We’re having a day of doctoring today, so we can’t be at our desk. But we’d really like to know why the Op-Ed piece by Susan Engel isn’t a news story. It’s the most interesting thing that we’ve read about education in years — despite its unfortunate title, “Let Kids Rule the School.”

The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn’t bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn’t want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, “Yeah, I think that’s what they call learning.”

One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: “I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing.” They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the seniors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges.

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

Peter Applebome’s column about the projected demolition of Lands End, the Long Island estate that inspired Scott Fitzgerald to dream of the unattainable Daisy Buchanan and her doomed admirer, is almost as poignant as The Great Gatsby itself.  

Perhaps 500 of the grandest mansions have already been knocked down, said Monica Randall, who has chronicled the era and its architectural heritage. So the demolition of Lands End is just one last domino falling from a long-gone era. And yet, the gravitational pull of Gatsby’s world endures, undimmed.

Dan McCall, a professor emeritus at Cornell University, taught the book for 40 years. He marvels at the hold Gatsby still has on students. On the one hand, he said, with its hypnotic prose, its layers of longing for money, status, reinvention and love, it’s still channeling the American experience. “It’s not an antique to them, it’s never gone out of style the way some books I teach.” On the other hand, he said, Gatsby’s evocation of the American dream has an innocence and passion that are impossibly distant, like astral material from a lost galaxy. “Gatsby’s dream, the way he’s so devoted to it, that’s not something you find much in this economy, at this time. I think it’s breathtaking for kids in college. It’s an America they haven’t heard about from their parents.”

Of course, Gatsby’s dream was built on deceit and illusion. The Roaring ‘20s ended in the Great Depression. Fitzgerald burned out and died at 44.

Since my last entry on A Visit From the Goon Squad, we’ve had the good news that the book has won the National Book Critics Circle award for its author. News of the award usually mention that the novel is “set in” or “about” the “music business,” a connection also announced by the drawing of a guitar’s headstock on the (American edition’s) dust jacket. “Music business” is, obviously, an unstable term; serious participation in any of the activities associated with one of those nouns generally precludes awareness of the other. But the sale of beauty, the commercialization of aesthetic experience, is a problem throughout Egan’s work. (In “Puerto Vallarta,” a story from Emerald City, the cheating father sells franchises to a lobster restaurant that uses “real butter.”) If this is a kind of prostitution, Egan’s businessmen are pimps who long for more than a percentage of the transaction. And if music — popular music — is the business, then what’s longed for includes the impossibility of youth regained. 

“The Gold Cure,” Goon Squad‘s second chapter, belongs to Bennie Salazar, who, like Sasha from the first chapter, is one of the novel’s recurring characters. Now in his mid-forties, Bennie is afflicted by shames — powerfully unpleasant memories for which he may or may not have been actually responsible but which leave him feeling humiliated — as well as by a flagging libido. Bennie is a successful music producer; although he sold his label, Sow’s Ear, to a  multinational oil company five years ago, he still runs the operation. But he can’t shake the conviction that the music that he is promoting is “bloodless.” The old songs that Bennie prefers to listen to are the ones that, in contrast, inspire “rapturous images of sixteen-year-old-ness” and remind him of his high-school band — a scene that we will visit, through other eyes, in the third chapter.  The chapter title refers to Bennie’s costly faith in the efficacy of gold flakes, which he drops into his coffee; so far, however, the gold cure has failed to ignite his engines. Bennie is, in short, one of Egan’s trademark desperate characters. He may not want for funds or health or occupation, but without youth these boons mean little. Meaning is leaking out of Bennie’s life with a fairly audible hiss. 

In “Found Objects,” Sasha and her date, Alex, had drinks at the Lassimo Hotel, which Sasha chose “out of habit; it was near Sow’s Ear Recods, where she’d worked for twelve years as Bennie Salazar’s assistant.” In “The Gold Cure,” Sasha is still Bennie’s assistant; what’s more, Egan throws us an anchor by which to date the chapter: five years have passed since 9/11. So we have moved at least a year or two before the “present” of the novel’s opening, but not too much more than that, because Sasha has been working for Bennie for a long time — so long that he no longer sees any part of her but her breasts, which serve as a “litmus test” of his randiness. Sasha’s ability to bear up under this wolfishness without embarrassing her boss is only the lesser half of her expertise; she also understands the running of his business better than he does. (As Bennie puts it, Sasha is always finding the things that he has misplaced.) At the end of the story, when Bennie collapses into a lustless longing for Sasha, she demurs: “We need each other.” Sasha and Bennie can be together only on the business side of the music business. 

There is no sign in this sad scene of the personal damage that (as we saw in the previous chapter) goaded/will goad Sasha to steal things; we not only see Sasha from the outside but from Bennie’s sporadic and largely inattentive point of view, which allows her to become little more than what Bennie wants her to be: someone with whom he can feel the “safety and closeness” that he knew with his ex-wife, Stephanie, “before he’d let her down so many times she couldn’t stop being mad.” One might evince a cliché about the unknowableness of other people from the contrasting perspectives of these opening chapters, but the richness of the portraits (together with the deft shift in time) serves an opposite effect. Even more than in “Found Objects,” “The Gold Bug” richly studs familiar types and situations with peculiar details. It is set on a day in which Bennie decides to do something unusual, as if on a whim but in fact to escape the oppression of his painful memories, which, the opening sentence tells us, “began early that day.” The unusual thing will be to pay a visit to  the sisters who front for a failing band that he signed a few years ago. He’s got to drive up to Westchester anyway, to spend the afternoon with his nine year-old son, Christopher.

This earlier appointment would be dreary and depressing for both father and son, we’re assured, if it were not for Bennie’s carelessness, which leads him to take out his little box of gold flakes in front of Christopher, who of course instantly wants to taste one. We are thus distracted from the low-grade ordeal of a divorced father trying to pass a few hours in the company of a boy with whom he no longer lives — but we never forget that we’re being distracted. Nothing happens to suggest that the gold flakes have brought Christopher closer to his father. He’s just taking an ordinary boy’s delight in doing something different and probably improper. 

