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'I Am Not A Sixth Grader': Sens. Feinstein, Cruz Spar On 2nd Amendment

A curious shift has happened in global wine-drinking trends: Americans have overtaken the French and Italians, Europe's traditional lovers of the fruits of the vine, as the world's top wine guzzlers.

And it's not just wine drinking that's taken off stateside: U.S. wine production is also on the rise.

Back in the 1970s, there were about 400 wineries in America. Today, there are more than 7,000. And they're not just in locations like Napa, Calif.; Walla Walla, Wash.; and Williamette Valley, Ore. They're in places that are less familiar as wine regions: Texas, Ohio, Hawaii and even Alaska.

"I've had some stunning American wines, and I don't think anyone should think that American wine is necessarily inferior to, say, French or Italian," Jancis Robinson, a leading authority on wine, tells Weekend Edition host Scott Simon

Robinson is the co-author of American Wine: The Ultimate Companion to the Wines and Wineries of the United States. The book traces an American "wine revolution" that is kind of amazing, considering it was only 20 years ago that the industry was feeling threatened by Neo-Prohibitionists.

"But now, wine seems to be such a popular interest with a whole load of people — particularly young people," Robinson says.

That interest has even led to wineries sprouting up right in the middle of cities. Just ship in grapes from a nearby vineyard, and you've got a resource for city-dwellers to see how wine is made.

While you may think your local wine can't possibly be as good as something imported, that's not necessarily the case, Robinson says.

She says she's especially a fan of some wines produced around the Finger Lakes in New York. She's also found a very good copy of champagne from the Gruet family in New Mexico.

"Pretty much all countries that make wine make some good wine and some bad wine," says Robinson. "Yes, it's true that the majority of the very, very, very finest wines I have ever had have been from France, but then, France makes more wine than everyone else most years."

Because winters can be pretty harsh in the American interior, European grapevines are tricky to grow. But new varieties like Traminette were bred to survive the climate. Then there's the all-American Norton grape, discovered in Virginia and particularly popular in Missouri vineyards.

"It makes some really serious red wines," Robinson says. "So you can have very respectable Missouri Norton that has not an ounce of influence of France or Italy in it."

Israel appears to have a new government, nearly two months after parliamentary elections.

Since the voting in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle that just would not fit.

If he included traditional allies, such as the religious parties, he would close out a chance of forming a government with a popular political newcomer, Yair Lapid.

A former TV newsman, Lapid is secular and centrist. His party was the second largest in the balloting and has demanded that ultra-Orthodox Jews perform military service, rather than receiving an exemption.

Professor Reuven Hazan of Hebrew University says that in the end, Netanyahu had to make major concessions to Lapid's centrist movement. The prime minister also made room for the right-wing Jewish Home party, which is strongly supportive of West Bank settlers.

Meanwhile, ultra-Orthodox parties are not included in the government coalition for the first time in more than three decades.

"He has formed a government that is not focused on the main issue of Israeli politics, which is security," Hazan said of Netanyahu.

The new government appears more concerned with domestic questions, such as mandatory military service and government reform. Attacking those problems is likely to make life harder for Netanyahu, as he will have to take things away from his traditional supporters.

The new coalition may allow Netanyahu to continue his hard-line approach toward the Palestinians.

Jewish Home is opposed to the two-state solution entirely. Yair Lapid supports negotiations, but has made clear he will not make major concessions.

Hazan says that means "we might get back to negotiating, but these negotiations will lead nowhere and they won't last for very long."

The new government is expected to be sworn in just in time for the arrival of President Obama next Wednesday.

Pope Francis, in his first audience with the cardinals since becoming head of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, praised his predecessor, Benedict XVI, and urged the evangelization of the church's message.

Francis said of Benedict, who served as pontiff for eight years before his historic resignation last month, that he "lit a flame in the depths of our hearts that will continue to burn because it is fueled by his prayers."

On his first full day as pope Thursday, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires called on the cardinals "to find new ways to bring evangelization to the ends of the Earth" and cautioned against giving into pessimism — "that bitterness that the devil offers us every day."

The 76-year-old pontiff, formerly Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, encouraged the prelates — many in their 60s and 70s — to pass their wisdom to younger members of the church. "Like good wine, [it] gets better with the years. Let's give the young the wisdom of life."

Meanwhile, the Rev. Francisco Jalics, a Jesuit priest who was abducted along with fellow priest Orlando Yorio by Argentina's military during the country's so-called "dirty war," says he and Yorio reconciled with Bergoglio, who was accused at the time of having not done enough to prevent the kidnapping.

According to The Associated Press:

Bergoglio has said he told the priests to give up their slum work for their own safety, and they refused. Yorio, who is now dead, later accused Bergoglio of effectively delivering them to the death squads by declining to publicly endorse their work.

'It was only years later that we had the opportunity to talk with Father Bergoglio ... to discuss the events,' Jalics said Friday in his first known comments about the kidnapping, which occurred when the new pope was the leader of Argentina's Jesuits.

Last year, a federal program called the Earned Income Tax Credit took about $60 billion from wealthier Americans and gave it to the working poor. And here's the surprising thing: This redistribution of wealth has been embraced by every president from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama.

"This program worked," says Richard Burkhauser, an economist at Cornell University and the American Enterprise Institute. "And there's not a hell of a lot of these programs where you can see the tremendous change in the behavior of people in exactly the way that all of us hoped it would happen."

When he says it worked, he means it helped single mothers on welfare find work and get out of poverty.

In the 1930s, in the early days of welfare, many of the women who received it were widows. Americans didn't think single mothers should have to work, so the government paid them to stay home. But by the '90s, the idea of paying people not to work seemed backwards to many Americans. If moms want to get paid, many thought, they should get a job.

The Earned Income Tax Credit started as a small program in the 1970s and was expanded under President Reagan. But it was President Clinton who turned the program into what it is today — one that effectively gives low-wage working parents a big bonus. For some workers making around $15,000 a year, that bonus can now reach nearly $6,000. As the name suggests, the money is paid out like a tax refund, when workers file their income taxes.

Mirian Ochoa was on food stamps, in debt from a divorce and caring for a son in special ed. On her long commute to work, she remembers going past McDonald's every day and smelling the french fries but telling herself, "You have to say no, because I have to pay my rent."

The first year she got the credit, Ochoa received $3,000. Over the years, she says, the credit allowed her to pay off debts, get an associate's degree in accounting, get off of food stamps, and move to a better school district for her son. "I found an apartment there, and I changed my son's life," she says.

This gets to one feature of the credit that economists love — something that goes back to Milton Friedman, one of the most influential conservative economists of the 20th century. He argued that, rather than creating lots of targeted programs for poor people, the government should simply give them money and let them decide how to spend it — even if, like Mirian Ochoa, they sometimes spend $1,000 to take their son to Disney World and Universal Studios.

Her son's favorite part was the Incredible Hulk roller coaster. "He's small, little fat boy, and running and saying, 'Mother, come with me, do the ride,' " she says. I say 'No, it's too much, I cannot do it. But go! Go!' "

To Ochoa, this was money well-spent. Her ex-husband had promised the trip to her son but never came through. And she says taking him was a key moment in his life. Now he's in college, studying graphic design in Orlando, Fla.

The Earned Income Tax Credit is not perfect. It doesn't help people who can't get work. Some people game the system. Others are eligible but never collect. But while most programs to help the poor are constantly under the magnifying glass, this one has expanded every decade since the 1970s. Encouraging poor people to work and giving them a boost for keeping at it remains relatively uncontroversial. For now.

Once known as the most beautiful avenue in the world, the Champs Elysees is changing. Some Parisians fear it's starting to look like any American shopping mall as high rents and global chains steadily alter its appearance.

"We just try to keep a sort of diversity on the Champs Elysees, with the cinemas, with restaurants, with cafes and shops," says Deputy Mayor Lynn Cohen-Solal. "We don't think the laws of the natural market, the free market, make for a good Champs Elysees."

Cohen-Solal says the Champs Elysees is being transformed by those skyrocketing rents. A Qatari firm recently bought the Virgin Megastore building and is doubling the rent. She says foreign investors now see the Champs Elysees as a place for real estate speculation.

Many French regard it as a horrible fate for an avenue that is not only a symbol of Paris but also a reflection of the French nation itself.

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The white smoke has appeared and that can mean only one thing: the new edition of the It's All Politics podcast with NPR's Ken Rudin and Ron Elving is ready. It also means that there's no budget deal in Congress, that the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is underway and that Carl Levin has decided that 36 years in the Senate is enough.

"The meek shall inherit the earth" — that seems to be the latest message from the United Nations Development Program.

