In today’s column, David Brooks offers an irresponsible assessment of Donald Trump, hailing him as a “straight-talking, obnoxious blowhard” who, his admirers believe, might actually get things done. Wishful thinking! Mr Brooks himself concedes that Mr Trump is an overgrown boy “thrilled to have acquired a gleaming new bike, and doubly thrilled to be showing it off.” That’s not our frankly elitist view of accomplishment. It’s no surprise that we don’t like Donald Trump, but Mr Brooks’s column makes it necessary to insist that we do not tolerate him, either.

Now, I don’t mean to say that Donald Trump is going to be president or get close. There is, for example, his hyper-hyperbolism and opportunism standing in the way.

[snip]

But I do insist that Trump is no joke. He emerges from deep currents in our culture, and he is tapping into powerful sections of the national fantasy life. I would never vote for him, but I would never want to live in a country without people like him.

We disagree. We would be happy to banish Donald Trump to some other country that might actually benefit from his Gospel of Success. As for “deep currents” and “powerful sections of the national fantasy life,” we recommend the movies or, if absolutely necessary, team sports. There is obviously no place in political life for fantasy.

From the obituary (penned by Margalit Fox)of Arthur Lessac, legendary voice coach, who died earlier this month at 101: a tough way of dealing with a tough beginning.

Mr. Lessac was born in Haifa, at the time in Palestine, on Sept. 9, 1909. His original surname is unknown: throughout his adult life, he neither used nor mentioned it. He had no wish, his family said, to utter the name of the parents who had left him to his own devices when he was very young

At 2, he sailed with his birth parents to the United States. Their marriage soon dissolved, and they put him in the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society Orphan Asylum in Pleasantville, N.Y., where he would spend most of his childhood.

At about 12, working for the summer as a delicatessen delivery boy in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he befriended a family on his route, who were named Lessac. They took him in for a while, and with their blessing, he took their name.

It is very difficult to imagine Jennifer Egan, the latest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, ever taking her life, or indeed doing anything that would cause her readers sorrow. I have nothing but a packet of intuitions to support what I’ve just said, but I can boil them down to one point of surmise. Both as a writer and as a woman standing in front of strangers reading from her work and answering questions about it, Egan seems to me to be Not A Romantic. She also appears to be untroubled by mental illness. Her fiction is dark but clear, and it recurs to an old and unfashionable view of human nature, according to which we do more harm to other people than we do to ourselves. This is at odds with tragic modernism, which pierces the gifted hero with the spears of his own strength. Egan doesn’t believe in heroes. I think that she believes in curiosity — a curiosity that kills some other cat.

These thoughts are occasioned by perusal of The Pale King, and by the strange multifaceted essay that Jonathan Franzen published in last week’s New Yorker. I’m not sure that it was a good career move for Franzen to sift the ashes of David Foster Wallace’s career and death; there are too many moments in the piece where Franzen sounds like the earnest older brother whose lamentation for a fallen sibling muffles unmistakable cackles of self-satisfaction.

That he was blocked by with his work when he decided to quit Nardil — was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it — is not inconsequential.

Franzen (who seems much more like Jennifer Egan than he does his late friend) inflects his observation that “David died of boredom” with the accent of someone amazed by such a remarkable feat, and clearly incapable of it himself.

Which was it that killed David Foster Wallace — his romanticism or his depression? I suspect that they were densely intertwined. What interests me about wallace isn’t the accretion of small-scale discouragements that must have surrounded the locality of his suicide, but rather the doom that was presaged by the unruly immensity of Infinite Jest, twenty-odd years ago. I haven’t read it, but I understand it to be an attempt, as Wallace put it in conversation with David Lipsky, to capture “what it feels like to be alive right now.” Although he was the keenest of reporters, capable of reducing almost every observation to fully-articulated prose, I’m not sure that Wallace will be remembered for his fiction.  I do mean to read The Pale King, but not as a novel. Because it’s unfinished, retains a rough documentary quality, attesting to the author’s accumulation of views, that a final editing would almost certainly have effaced. Or maybe not! 

