¶ 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.

The dishwasher’s non-working status has grown Really Old. And very distracting: I’m worn down by the anxiety of wondering if it will ever work again. (Actually, it’s not broken. The water intake filter is clogged, so saith the super.) That’s why I haven’t got much to report this evening.

That and Will. Will’s day care was closed for Easter Monday, so Megan brought him up to our place for a change. The blue room was transformed into the slumber chamber — the draperies can actually be drawn in here. The coffee table was cleared and set on edge; the Pack and Play took its place. Will got the idea, all right: he actually napped for a total of seventy minutes during the course of the day, a record so far as my being around is concerned. Megan and I agreed that Will ought to spend an hour or more in the blue room, at regular intervals, whether he’s asleep or not, whether we’re holding him or he’s stretched out in the crib. The two of us understand his reluctance to fall asleep from the inside.

At thirteen weeks, Will has come a long way from Day One. The impression of unimaginable development is paradoxically enhanced by his unchanging character—he has always been the one and only Will O’Neill. Every time he picks up a new trick, I respond as though he were now all grown up, finished with this childhood thing. And yet he is months away from eating solid food, much less crawling across the floor. He is, in a word, an infant. But when he gazes about the blue room in the draped dusk, it is obvious that he is at some level registering all of the stuff in here. When I whispered in his ear the question that I always get — “Have you really read all of those books?” — he smiled to one side, as if I didn’t know the half of it.

He likes to be held, and he likes to play. Nothing unusual about that, I suppose, but the boy could use a few lessons in decent dissumulation. He brakes from sixty to zero— from squalling infant to fun-seeking jokester — with shameless brevity. This reminds me of the more naive portion of my own childhood. I would convince my mother that I was too sick for school — no problem. Then I would give the game away by rearranging all the furniture in my bedroom. It does not yet seem to have dawned on Will that we are not out-of-towners. 

I wish that there were a way to describe the exhaustion that Will leaves behind him (or that I carry away in my taxi uptown, if I’ve been at his house) without appearing to complain. Or even to seem to be excusing the trickle of my contributions to Portico. (I’m now I don’t know how many New Yorker stories in arrears, and I’ve got two movies to put up.) It’s not physical fatigue, but more a matter of wary remoteness, as if I were carefully avoiding the job of carrying a thought across the room. I certainly don’t mind. I’d much rather carry Will.

We don’t usually have the Editor’s grandson in the house on Mondays, but, because of holiday schedules, he was here all day today, and up to his usual tricks. The child is criminally charming — but that’s no more exculpatory than the dog’s eating the homework. We plan to have Will take care of our homework as soon as he is old enough. If we don’t eat him with a spoon first.

¶ Non-DIY.

¶ A video to remember the next time you’re consumed by MustHaveItis. (Poor Sony.)

¶ How long before we watch this on Law and Order?

¶ 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.

This evening’s entry could easily be even more long-winded than last night’s — but I’m not up to it. At least, here at the outset, I don’t think that I am. Let’s see.

It was a day of errands. I was out of the house for over four hours — although, when I got home, I could not remember leaving, it seemed so long ago. This was largely a matter of sore feet. Because my errands would take me to the east side of the Upper East Side, I decided to break in an unworn pair of loafers. When I took them off (first thing), I felt that I’d had a crash-course in foot-binding. My stride was certainly no longer than that of a little old dowager empress or whatnot.

Points of interest: HousingWorks (old linens that Kathleen and I decided that we’d never use and so ought to donate);, Perry Process (“I was wondering about those,” said Kathleen when I remarked that I’d finally be taking her specialty dry-cleaning items in — including a blouse that has been waiting for two months); Demarchelier (the best croque monsieur in these parts, and, today, an amazingly tasty creamy vinaigrette on the accompanying greens; as if to compensate, the crème caramel  had no flavor at all); the Museum (membership renewal); Metro-Mini (a kit of Bummis); and Gracious Home (don’t start). Along the way, I forgot to go to the bank.

I hadn’t set foot in the Museum since late 2009, and I was definitely out of practice. Slow to believe in spring, I was wearing too many layers of clothes, and wasn’t at all in the mood for the Bronzino drawings now that I was finally looking at them. The photocollage show was more amusing — a lot more amusing. But I’d had no idea until I was actually in the building that the Belles Heures of Jean de Berry had been given the Catherine of Cleves treatment — the leaves of the Cloisters treasure, unsewn and mounted in dozens of frames, filled the basement of the Lehman Wing.

Great minds think alike? Maybe a press release went missing. Everyone knows about the Morgan show, but I alotgether missed mention of the Belles Heures project. The fact that the two most glorious illuminated codices currently domiciled in New York City have been deconstructed and put on view at the same time beggars my powers of equipage. What’s immediately astonishing is the complementary nature of the two books. The Belles Heures, about forty years older than Catherine of Cleves’s Hours, frames brilliant paintings (which I have treasured since my teens) in more or less identical borders, traceries of jewel-box ivy vines. The later book’s illustrations, although very fine, are not nearly so intensely designed as the Limbourg brothers’ work for Jean de Berry, but the borders are nothing short of trippy.

At Metro-Mini, I was shown how to change a diaper. I took this is in good humor, largely because I needed the lesson. It turns out that Bummi diapers are held together by the same sort of tension clips that are used to fasten Ace bandages, only the clips are wider, if that makes any sense. I had joked with Megan about asking for diapers suitable for a fifteen pound turkey. Will isn’t quite thirteen pounds yet — but you’ve seen those legs.

At Gracious Home, I bought a few useful things for Ryan and Megan’s flat. Their demesne has just expanded by a power of ten, and I thought that a few temporary stopgaps would be helpful — nothing that can’t be folded up and banished to storage when the time comes. The thing was, the items in question were all in different parts of the Gracious Empire. So there will be three separate deliveries! Alphabet City may be going the way of Park Slope, but three Gracious Home panel trucks in one day are certain to trigger Loisaida alarms.

¶ 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)