Their 2013 Human Development Report chronicles the recent, rapid expansion of the middle class in the developing world. It also predicts that over the next two decades growth in the so-called "Global South" will dramatically shift economic and political power away from Europe and North America.

The report projects that by 2020 the combined gross domestic products of Brazil, China and India will exceed the entire output of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the U.S. put together.

"Much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself," according to the report.

And this is translating into more than just financial gains in the developing world. According to UNDP, every country surveyed — and just about every nation on earth was sampled — improved the health, education and income of its citizens over the last decade.

Bill Orme, a spokesman for UNDP, says the report finds that economic growth and human growth are inextricably linked. He says government investment in key social sectors is crucial in moving nations forward.

"Even if your only goal is to boost your economic output, what you need to do is invest in your people," ," Orme says. "You need to invest in education ... health ... governance structures that allow people to affect their lives on the community, local and national level. And if you do all those things right, economic progress will follow."

The other key factor for nations trying to get ahead in the 21st century is globalization.

"This report shows that engagement with the world economy is good for you," Orme says. "That is to say that countries that have the most interaction with global trade have better standards of living for their people."

Standards of living are improving not just in the big developing nations — Brazil, China, India for example — but also in smaller countries such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Tunisia and Rwanda.

The report projects that over the next two decades the size of the middle class will increase modestly in North America and it will actually go down in Europe. But it will boom in Asia from 525 million to 3.2 billion people.

"The meek shall inherit the earth" — that seems to be the latest message from the United Nations Development Program.

Their 2013 Human Development Report chronicles the recent, rapid expansion of the middle class in the developing world. It also predicts that over the next two decades growth in the so-called "Global South" will dramatically shift economic and political power away from Europe and North America.

The report projects that by 2020 the combined gross domestic products of Brazil, China and India will exceed the entire output of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Great Britain and the U.S. put together.

"Much of this expansion is being driven by new trade and technology partnerships within the South itself," according to the report.

And this is translating into more than just financial gains in the developing world. According to UNDP, every country surveyed — and just about every nation on earth was sampled — improved the health, education and income of its citizens over the last decade.

Bill Orme, a spokesman for UNDP, says the report finds that economic growth and human growth are inextricably linked. He says government investment in key social sectors is crucial in moving nations forward.

"Even if your only goal is to boost your economic output, what you need to do is invest in your people," ," Orme says. "You need to invest in education ... health ... governance structures that allow people to affect their lives on the community, local and national level. And if you do all those things right, economic progress will follow."

The other key factor for nations trying to get ahead in the 21st century is globalization.

"This report shows that engagement with the world economy is good for you," Orme says. "That is to say that countries that have the most interaction with global trade have better standards of living for their people."

Standards of living are improving not just in the big developing nations — Brazil, China, India for example — but also in smaller countries such as Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Mauritius, Tunisia and Rwanda.

The report projects that over the next two decades the size of the middle class will increase modestly in North America and it will actually go down in Europe. But it will boom in Asia from 525 million to 3.2 billion people.

The new boom in natural gas from shale has changed the energy economy of the United States. But there's another giant reservoir of natural gas that lies under the ocean floor that, theoretically, could dwarf the shale boom.

No one had tapped this gas from the seabed until this week, when Japanese engineers pulled some up through a well from under the Pacific. The gas at issue here is called methane hydrate. Methane is natural gas; hydrate means there's water in it. In this case, the molecules of gas are trapped inside a sort of cage of water molecules.

Few people have actually seen methane hydrates, but Ann Cook, a geophysicist at Ohio State University, is one of the few.

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"It manifests itself in these instruments because they allow the banks to use all kinds of tricks to borrow more and to hide all the risk in borrowing that happens. And so they can manipulate the regulation and they can actually be riskier than they appear, and all of this is just living on the edge and not being prepared enough, with your own money, indeed, to various eventualities, to what might happen."

On new regulations and banks' resistance to carrying more equity

"So the requirements now, which the regulators will tell you are so tough, actually still allow the banks to use borrowed money for 97 percent of their investment and have just 3 percent equity, so even if it's a little bit, just a little bit more of a buffer, it's still not a healthy place to be. ...

"If they find that they cannot live with much more equity, then we have to wonder about their business model and the viability of having such a banking system that possibly is quite bloated and is distorting the rest of the economy. If the only way they can live is on subsidized borrowing, then we have to be concerned about why that is."

On what would make the banking system more stable

“ The banks that cannot raise new equity are showing us a great weakness. ... The time to take care of that is now, and not in a crisis.

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There's a diplomatic spat brewing between India and Italy over the trial of two Italian marines charged with killing two Indian fishermen last year.

India's Supreme Court on Thursday ordered the Italian ambassador not to leave the country after Rome refused to let the marines return to India to stand trial for the killings. The court had earlier allowed the marines to return to Italy to vote in last month's national elections after Ambassador Daniele Mancini assured Indian authorities that they would return by March 22 to stand trial. Earlier this week, the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that won't happen. The Indian court has given Mancini until March 18 to respond.

Here's the background to the story, from The Associated Press:

"The marines, Massimilian Latorre and Salvatore Girone, were part of a military security team aboard a cargo ship when they opened fire on a fishing boat in February last year, killing the two fishermen. The marines said they mistook the boat for a pirate craft.

"Italy maintains that the shooting occurred in international waters and that Rome should have jurisdiction. India says the ship was in Indian territorial waters."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.

When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.

Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.

In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.

Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")

You can now enjamb your tweets.

Like most people, Roth doesn't like getting old, and losing friends is perhaps the most painful part of it. "If you look at your address book," he says, "it's like walking through a cemetery."

Philip Roth: Unmasked — which opens at Film Forum in New York on March 13 and will air on PBS beginning March 29 — covers a lot of territory, beginning with Roth's recollections of growing up in Newark, N.J., followed almost immediately by his assertion that he couldn't wait to leave there forever.

He makes the case, cogently, that although certain elements of his work have been drawn from his own life, his stories are largely un-autobiographical. ("Life isn't good enough in some ways," he says, in defense of the good old-fashioned tradition of making stuff up.)

Early in the film, he notes that he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a Jewish-American writer. "I don't write in Jewish," he says simply. "I write in American."

Roth says nothing in the movie, and isn't asked, about his recent announcement that he has permanently retired from writing fiction. But he does offer some fascinating observations about how writers cannot operate from feelings of shame — which is different, he notes, from feeling shame as a person — and about the joys of writing about people who misbehave sexually.

He also discusses the point, around the time of The Counterlife, at which politics and history began to play a larger role in his work — sex and death, after all, can take you only so far.

Manera and Karel have shaped Philip Roth: Unmasked simply but carefully, keeping the number of talking heads — other than Roth's own — to a minimum. Roth's detractors may very well hate this documentary. There's no one to carp on-camera about his alleged misogyny, his preoccupation with the male ego and other assorted oldies but goodies.

Yet a Philip Roth documentary that doesn't trundle heavily down those tired old avenues is probably all the better for it. Interviewees include superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen and New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, both of whom are great admirers of Roth's work. But the most persuasive and passionate of all is novelist Nicole Krauss.

"We don't go to literature for moral perfection," she says. "We go there for moral ambiguity, moral feeling, moral struggle."

Roth hands us nothing on a plate; it's the only way, maybe, to give us everything. (Recommended)

Feminism hovered in the wings, but at the time my girlfriends and I read Sartre (or tried to, or just said we did) and marched with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, there to lust after intense young men in duffel coats who held forth on the iniquities of Cold War saber-rattling.

I was far too self-absorbed to feel real fear at the prospect of being vaporized by a mushroom cloud — the image that opens Sally Potter's wonderfully high-strung period piece, Ginger and Rosa. Potter's semi-autobiographical domestic melodrama is set in a romantically seedy part of London in 1962, when the director was entering adolescence. Like Potter was then, its eponymous central figure (that would be Ginger) is a sensitive young redhead and budding artist played by Elle Fanning.

Like Ginger, I wore my hair long and straight (ironing was optional), my men's sweaters baggy, my glasses wire-rimmed, my expression pained for the sorrows of the world. Like her, I was miserable — though as it turned out, with far less reason.

I didn't run with girls like Ginger or her best friend Rosa (Alice Englert). Coming from a reasonably stable, lower-middle-class suburban family, I slogged my way obediently through the advanced curriculum and never played hooky. As the first member of my extended family to apply to university, I sensed there was far too much at stake to goof off. In most countercultures, it's the elite who rebel.

Intimidated by the posh accents and willowy grace of the Gingers and Rosas (they had no hips at all), by their air of bohemian rebellion and contempt for rules, their sexual precocity and nervous gaiety, I gnawed on my envy from afar. Once, after a CND demonstration, I actually got invited home by one of them. The genteel poverty of her mother's boho flat, with its faded Persian carpets, peeling wallpaper and teetering piles of books by Freud and Heidegger — it all thrilled me to bits.