The people who knew David least well are most likely to speak of him in saintly terms. What makes this especially strange is the near-perfect absence, in his fiction, of ordinary love. Close loving elationships, which for most of us are a foundational source of meaning, have no standing in the Wallace fictional universe. What we get, instead, are characters keeping their heartless compulsions secret from those who love them; characters scheming to appear loving or to prove to themselves that what feels like love is really just disguised self-interest; or, at most, characters directing an abstract of spiritual love toward somebody profoundly repellent…David’s fiction is populated with dissemblers and manipulators and emotional isolates, and yet the people who had only glancing contact with him took his rather laborious hyper-considerateness and moral wisdom at face value. 

That is not the profile of a writer of mature literary fiction. Not every great novel is about love (and its failure), but most are, and to write instead about the simulation of love seems to me an adolescent exercise, something that you do before you have fallen in love yourself, while you are still tempted to think that love is an illusion, a puff of poetry, as a way of excusing the monstrous defect that must be preventing you from sharing a transcendant experience. For my part, I see adolescence — struggling to be an adult — at the bottom of addiction (substance abuse provides both a shortcut to the desired state of mind and a distraction from the search for it) and at the heart of romanticism as well. As if to prove my point, Wallace not only dressed like a teenager, but like a teenager from an earlier era — a hippie, in fact. I’m always surprised that Wallace’s appearance goes unmentioned, when it was so patently a costume.  is shambolic appearance is at complete odds with the precision of his voice, even when that voice is registering the blur of ambiguity. 

It’s not a stretch to imagine Jennifer Egan writing a novel about David Foster Wallace.

So far, it’s a case without names. An investigation into narcotics trafficking inadvertently opened a window on a much broader corruption problem, and one that is arguably more serious; for while cops dealing drugs is a very bad thing, making traffic summonses issued for moving violations disappear exposes the public to dangerous drivers.

It is not clear if any of the officers under investigation received bribes or gifts for fixing tickets.

“From what I understand, it was taking care of friends, basically,” a law enforcement official briefed on the investigation said. “Friends and relatives.”

The official who was briefed said that fixing tickets “is a way of delegates to maintain their status or popularity with the police officers they represent.”

As always, this systemic corruption shows that there is a problem with the system. Law enforcement officers aren’t getting the message that they and theirs will be held to a higher standard of conduct.

Matins

¶ At Koreanish, Alexander Chee concludes a wandering entry with an arresting and very disheartening assessment of the decadence of current democratic leadership worldwide. 

And that really is the other point to make—the problems in the US are the problems in the world, really—few countries if any are inoculated from being subjects to a global financial elite that has figured out how to make money from firings and layoffs, foreclosures, highspeed computerized stock trades and stockpiled cash. Yes, I could move to about 60 other nations and receive socialized medicine, for example (one bright spot—soon may be able to add “Vermont” to that list of places), but wherever I go, this elite is indifferent to these crises, and no longer needs the good will or even the general population in order to be rich. They make money off each other, in brutal raids and corporate takedowns. They’ve manipulated the markets to the extent that we need their good will in order to survive them. It’s as if they decided 30 years ago that the creation of a middle class was a mistake, and they’re pulling up the gates.

Our only cold comfort is that the oligarchy is a patched-together international affair that lacks natural coherence.

Lauds

¶ The enviably satisfying life of Charles Rosen, pianist and writer. (Also, French teacher at MIT.) Mr Rosen’s current preoccupation (he is 84) is the way that Mozart and Beethoven had of veing unconventionally conventional. “The public always demand something original, and then they resent it when they get it.” (Guardian; via ArtJournal) ¶ At Slate/FT, Jackie Wullschlager talks to “elusive billionaire,” purveyor of luxury goods, and art collector extraordinaire François Pinault, a self-made Breton who now sponsors two museums of new art in Venice. Takeaway: channel the emotions that you suppress in your ruthless business dealings into a passion for art collecting. As we said, “self-made.” ¶ Felix Salmon explains why Andy Warhol is not only the most successful modern artist but the best investment (or is that the same thing?) — twenty-odd years after his death. Liquidity, darling. ¶ At the Guardian, Simon Jenkins waxes impatient with “modernist nonsense” about ruins, and urges us to be more Victorian about them, fixing them up and restoring them for use instead of treating them as sacrosanct untouchables. (via Arts Journal)