A further distraction supervenes in the basement of the sisters’ Mount Vernon house, where the simple live-ness of the music awakens Bennie’s “rapturous images,” he he joins in the jam session by whacking a cowbell. We have seen this sort of thing before, too, but Egan doesn’t let it go on for more than a moment. “And from this zenith of lusty, devouring joy, he recalled opening an e-mail he’d been inadvertently cpied ion between two colleagues and finding himself referred to as a ‘hairball’.” There is simply no escaping these humiliations! For someone who dwells on lost youth, no present happiness is ever strong enough to defeat the insinuation of an old shame. Bennie’s attempt to escape into the heedless orgies of the past is of course doomed, but Egan gives it a particularity that makes us dream for a moment that it might succeed. We feel with and for Bennie even though we know that he’s just another jerk who liked life better with “the half hard-on that had been his constant companion since the age of  thirteen.” 

The curious thing, the special thing about Jennifer Egan is that her interest in shame — a force of which she has an engineer’s understanding — is uncoupled to any sense of alienation. Nothing is more private, more personally difference-making than shame, but if Egan gives us characters who feel this wretchedness acutely, the very fact that they feel it creates a common ground. Not for them, perhaps, but for us. Sahsa and Bennie are like two beautifully sketched trees that, we’re told, stand not far apart in a forest somewhere. What we do, effortlessly, is to sketch the ground between them. The sketch may lack detail, but it shows the ground to be firm. Alienation is just another feeling, just another shame, that establishes a shared humanity. The awfulness of life lies not in the fact that we’re unknowable to each other, interesting as that fact might be, but that it’s carrying us inexorably away from a youthfulness that we never knew, either, until it began to slip away from us.

Japan’s quake-damaged nuclear power plants could be taken as warning against future nuclear projects, but we hope that they will instead provide a learning experience for engineers. The catastrophe at Fukushima does not in the slightest alter our available energy options.

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

The policy implications for the United States are vexing. “It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”

“The world is fundamentally a set of relative risks,” Mr. Grumet added, noting the confluence of disasters in coal mining, oil drilling and nuclear plant operations. “The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy.”

Matins

¶ Doug Saunders writes about the “catalyst class,” a growing lower-middle class with no ties either to local elites or to their radicalized opponents. Another way to describe them: angry first-time apartment owners who want open and fair business conditions. They threw Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt, and they’re increasingly mobilized in China. We should know these people. They were the ones who brought democracy to North America.” (Globe and Mail; via Real Clear World) ¶ Kwame Anthony Appiah’s review of the new Montaigne books by Sarah Bakewell and Saul Frampton includes the most excellent description of the liberal cast of mind that we have ever come across: it is “compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge.” (Slate; via Arts Journal)

Lauds

¶ We agree with Justin Davidson, who believes that James Levine ought to retire from his leadership role at the Metropolitan Opera. “But even if he’s in fine fettle for the anniversary gala on May 1, the time has come to make him conductor laureate for life and hand the keys to someone else.” Mr Levine has built a great orchestra, which will now go on being a great orchestra for years to come, just as the Philadelphia Orchestra did after Leopold Stokowski handed it over to Eugene Ormandy in the Thirties. (New York; via Arts Journal) ¶ Jimmy Chen is such a funny man that we read his praise of Giorgio Morandi with eyebrows arched — cocked, Jimmy might say. Apparently there’s a Daren Wilson who paints slightly inaccurate copies of Morandi. Something to think about!  (HTMLGiant)

Prime

¶ Yves Smith cuts through all the blah-blah about how difficult it is to prosecute banking dereliction cases. She has found just the provision of Sarbanes-Oxley for the job, and it’s aimed at holding the top people responsible for risk management and other grown-up duties, and she believes that prosecuting a few Lehman alums would be a good start. Write to your prosecutor! ¶ Tyler Cowen serves up lists of the common misjudgments of left- and right-wing economists. (A pox on the lot of ’em!) ¶ For Ezra Klein, one list is enough. We like the last two items. Nobody does know what “stochastic” means, and (more importantly) economists don’t spend enough time arguing with people who aren’t trained economists. Do they spend any? (via The Morning News)

Tierce

¶ Given the choice between fire and ice, we choose ice — when it comes to post-life body disposal. Promessa Organic Burial isn’t offering its services yet (dipping the corpose in liquid nitrogen, then vibrating it into dust, and finishing off by planting a shrub on the remains), but it’s certainly cooler than cremation. (Discoblog) ¶ Zoe Chance, at Harvard Business School, has arrived at some chilling findings: cheaters have self-serving oblivion powers! Especially when they win (undeserved) recognition for their (fraudulent) achievements, cheaters tend to forget about the cheating! Ed Yong reports, at Not Exactly Rocket Science.

This tells us a little about the mindset of people who fake their research, who build careers on plagiarised work or who wave around spurious credentials. There’s a tendency to think that these people know full well what they’re doing and go through life with a sort of Machiavellian glee. But the outlook from Chance’s study is subtler.

She showed that even though people know that they occasionally behave dishonestly, they don’t know that they can convincingly lie to themselves to gloss over these misdeeds. Their scam is so convincing that they don’t know that they’re doing it. As she writes, “Our findings show that people not only fail to judge themselves harshly for unethical behaviour, but can even use the positive results of such behaviour to see themselves as better than ever.”

¶ The editors of the London Review of Books finally got round to assigning Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows — or perhaps Jim Holt was dilatory about submitting his review. No matter; it’s a fine piece, and possibly the best that we’ve read. Although Holt disagrees with Carr on questions of “fluid” and “crystalline” intelligence, he brings up an anecdote by the great French mathematician Henri Poincaré as evidence in support of the proposition that Googling is bad for creativity — whatever that may be.

Sext

¶ Melissa Lafsky finds the new Red Riding Hood to be “face-clawingly terrible” — but instructive withal.Not! “Yeah sure, it’s asking for all kinds of trouble to make teens ignore their sexual urges, we know. But does doing so really give them leave to become sociopathic murderers?” (The Awl) ¶ As the daughter of a lapsed Catholic, Erin Carver naturally wishes that the Mass were still conducted in Latin and in other ways rendered unintelligible. She hides out in the bathroom during Communion, and envies a young couple that has evidently gotten beyond the smells and bells. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ Christine Byrne, who went to culinary school in order to become a better food writer, says a few words about taillage (knife work), and her meditative pursuit of the perfect julienne. (GOOD)

Nones

¶ At The Awl, Brent Cox runs through the pros (obvious) and cons (numerous) of seasteading, which has attracted the interest of Pay-Pay founder Peter Thiel. We expect that it’s only a matter of time before someone rigs up a floating campus of some kind and parks it in calm, sunny waters — not too near to Tonga, though. The whole thing reminds us a bit of Zardoz. ¶ Among the days we never thought we’d see was the one on which we read Judith Butler with pleasure and interest. But it has come. Butler’s essay, “Who Owns Kafka?”, in the London Review of Books, makes the most of the ironies contained in the suitcase of Kafka’s writings that Max Brod didn’t burn as instructed but left instead to a girlfriend, whose two daughters now proposed that it be auctioned off by weight. The essay underscores the black humor implicit in attempts by Israel and Germany to nationalize Kafka’s legacy.

