Most Recent Posts

A recent news item out of Minnesota caught our eye: "Bulletproof Whiteboards Unveiled at Rocori Schools."

Bulletproof what? Where?

That would be whiteboards, at the small central Minnesota Rocori School District, which will spend upward of $25,000 for the protective devices produced by a company better known for its military armor products.

"The timing was right," Rocori school board Chairwoman Nadine Schnettler tells us. "The company is making these in response to the Newtown shooting, and has been making similar products for our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan."

The $300, 18-by-20-inch whiteboards, produced by Maryland-based Hardwire LLC, "will be an additional layer of protection" for students and teachers, she says.

It's not just the conversation about guns and school safety that's changed since Adam Lanza gunned down 20 students and six adult staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., in December. It's also the plethora of products, including training programs that in some instances advocate fighting back, that are being marketed to school districts that are typically cash-strapped but desperate to prove they're doing something to provide better security.

Bulletproof whiteboards and clipboards. Bulletproof wall panels. Bulletproof backpack inserts. Bullet "resistant" window film. Specialized locks. Training that turns the emergency lockdown, "shelter in place" response on its head.

While proponents of the school safety items and training say their products provide more than just a psychological fix, critics say they need a lot more persuading.

"After every high-profile school shooting, we have an explosion of gadgets, gurus and charlatans," says school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, who is openly disdainful of the bulletproof items, but more so of training programs that advocate confrontation. "Corporations see dollar signs," he says, "and believe that schools have huge budgets to buy new products and services."

But school budgets are far tighter now than in recent memory, he says, with precious little to spend for whiteboards or training.

"Federal and state school safety grants have been hacked at, if not eliminated," Trump says. "The pool of dollars that many vendors envision doesn't really exist."

His unvarnished take: "The vendors may be opportunistic, but the people on the purchasing end aren't thinking it through, either."

A post-Newtown measure that will be considered by the U.S. Senate would authorize $40 million in grants that must be matched by local school systems for improving security with measures including lights, locks and surveillance equipment, as well as for security training for teachers and administrators.

The U.S. Education Department is also developing an emergency guide for schools, and the Department of Homeland Security is writing a similar one on securing school buildings. The Education Department's Readiness and Emergency Management for Schools grant program has been a victim of budget cuts, unfunded since 2011.

The Minnesota Sale

When Hardwire LLC, traditionally a manufacturer of armor and shields for the military and law enforcement, wanted some attention for its new bulletproof school products, it's not surprising it zeroed in on Rocori.

A decade ago at Rocori High School in Cold Spring, Minn., 15-year-old John Jason McLaughlin used a .22-caliber handgun to kill two fellow students.

And Hardwire already had a working relationship with a local company, Cold Spring Granite, which provides material that the armor company uses in its products for bridge and building infrastructure protection.

The town's police chief made the whiteboard pitch to the school board, says Schnettler. And members were pressed to act quickly, she says, to take advantage of a special offer: The granite company would donate 75 whiteboards to the district's public and parochial schools if the board agreed to match the purchase.

"It wasn't a unanimous vote," Schnettler says, "primarily because Hardwire had a bit of a sense of urgency. They wanted Rocori to be the first district to have these, and if we didn't take the offer, they were going to move on."

Enlarge image i

She says the problem has grown dramatically in the wake of global trade agreements, starting with NAFTA in 1994. Going back to the 1950s and '60s, nearly 100 percent of clothing in the U.S. was produced domestically. As recently as 1990, that statistic was 50 percent. It is now 2 percent.

Cline does, however, see parallels between the fashion industry and the food industry and these make her hopeful for the future.

"We're having conversations about clothing that people were having about food 15 years ago," she says, adding that given the enormous growth of the locavore movement in that period, that's good news.

The stock market continues its winning streak: The Dow Jones hit another milestone today, tapping 15,000 for the first time, but closing just shy of the milestone.

This, of course, follows good news about the job market released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

All of this got The Wall Street Journal thinking: just how long does it take the Dow to climb 1,000 points. They explain:

"The answers vary, but the latest stretch from when the blue-chip average initially climbed over 14000 to its current level is one of the longest on record, underscoring the severe drought and subsequent comeback stocks have ridden over the past decade.

"The answers vary, but the latest stretch from when the blue-chip average initially climbed over 14000 to its current level is one of the longest on record, underscoring the severe drought and subsequent comeback stocks have ridden over the past decade."

The trial in Munich of an alleged neo-Nazi woman accused as an accomplice in a string of murders of mostly ethnic Turks is, as The Associated Press writes, "forcing Germans to confront painful truths about racism and the broader treatment of immigrants in society."

Last month, NPR's Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reported on the impending trial of Beate Zschaepe, 38, set to begin Monday after being delayed last month. Zschaepe is charged with complicity in the murders of eight Turks, a Greek and a policewoman between 2000 and 2007.