Prime

¶ Although it’s billed as the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Bretton Woods conference sounds like the Same Old Same Old. Simon Johnson reports that a consensus of attendees holds that Goldman Sachs would be bailed out if it were in trouble. Politicians have given up on two fronts: cuttting down its size (and with it its riskiness), and raising its capital requirements. Capcha! (The Baseline Scenario) ¶ What with that budget adaptation of Atlas Shrugged going the rounds, Ayn Rand is back in the news, and who better than Maria Bustillos to examine Rand’s lunatic ethos, which, as she demonstrates with the example of Alan Greenspan, leads inevitably to hardening-of-the-brain. (The Awl)

Tierce

¶ Facts and Figures: Jonah Lehrer reports that the Allen Institute for Brain Science has established a 94% similarity in gene expression among human beings — making us all only 6% different, to put it facetiously — and, even more startlingly, that 82% of our genes are expressed somewhere in the brain. (The Frontal Cortex) 

Sext

¶ Simon Doonan’s Note on Camp (he has but one) is cheeky but accessible. He claims to be the child of camp parents. When was the last time you heard Sontag referred to as “Sue“? (Slate) ¶ Erin Carver, who resolved to sample religions this year, attends a meeting of the Religious Society of Friends, and, perhaps because she didn’t see any quaking, contemplates a return visit with something like enthusiasm. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ At Bidoun, Curtis Brown meditates on the author of The Eternal Male, a sometime Anglophone schoolboy in Cairo called Michael Demitri Chalhoub who, among other things, bullied Edward Said. This would be Omar Sharif. (That’s “Omar” as in “Bradley,” by the way.) A fascinating page. (via 3 Quarks Daily)

Nones

¶ To the extent that it alerts naive American technophiles to the fact that societies other than our own may have very different priorities and purposings for social networks, Niall Ferguson’s “Mash of Civilizations” is useful. But dismissing those other societies as “enemies of freedom” — when in fact they have a very, very different idea of what freedom means — is simply wrongheadedly simplistic. (Newsweek; via Real Clear World) ¶ Once upon a time, CIA officials retired from their profession; since 9/11, they’ve been taking their expertise to private contractors. Julie Tate covers this depressing but unsurprising development at the Washington Post. (via The Morning News)

Vespers

¶ Until last week, we had never heard of Peter Mountford. Now we’re in the middle of his engaging debut novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism. Gregory Brown turned us on to it at The Rumpus; at The Millions, Caleb Powell interviews the author — who has a piece of his own at Speakeasy.

The hero/anti-hero of my novel, A Young Man’s Guide to Late Capitalism, is tasked with trying to trying to find a monetizable angle on the 2005 Bolivian election for his new employer, a small unscrupulous (fictional) hedge fund called The Calloway Group. The mission is just a test. As the fund manager puts it, “In Bolivia, if you screw up, it won’t hurt us…you’re flying a worthless Cessna, not one of our gold-plated seven-forty-sevens.”

In the first chapter, Gabriel attempts to obtain a copy of Bolivia’s Article IV Report—the IMF’s completely candid assessment of a country’s economic outlook. Countries with especially dour prospects (like Bolivia in 2005) often keep their A-IV Reports under lock and key. Gabriel’s mission is pulled directly from a nearly-identical experience I had in Ecuador in late 2000, when I spent the better part of a month trying to chase down the IMF’s recent (but classified) A-IV Report on Ecuador for my then-employer, a small (now defunct) think tank.