Vespers

¶ John Williams gets round to Allen Shawn’s Twin, and writes about it very sweetly, responding to Neil Genzlinger’s gratuitous Book Review attack. (The Second Pass) ¶ K E Semmel roots for Per Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time to win a Best Translated Book Award, pointing out incidentally but enticingly how like Richard Ford’s novels it is. ¶ April Bernard laments the all-inclusive centenary collections of Bishopiana that Elizabeth Bishop herself would certainly have prohibited during her lifetime. (New York Review of Books)

A cooler editorial head—deciding that for whatever combined reasons of reticence, manners, oppression, and repression, Bishop simply did not often write well when writing directly about sex and love (as opposed to loss, about which she wrote better than anyone)—would lead one to a different conclusion, one that would continue to support the judgment Bishop herself made, again and again, about what constituted a finished poem.

Compline

¶ When The Reformed Broker (Joshua Brown) turns to Charlie Sheen for help, you know how deep the doo-doo has got to be: “Peak Sheen (or how $10 gas will save the world)” ¶ Here’s a conundrum (if one that is unlikely to come up very often): can a former porn actress have a career as a high-school science teacher? Not if there are boys in the class, it seems; Tera Myers has been outed twice by students who saw the movies that she made when she was a young and broke single mom. Maybe if there’s a really progressive girls’ school out there… (GOOD) ¶ At Slate, David Weigel asks why conservatives hate railroads? And he gets a very intriguing answer from a transportation consultant called Wendell Cox.

“A lot of this has to do with Euro-envy,” says Cox. “People like to talk about how much better Europe is. I don’t see that their quality of life is better in Europe. The fact is that we live in a dispersed society, and there’s no set of circumstances where people are going to leave cars and take rail transportation.”

But of course the population of the Northeast Corridor — what the Editor calls the Republic of 202, after a highway that threads the region at a distance that’s rarely closer than fifty miles from the Atlantic Ocean — is not “dispersed.” Nor is that of southern Florida; nor that of coastal California. The truth is that there are several mini-Europes in the United States. The thinly-peopled rump of the country looks a like George III.  

Have a Look

¶ Philip IV signs autographs at the Museum. (Improv Everywhere) ¶ Don’t: Barbecue a Water Balloon. (via The Awl) ¶ The body heat cell phone. (GOOD) ¶ Insane asylum plans from the old days. (Object; via kottke.org) ¶ The Australian Voices sing “The Facebook Song.” Must listen (@ Joe.My.God)

Noted

¶ The Grace Coddington story. (Intelligent Life; via The Morning News) ¶ Using Sweaters Better (The Awl) ¶ Why “Q-A-D-D-A-F-I?” (GOOD) ¶ Jennifer Egan wins the National Book Critics Circle Award. Brava! (Speakeasy) ¶ The week in review, summed up by Shakespeare (Where Else?)

Steven Erlanger outlines what the 17 members of the euro-zone spent the day haggling over. The price of Germany’s further cooperation in restoring financial health to the continent will entail chipping away at sovereign powers — as treaties routinely do, but rarely with such broad domestic impact.

The issue that has gotten the most attention is the German-French Pact for Competitiveness, a name chosen for German ears. The intention was to lay down specific commitments to coordinate euro-zone economies — a common basis for corporate taxes for instance, or a common age for retirement — intended to unify policies across the region while raising tax revenue and reducing spending. Wage indexation was to be banned and high deficits punished.

But when the pact was first broached at the European level last month, there was anger from other leaders, who had not been consulted. While the pact might help in the future, it would do nothing to solve the current problems of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Nor, critics argue, does it deal with a looming problem for Germany and the euro zone — huge private debt and shaky banks, including some German state banks. Berlin has resisted serious stress tests of its banks.

Still, on Friday, euro-zone leaders are expected to approve a watered-down version of the pact, negotiated by the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy, that eliminates fixed pension ages and wage indexation and gives states more latitude to reach objectives, with monitoring of compliance left unclear. The main fight is about whether to align corporate tax systems, and if so, how to do so.

By the time I heard from Kathleen —After a delayed but otherwise uneventful flight to Raleigh-Durham, Kathleen enjoyed a nice lunch with her father and her brother. Then she called me to check in. Ordinarily, she calls whenever her flight lands, but today she decided not to, since I’d be at the movies as usual. Trouble was, I didn’t go to the movies. I’m not sure that it would have calmed down to surmise what turned out to be the case, because it had never happened before. But once I heard her voice — well, it seems in poor taste today to talk of floods of relief.

I didn’t go to the movies because when I finally did stagger out of bed at 8:30 this morning (Kathleen called to say that her plane had just arrived at LaGuardia, when it ought to have been taking off), every joint and tissue clamored for a day off. I wanted only to spend the day reading and watching movies. Kathleen’s being away for the weekend was slightly liberating but largely dispiriting; more often that not, when she’s out of town I feel like the gods in Das Rheingold after the giants carry off Freia, the goddess who tends the orchard where the apples of youthfulness grow.

It’s amazing, though, how quickly a day passes when all you’re doing is reading a book like James Gleick’s The Information. I’m struggling to keep my head about the symbolo-logico-mathematical waters. I nourish a fond hope that Mr Gleick or some other worthy will sex up set theory for me, so that I can at least imagine being interested in the topic. Despite all my years in radio, I have absolutely no palpable grasp of how sound waves, converted into electromagnetic ones, shoot through wires or zoom through the air. I can’t see how it works, and the words get in the way. And whenever the pursuit of abstraction begins to look like a game, I not only lose interest but become annoyed. I don’t like games.

I used to like a lot of games (although never athletic ones), but the passing years presented me with ever-better things to do with my time. I used to do Thomas Middleton’s acrostics whenever they appeared in the Times — something that I had occasion to remember when The Information taught me the counterintuitive but absolutely sound equation of certainty with the total lack of information. If the message can say only one thing — if there is not even the possibility of the message’s not being sent or received — then it is completly devoid of information. It was always very helpful, when solving the acrostics, to try out suffixes such as tion. (And, if that didn’t work — if, say, I had ti for sure — then ting.) But even though I’ve waded through pages about Claude Shannon and bits, I can’t quantify the amount of information that is conveyed by the difference between I  and a, the only two words that can fill a single space. It’s lots, though. A passage narrated in the first person calls up a world of probabilities that distinguishes it from other kinds of prose.