Zschaepe is the sole survivor of the group blamed for the killings — the self-styled National Socialist Underground. Four men alleged to have helped the killers in various ways will also be tried, according to The AP. She is also accused of involvement in at least two bombings and 15 bank robberies carried out by her accomplices Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Boenhardt, who died in an apparent murder-suicide two years ago, the news agency says.

As Soraya reported at the time:

"For years, German authorities failed to see a link between the crimes, even though the same gun was used in all of the shootings. They also rejected any link to right-wing extremism.

German authorities instead blamed the victims, falsely accusing the non-German ones of ties to criminal and drug gangs. Police searched at least one home of a victim's family with drug-sniffing dogs."

While ideological gridlock continues to immobilize Capitol Hill, another of Washington's institutions is morphing behind the scenes.

The lobbying industry is becoming more secretive — reversing a trend that dates back to the 1990s. And campaign money now looms ever larger as a critical element in the persuasion business.

Ever since Congress strengthened the lobbying disclosure laws in 1995, most lobbyists have routinely registered and filed their quarterly disclosures of clients, issues and fees. But in the past few years, lobbyists by the hundreds have been rethinking that whole thing.

"It's largely a matter of choice that each of us makes, as to whether we comply with the law or not," says Tony Podesta, one of Washington's top lobbyists. He says whether you have to register depends on how much lobbying you do for each client.

"The line is 20 percent of your time being spent in preparation for or in contacting government officials," he says.

But lobbying these days isn't just trips to Capitol Hill. There's strategic planning, public relations, grassroots lobbying, TV ads — none of which needs to be revealed.

"I could become an unregistered lobbyist with the flick of a pen," Podesta says, but he thinks registration and disclosure are good — even if they open him up to certain indignities.

The big one: the Obama administration's open contempt for lobbyists. "If there's a registered lobbyist who has RSVP'd to an event, they call him and tell him not to come," Podesta says.

Has that ever happened to him? "Last week," Podesta says, laughing.

But insults from politicians are only one reason for lobbyists to stop disclosing.

Wright Andrews, a lawyer-lobbyist on banking and finance legislation, says he's been lobbying for 40 years. And the trend in the past few years goes in one direction — "to move many things more into the shadows as far as lobbying itself goes."

The result? "Many people are not registering, in my view, when they should be registering," he says.

And that could be one reason that reported lobbying revenues have actually started dropping. Some other reasons: the recession and the fact that Congress just isn't moving that much legislation.

Andrews and others interviewed for this story point to a second big change in lobbying.

As Andrews says: "Contributions are having, in many cases, a disproportionate and, I think, improper influence."

Lobbyists are expected to do fundraising for an incumbent's campaign. And now there's even bigger money involved. SuperPACs — those groups that collect unlimited and corporate contributions — are becoming tools for lobbying.

A superPAC funded by the National Association of Realtors tried to help Republican Rep. Judy Biggert hang on to her Illinois district last fall. It wasn't successful, but Scott Reiter, the Realtors' vice president for political programs, says the superPAC is here to stay.

"Looks like this is the new rules of the game," he says. "So, you know, Washington always adapts to whatever the rules are, to keep trying to have their voice heard."

Tom Susman, a lobbyist for the American Bar Association who also works on lobbying ethics issues, says lobbyists are in a bind.

They are dealing with a new breed of lawmakers — "members of Congress who, you know, spend all of their time worrying about re-election and raising money." And he says that when members of Congress start getting their own superPACs, "that's really when lobbyists are going to wake up and find the world has changed because the professional lobbyist will have to be a money person."

That wakeup call could come in time for the 2014 midterm elections.

Greetings from Tim Buckley

Director: Daniel Algrant

Genre: Drama

Running Time: 99 minutes

Not rated.

With: Penn Badgley, Imogen Poots, Ben Rosenfeld, William Sadler, Norbert Leo Butz, Kate Nash.

The late Jimmy Savile is not the only U.K. TV personality whose name has emerged in a sexual abuse investigation. A wide-ranging British inquiry has revealed many other household names who are suspected of committing sexual offenses decades ago.

The latest name: BBC broadcaster Stuart Hall, who on Thursday admitted to 14 charges of indecently assaulting girls.

The BBC reports:

"The 83-year-old of Wilmslow, Cheshire, pleaded guilty at Preston Crown Court to the offences, involving 13 victims, which occurred between 1967 and 1985.

"The ex-host of the BBC game show It's a Knockout ... was bailed and is due to be sentenced on 17 June.

"His lawyer said he apologised to his victims and was 'all too aware that his disgrace is complete.'

"Three charges of indecent assault and one of rape will lie on the court file.