¶ “On its own terms, sex is information.” This startlingly Gleickian claim appears in Alexander Chee’s tribute to James Salter’s sex writing, as virtuosically displayed in the classic A Sport and a Pastime, from which many enticing quotes are drawn. (The Paris Review; via The Morning News)

Compline

¶ Nothing on David Cay Johnson’s list of “9 Things the Rich Don’t Want You to Know About Taxes” will be unfamiliar to regular readers, but Mr Johnson’s tempered outrage is encouraging. “The Mad Men who once ran campaigns featuring doctors extolling the health benefits of smoking are now busy marketing the dogma that tax cuts mean broad prosperity, no matter what the facts show.” (Willamette Week; via 3 Quarks Daily)

Have a Look

¶ At City of Sound, amazing photographs by Dan Hill of the Linked Hybrid, a complex of buildings in Beijing, which basically comes off as the background of Eraserhead only in color. ¶ “This has been going on since Ronkonkoma.” (@ The Awl) ¶ Bent Objects, @ Brain Pickings. ¶ Canal Street subway interchange, much reduced, @ The Best Part.

Noted

¶ Getting Byrned. (GOOD) ¶ Tyler Cowen is in Brasilia. (Marginal Revolution) ¶ A selection of Vreeland Memos, @ Letters of Note.

Floyd Norris considers Europe at an interesting tipping point: now that the bankers and their regulators have decided what must be done, voters may refuse to ratify the plans.

There is a risk over time that democracy will lead Europe to splinter. Germans are angry about having to pick up the bill for bailouts of other countries, which is one reason the German government felt called upon to insist on that “strict framework.” Others are resentful of the enforced austerity.

If European economies somehow grow enough, those resentments may not matter much. But if not, voter anger may intensify and demand that something change. Maybe the Germans will want to cut off their prodigal neighbors. Maybe the neighbors will decide they would be better off with a new currency and without overbearing demands for austerity that prevent recovery. In either case, populist politicians demanding the demise of the euro might win elections. The fact that European law does not allow for such a possibility would make the situation messier, but in the end voters would have their way.

There was a moment, during an early escape sequence, when I half expected Lady Gaga to pop out from behind a concrete bunker. Lights were flashing, troops were trotting, and a young woman was fleeing within their midst: it looked like any number of music videos, and sounded like a music video as well, but for the singing (there wasn’t any).

Hanna works very much like a music video in a more important way: it feeds entirely on its star power. Cate Blanchett, Eric Bana, and, most of all, Saoirse Ronan hold the camera in fierce close-ups that help you forget that Hanna doesn’t make a lot of sense. Happily, the screenplay is similarly discreet; the characters do not engage in discussions that would highlight the nightmarish absurdity of the story, which takes a very European view of the CIA (the same mad scientist rap that American filmmakers used to lay on the nation’s Cold War opponents). I say “nightmarish” for a reason: Hanna proceeds like a highly-styled bad dream with interesting episodes and a “happy” ending.

Which is to say that it’s a gripping film, for the most part. Sometimes the episodes take over, and threaten to run away with the main story, while the stylization threatens to render the movie precious in a Sixties sort of way. But you want to know how it comes out — or in any case you want to see Marisa Wergler (Ms Blanchett) get what’s coming to her. Even though you don’t know what she did, or — correction — you know what she did, but you don’t know why.  (Not really.) To my knowledge, she is the first person from Texas ever to be called “Marisa,” and, again, the overlap between wicked East-European Mata Hari and the role that Julia Roberts played in Charlie Wilson’s War provides a certain cognitive-dissonant fizz.

Joe Wright, who directed her in Atonement, is obviously taken with Ms Ronan’s looks — and why not? With Gemma Jones’s trascending gaze, and a fine-boned reserve that seems inherited from Helen Mirren and Vanessa Redgrave, Saoirse Ronan has a beauty to be reckoned with, and her Hanna is gorgeously feral. Long before we learn that, thanks to DNA tampering that the Marisa person would like to keep hush-hush, Hanna is every bit as unusual as she seems to be — she can wrestle Eric Bana, whom she thinks is her father, to the ground — we have given up expecting Ms Ronan to be just another pretty face.