(Playing games with Will will be different. I don’t in fact have anything better to do with my time than play with my grandson. I expect to have at least as much patience with games as he does.)

As for the day’s videos, I’ve watched the latter half of Morning Glory; all of Coco Before Chanel, a picture that I missed in the theatres, heaven knows why; and a strange BBC thing about Agatha Christie with Olivia Williams and Anna Massey. The last is a sort of enacted documentary, with a script taken from genuine records and from Christie’s press talk at the umpteenth anniversary of Mousetrap. I’ll watch anything with Olivia Williams in it, and I just about have.

Kathleen is going to calls tongiht, after dinner, she is bound to have more to report than I do.

What an awful surprise it was, this morning, to turn from the print edition of the Times to its Web site’s headlines. 

Television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The tsunami drew a line of white fury across the ocean, heading toward the shoreline. Cars and trucks were still moving on highways as the water rushed toward them.

The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys, in some places carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields, highways, bridges and homes. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance.

The force of the waves washed away cars on coastal roads and crashed into buildings along the shore. Television footage showed a tsunami wave bearing down on the Japanese coastline near the community of Sendai.

NHK television transmitted aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof of the airport building. The runway was partially submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks. A television commentator called the blaze an “inferno.”

We are grieved.

In our view, it’s a problem of democracy that a man such as Chris Christie can win a powerful public office. What attracts voters to someone so grouchy, impatient and fearful? Does he mirror their own anxieties? If so, why is this an asset? In any case, we doubt that Richard Pérez-Peña’s commendable hounding is going to cramp his style or lower his ratings.

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong. But Peter J. Woolley, a politics professor and polling director at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said there had been no sign, so far, that these issues had much effect on the governor’s political standing.

“People prefer directness to detail,” Professor Woolley said. “People know it’s not unusual for politicians to take the shortcut in public debate, that they’re not academics who are going to qualify everything.”

Some overstatements have worked their way into the governor’s routine public comments, like a claim that he balanced the budget last year without raising taxes; in truth, he cut deeply into tax credits for the elderly and the poor. But inaccuracies also crop up when he is challenged, and his instinct seems to be to turn it into an attack on someone else instead of giving an answer.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, Mark Lilla gives Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful Montaigne book, How to Live, what begins as a nice review. He praises it as a genuine introduction to Montaigne’s work and to the circumstances in which it was written; and he takes the occasion to deplore the “scholarly detritus” that has supplanted the informative prefaces that used to be aimed at the general reader.

Bakewell begins at ground zero, much as Montaigne did, without assuming anything more than that her readers have an interest in themselves and a desire to live well, which she addresses by cleverly organizing her book as a series of suggestions Montaigne makes for doing just that.

Then Lilla sums up the contemporary consensus about Montaigne, which is that his essays have no agenda. As Bakewell puts it, Montaigne’s collections of self-portraits and miscellaneous musings “does not have designs on you; you can do as you please with it.” With this proposition Lilla heartily disagrees, and he spends the rest of his lengthy review making a case that Montaigne’s transparency is an illusion wrought by his immense influence: he is, as many readers feel him to be without perhaps knowing why, the father of modern man.  

tated in a positive sense, Montaigne was the first liberal moralist. Ancient virtues like valor and nobility, and Christian ones like piety and humility, were unattainable for most people, he thought, and only made them vicious and credulous. But rather than say that directly, a suicidal act, Montaigne sang a song of Montaigne, giving himself virtues that we accept without question today as being more reasonable and attractive: sincerity, authenticity, self-awareness, self-acceptance, independence, irony, open-mindedness, friendliness, cosmopolitanism, tolerance. He was an idealist, though, not a realist. And his ideal reshaped our reality. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the reason Montaigne knows us so well is that he made us what we are (or at least what we profess to be).

In the very next sentence, Lilla contradicts this claim: “But he did not entirely remake us.” No, what Montaigne couldn’t alter was the desire for transcendance that springs naturally in the human breast. He could counsel against yielding to it, by referring to the horrors that the search for transcendance throws off in its most widespread form, organized religion. Montaigne was writing through the religious wars that wracked France in the final third of the Sixteenth Century; in no other country did the old faith and the new struggle so relentlessly to  extirpate the other. Lilla finds that, the more you read of Montaigne — especially if you read the Essays in order, and more or less all at one go — the more clearly an anti-transcendance message emerges. Lilla construes this as necessarily an anti-Christian message, as well as an anti-heroic one. And he faults Bakewell for not pointing out that Montaigne is a corrupter.

Lilla takes the longing to transcend the limitations of everyday life — and the corresponding contempt for the “mediocre life” extolled by Montaigne, that connoisseur of comforts — as a natural good. He writes with the air of a breathless messenger who, by reminding us of something vital, something that we had been lulled into forgetting, brings us back to our senses at the last minute, before we rashly sign away everything important about life.

By refusing to recognize the grandeur in our desire for transcendence, our urge to understand what is, to experience rapture, to face and overcome danger, to create something bold and lasting, Montaigne offered no guidance for coping with it, let alone directing it to good ends. And his silence had consequences. The Essays not only inspired a skeptical Enlightenment that aimed to make modern life softer, freer, and more humane, with some success; they also, through Rousseau, helped inspire a Romantic cult of the self that beatified the individual genius and worshiped his occult powers—also with some success. The easy inner reconciliation Montaigne offered his readers has proved as impossible for them to attain as sainthood was for his Christian contemporaries. Suggesting, perhaps, that the most we can ever hope to achieve is reconciliation to the fact that we will never be reconciled.

I’m not so sure. Reading Bakewell’s book, I felt encouraged to hope that Montaigne may inspire a third development, that of a society of sociable individuals, of men and women who have outgrown the urges that Lilla enumerates — the rapture and danger and boldness and grandeur that always beckon from outside and beyond our mortal frames but that only carry us deeper into the prison of our own individual experience (no matter how powerful the illusion of connecting with “something greater” — it is the subjective feeling that matters). I read the other day that children are natural philosophers; I agree, and I think that it says something about systematic philosophy, which in the last couple of years has come to seem to me to be rather astonishingly juvenile (given its august if dusty place in the scheme of things), yet another attempt to justify persisting in a childish pastime by giving it a serious look.