Only when I got to university — the great class leveler designed by a post-World War II Labour government — did it become obvious how fragile and vulnerable these young women were, how meshed the personal and the political were for them, and not in a good way.

That, in part, is Potter's subject. Raised, after a fashion, by pale-and-romantic single mothers with names like Anoushka and Nat, the two girls are walking on quicksand. Ginger resents her mother (Christina Hendricks), a stalled artist who remains in resentful thrall to her estranged partner, Roland (Alessandro Nivola). But she adores her father, a narcissistic champagne Marxist who blathers on about the oppressor classes, then abuses his own power over his daughter and her credulous friend in a way that would devastate most young women.

In a crisis Roland crumples, as does Ginger's mother, leaving their distraught daughter's emotional rescue to a gay couple (Timothy Spall and Oliver Platt) and their brainy American friend (Annette Bening), all of whom have a great deal more to lose by questioning authority than does Roland.

Watching this scenario unfold, I understood why so many girls like Ginger and Rosa fell apart when they got to college. They clung like limpets to charismatic male leaders of the campus revolt, who sloughed them off when they grew tiresome or needy. Some of them overdosed before finals, or dropped out altogether and became their mothers, sporadically attached to feckless men who repeatedly left them holding the babies.

Potter doesn't reduce Ginger's radicalism to her screwed-up family, still less to the miseries of adolescence. She treasures her artistic milieu and gives us no reason to doubt the girl's genuine terror of a nuclear holocaust. But bohemian or not, at home Ginger has no safety net, no source of comfort to allay her fears of world annihilation, which grow all the more terrifying for overlapping with her rickety home life.

I often wonder what became of the Gingers and Rosas, most of whom seemed to drop out of sight once we left university. Undoubtedly the women's movement bailed out Potter, most of whose movies — including her famously stylized adaptation of Virginia Woolf's gender-bending 1992 Orlando with Tilda Swinton — are inspired by feminism. With any luck, it saved Ginger and friends too.

Israel appears to have a new government, nearly two months after parliamentary elections.

Since the voting in January, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been trying to put together the pieces of a puzzle that just would not fit.

If he included traditional allies, such as the religious parties, he would close out a chance of forming a government with a popular political newcomer, Yair Lapid.

A former TV newsman, Lapid is secular and centrist. His party was the second-largest in the balloting and has demanded that ultra-Orthodox Jews perform military service, rather than receiving an exemption.

Professor Reuven Hazan of Hebrew University says that in the end, Netanyahu had to make major concessions to Lapid's centrist movement. The prime minister also made room for the right-wing Jewish Home party, which is strongly supportive of West Bank settlers.

Meanwhile, ultra-Orthodox parties are not included in the government coalition for the first time in more than three decades.

"He has formed a government that is not focused on the main issue of Israeli politics, which is security," Hazan said of Netanyahu.

The new government appears more concerned with domestic questions, such as mandatory military service, and government reform. Attacking those problems is likely to make life harder for Netanyahu, as he will have to take things away from his traditional supporters.

The new coalition may allow Netanyahu to continue his hard-line approach toward the Palestinians.

Jewish Home is opposed to the two-state solution entirely. Yair Lapid supports negotiations, but has made clear he will not make major concessions.

Reuven Hazan says that means "we might get back to negotiating, but these negotiations will lead nowhere and they won't last for very long."

The new government is expected to be sworn in just in time for the arrival of President Obama next Wednesday.

North Korea's nuclear chest-beating has achieved the seemingly impossible by aligning the concerns of South Korea, Japan and even China, three Asian neighbors that have a long history of strained ties.

While all those countries have separate aims and interests, they share with the United States a mutual interest in containing the North Korean regime, restraining its rhetoric and keeping Pyongyang's nuclear option in a box, says Richard Bush III, the director of the Center for Northeast Asian Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution.

"One charming thing the North Koreans possess is an ability to drive others closer together," he says.

North Korea in recent weeks has threatened the United States, South Korea and Japan with annihilation and its nuclear and missile tests have been carried out in defiance of Beijing's warnings.

International condemnation has been fierce, aside from former NBA star and recent visitor Dennis Rodman, who declared his admiration for leader Kim Jong Un. "I love the guy. He's awesome. He's so honest," Rodman told ABC.

North Korea's recent behavior prompted Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, a professor of American foreign relations at San Diego State University and a national fellow at the Hoover Institution to write in The New York Times that "China, Japan and South Korea should be encouraged to rank this problem No.1."

SOUTH KOREA

North Korea's saber-rattling is heard loudest just south of the Demilitarized Zone. Memories of the the Korean War are never far from the surface, and are periodically refreshed by events such as a 2010 torpedo attack on a South Korean ship that killed 46 sailors. Pyongyang followed up that attack by shelling the South Korean border island of Yeonpyeong.

South Korean president at the time of the 2010 sinking, Lee Myung-bak, was criticized for his perceived weak response.

"I think that the North thought that the sinking of the South Korean ship was a huge victory because all South Korea did was sit there and wring its hands and appeal for international investigations and assistance," says George Lopez, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame who served on as a U.N. monitor for sanctions on North Korea.

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Like most people, Roth doesn't like getting old, and losing friends is perhaps the most painful part of it. "If you look at your address book," he says, "it's like walking through a cemetery."

Philip Roth: Unmasked — which opens at Film Forum in New York on March 13 and will air on PBS beginning March 29 — covers a lot of territory, beginning with Roth's recollections of growing up in Newark, N.J., followed almost immediately by his assertion that he couldn't wait to leave there forever.

He makes the case, cogently, that although certain elements of his work have been drawn from his own life, his stories are largely un-autobiographical. ("Life isn't good enough in some ways," he says, in defense of the good old-fashioned tradition of making stuff up.)

Early in the film, he notes that he doesn't like being pigeonholed as a Jewish-American writer. "I don't write in Jewish," he says simply. "I write in American."

Roth says nothing in the movie, and isn't asked, about his recent announcement that he has permanently retired from writing fiction. But he does offer some fascinating observations about how writers cannot operate from feelings of shame — which is different, he notes, from feeling shame as a person — and about the joys of writing about people who misbehave sexually.

He also discusses the point, around the time of The Counterlife, at which politics and history began to play a larger role in his work — sex and death, after all, can take you only so far.

Manera and Karel have shaped Philip Roth: Unmasked simply but carefully, keeping the number of talking heads — other than Roth's own — to a minimum. Roth's detractors may very well hate this documentary. There's no one to carp on-camera about his alleged misogyny, his preoccupation with the male ego and other assorted oldies but goodies.

Yet a Philip Roth documentary that doesn't trundle heavily down those tired old avenues is probably all the better for it. Interviewees include superstar novelist Jonathan Franzen and New Yorker staff writer Claudia Roth Pierpont, both of whom are great admirers of Roth's work. But the most persuasive and passionate of all is novelist Nicole Krauss.

"We don't go to literature for moral perfection," she says. "We go there for moral ambiguity, moral feeling, moral struggle."

Roth hands us nothing on a plate; it's the only way, maybe, to give us everything. (Recommended)

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.

When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.

Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.

In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.

Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")

You can now enjamb your tweets.

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has been ordered by U.S. District Judge Denise Cote to testify in the Justice Department's antitrust case over alleged price fixing. Last year, the DOJ filed a lawsuit accusing Apple and five major publishers — Penguin, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Macmillan – of conspiring to fix e-book prices. The publishers all chose to settle. The trial is scheduled to start in June.

When Middle C author William H. Gass was asked the question "What is something you always carry with you?" by The Daily Beast, he answered, "Grudges" in a rather crotchety interview Wednesday. Let's hope he doesn't read NPR contributor John Freeman's review of his latest book.

Claire Vaye Watkins beat out Junot Diaz for the Story Prize on Wednesday. Watkins is the author of Battleborn, a short story collection — and the daughter of Paul Watkins, of Manson Family fame.

In other prize news, the U.K.'s Folio Society will sponsor a literary award worth 40,000 pounds that is expected to compete with the Booker Prize. But, unlike the Booker, this prize will be open to Americans.

Alisa Sniderman, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, argues in favor of reading Vladimir Nabokov apolitically: "History does lurk in the wings of Nabokov's fiction, but he never gives it center stage." (Although he did once say, charmingly, in a Paris Review interview, "It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology and never written any novels at all.")

You can now enjamb your tweets.

Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church made history twice Wednesday, electing the first pope from the Southern Hemisphere and the first Jesuit.

In choosing 76-year-old Cardinal Jorge Maria Bergoglio of Argentina, now Pope Francis, the College of Cardinals signaled the growing importance of Latin America, Africa and Asia in the church's fortunes.