That’s why the movie’s most extended episode, in which Hanna hooks up with an English family caravaning its way from Morocco to Spain and beyond, bogs down: it tells us what we already know, which is that Hanna is not just another teenaged girl. Having spent her entire life on the edge of the Arctic Circle, she has never seen gypsies dance, or worn a tutu, or kissed a boy. This is what Hanna might have been about, making it an entirely different picture, one that would put to better use its fantastic little ensemble of actors cast as the English bobos, Olivia Williams, Jason Flemyng, Aldo Maland, and the deliciously jaded Jessica Barden. But since this is a thriller, we can’t get into the class struggle that the parents wage while bringing up their children as free spirits; we’re just annoyed with them for being unaware of the danger that they’re in. We fret for their safety every moment that Hanna spends with them, uneasily convinced that they will not escape the twisted attentions of Marisa’s hit man, Isaacs (Tom Hollander,) and his minions. That we are spared their untimely demise is not something that we can feel quite grateful for; it’s almost worse that they’re dropped into limbo.

Another episode — and more of this might have strengthened the movie’s thriller spine — takes place at an abandoned theme park devoted to the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  This relic of the DDR makes an appealing ruin, and Joe Wright makes the most of its ironies. (The one souvenir that Hanna has of her mother is a book of the fairy tales, told mostly in drawings.) But I came away thinking that what this episode needed was not an artiste like Wright but a Hollywood hack who would not let interesting cinematography get in the way of heartstopping action. As it is, the episode (which is also climactic) feels both confused and truncated.

Perhaps the theme park offers a clue: what Hanna really is is a fairy tale. What’s riveting about the movie is the archetypal antagonism between Hanna and Marisa, which blazes through the film even though it is only at the end that the wicked stepmother and the innocent angel come together. This is a duel that we know very well, and from one of the best-known Grimm tales, that of Snow White. 

The Postal Service has issued a “forever” stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty — the one in Las Vegas.

The post office, which had thought the Lady Liberty “forever” stamp featured the real thing, found out otherwise when a clever stamp collector who is also what one might call a superfan of the Statue of Liberty got suspicious and contacted Linn’s Stamp News, the essential read among philatelists.

But the post office is going with it.

“We still love the stamp design and would have selected this photograph anyway,” said Roy Betts, a spokesman. Mr. Betts did say, however, that the post office regrets the error and is “re-examining our processes to prevent this situation from happening in the future.”

The service selected the image from a photography service, and issued rolls of the stamp bearing the image in December. This month, it issued a sheet of 18 Lady Liberty and flag stamps. Information accompanying the original release of the stamp included a bit of history on the real Statue of Liberty. Las Vegas was never mentioned. The whole mess was exposed by the stamp magazine, which this week ran photographs of both statues.

The rot begins when officials bull-headedly stick with their mistakes instead of falling on their swords in disgrace. That there should be anything at all accidental about a postage stamp (a kind of currency) is horribly worrisome.

Donald Trump’s emergence on the political scene occasions some interesting comment by Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight. He divides Republican presidential candidates into two groups, one of which (the Fairfax Five) has the party establishment’s blessing, while the other (the Factional Five) does not.

For the establishment Republicans, it must feel like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Just as Ms. Palin’s numbers decline, candidates like Mr. Trump and Ms. Bachmann — who could be nearly as problematic next November — pop up in her place.

As a result, the Fairfax Five are gaining no ground at all on the Factional Five — in fact, the opposite is true. In an average of four polls of Republican voters conducted in November and December, just after the midterm elections, the Fairfax Five collectively held 27 percent of the vote, to 31 percent for the Factional Five. In the three most recent polls, however, the Fairfax Five’s share has declined to 22 percent, while the Factional Five’s — mostly because of Mr. Trump — has risen to 44 percent.