Now that I am an old man, these caperings are more obvious as such. Whenever I hear the word “hero,” I think of the adolescent impusles that seasoned old codgers have been exploiting for millennia. I draw the self-sacrificing line at taking risks in order to assist those who are weaker; self-immolation is to be confined to the opera stage. I remember all the outsized longings, but I regard them as signs of immaturity, and I’m delighted to have survived them.

I depend enitrely upon my fellow man and woman for meaning and pleasure. I hope that a few men and women can depend upon me for some of the same, but I myself am not a source of interest to me. Ive necessarily got to take an interest in the fact of myself, as a problem-in-progress, if you like. But that’s a responsibility, not a pursuit. I have no objection to your concern for a soul, if you believe yourself to be possessed of one, but I do object to your placing that concern ahead of your concern for the rest of us. I believe that Jesus shared this objection.

You know there’s a commandment against murder. Where would you draw the line? Would you say murder is wrong, but beating someone is maybe a little less wrong, and just being angry with them isn’t wrong at all? I’m telling you that if you’re angry with a brother or a sister, by which I mean anyone at all, even if you’ve just got a grudge against them, don’t dare to go and offer a gift in the temple until you’ve made your peace with them. Do that first of all.

That’s part of the Sermon on the Mount as reconceived by Philip Pullman in his wonderful little book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ. It’s interesting to note that, for all his talk of Christian values, Mark Lilla mentions Jesus only once, and then only in passing, as a byword for Christianity. The Christian wisdom that he likes to quote from goes back to Augustine, the inventor of many onerous and unforgiving Christian dogmas. Before launching tirades against the likes of Montaigne, Lilla ought to examine his own Christianity with a view to casting out the un-Jesus-like selfishness of seeking personal redemption. Happily, he is not so preoccupied by the need “to become other than we are” that he can’t share his well-put thoughts with us. 

It’s a short story, but we’re compulsively re-reading a report by Andy Newman on the arrest (by the ASPCA) of a little boy’s big sister. Monique Smith killed his hamster. ‘Monique picked up the biggest of the three hamsters, Sweetie, “took it out of the cage, and she slammed it on the floor,” Theresa Smith said. “It died on impact.”’ Okay, her bad. It’s what follows that’s strange.

This was on June 7, 2010. Tuesday night at 7, after a nine-month hunt for a suspect they described as evasive and uncooperative, law enforcement agents from the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals arrested Monique Smith, 19, along Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick.

She was charged with aggravated cruelty to animals — a felony that carries a sentence of up to two years in prison — along with two misdemeanors, torturing animals and endangering the welfare of a child.

“Evasive and uncooperative”? “Nine-month hunt”? Nurse!

Last night, at MTC, we saw Matthew Lopez’s play, Whipping Man. I admired the play and the performances, and I noted the skill with which the playwright wove his plot lines into a dense mat of ironies. But I didn’t enjoy myself for a moment. 

I don’t much like plays without roles for women; there’s that. Nor do I care for plays set in ruined houses — I want to tidy them up, and I exhaust myself trying to decide where I’d start. But the biggest handicap presented by Whipping Man was its Civil War context. When I wasn’t mentally repairing broken windows, I was simmering in my contrarian view of what many Southerners quite rightfully call the War of Northern Aggression. This is not the place to expound on that theme, but listening to a former slave celebrate his new freedom, while knowing what that freedom would in all likelihood mean for him, for his children, and for his children’s children, was an irony so bitter that only the comic flash of a Tom Stoppard could have made it supportable. No one is going to mistake Whipping Man for the work of Tom Stoppard. It is an earnest, well-crafted morality tale, built on a twist designed to make audiences sit up and think. As such, I wish it a flourishing career in the theatre departments of the nation’s colleges and universities. 

The twist is that Southern Jews not only owned slaves but imposed Jewish ways upon them. Whether this made the slaves Jews is the crux of Whipping Man. The Book of Leviticus is quoted: “Such you may treat as slaves. But as for your Israelite kinsmen, no one shall rule ruthlessly over the other.” (25:46). I quote from the JPS edition of the Tanakh; for “Israelite kinsmen,” Mr Lopez substitutes the far more pungent “brothers.” Pungent, that is, because, in a glaringly foreseeable development at the end of the show, two of his characters discover a fraternal bond. When they were children, the slave brother was frequently sent off to the whipping man for chastisement. (The whipping man was never fully explained. We surmised that he provided a service for urban slaveholders who did not staff an overseer.) The first time this happened, the white brother was taken along by the father. During the whipping, the white boy cried out, “Stop!” The black boy thought that his playmate was going to save him, but no: the white boy asked to do the whipping himself. And yet the boys remained playmates for all that. To the degradation of slaveholding, Mr Lopez adds the degradation of Jews, who might have been expected to have known better, his play keens, than to own slaves themselves. But the larger point is that Jews are human beings no better than others. That is the seal of their humanity. 

Whipping Man is set in Richmond, Virginia, in the middle of April, 1865. At the beginning, Caleb, a defecting Confederate officer with a serious leg wound (Jay Wilkison), returns to his stripped and damaged home, to find it in the care of Simon, the butler (André Braugher). When Simon blesses Caleb in Hebrew, the twist begins to turn. Presently another former slave, Nigger John, appears, loaded with goods pilfered from other deserted homes and banters edgily with Caleb about ordering people around. John can read, and he has worked out the date: Pesach. The upshot is that the second act of the play features a makeshift seder (with a brick for the charoset) that has been organized by a pious but illiterate black man — a man who has good reason to walk out on the meal at the play’s climax. It would be wrong to call the construction formulaic, but the ironies are so think that there is barely enough air for the actors to breathe. 

André Braugher does a highly commendable job of showing us a man who has been sustained by wrestling with his faithd; his Simon is neither priggish nor (notwithstanding John’s taunts) “simple.” When the full extent of his master’s faithlessness is revealed to him, Simon does not so much abandon his post as continue in the ways of righteousness with redoubled vigor. But he is as much the slave of a foreordained theatre piece as Simon was the property of a Jewish merchant. André Holland is suitably mercurial as John, a fast talker with cold feet. Jay Wilkison’s Caleb is something of a puzzle; altogether indistinguishable from any good old son of the South, he came across as evidence that a Jewish family could produce a callow college boy. That’s not much of a point to make unless, of course, you’re making the larger one that Jews are just like Mormons or the members of some other American cult. Although interesting in its way, this take on being Jewish is at odds with the rich and complicated sense of being Jewish shared by Simon and John, who, unlike Caleb, regard their faith as no more optional than the color of their skin. Perhaps Mr Lopez is making a point about the pitfalls of assimilation, which is also interesting. Interesting, but not particularly engaging as drama. 