But they also affirmed their commitment to traditional church doctrine.

"Cardinal Bergoglio has been a staunch defender of orthodoxy," says the Rev. James Martin, a Jesuit and editor-at-large at America, a national Catholic magazine. "He is also someone very devoted to not only the poor, but to living simply."

That the new pope chose the name Francis, the first pontiff in church history to do so, appeared significant — revolutionary, even — to many church-watchers.

"He took it from St. Francis of Assisi — a saint who's hard not to like," says James O'Toole, author of The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America. "St. Francis had a radical commitment to the poor, and this might signal where he would like to put his emphasis."

Says Timothy Matovina, a theology professor at the University of Notre Dame: "Francis was a very humble saint. And that [Pope Francis] came out bowing, asking the people to bless him and pray over him was telling."

"His whole demeanor was humble, approachable — a servant-type leader," said Matovina, who directs the university's Institute for Latino Studies.

But how that demeanor, and his dedication to a simpler life — the new pope famously took public transportation back home in Buenos Aires — will translate to how he will direct the church, and especially the powerful Roman Curia ensconced in the Vatican, is not at all clear.

No one expects this new pope, older than expected, and conservative, to put forth new initiatives on celibacy or women's roles in the clergy.

But will he attempt to decentralize the church, shift some policymaking authority out of the Vatican, where in recent decades it has been consolidated, back to national bishop conferences or diocese or churches?

Will he encourage his bishops to be less involved in heated political debates, including same-sex marriage, and more focused on service and the poor?

The answer is elusive, and largely for reasons encapsulated by David O'Brien, professor emeritus at College of the Holy Cross and author of American Catholics and Social Reform.

"This is a statement about making a fresh start," O'Brien said. "Maybe the church will get back to the Vatican II sense of decentralization."

"But I don't know a lot about this fellow," he said.

The Global South Imperative

Pope Benedict XVI's resignation was only moments old when speculation took flight about whether Catholic leaders would make history and look outside Europe for a new pontiff.

David Gibson, who has covered the Vatican since the 1980s, told NPR that it was the Catholic Church's "Obama moment."

More than 28 percent of the world's 1.19 billion Catholics now reside in South America; and more than 15 percent live in Africa. Asians make up 11 percent of church members worldwide, but are the second-fastest growing demographic.

As the church becomes less Europe-centric and less concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere, choosing the 76-year-old cardinal from Argentina made sense strategically.

"I think they chose him for his personal attributes," says Martin, author of The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. "And I think it's clear they wanted someone from the Southern Hemisphere, where the center of gravity has shifted."

The region is also where Protestant Pentecostalism has been making significant inroads in traditional Catholic strongholds.

"It's a very significant challenge," Martin says. "But rather than looking at it as a threat, we should look at it as an opportunity — what can the Protestant Pentecostalists teach us about evangelism?"

Says O'Toole: "The shift toward Latin America from Europe is important, in terms of both energy and symbolism — that this is, indeed, an international institution."

Addressing Scandal, Preventing More

It's too early, and the new pope is too unknown to most, for any predictions to be made in how he will address the church's ongoing international sexual abuse crisis.

Peter Isely of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP, says he was struck by the name chosen by the new pope.

"St. Francis was the greatest reformer in the history of the church," he said. "I hope that the pope is signaling that he's going to follow that — protect children and bring accountability to the church."

Isely, assaulted by a Franciscan priest while at a boarding school, says he wants to see Pope Francis "decree zero tolerance for the sexual abuse of children worldwide, which is not the case today."

He notes that the places where the church is growing most rapidly, including in South America, are often places where there are fewer protections in place for children, and more secrecy surrounding abuse.

"Having a pope from South America could go either way," he said. "It could make it more difficult for victims to come forward and be seen as criticizing the church, or he could make a personal appeal and give permission to abuse victims to come forward, and for Catholics to embrace those victims."

A Bigger Voice For Laity

A victim of the growing centralization of power and decision-making in the Vatican has angered some church members who have seen their roles greatly diminished.

"What we have is a church structure appropriate for the Holy Roman Empire, for a medieval kingdom in Europe," says Donna B. Doucette, executive director of Voice of the Faithful, a group of Catholic lay activists.

"God," she said, "is perfectly happy in the 21st century."

Doucette and activists like her would like to see the new pope allow lay people more say in guiding the church, and more transparency in spending by church officials, including its bishops.

"Restore meaningful lay input, address the financial scandals, the sexual abuse cover-up and the very clear second-class status of women in the church," she said. "That's a huge prescription — we're asking for Superman."

But, she added, "It's the first day — everything is possible. In a year we'll know if it's the same old, same old."

Pope Francis is not a young man, and if he is to make a mark, he will have to move aggressively, church-watchers say.

He has already made history on a day that filled many Catholics with hope, and more.

"This fills me with joy and as much pride as a Jesuit is supposed to have," the Rev. Martin said. "It's a day of firsts."

"Pope Francis will not change the doctrine of the church," he said. "He will deepen it, and I imagine he will turn our attention more to the poor."

He's the richest man you've never heard of: Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish clothing chain Zara. He's a notorious recluse who is rumored to wear the same plain shirt every day, but his Zara empire has come to define the concept of fast fashion.

And now he's taken Warren Buffett's No. 3 spot on Forbes' billionaires list.

Ortega's rags-to-riches tale mirrors the fast growth of southern Europe in the past 30 years. But the difference in this story is that Zara shows no sign of crashing.

His Beginnings

Ortega built the world's biggest fashion company in a rainy, impoverished corner of northwest Spain — Galicia — where the 76-year-old has lived since he was a kid.

The son of a railway worker, Ortega went to work in a local shirt maker's shop at age 14 to help feed his family. Jose Martinez was Ortega's first colleague. He's 77 now and still works at that same shop called Gala.

Business

In Trendy World Of Fast Fashion, Styles Aren't Made To Last

Following up last month's news about reports that tie hackings of American defense contractors' websites to operations run — or at least encouraged — by the Chinese government, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday told the tale of a Shanghai man who used to blog about his work in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit.

If the stories from this blogger — whose family name is Wang, but who blogged as "Rocy Bird" — are true, the Times writes, the hacking life was "all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation."

According to the Times, its reporters "tracked down Wang and his blog through an email address that was listed on a published 2006 paper about hacking. ... [He] did not return several emails and instant messages requesting comment."

The security firm that reported about hacking last month tells the Times that Rocy Bird's posts from 2006-2009 "provided the most detailed first-person account known to date of life inside the hacking establishment" and that it's likely not much has changed in the four years since.

A few details from the blog, via the Times' report:

— Rocy Bird complained about being told to improve his English skills, and then being criticized for reading too many English-language magazines. "The boss doesn't understand," he wrote.

— At a school reunion, the hacker "felt ashamed to say hello" to old classmates because his pay was much less than theirs.

— His unhappiness showed through right from the start. " 'Fate has made me feel that I am imprisoned,' he wrote in his first entry on Sina.com. 'I want to escape.' "

Related posts:

— "A Chinese Army Outpost That's Tucked Into Modern Shanghai."

— "Who's Been Hacked By China? Better Question Might Be: Who Hasn't?"

A small herd of European bison will soon be released in Germany's most densely populated state, the first time in nearly three centuries that these bison — known as wisents — will roam freely in Western Europe.

The project is the brainchild of Prince Richard of Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg. He owns more than 30,000 acres, much of it covered in Norwegian spruce and beech trees in North Rhine-Westphalia.

For the 78-year-old logging magnate, the planned April release of the bull, five cows and two calves will fulfill a decade-old dream.

But the aristocrat's neighbors aren't all thrilled about his plan to release wisents, which have been living in an enclosure on his property for three years. They are slightly taller than their American cousins and weigh up to a ton. Questions remain about who will foot the bill if the European bison damage property or injure someone.

"We were skeptical because we weren't given enough information," says Helmut Dreisbach, a cattle farmer and vice chairman of the Farmers' Association of Siegen-Wittgenstein. "How will the animals react? Will they stay in a particular area or will they move onto working farmland?"

Enlarge image i

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eighth graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."

Following up last month's news about reports that tie hackings of American defense contractors' websites to operations run — or at least encouraged — by the Chinese government, the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday told the tale of a Shanghai man who used to blog about his work in a People's Liberation Army hacking unit.

If the stories from this blogger — whose family name is Wang, but who blogged as "Rocy Bird" — are true, the Times writes, the hacking life was "all about low pay, drudgery and social isolation."

According to the Times, its reporters "tracked down Wang and his blog through an email address that was listed on a published 2006 paper about hacking. ... [He] did not return several emails and instant messages requesting comment."