[snip]

I’m not convinced that these markets are underrating the Factional Five, each one of whom has some significant liabilities as a candidate and several of whom may not run. I do wonder, however, whether the sorts of candidates that Mr. Will likes will ultimately have enough Main Street charisma and Tea Party bona fides to win over Republican primary voters, especially in conservative states like Iowa and South Carolina. There is plenty of time left, but at some point, for a candidate like Mr. Pawlenty to prevail he has to at least begin to poll in the high single digits rather than the low single digits, which would suggest he has some flesh-and-blood appeal.

How do you find governors for people who don’t like government?

In this week’s New Yorker, James Surowiecki devotes his column to the price of gasoline and its outsize effect on the economy. I read it with an odd detachment, as if I lived in some other economy. Well, I do; I live in the economy of Manhattan, which while not unrelated to the national economy isn’t the same, either. There are other cities in the United States, but none of them is like New York in having an enormous concentration of wealthy residents not far from the heart of town. Nor so many merely affluent inhabitants, either. The “city” parts of the other American cities are clusters of office buildings. We have plenty of office buildings, too, but they’re all a few blocks at most from apartment buildings where people actually live. The marginal avenues on the East and West Sides of the island are lined with shops and services — dry cleaners, nail salons, liquor stores — by the dozens. Food is sold in many different ways, from delicatessens to bodegas to vegetable stands to supermarkets. (The supermarkets are much, much smaller than their suburban counterparts.) Wherever you live in Manhattan, you will find the necessities of life on sale within walking distance. You won’t need a car. A car, in fact, will be an expensive and inconvenient albatross. Every day, I give thanks that I do not own a car. 

When I lived in Houston in the Seventies, I did not give daily thanks that I didn’t own a car; not owning a car in Houston was, as you might surmise, a royal pain. I managed, because it so happened that I rarely needed to be more than a few blocks from Westheimer Boulevard, a long thoroughfare served by a bus line. But everybody else had a car; having a car was the done thing. To say that you couldn’t do something because you didn’t have a car — well, you might as well come out and say that you were broke, improvident, poor. As indeed I was, working in classical FM radio. But at least I was spared the equally royal pain of taking care of a car, that is of paying someone else to take care of a car, at ruinous prices and on an unaccommodating timetable. My mother had a Mercedes that was always in the shop, even though it never broke down; at her level of consumption, neurosis took the place of need, and if the engine didn’t sound just right, in went the car. But my mother would have been happy to live in her car. She did live in her car. She was always driving to the other side of the county to take advantage of a special on Planter’s Dry Roasted Peanuts, horrid things. I learned about unsustainable energy use up close. 

The only habit worse than car-owning is smoking. I smoked for twenty years, and I’m glad to be done with that, too. Cigarettes are also very expensive these days, at least here in New York, where taxes have raised the price of a pack of cigarettes to something like eleven dollars. Imagine! Quite aside from health concerns, I’m delighted that I no longer smoke. Even when “everybody smoked,” plenty of people didn’t, and they minded if you did, at least in their apartments. Running out of cigarettes could be just as catastrophic as running out of gas, or at least it felt that way. And matches — to have to think about matches! Or disposable lighters that managed to dispose of themselves unexpectedly. I took up smoking in prep school, where I was desperate to send some kind of signal that I was not totally weird. Smoking, I hoped, would smooth the abrading edges of my strangeness and make me look worldly and intellectual. It was at least a bad thing to do, a noticeable vice. My other vices were all private, in that they involved not doing the things that I was supposed to do. I might not look particularly vicious, sitting there reading quietly, but in fact I was undoubtedly shirking, or at best reading the wrong book. The worst thing about reading is that it never looks as transgressive as it really is.  