"Hall was working as a football reporter on BBC Radio 5 Live and wrote a weekly sport column for the Radio Times magazine until his arrest."

The government's employment report for April comes out Friday. It's an important measure of the economy's health and the advance signals have been mixed. One report this week showed layoffs falling to a five-year low, but another suggests disappointing jobs creation.

At least one sector is providing some positive news for the job market: housing.

It was only a year or so ago that housing was a big drag on the economy, and the main reason for the disappointing recovery. But that's changed. Jim O'Sullivan, chief U.S. economist at High Frequency Economics, says right now housing is a big positive.

"There are pluses and minuses out there, and it's definitely a plus right now," he says. "I think within the economy, it's probably the strongest part of the economy in terms of growth right now."

Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors, says the housing recovery is now responsible for about one-third of the economy's growth and lots of jobs.

"Over the past year, I would say it's probably added about 300,000 jobs from the housing sector improvement," Yun says.

'An Amazing Year'

Some of those jobs were added at Synergy Design and Construction in Reston, Va.

Mina Fies, the company's chief executive officer, says 2012 "was just an amazing year for us: We grew about 40 percent in revenues. We added three people, more toward the end of 2012. And already we're tracking for 2013 to grow another 30 percent, and we're looking to hire at least another three employees."

But it's not just in design and construction that the housing recovery is creating jobs. After all, those construction workers need something to get themselves and their tools to work.

Enlarge image i

The government of Kazakhstan says it's cooperating with U.S. officials in the investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings, a day after two men from the Central Asian country were charged in connection with the blasts that killed three people and wounded more than 250.

"As we have repeatedly stressed, Kazakhstan strongly condemns any form of terrorism," a statement from Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry office read, according to The Boston Globe. "The Kazakhstan side is cooperating with the U.S. law enforcement bodies in their investigation."

The Globe writes:

"The brief statement also outlined the charges against Dias Kadyrbayev and Azamat Tazhayakov, who were both charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice. They allegedly disposed of a backpack and a laptop that they found in the dorm room of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who is accused of planning and executing the Boston bombings.

'We would like to emphasize that our citizens did not receive charges of involvement in the organization of Boston marathon bombings,' the Kazakhstan foreign minister's office said. 'They were charged with destroying evidence.'

The foreign minister's office also said that Kadyrbayev and Tazhayakov were receiving 'the necessary consular assistance' but did not elaborate on what that assistance might entail.

'Their guilt has not been proven and the investigation is ongoing,' the statement read."

Jasmine Tierra is a singer whose voice is crossing boundaries of language and culture. She's African-American, and grew up singing gospel music. But that's not where she's making her mark now. She has become a YouTube sensation by singing in Hmong. That's the language of an Asian ethnic group rooted in certain regions of China, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand.

Tierra has been singing and writing songs in Hmong for years, winning fans and sometimes besting native speakers at Hmong festivals around the country. She even performed at the First Annual Hmong Music Awards.

In an interview with Tell Me More host Michel Martin, Tierra says the Hmong language is musical, all by itself. "It sounds like a melody," she says.

Tierra first learned about Hmong culture when her family moved to Minnesota. In 2006, she entered Arlington High School in St. Paul, which had a large Hmong population. Her hunger to sing in the language began after she befriended fellow student Panyia Kong. "She's a really excellent singer as well. She's Hmong. And she gave me some of her albums – her Christian Hmong albums," says Tierra. "It started off with me just listening to the CDs...and then she would start singing one of the songs and I would join in with my broken Hmong."

Home grocery delivery sounds like a frill for people too lazy to schlep to the store. But having food delivered can be more environmentally friendly than driving to the store, researchers say.

Having groceries delivered can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half, compared to driving to the store, according to a new study. That's because the delivery truck offers the equivalent of a "shared ride" for the food.

"It's like a bus for groceries," says Anne Goodchild, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Washington, and a coauthor of the study. "Overwhelmingly, it's more efficient to be sharing a vehicle, even if it's a little larger."

Goodchild studies logistics and freight transportation. She also gets her groceries delivered. "As a working mother, it's another trip I don't have to make while my kids are awake," she says. But, she admits, "I felt sort of lazy and indulgent to be ordering my groceries this way."

Buy combining her knowledge of freight transport and data on commuter habits, Goodchild and her colleagues were able to calculate just how efficient it is to put the groceries on the "bus," using neighborhoods in Seattle and randomly choosing households as potential customers. Pretty darned efficient, it turns out.

Home food delivery trucks, they found, produce 20 to 75 percent less carbon dioxide than having the same households drive to the store. The variation is based on how close people live to the store, the number of people in the neighborhood getting food delivered, and the efficiency of the truck's route.