The security firm that reported about hacking last month tells the Times that Rocy Bird's posts from 2006-2009 "provided the most detailed first-person account known to date of life inside the hacking establishment" and that it's likely not much has changed in the four years since.

A few details from the blog, via the Times' report:

— Rocy Bird complained about being told to improve his English skills, and then being criticized for reading too many English-language magazines. "The boss doesn't understand," he wrote.

— At a school reunion, the hacker "felt ashamed to say hello" to old classmates because his pay was much less than theirs.

— His unhappiness showed through right from the start. " 'Fate has made me feel that I am imprisoned,' he wrote in his first entry on Sina.com. 'I want to escape.' "

Related posts:

— "A Chinese Army Outpost That's Tucked Into Modern Shanghai."

— "Who's Been Hacked By China? Better Question Might Be: Who Hasn't?"

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eighth graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."

Several years ago I gave a speech in which I mentioned that athletes tended to be the only college students who were awarded scholarships for what is an extracurricular activity.

Afterward, Myles Brand, the late president of the NCAA, told me I was wrong, that many music extracurricular scholarships were awarded at colleges.

Brand and I seldom agreed on much of anything, but I've always found him to be a gentleman. So, I expressed surprise at this claim.

Oh, no, Brand said, many colleges award music scholarships to members of the band who march during halftime at football games. I resisted the urge to quote John McEnroe: You can't be serious. I only replied, politely, that it seemed to me that those students, however hardworking they may be at high-stepping, were not primarily getting aid for their musical education, but for being an entertainment adjunct to the football team. Brand shook his head at me; we disagreed once again.

It turns out, though, that because there is also an overemphasis on football down a step, at the high-school level, that may well affect secondary school music programs throughout the country.

Lisa Chismire, the parent of a student in the Unionville-Chadds Ford District in Pennsylvania, discovered that it was district policy — as it is elsewhere — to force serious music students to attend band camp in the summer and then march in the band at football games. If music students who had no interest in the marching band did not go along and assist the football program, the young musicians would not be allowed to play in the concert band, the symphonic band, the jazz band or the orchestra.

Chismire, who is a retired lawyer, was appalled. She called this "extortion" and "institutional bullying" — coercing students in one discipline to serve as spear carriers for those in another.

In response to her charges of discrimination, there were protests that if music students who didn't want to march in the band were excused, then those who did would be disappointed because the band would be smaller and make less of an impression at halftimes. Chismire was called "threatening, aggressive, unkind and disrespectful" by one school board member.

But she obviously had the law on her side and was able, ultimately, to cause reform of the program in the whole school district. But, although the numbers aren't known, policies of this sort do exist in school districts throughout the country.

We all know that athletes, in high school and college alike, are awarded special privileges, but somehow it seems even more unfair that students who pursue other extracurricular talents, should, anywhere in America, be placed in a subsidiary position to their classmates who happen to play sports.

When she got out of college and moved to New York, Elizabeth Cline liked to shop at vintage-clothing stores. They were the kinds of places tucked away on side streets in Manhattan and Brooklyn, where a lot of hunting and a little luck might reward you with a great, inexpensive cocktail dress that no one else had.

Then she discovered the world of "fast fashion" — chains like Forever 21, H&M and Zara — and it redefined her whole notion of bargain shopping.

"The products are very, very cheap," says Cline, author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion. "The design is pretty attractive. And if you walk into the store, I think, for a lot of consumers, it's virtually impossible to walk out empty-handed."

“ You see some products and it's just garbage. It's just crap, and you sort of fold it up and you think, yeah, you're going to wear it Saturday night to your party — and then it's literally going to fall apart.

It's pilot season, that time of year when television networks create and test new shows with hopes of turning out the next big thing. But whatever new plots they come up with, it's safe to say that they will turn to the safety of a limited number of character archetypes: the lovable loser, the charming rogue, the desperate housewife.

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum would like to add one more character to that long, familiar list: the hummingbird. She writes that hummingbirds are "idealistic feminine dreamers whose personalities are irritants. They are not merely spunky but downright obsessive."

More On 'Homeland'

Television

Claire Danes: Playing Bipolar Is Serious Business

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are battling a bid by Amazon to claim new Internet domains such as ".book," ".author" and ".read." In complaints filed late last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the two groups call Amazon's concept "plainly anticompetitive" and "not in the public interest." Barnes & Noble also isn't happy about it.

Mindy Kaling is writing a follow-up to her 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Kaling, your cool big sister and the star of The Mindy Project, announced her plans last week to a crowd at a TV festival.

"Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own," writes Francine Prose in an essay about literary dreams for The New York Review of Books.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic languages, writes about the idea of the "female trickster" for The New Yorker: "Lady Gaga draws us out of our comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices. Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial characters. She may have the creativity of a trickster, but she is also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy's Blue Book is the weird and lovely story of a chance meeting of former con artist partners aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. And don't miss Kennedy's essay for NPR on Derek Raymond's crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open. She writes: "Derek Raymond, who died in 1994, has been described as the father of British noir. But he's far beyond noir. There probably isn't even a word for his kind of darkness."

The protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, has a rich imaginary inner life as the founder of the mysterious Inhumanity Museum.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which came out Monday, has generated an extraordinary amount of debate. NPR's Renee Montagne calls the book "something of a feminist call to arms." But others say Sandberg's view is too narrow — Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The Washington Post that "this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg's bottom line."

Although he's been a public figure for three decades, the Rev. Al Sharpton is more visible these days than ever, often in ways even he wouldn't have dreamed when he was leading protests on the streets of New York in the 1980s.

If you watched the inauguration ceremony for President Barack Obama, you probably saw the dais behind him filled with the usual lot of past presidents, members of Congress and so on. You also may have caught sight of a new, and improbable, addition: Sharpton.

His exclusive seating among America's top dignitaries was a first for the controversial civil rights leader, whose career has been a thorn in the side of many politicians.

Sharpton recently told NPR: "I've had worse inaugurations. I remember George [W.] Bush's [2001] inauguration; we were marching because we thought he stole the election."

As reported on NPR's Tell Me More, it's a turnabout that comes just after the 25th anniversary of the Tawana Brawley rape case, the alleged hoax in New York that made Sharpton perhaps the most racially polarizing figure in the nation for a time.

Since then, the outsider gradually has become the consummate insider.

Once considered by many elected officials to be political kryptonite, Sharpton, 58, now has the ear of a sitting president. Once fiercely combative with the news media, Sharpton now is a prominent part of it as host of both a nationally syndicated talk-radio show, Keepin' It Real, and the MSNBC nightly program PoliticsNation.

Perhaps just as unlikely, MSNBC says that after 15 months, PoliticsNation has the largest audience in the 6 p.m. hour in the cable network's history. In addition, the show ranked second behind Fox's programming in both total viewers and the coveted 25-to-54-year-old demographic that advertisers covet.

A Day In The Life Of Al Sharpton

It's not required, but it's almost surely going to happen:

The man chosen to be the next pope will choose a new name — one other than what he was born with.

So, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI. His predecessor, Pope John Paul II, was born Karol Jozef Wojtyla. And so on back through history.

How far back? That's one of the 5 things we'll try to explain.

1. Who started this tradition? The Kansas City Star reports in a story headlined "What's In A Name? A Lot If You're A Pope," that it apparently began with "Mercurius, named for the god Mercury," who in 533 changed his name to John II. "A pope named after a pagan god — that wasn't going to go over, PR-wise," Biagio Mazza, a church educator and historian in Kansas City, tells the Star.

John II set a precedent: Almost all popes since have chosen a name that honors a saint or a previous pope (or both).

Many are thought to have been sending some sort of message. Pope John Paul I, as CTV News reports, chose "a composite of the names of two previous popes, John and Paul, who had guided the church through the tumultuous Second Vatican Council (known as Vatican II) in the 1960s. Many consider it to be one of the most important — and controversial — periods in the church's history, as leaders attempted to modernize relations between the church and the secular world." The new (and short-lived) pope "wanted to show he was not going to deviate from their path and would be faithful to what they had done," William Portier, chair of Catholic theology at the University of Dayton, tells CTV.

2. When did a pope last choose not to change his name? That's a bit of a judgment call. The Clerical Whispers blog writes that "the last pope to use his baptismal name was Marcellus II in 1555." As the 2008 book Popes and the Tale of Their Names notes, "his birth name was Marcello Cervini degli Spannochi." So, Marcellus was really just a variation of Marcello.

3. Whose name has been "retired." St. Peter was the first pope and there hasn't been a Pope Peter since. He has "a unique and sacrosanct standing as a pope," as Popes and the Tale of Their Names puts it, and his followers have not wished to look as if they're comparing themselves to him.