But that’s just me. Most of the audience, once the somber mood of the final curtain had been shaken off, responded with warm appreciation. I just think it’s a pity that Whipping Man was not conceived as a heartbreaking comedy.

David Becker ought to resign his post as SEC General Counsel before you even have the chance to read this.

Both SIPC and Mr. Picard, the trustee for the Madoff estate, have proposed that the customers who withdrew funds before the fraud was uncovered should be allowed to keep only as much money as they put in. Initially, the full commission agreed and approved that approach in early 2009, according to the two people briefed on the discussions.

Mr. Becker joined the commission in February that year. By spring, he began meeting with lawyers for Madoff customers seeking a different formula. They wanted to let longer-term investors keep more money than those who had money with Mr. Madoff for shorter periods. Mr. Becker apparently dismissed arguments that investors were entitled to the amounts Mr. Madoff had listed on their final statements.

In the summer of 2009, Mr. Becker did reverse the commission’s earlier decision, however. His legal staff came up with a new proposal to reflect the length of time the money was invested, and the commissioners approved it at the end of the year. Some at the agency who worked with SIPC expressed dissent about the change, according to the people briefed on the deliberations.

Stephen P. Harbeck, the chief executive of SIPC, confirmed that his investor protection unit and the S.E.C. had initially agreed that victims should be able to keep only the money they had originally put into the Madoff firm. “Then they refined their opinion,” he said on Monday, referring to the S.E.C. He said that he did not know who had pushed for the change.

The S.E.C.’s definition, Mr. Harbeck said, would benefit anyone who withdrew more money from their Madoff accounts than they had put in. Mr. Becker’s family would be among them.

You might think that running an excellent public school in a town with property taxes that approach the US median income would be something of a breeze, but you’d be overlooking the updraft of rising expectations. Bronxville’s golden goose is having a harder time laying the right kind of eggs.

In Bronxville, 86 percent of the typical $43,000 property tax levied by the village goes to the school system, particularly to educate the growing grade school population. For the parents of these children — moving here in many cases from New York City — $43,000 is less than they would spend to put two or three children in a private school.

Adding to the pressure, younger couples, including the Pulkkinens, are buying their homes from empty-nesters, who often sell to escape the rising tax burden. Mary C. Marvin, the mayor, says this exodus is accelerating.

In a village covering one square mile, with a static population of 6,400 people, the elderly once constituted nearly 20 percent, but that proportion is steadily dropping. Most important, these empty-nesters paid substantial property taxes without swelling the school population.

“You want the taxes to be something these older people can pay,” the mayor said, “because when they sell, they sell to families with children, and the children cost more to educate than the taxes their parents pay.”

A book that hasn’t yet been published, The Origins of Political Order, is already stirring up very favorable buzz for its author, still the object of much misunderstanding for his first big title, The End of History.

Few people have yet read the book, but it has created a considerable stir in universities where he has talked about it. “You have to be bowled over by the extraordinary breadth of approach,” said Arthur Melzer, a political scientist at Michigan State University who invited Dr. Fukuyama to give lectures on the book. “It’s definitely a magnum opus.”

Dr. Melzer praised Dr. Fukuyama’s view that societies develop politically in several different ways, followed by selection of the more successful, rather than marching along a single road to political development. “It’s the kind of theory situated between the hyper-theory of Marx or Hegel and the thick description that certain anthropologists and historians aim at,” he said.

Georg Sorensen, a political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, also called the book a magnum opus, saying that it provides “a new foundation for understanding political development.” It is neither Eurocentric nor monocausal, but provides a complex, multifactor explanation of political development, Dr. Sorensen said. “In terms of discussing political order this will be a new classic,” he said.

Dr. Fukuyama burst into public view in 1989 with his essay “The End of History,” a title widely misunderstood to mean that no major turning points in history would occur in future. In fact the essay concerned the evolution of human societies and the belief by Hegel and Marx that history would be fulfilled when the ideal political order was achieved — the liberal state, in Hegel’s view; communism, in Marx’s.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books, the eminent professor of comparative literature Peter Brooks considers a clutch of books about higher education in America, all of them critical but most of them, in Brooks’s view, off-target or even “pernicious.” Every time I tune into this querelle, I assume the posture of a critic myself, ready to strip the ivy from the walls and the tenure from the profs. Lately, however, I’ve been asking myself why I’m hostile to the modern university, since I got an excellent education at one myself. Now, it’s true that I got an excellent education at Notre Dame more or less in spite of institutional constructs; I did not perform very well “academically,” largely because I was never persuaded that it was important to go to classes and to do well at tests. (I’d have been done for if I hadn’t been keen on writing, which I took very seriously.) But what’s wrong with this picture? Like a co-ed who goes to college to find a husband, I hung around libraries and seminar rooms hoping to develop an intellect. That certainly happened, even if it did take decades to manifest itself. And if my studies were economically useless, I did emerge with a trade skill, one that, at least in those days, was pretty much taught only on an extra-curricular basis at the nation’s colleges (radio broadcasting). I would have been a slow- to late-bloomer no matter what kind of school I’d gone to. I really shouldn’t complain. 

And yet I do — for the very reason that I did get an education. I did. Most of my classmates, who were more chary about following the rules, did not. They jumped a series of hurdles until they landed on one kind of career track or another, and that was it for “education.” I don’t mean that they stopped reading good books. What I mean is that what they studied in college was how to do well in school. It was laid out very carefully for them, with teachers ready to help them from one step to the next. If they were diligent and obedient, they wound up with a nice degree — which is to say, a burnished resume. Their good grades would get them into a good professional school (business, medicine, law, architecture), where the aptitude for doing well in school would pay even higher rewards. They might even become teachers themselves. But their educations were over.

What we call “education” in this country — the institutions of higher and lower learning — is aimed at young students, and it is designed to produce “outcomes.” Genuine education, in contrast, is an ongoing, never-ending affair. It gets harder (if more satisfying) as you get older — because you have to swallow the bitter pill of recognizing that most of what you were taught when you were young is now deemed to be wrong, misguided, or simply out of fashion. You have to start all over again. And again. Even if you’re a teacher yourself. This does not come naturally, and it’s even harder to get traction in a system that “graduates” its students by dumping them back into a real world full of defiantly
uneducated people. 

