentation.

¶ Matins: The American Scholar has reprinted a speech, “Solitude and Leadership,” delivered by writer and critic (and former Yale prof) William Deresiewicz to the plebe class at West Point last October. It is an important speech, probably because it follows its own advice. Mr Deresiewicz offers no canned adages about leadership, and in fact he never discusses the skills required in order to command others. What concerns him is the moral self-awareness that can be achieved only after long and serious self-interrogation.

¶ Lauds: At the Guardian, Tanya Gold describes her visit to the Jewish Museum in north London, and her adventures in Yiddish drama with comedian David Schneider at the museum’s “tiny interactive theatre.”

¶ Prime: At the Guardian, Tanya Gold describes her visit to the Jewish Museum in north London, and her adventures in Yiddish drama with comedian David Schneider at the museum’s “tiny interactive theatre.”

¶ Tierce: Felix Salmon quite brilliantly compares the monoculture of genetically-modified crops to CDOs — and it’s brilliant because each side of the comparison illuminates the other.

Essentially, you’re trading a large number of small problems for a small probability that at some point you’re going to have an absolutely enormous problem.

¶ Sext:  Sam Sifton has quickly established himself as a peerless reviewer of restaurant experiences. Each piece is a memoir, rich in incidental associations. He doesn’t think a whole of Choptank, ‘way down on Bleecker Street, but we’re always on the lookout for awesome fries. (NYT)

¶ Nones: Back from the dead, as it were, Yukos Oil stakeholders have brought a claim for whopping damages against Russia at the European Court of Human Rights. (NYT)

¶ Vespers: Jessica Ferri reviews Still Life: Adventures in Taxidermy, by Melissa Milgrom, at The Second Pass. Learn, among other things, about the power behind Damien Hirst, a “short-haired, chain-smoking battle-axe who finds beauty in death.”

¶ Compline: James Crabtree and Nicholas Christakis take the social-network-contagion findings apply them to politics. (About time.) But the fascinating passage relates to Brian Uzzi’s study of Broadway production teams over more than forty years. (Prospect; via 3 Quarks Daily)

¶ Matins: In a discussion with with Christine Smallwood, at The Nation, philosopher Martha Nussbaum isolates the irrationality of disgust, and argues that it ought not to be allowed to influence the discussion of gay marriage.

¶ Lauds: The obituary, in Gramophone, of Bernard Coutaz, founder of classical recording label Harmonia Mundi. Don’t miss the video clip. (via Arts Journal)

¶ Prime: Don’t blame Wall Street for the European debt mess. Blame Jacques Chirac. His politically-savvy victory in 1996 rendered debt regulation fairly toothless. (Wall Street Journal)

¶ Tierce: The earthquake in Chile may have shifted the planet’s axis, and shortened the day by microseconds. (Sidney Morning Herald; via cityofsound)

And, at The Infrastructurist, Melissa Lafsky discusses the “strong column, weak beam” technology that was instituted in Chile after the 1960 quake, and which may be credited with saving many lives.

¶ Sext: The Rumpus interviews Web log pioneer Jason Kottke. We have always admired Mr Kottke’s fundamental humanism.

¶ Nones: So, does Chinese spokesman Zhao Qizheng mean that the US gets to pick the radio station? We’re reminded of Lord Macartney’s Embassy. (BBC News)

¶ Vespers: At The Millions, fiction writer Victoria Patterson confesses that she can’t write at home. But she knows how to make writing in public work for her.

¶ Compline: Why Tony Judt believes that “‘Identity’ is a dangerous word. It has no respectable contemporary uses.” We could not more whole-heartedly agree. (NYRBlog)