4. Which name has been the most popular? John is the leader and may never be topped. Pope John XXIII, who died in 1963, was the most recent (if you include the two John Pauls, of course, you could argue that there have been 25). Tied at No. 2: Benedict and Gregory. Those names have each been used 16 (XVI) times.

5. What Names Are Still Waiting To Be Reused? St. Linus was the second pope, and there hasn't been another Linus since, as NewAdvent.org's list shows. And there are many others from the church's first 350 years or so that haven't seen their names reused — including St. Hyginus, St. Zephyrinus and St. Dionysius.

But Pope Lando (913-14) deserves a special mention. He appears to be the last pope with a name that was completely unique (though John Paul I also deserves a nod because he decided to add the "I" himself; no other pope, it seems, has declared himself to be a "first").

Since Lando's short time leading the church, of which not much is known, there hasn't been another Pope Lando.

Before we finish, we'll say this before someone else does: Lando does have one semi-famous namesake, of course, from the Star Wars movies.

Update at 3:30 p.m. ET. Leo Is The Betting Favorite:

The Irish online betting site Paddy Power does give odds on what name the next pope will choose. Right now, Leo is the 11/10 favorite. There have been 13 other Leos, so far.

The stage is now set for the opening act of one of the more spectacular and intriguing theatrical dramas on the planet: the election of a pope.

In Rome, TV camera crews have set up their positions on big platforms overlooking St. Peter's Square and the Vatican, where the secretive process will begin Tuesday.

Bookies are raking in bets, even though veteran Vatican watchers insist that no obvious front-runner has emerged from a wide field of possible candidates to replace Benedict XVI, the first pope to resign in nearly 600 years.

After a tsunami of scandals about clerical sex abuse and cover-ups, Vatican mismanagement and corruption — and more besides — this is the Roman Catholic Church's chance to generate some positive headlines as attention focuses on the mysterious workings of what's known as the conclave.

Conclave — from the Latin for "with a key" — is a historic term that refers to the fact that the cardinals charged with the task of electing a new leader of the world's 1.2 billion Catholics will do so locked within the Vatican.

Most of the 115 "cardinal electors" will be housed in two-room suites in a guesthouse run by nuns. The accommodation is, by all accounts, modest — three- rather than five-star.

On hand is a team of cooks, doctors (the average age of this group of cardinals is 72), priests (to take confession) and technicians to enforce a communications blackout, both in the guesthouse and the Sistine Chapel, where the balloting takes place. The Vatican is determined to prevent any outside interference — or news leaking out from a tweeting cleric.

"The phone doesn't work, the TV doesn't work. They have no e-mail, they have no Internet, they have no cellphones," says Father Thomas J. Reese of the National Catholic Reporter, who is an authority on the workings of the conclave.

On Tuesday morning, the "cardinal electors" will celebrate Mass in St. Peter's Basilica. Then, mid-afternoon, they walk into the Sistine Chapel in procession while singing prayers, and take their places.

Within the chapel, the scene must surely be stunning — a throng of cardinals, wearing blood-red robes, sashes and crucifixes beneath the pulsating blue, silver and gold hues of the Renaissance frescoes that adorn the Sistine's vaulted ceiling.

Mayor Mike and his public health edicts are having a rough ride.

On Monday, a state judge in Manhattan struck down New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's rule capping soda sizes. And lawmakers in Mississippi are taking the backlash against government regulation on food marketing one step further.

A bill now on the governor's desk would bar counties and towns from enacting rules that require calorie counts to be posted, that cap portion sizes, or that keep toys out of kids' meals. "The Anti-Bloomberg Bill" garnered wide bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature in a state where one in three adults is obese, the highest rate in the nation.

The bill is expected to be signed by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. It was the subject of intense lobbying by groups including the restaurant association, the small business and beverage group, and the chicken farmers' lobby.

Mike Cashion, executive director the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, says the bill is a direct reaction to Bloomberg-style government intervention in public health.

"If you look at how menus have changed, whether it be in fast food or family dining, you are seeing more and more healthy options," Cashion says. "Not because of legislative mandates or regulatory mandates, but because of consumer demand. Our industry has always been one to respond to the marketplace."

Rep. Gregory Holloway, a Democrat, ushered the popular bill through the state House. He says the goal is to create consistency in nutrition laws across the state. "We don't want local municipalities experimenting with labeling of foods and any organic agenda. We want that authority to rest with the legislature," Holloway says.

But the measure does have detractors in Mississippi: local politicians who say it steps on an ideal Mississippians hold dear — the ability to govern themselves.

Chip Johnson, mayor of Hernando, Miss., near the Tennessee border, is no fan of a soda ban, but he doesn't like the anti-Bloomberg bill, either.

Hernando has built biking and walking paths all over town, and has received national attention for the work. Johnson bristles at the legislature's efforts to dictate what he can do in pursuit of a healthier community, including restricting the ability to put nutritional information on menus.

"You know what? If little Alligator, Miss., wanted to do that, that's up to the people that live there. It is not up to the state to tell the people at the local level what to do," Johnson says. "They're just using this to mask what the bill is really about, which is about taking away home rule."

Johnson says he resents that the measure even puts some restrictions on a town's ability to zone where a restaurant can go.

Still, the bill passed the state Senate, 50-1, and the state House, 92-26.

This piece is part of a partnership of NPR, Mississippi Public Broadcasting, and Kaiser Health News.

Like the famous cherry blossoms forecast to bloom in a few weeks, this time of year is also marked by the arrival of competing, partisan federal budget proposals that political foes immediately declare dead-on-arrival, though not so dead that they can't be used as campaign fodder.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) got the process underway Tuesday by introducing the House Republican budget for the coming fiscal year, DOA because it has no chance of getting through the Democratic Senate or to be signed by President Obama.

Ryan, the GOP's nominee for vice president, did this last year, of course. The big difference between his new plan and his old one is that this year's would balance federal spending and revenues in 10 years, not nearly three decades. In fact in 2023, the new proposal runs a small surplus. But other than that it's almost an exact repeat of the budget from last year, right down to the title - "The Path to Prosperity."

How is it possible that this year's proposal would lead to a surplus by 2023 when the last one didn't reach balance until 2040? It has $600 billion dollars in tax increases.

No, Ryan hasn't done a "Jedi mind meld" with the president, as Obama might put it. He's just banking the new revenue from the fiscal cliff deal, which allowed tax rates to rise on the wealthiest Americans.

But many features that made the previous year's GOP budget dead on arrival in the eyes of Democrats are still there.

They include repealing Obamacare (even though Ryan counts on $716 billion for deficit reduction from that) and changing Medicare for future retirees so they would buy health insurance in the private market with "premium support" from the government instead of the current system in which every senior is automatically enrolled in a single-payer insurance system.

The Medicare proposal, you may recall, is the one Democrats successfully attacked during the 2012 campaign by saying Ryan wanted to "end Medicare as we know it." Those aspects remain objectionable and we can expect to see Democrats go after Medicare changes again when everyone returns to the campaign trail in 2014.

On Wednesday, the Democrats in control of the Senate are scheduled to release their own proposal, which will, in turn, be DOA. That's because it will include what Democrats call a "balanced" mix of spending cuts and tax increases, about $975 billion in cuts (some of which Republicans deride as budget gimmicks) and $975 billion from closing tax loopholes. Republicans adamantly oppose raising taxes.

Then, in April, the president is expected to unveil his own budget, nine weeks later than the February deadline. It hardly matters, however, since that budget will be DOA, too. The president almost certainly will offer a budget that, like the Senate Democrats' plan, includes tax increases along with spending cuts.

But Washington is one of the few places where hope springs eternal, that DOA proposals will breathe new life into partisan causes. In this case, Ryan said, it's the starting point for negotiations and a flag planted in the ground:

"This is our offer. This is our vision. And what you do is you actually show the country what you believe in."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eight graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers are battling a bid by Amazon to claim new Internet domains such as ".book," ".author" and ".read." In complaints filed late last week to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the two groups call Amazon's concept "plainly anticompetitive" and "not in the public interest." Barnes & Noble also isn't happy about it.

Mindy Kaling is writing a follow-up to her 2012 book Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). Kaling, your cool big sister and the star of The Mindy Project, announced her plans last week to a crowd at a TV festival.

"Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own," writes Francine Prose in an essay about literary dreams for The New York Review of Books.

Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of Germanic languages, writes about the idea of the "female trickster" for The New Yorker: "Lady Gaga draws us out of our comfort zones, crosses boundaries, gets snared in her own devices. Shamelessly exploitative and exploratory, she reminds us that every culture requires a space for the disruptive energy of antisocial characters. She may have the creativity of a trickster, but she is also Sleeping Beauty and menacing monster, all rolled into one."