I’m all for professional school. I don’t want to board an airplane that has been designed and fabricated by well-meaning amateurs. I wish that I’d done better at math, and I don’t know whom to be angrier with about my lack of Latin, myself or my schools. I was a consistently sloppy student — it wasn’t until I got to law school that I understood the vital importance of diligence — and I don’t wish that I’d been graded for creativity and imagination. Measurable academic achievement really meant nothing to me, and it still means nothing, possibly because I don’t believe that anything important is ever achieved. (I treat the idea of “achievement” as do the French, for whom the word is a term for death — game over.) If you build a great building, whether by designing it or obtaining the funding, you had better have a plan for maintaining it, because it is going to need to be rebuilt in twenty-five to fifty years or else demolished (“achieved”). I’m glad that the skills of engineers and architects are rigorously tested. But there is no skill set that will teach you what might be expected of a great public building. That is what the humanist curriculum is for.  

This isn’t the place for me to lay out my ideas for teaching the humanities seriously. I merely wish to register my conviction that current higher education in the humanities is wasteful and ineffective: the liberal arts are not being taught, and at great expense, too. There may be fine professors out there, like Peter Brooks, who really do illumine the minds of their students, but Brooks himself highlights the problematic nature of his own work, vis-à-vis “successful outcomes” and such, when he observes that it “might best be evaluated, I have often thought, by what students are thinking about and dreaming twenty years after graduation.” If there is a way to subject that kind of teaching to cost-benefit analysis, then it still lies far beyond the grasp of our most brilliant AI research. The one book that Brooks admires, Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, argues against the “marginalization” of liberal-arts studies “by technocratic and business-oriented demands.” But how can a major research university, with its staggeringly expensive laboratories and its equally costly (but loss-leading) athletic programs, shelter the humanities without proposing exceptionalist arguments that it will never argue persuasively? 

Contrary to received understanding, the university as we know it was never intended to be the liberal-arts finishing school for the well-to-do that the Ivy League colleges became in the later Nineteenth Century. They still aren’t, and neither are the great public institutions. There is no free lunch in this country, and the loftiest benefactions contemplate measurable results. If we all agree that citizenship in a democracy effectively requires some exposure to humanist values and habits of mind, lets stop counting on schools to provide the service as a sideline. Let’s re-think.

Let’s all shed a tear for ousted, “martyred” patriarch Iranaeus of Jerusalem, a prisoner in his own apartment (which he won’t leave lest he be denied re-entry by his successor and “nemesis,” Theophilus). Not. Iranaeus was ousted from his life-tenure position in the wake of allegations of shady real-estate deals involving long-term leases of church-owned properties in the Old City (arguably Palestine) made to “fronts for a Jewish settlers group.” The moral of the story? Greeks Go Home! There are enough difficult tribal sortings in Jerusalem without the exotic import of Greek clergymen.

For many local members of the church, the goings-on in the patriarchate, particularly the land issues, have merely confirmed long-held grievances.

“The problem is that the patriarchs come from Greece,” said Khaled Ikhleif, a Palestinian taxi driver from Bethlehem in the West Bank. “They are foreign, not Arab, and they do not understand our problems.”

Mr. Ikhleif was attending epiphany celebrations at Qasr al-Yahud, a spot on the Jordan River where Jesus was said to have been baptized. The site, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is in a border area surrounded by minefields. After a procession and a ceremony led by Theophilos, pilgrims immersed themselves in the opaque, khaki-color water, momentarily oblivious to all dissension and discord.

While we wait for the tech boys at the Times to weigh in, there’s the almost tongue-tied rave by Janet Maslin that appears in today’s paper. 

The segments of “The Information” vary in levels of difficulty. Grappling with entropy, randomness and quantum teleportation is the price of enjoying Mr. Gleick’s simple, entertaining riffs on the Oxford English Dictionary’s methodology, which has yielded 30-odd spellings of “mackerel” and an enchantingly tongue-tied definition of “bada-bing” and on the cyber-battles waged via Wikipedia. (As he notes, there are people who have bothered to fight over Wikipedia’s use of the word “cute” to accompany a picture of a young polar bear.) That Amazon boasts of being able to download a book called “Data Smog” in less than a minute does not escape his keen sense of the absurd.

As it traces our route to information overload, “The Information” pays tribute to the places that made it possible. He cites and honors the great cogitation hives of yore. In addition to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the Mount Rushmore of theoretical science, he acknowledges the achievements of corporate facilities like Bell Labs and I.B.M.’s Watson Research Center in the halcyon days when many innovations had not found practical applications and progress was its own reward.

“The Information” also lauds the heroics of mathematicians, physicists and computer pioneers like Claude Shannon, who is revered in the computer-science realm for his information theory but not yet treated as a subject for full-length, mainstream biography. Mr. Shannon’s interest in circuitry using “if … then” choices conducting arithmetic in a binary system had novelty when he began formulating his thoughts in 1937. “Here in a master’s thesis by a research assistant,” Mr. Gleick writes, “was the essence of the computer revolution yet to come.”

Photo by Kathleen Moriarty

Until last Thursday, Kathleen and I were planning to go to Venice in September, to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary. Some time ago, concluding from the debris of our junked plans to visit Italy for the first time, that we’d never get there until we narrowed our ambitions to a few days spent in one city or the other, I’d asked Kathleen to choose between Venice and Rome, and she chose Venice. But on Thursday, she changed her mind in favor of another island, this one much closer to home. At dinner, Megan had said that she would like Will to spend some time on Fire Island this summer. What a nice idea, I thought — but I mentioned that Kathleen was already busy planning Venice (as well as a business trip to Amsterdam in May).

Little did I know. When Kathleen got home from a bar association meeting, I told her Megan’s wish, and she got right online and scouted the offerings for a few hours. Before we went to bed, she had four very attractive rentals in mind. The next morning, Kathleen decided that what she wanted in the way of an anniversary present was not a few days in Venice but a month of weekends (at least) with Will and his parents, on a beach where she’d been very happy as a child. The glamorous pleasure of top-drawer sightseeing in a distant Oz was replaced by the richer one of extended family time on a local sand bar. If I’m a bit wistful about Venice, it’s probably because I don’t have to travel there, not for the moment, anyway. And a month on Fire Island is actually more fun to look forward to. 