The worst thing about driving a car is that you can’t read, not even the wrong book. You can be read to, of course, but as far as I’m concerned that is just not the same thing at all. In one ear and out the other, is what happens to me. When we had a weekend house in Connecticut (oh, what were we thinking?), we had a car. The drive was about seventy-five minutes long if there was no traffic. I listened to a lot of NPR. My favorite thing to listen to, though was Wallace Stevens reading “The Credences of Summer.” It’s a terrible shame that Stevens didn’t record more of this verse than he did, but “Credences” became a big hit with me, and fragments of it still float around in my brain, like aural muscae volitantes. “Fully made, fully apparent, fully found.” “Ten thousand tumblers tumbling down.”  

If I were driving these days, I’d put the time to good use with my extensive library of Teach Yourself language kits. It breaks my heart that, for all the time that I have put into them, I remain hopelessly non-fluent in Dutch, Turkish, Chinese, and even French, which I can read well enough but which I don’t understand very well when I hear it spoken. It appears likely that I will go to my grave speaking only the one language — the one language that everybody else on earth wants to speak. I do give daily thanks that I do not have to learn English; I can’t imagine how anybody picks it up. Such is my life of privilege that I don’t have to.

Elsewhere in The New Yorker, I came across the word “aotelaise,” which is how Evan Osnos renders the new Chinese word for “outlets.” How does he say this “aotelaise”? Is that a Chinese “ao,” which sounds the same as the “ou” in “outlet”? If so, it’s not how I would spell it for an English speaker. The simple fact is that you never know how anything in English is supposed to be pronounced until you know it. Which is almost but not quite as bad as never being able to get a cab after the theatre, and having to take the subway home, while all the bridge and tunnel people get in their cars and drive back to New Jersey.

Acting with tact and a dispatch, an American Air Force team based in Okinawa restored the airport at Sendai, now reopened and under Japanese control.

The situation was quite different after the Kobe earthquake in 1995. Then, Tokyo rejected assistance by the United States military, a decision that many Japanese criticized as possibly raising the death toll. This time, Tokyo accepted, and promptly.

[snip]

Within minutes of the 9.0 magnitude earthquake on March 11, some 1,400 passengers and workers in the terminal suddenly found themselves surrounded by black, churning waves that crumpled parked aircraft like paper toys.

The people were rescued, but the airport seemed a near total loss — until Col. Robert P. Toth, commander of the 353rd Special Operations Group, based in Okinawa, heard of the airport’s destruction. His unit specializes in turning ruined landing strips and patches of empty desert into forward supply bases for American aircraft, but usually in war-torn countries, like Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan.

“It was clear that opening Sendai Airport was the No. 1 priority, but everyone had written it off,” Colonel Toth said. He approached his superiors with a plan to turn it into a hub for American relief.

Bravo.

The remarkable non-stop life of Sidney Harman has come to an end, cut short by acute myeloid leukemia at the age of 92, less than a year after Harman purchased Newsweek and forged its alliance with The Daily Beast.

At a time when sophisticated hi-fi radio required a tuner to capture signals, a pre-amplifier, a power amp and speakers, Mr. Harman and Bernard Kardon, Bogen’s chief engineer, quit their jobs in 1953, put up $5,000 each and founded Harman/Kardon. It produced the first integrated hi-fi receiver, the Festival D1000.

It was hugely successful, and by 1956 the company was worth $600,000. Mr. Kardon retired, and in 1958 Mr. Harman created the first hi-fi stereo receiver, the Festival TA230. In later years, the company made speakers, amplifiers, noise-reduction devices, video and navigation equipment, voice-activated telephones, climate controls and home theater systems.

In the 1960s Mr. Harman was an active opponent of the Vietnam War, and for a year taught black pupils in Prince Edward County, Va., after public schools there were closed in a notorious effort to avoid desegregation. From 1968 to 1971 he was president of Friends World College, a Quaker institution in Suffolk County. In 1973 he earned a doctorate from the Cincinnati-based Union Institute and University.

In the early 1970s he created a program to provide employees at his Bolivar, Tenn., automotive parts plant with training, flexible hours and work assignments, stock ownership and other benefits that eased tensions with management and raised productivity. It was hailed as visionary and scorned as impractical. But President Carter was impressed, and made him deputy secretary of commerce. He served in 1977-78