The Best Books Coming Out This Week:

Scottish novelist A. L. Kennedy's Blue Book is the weird and lovely story of a chance meeting of former con artist partners aboard a trans-Atlantic cruise. And don't miss Kennedy's essay for NPR on Derek Raymond's crime novel He Died With His Eyes Open. She writes: "Derek Raymond, who died in 1994, has been described as the father of British noir. But he's far beyond noir. There probably isn't even a word for his kind of darkness."

The protagonist of William H. Gass' long-awaited Middle C, Joseph Skizzen, has a rich imaginary inner life as the founder of the mysterious Inhumanity Museum.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead, which came out Monday, has generated an extraordinary amount of debate. NPR's Renee Montagne calls the book "something of a feminist call to arms." But others say Sandberg's view is too narrow — Melissa Gira Grant wrote in The Washington Post that "this is simply the elite leading the slightly-less-elite, for the sake of Sandberg's bottom line."

It's pilot season, that time of year when television networks create and test new shows with hopes of turning out the next big thing. But whatever new plots they come up with, it's safe to say that they will turn to the safety of a limited number of character archetypes: the lovable loser, the charming rogue, the desperate housewife.

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum would like to add one more character to that long, familiar list: the hummingbird. She writes that hummingbirds are "idealistic feminine dreamers whose personalities are irritants. They are not merely spunky but downright obsessive."

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Claire Danes: Playing Bipolar Is Serious Business

The daily lowdown on books, publishing, and the occasional author behaving badly.

An American history textbook used by some schools in Louisiana's voucher system has caused a bit of a stir over passages describing 1960s counterculture. America: Land I Love teaches eight graders that during the '60s, "Many young people turned to drugs and immoral lifestyles; these youth became known as hippies. They went without bathing, wore dirty, ragged, unconventional clothing, and deliberately broke all codes of politeness or manners... Many of the rock musicians they followed belonged to Eastern religious cults or practiced Satan worship." This is only the latest outcry over textbooks used in Louisiana voucher schools. Other textbooks claim that "[t]he majority of slave holders treated their slaves well" and "[d]inosaurs and humans were definitely on the earth at the same time and may have even lived side by side within the past few thousand years."

"I don't think I'm particularly good at research. For better or worse, I write about myself," says Sarah Manguso, author of The Guardians, in an interview with Guernica.

Former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is writing a book called A Happy Holiday IS a Merry Christmas, according to The Associated Press. In a statement, Palin says, "This will be a fun, festive, thought provoking book, which will encourage all to see what is possible when we unite in defense of our faith and ignore the politically correct Scrooges who would rather take Christ out of Christmas." The book is slated to come out in November. There's still no word on the Palin family's fitness book we were promised last year.

In n+1, Rachel Aviv writes about Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, who used The Iliad and The Odyssey to trace the origins of human consciousness: "Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness — 'a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can' — as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist."

The tall and imposing Nicolas Maduro stepped forward last week to be sworn in as Venezuela's interim leader following the death of President Hugo Chavez.

Before the country's packed congressional hall, he swore to complete Chavez's dream to transform the OPEC power into a socialist state, allied with Cuba and decidedly opposed to capitalism and U.S. interests in Latin America.

It's a dream Maduro says will not die, even with the death of El Comandante. Maduro told the country that he wasn't taking the oath because of ambition, vanity or because he comes from the Venezuelan elite.

The lawmakers and Chavista rank and file responded with cries of, "With Chavez and Maduro, the people are safe."

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For Baby Boomers, Lessons In Financial Basics

Risa Hirai is a Japanese artist who paints detailed images of bonsai trees and Japanese meals. But instead of using paint on a canvas, she works with icing on a cookie.

The 23-year-old is a senior at Tama Art University in Tokyo whose mouthwatering works will be exhibited at Gallery Tokyo Humanite all this week. Assistant director Maie Tsukuda tells The Salt it's the gallery's first cookie exhibit and notes that it's not an ordinary medium for artists.

"I started making these cookies as presents to my friends," Hirai told The Salt via email (Tsukuda helped translate). "I had painted in oils until then, but I became so into making cookies and began to think that this could be a form of expression as art."

Hirai paints various things like animals, flowers and jewelry, but because she's primarily interested in juxtaposing traditional Japanese motifs against cookies, a very Western canvas, her works often feature bonsai, sushi, Daruma dolls and a one-pot meal called sukiyaki.

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Militants in Nigeria have killed seven hostages, including three Westerners, in an act the British foreign secretary called "pure, cold-blooded murder."

The seven hostages — four Lebanese and one British, one Greek and one Italian citizen – worked for the Setrapo construction company. They were kidnapped Feb 16 from Jama'are, a town about 125 miles north of Bauchi, the capital of Bauchi state. Ansaru, a group that's an offshoot of Boko Haram, the militant Islamist movement, claimed responsibility for the killings.

Here's more from The Associated Press:

"Nigeria's police, military, domestic spy service and presidency remained silent over the killings of the construction company workers, kidnapped Feb. 16 from northern Bauchi state. The government's silence only led to more questions about the nation's continued inability to halt attacks that have seen hundreds killed in shootings, church bombings and an attack on the United Nations."

In the exiled Tibetan calendar, March 10 is an emotive day, the anniversary of a failed uprising in 1959. It's marked by large protests by the exiled Tibetan community overseas, though this year Nepalese police reportedly arrested 18 Tibetans for "anti-China activities." This comes as the number of self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule has already surged past a hundred.

Within China itself, exiled groups reported five Tibetans were arrested for staging a protest in Ganzi, a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province, while in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, police are reportedly launching a crackdown on personal cellphones.

State-sponsored repression seems entrenched in everyday life for Tibetans. For those who have any doubts, look no further than an exhibit in the National Museum of China — reportedly the world's biggest museum — flanking Tiananmen Square. It features a multimedia exhibit about the world's highest train ride from Qinghai province to Lhasa that allows visitors to sit in train seats and browse through photos showing everyday life in Tibet.

One of those pictures, under the heading "National Customs," shows the Nagqu horse festival in northern Tibet.

The foreground shows the horse race, but the detail in the background is telling: dozens of paramilitary police, armed with anti-riot shields and helmets, are standing guard, watching the race. Behind the crowds, more police are stationed in the stands, spaced out at regular intervals, some facing away from the race and looking into the distance for any sign of approaching trouble.

It's telling that such a state of affairs is considered so ordinary that it should slip into the county's showpiece museum.

On the other side of Tiananmen Square, the country's legislators are holding their annual meeting in the Great Hall of the People. The latest budget allows spending on domestic security of 769.1 billion yuan ($123 billion), which is more than the army's budget of 740 billion yuan ($118 billion). It's the third consecutive year that the domestic security budget has outpaced military spending.

China's ballooning security apparatus needs money to ensure domestic stability, by whatever means. And the "security maintenance" machine was openly visible outside the museum, on Tiananmen Square, where plainclothes policemen were marching along the outskirts of the square in formation in full view of the world.

Anyone still looking for Dr. Ben Carson to apologize for criticizing President Obama's policies to his face at the recent National Prayer Breakfast, won't hear one in his conversation with host Michel Martin's of NPR's Tell Me More.

Carson, the famous Johns Hopkins pediatric neurosurgeon, made a large splash last month with a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he criticized progressive taxation and President Obama's health care overhaul as the president sat just feet away.

Michel asked the physician what he thought of the reaction of conservative columnist Cal Thomas, a longtime prayer breakfast attendee, who called the speech's political nature inappropriate for an event with a 61-year tradition of non-partisanship. Thomas recommended that Carson apologize to Obama. When Michel asked Carson if he agreed, he said:

"I don't think so at all. In fact, I don't believe that expressing your opinion, regardless of who's there, is being rude. And it's a shame that we've reached a level in our country where we think that you don't have the right to put your opinion out there."

In the exiled Tibetan calendar, March 10 is an emotive day, the anniversary of a failed uprising in 1959. It's marked by large protests by the exiled Tibetan community overseas, though this year Nepalese police reportedly arrested 18 Tibetans for "anti-China activities." This comes as the number of self-immolations by Tibetans protesting Chinese rule has already surged past a hundred.

Within China itself, exiled groups reported five Tibetans were arrested for staging a protest in Ganzi, a Tibetan autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province, while in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, police are reportedly launching a crackdown on personal cellphones.

State-sponsored repression seems entrenched in everyday life for Tibetans. For those who have any doubts, look no further than an exhibit in the National Museum of China — reportedly the world's biggest museum — flanking Tiananmen Square. It features a multimedia exhibit about the world's highest train ride from Qinghai province to Lhasa that allows visitors to sit in train seats and browse through photos showing everyday life in Tibet.

One of those pictures, under the heading "National Customs," shows the Nagqu horse festival in northern Tibet.