We change our plans fairly regularly in this household, which is why I avoid mentioning them. I was looking forward all week to Paul Taylor on Saturday. I’d had the bright idea of making a day of it, and seeing both a matinee and an evening show. It did not threaten to be an ordeal; in the three hours between the events, we’d do some shopping and have an early dinner. And that’s exactly what happened; it couldn’t have been simpler. When the matinee was over, we cut through the arcade that runs for four blocks south of 55th Street to 52nd Street, where there’s a men’s clothing shop that I like and that is never open when I’m in that part of town; and then we went to Cognac, where we enjoyed a very leisurely meal. Instead of shooting back to City Center, we walked up a bit to Carnegie Hall, so that I could take some photographs that I might use as  decoration here. The second show let out at about ten, and we dashed for a taxi. We were home by 10:20, exhilarated but nicely exhausted as well, our brains still popping from the day’s workout. 

No doubt because I happen to be reading James’s Gleick’s The Information, I’m seeing and recalling Paul Taylor’s dances as fountains of information — fountains as fancily up-to-date as Mark Fuller’s celebrated installation at Lincoln Center. No: fancier. Most information that we process as such comes to us in streams that are comprehensible because they’re filtered according to overall expectations. Within the context of dancers moving voicelessly, Taylor tells us a lot of things that we don’t expect to hear, not in the order in which we hear them. A good deal of it looks meaninglessly decorative, but if we suspect that this appearance is misleading, that’s because the vocabulary of movement, no matter how wide-ranging, is coherent. What seems decorative or unintelligible is as much a part of the story being told as the bits that we easily get (fists shaken at heaven, for example, in The Word, or in the very different Phantasmagoria). Taylor tells his stories in his own kind of time; it is not the linear sequence of narrative but something more neural. Meaning often feels short-circuited, as if too much information were being pushed through too narrow a pipeline; and yet this effect always seems quite calmly planned. A lot of information is addressed to parts of my brain that know nothing of logic or history. I don’t know if I’ll ever put much of it to use, but I enjoy taking it in. 

We very much liked four of the six dances that we saw, including one of the premieres, Three Dubious Memories. This dance, which Alistair Macaulay didn’t much like, overtly foregrounds three little love stories, involving a man in green, a man in blue, and a woman in red (Robert Kleinendorst, Sean Mahoney, and Amy Young); and in each iteration the point of view is that of the exluded lover. Behind them, however, a chorus, dressed in grey (and led by James Samson), plays out a larger drama that is not so easily grasped. Indeed, this dance subverts the very idea of a chorus. Here, the chorus does not comment responsively on the colorful romances but rather it resists them, as if to remind us that life is more complex than boy-meets-girl. The choristers warn, they agonize, they resign themselves. They even try out the lovers’ gestures, but experimentally, not reflectively. The lovers, for their part, ignore the chorus, and their movement is designed to look spontaneous. The effect is oddly like that of a Bach chorale, with a steady, singable tune cutting through highly worked, almost complicated counterpoint. 

I must say a word about Company B, which is set to pop songs sung mostly by the Andrews Sisters but in two instances by Patti Andrews alone. Santo Loquasto’s costumes, always interesting, are here truly superb: clothed in generously-cut, pale-colored outfits laced with bright red belts, the dancers are animated by a period ease recognizable from the old movies; but unlike the studios, Paul Taylor does not want you to forget that this is a ballet set in war time. At the end of his number, the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B (Robert Kleinendorst) falls dead under fire. It is a moment, as they used to say, of great pathos.

The Paul Taylor Dance Company is made up of sixteen dancers, some of them starrier than others. Everybody gets a chance to shine, but some manage, by whatever theatrical alchemy, to make more of the opportunity. The tension between dancers’ distinct personalities and their mastery of the common Taylor idiom is one of the company’s wellsprings of excitement. The wonderful Annmaria Mazzini danced her last season with the company this go-round, but she leaves behind three full-blooded peers in Amy Young, Parisa Khobdeh, and Laura Halzack. It’s harder to foresee what the inevitable loss of Michael Trusnovec, the company’s senior dancer, will do to the make-up. The only dancer to remind me of him is the most junior, Michael Novak; both are sly understaters who pull of the stunt of making a complete spectacle of art concealing art.

Robert Kleinendorst, on the contrary, is a virtuoso on the lines of Robert Downey, Jr or Johnny Depp; morsels of the scenery are always disappearing into his brilliant smile. In her nice reflection on Paul Taylor and this season’s performances, Gia Kourlas calls James Sansom “rigorous,” and this seems just right, if not the whole story; in Company B, donning a pair of horn-rim spectacles, Mr Sansom teases the girls in “Oh Johnny Oh!” so bewitchingly that Laura Halzack walks away spouting a spoken line: “Oh, phooey!” Of Ms Halzack, Kourlas writes, “Laura Halzack is the most versatile and beautiful company member: versatile because she’s not afraid to appear uncomely, and beautiful because she has a sense of humor,” and that seems just, too, except that, er, Laura Halzack is beautiful.

Sunday was a wet and gloomy day, and sensible people everywhere stayed at home. But Kathleen and I ventured forth to take Will for his Sunday walk, which may or may not delight him but which gives his parents an hour or so of precious time to themselves. At Tomkins Square Park, the very air was sodden, and there could be no thought of sitting on a bench of putting Will in the swings. What Will did want to do was to splash his hands in the small puddles that accumulated on the railing surrounding the dog run. He was very entertained when Kathleen flicked at the water herself, sending it flying. (This turned out to be a trick that I could not pull off.) We pushed on toward Third Avenue and the St Mark Bookshop, our usual turning point. Back in the literature shelves, an attractive Japanese woman asked with great decorousness if she could take a picture of the “cute” little boy. When she had done so, she petted Will lightly on the shoulder and murmured “arigato.” Kathleen decided that the woman must have been as surprised by a child’s being carried by a man as she was delighted by Will’s appearance, but I wonder if this is entirely fair.  

Stacey Isaacson, by all human reports, is a fantastically gifted and effective teacher. But let a couple of dodos at the Tammany Courthouse “measure” her performance, using a formula out of RubeGoldberg, and you’ll “discover” that she’s really “worse” than 93% of her colleagues!

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.
The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

Experience with the bureaucratic mind suggests that the “statistical model” becomes more onerous as the performance of students rises.