The foreground shows the horse race, but the detail in the background is telling: dozens of paramilitary police, armed with anti-riot shields and helmets, are standing guard, watching the race. Behind the crowds, more police are stationed in the stands, spaced out at regular intervals, some facing away from the race and looking into the distance for any sign of approaching trouble.

It's telling that such a state of affairs is considered so ordinary that it should slip into the county's showpiece museum.

On the other side of Tiananmen Square, the country's legislators are holding their annual meeting in the Great Hall of the People. The latest budget allows spending on domestic security of 769.1 billion yuan ($123 billion), which is more than the army's budget of 740 billion yuan ($118 billion). It's the third consecutive year that the domestic security budget has outpaced military spending.

China's ballooning security apparatus needs money to ensure domestic stability, by whatever means. And the "security maintenance" machine was openly visible outside the museum, on Tiananmen Square, where plainclothes policemen were marching along the outskirts of the square in formation in full view of the world.

Contrary to what you read, everything politicians say and do don't necessarily always have to be only about 2016. Sometimes, really and truly, presidential calculations are not part of the conversation.

But regarding the coverage of Jeb Bush in the past week, it's hard to think anything else. Bush, of course, is the son and brother of former presidents. He has been urged to run for president since 2008, and the drumbeat for 2016 is getting louder ... especially since he helped it along by saying he is not ruling it out. With a Republican Party still trying to find its way after a second consecutive presidential defeat — and having lost the popular vote five of the last six times — what Bush says matters. Of course, whatever utterances he makes are always described as being part of White House strategic planning. Sometimes such conclusions are silly. This time they may make sense.

The former two-term governor of Florida has not run for office since 2002, and has up to now refused to get caught up in public presidential speculation. Widely acknowledged as a power behind the scenes, he is seen as politically savvy and astute. It's long been thought that had he won his 1994 gubernatorial campaign against Lawton Chiles in Florida, it would have been Jeb — not brother George W. — whom the GOP turned to in 2000. What he says carries great weight, and when he criticized his party last year for its approach to overhauling the nation's immigration laws, people sat up and paid attention. You're not going to win over the hearts of Latino voters, Bush said over and over, by talking about self-deportation and blocking paths to citizenship for those who are here illegally.

But in his new book, Immigration Wars: Forging an American Solution (co-authored with Clint Bolick), Bush is no longer focusing on a path to citizenship. Let's talk instead about residency rights. "A grant of citizenship," Bush now says, "is an undeserving reward for conduct we cannot afford to encourage." Pay a fee, he says of those 11 million people here illegally. Pay back taxes. Do community service. Learn English. But the end would be residency, not citizenship. For many, however, the headline was about 2016.

There has been some confusion about what Bush meant and whether he was retreating from his previous statements. But that was drowned out by White House speculation.

Most took the tone of the Washington Post's Peter Wallsten and David Nakamura, who write that the book "puts him more in line with his party's base — the kind of thing a potential presidential contender would be mindful of."

Personally, I think Politico's Alexander Burns has it right when he wrote that this "may have less to do with electoral maneuvering than with Bush's disdain for what he views as the strictures of political debate." But if it began with the theory that Bush was dipping his toe into the 2016 waters, it ended up with a consensus that he stubbed that toe.

Under the header, "Jeb Bush's Poorly Times Flip-Flop," National Journal's Beth Reinhard said Bush is "denting his own reputation as a bold policymaker," all of which "comes down to a colossal political miscalculation":

"Bush's revamped position on citizenship looks like the maneuvering of a potential presidential candidate who wants to outflank [Marco] Rubio and appease the conservative, anti-amnesty contingent that dominates GOP primaries."

Risa Hirai is a Japanese artist who paints detailed images of bonsai trees and Japanese meals. But instead of using paint on a canvas, she works with icing on a cookie.

The 23-year-old is a senior at Tama Art University in Tokyo, whose mouthwatering works will be exhibited at Gallery Tokyo Humanite all this week. Assistant director Maie Tsukuda tells The Salt it's the gallery's first cookie exhibit and notes that it's not an ordinary medium for artists.

"I started making these cookies as presents to my friends," Hirai told The Salt via email (Tsukuda helped translate). "I had painted in oils until then, but I became so into making cookies and began to think that this could be a form of expression as art."

Hirai paints various things like animals, flowers and jewelry, but because she's especially interested in juxtaposing "Japanese style" motifs on a Western material (cookies), many bonsai, sushi, Daruma dolls and a one-pot meal called sukiyaki.

Enlarge image i

On unanticipated effects on the health of genetically modified animals

"This work, by definition, is experimental, and no matter how well you think it out you never know quite what the resulting animal might be like, what its health might be like. There's a pretty good example of that from a few decades ago. It's called the Beltsville Pig, and scientists were trying to create a pig that was leaner and that grew faster and that required less feed. (The idea was to raise these pigs for pork.) So their solution was to put the Human Growth Hormone gene in all these pigs and, in some ways, it worked. The pigs did grow faster. They did require less feed.

"But, from an animal welfare perspective, it was disastrous and I don't think scientists really saw it coming. The pigs had ... basically every medical problem you can have: metabolic disorders, arthritis, eye problems. They were just miserable. And so that's a real concern but ... not all modifications will be bad for animal welfare. As it happens, these goats [with genetically modified milk] have elevated levels of an anti-biotic compound in their milk and early studies from the scientists that created them indicated that the goats are actually healthier than other goats because their milk essentially protects them from udder infections that can be common in farm animals. So it can really go both ways."

On the prospect of raising animals for their organs

"Scientists used to focus on the potential for transplanting ape organs into humans. The idea was that apes were very similar to us so that should work, but that idea has sort of become taboo, especially as we learn more about how cognitively sophisticated apes are. So, scientists are now really focused on pigs, largely because their organs are about the same size as human organs and there are already some very successful procedures being done. It's somewhat common now to receive a valve from a pig heart in certain heart operations. But scientists really want to be able to transplant whole organs, not just a heart valve from a pig but, say, a whole pig heart into humans. There's a huge shortage of organ donors worldwide, so scientists just imagine that if you could have these pig farms that are just growing organs constantly it might save a lot of lives. The problem is ... rejection. It just shows the potential of if we can re-engineer an animal's body, we could potentially engineer it so that it creates these perfect replacement parts for humans."

“ Emotionally and instinctively there's something that seems very distasteful about engineering animals only so we can take them apart and make our own lives better but, as soon as I have that thought, I think about the fact that I'm not a vegetarian. So, logically, it seems more defensible to me to have pig farms for organ transplants than it does to have pig farms for pork.

I've always felt it's no coincidence that some basketball powerhouses — let us say, off the top of my head, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas and Indiana — get a few better players because those hoops museums don't do very well with football.

I mean, if I were a big-deal high school recruit, I might very well say to myself, "You know, I'd rather be a Hoosier or a Wildcat or a Jayhawk than I would go someplace where I'm just gonna be a lounge act for the glamorous Mr. Touchdowns."

No, I'm not suggesting that cagey old Coach K whispers to prospects, "Hey, be a Dookie, Son, and get all the glory, 'cause our football team is dog meat." But, year in and year out, there must be just enough public relations-savvy blue-chippers who realize they've got a better chance of being a hero at a place where the football players are regularly unpopular losers.

And as this spirit moves us, so too is a powerful Roman Catholic leadership group stepping forward, heading in a bold new direction. Of course, as Dick Vitale might say, "I'm not talking about the Vatican, babee." No, this is the so-called "Catholic Seven" — and if that gives off a hint of martyrdom, well, just so.

The seven are colleges: DePaul, Georgetown, Marquette, Providence, St. John's, Seton Hall, Villanova — who, you see, have been discriminated against. That's because they're the outcast members of the Big East Conference who do not play big-time football.

When the Big East was created, it was absolutely basketball first, but the league was seduced by football money, and basketball atrophied. Now the Catholic Seven want to get out of the Big (football) East and once again make basketball the one blessed athletic faith.

This new league will probably expand, too, even adding Butler, which would be the token heathen member — proving that while there is only one true path to salvation, anybody can find a way into the NCAA tournament.

This development is a lovely loop back to a time when Roman Catholic schools were pre-eminent in the sport. So many, like the Catholic Seven, had started in urban areas to serve the immigrant faithful, but could not afford to maintain football teams as that sport became too expensive. So, they concentrated on basketball. Seventeen different Catholic colleges have made the Final Four, but only three since the 1980s.

But now, never mind the Catholic Seven. There is white smoke rising over the polls, for little Jesuit Gonzaga University, with less than 5,000 undergraduates, is the new No. 1 in all of college basketball.

Maybe more of those blue-chip high school players will even skip over colleges with merely bad big-time football teams and go star for colleges with no big-time football teams. May the saints be praised.