Penny Pritzker, one of the nation's richest people and a "longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser," as The Chicago Tribune writes, is President Obama's choice to be his next secretary of commerce.

The president announced the news this hour at the White House. He also said that one of his economic advisers, Michael Froman, is his choice to be the next U.S. trade representative.

As USA Today notes, Pritzker's nomination could rile some of Obama's other supporters:

"Pritzker, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama's two presidential campaigns, is on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corp. Her personal fortune is estimated at $1.85 billion, and she is listed among the 300 wealthiest Americans by Forbes magazine. ... Hyatt and the hospitality workers union have been involved in a long contract battle, and workers have protested the company's treatment of them. The AFL-CIO and other organizations have called for a global boycott of Hyatt properties. ...

"Senators may also grill Pritzker over the 2001 collapse of family-owned Superior Bank, which specialized in sub-prime lending, and federal lawsuits against her family over Caribbean tax shelters."

Penny Pritzker, one of the nation's richest people and a "longtime political supporter and heavyweight fundraiser," as The Chicago Tribune writes, is President Obama's choice to be his next secretary of commerce.

The president announced the news this hour at the White House. He also said that one of his economic advisers, Michael Froman, is his choice to be the next U.S. trade representative.

As USA Today notes, Pritzker's nomination could rile some of Obama's other supporters:

"Pritzker, who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Obama's two presidential campaigns, is on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corp. Her personal fortune is estimated at $1.85 billion, and she is listed among the 300 wealthiest Americans by Forbes magazine. ... Hyatt and the hospitality workers union have been involved in a long contract battle, and workers have protested the company's treatment of them. The AFL-CIO and other organizations have called for a global boycott of Hyatt properties. ...

"Senators may also grill Pritzker over the 2001 collapse of family-owned Superior Bank, which specialized in sub-prime lending, and federal lawsuits against her family over Caribbean tax shelters."

North Korea has sentenced a U.S. citizen to 15 years in one of the country's notorious labor camps for allegedly attempting to overthrow the Pyongyang government.

Pyongyang's official KCNA news agency made the announcement of the sentence on Pae Jun-ho, known in the United States as Kenneth Bae. He has been held since November, when he was arrested at the northeastern port city of Rason, a special economic zone near North Korea's border with China.

KCNA says Pae, 44, admitted to the charges against him at his April 30 trial.

Pae is not the first American in recent years to be detained by North Korea.

Pyongyang has arrested U.S. journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling, English teacher Aijalon Gomes, businessman Eddie Jun Young-su and Christian activist Robert Park. Former President Bill Clinton secured freedom for Lee and Ling and former President Jimmy Carter negotiated the release of Gomes. Jun and Park were freed by North Korea on "humanitarian grounds."

Pae is believed to be a tour operator of Korean descent. The Associated Press reports that he is described by friends as a devout Christian.

As we've written in the past that these kinds of incidents highlight difficult task diplomats face when a U.S. citizen is caught up in legal or political trouble in a so-called rogue state.

The New York Times, quoting analysts, his detention presents the White House with a choice between "two equally distasteful options":

"Washington ... could send a former president to win the release of Kenneth Bae. ... Then, North Korea, as it did before, could advertise such a high-profile visit as an American capitulation before its new young leader, Kim Jong-un, who is craving a chance to burnish his profile as a tough anti-American strategist.

Or Washington, as its leaders have repeatedly vowed, could try to break Pyongyang's habit of blackmailing its adversaries by ignoring its latest pressure tactic — and see one of its citizens languish in one of North Korea's infamous prison camps, where the State Department says starvation and forced labor remain rampant."

In the early days of New Girl, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) was a toddler-sized tutu made flesh: cute, affected, hard to actually dislike, but earning grins largely by doggedly evoking childhood's clumsy and doomed attempts at grace. Building a comedy around her resulted in a one-note dynamic in which her three male roommates were forever goggle-eyed at the things she didn't know, couldn't do, or couldn't bear to think about, only to find themselves ultimately unable to really relate to her but also unable to resist her, the way you might be unable to resist a sudden infestation of baby koalas.

But as the show matured through its first season, it emerged as much more of an ensemble, with the flavor of Jess' social idiosyncrasies adjusted from scorched-sugar bitterness to something more complex, while those of Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Nick (Jake Johnson) emerged more sharply. (Candidly, the show has yet to find a bead on Lamorne Morris' Winston, who changes from week to week while Schmidt and Nick become just as indelible and oddballsy as Jess.)

The writing got sharper, everybody stopped putting all their creative weight on Deschanel's ability to open her eyes even wider than last week, and it began to feel like a real show. It wasn't just that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt funny — though they did — it was that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt weird, and lost, and charmingly devoid of grace, just like Jess, so that she didn't have to be that way, all the time, to the utmost degree, about everything.

These days, Jess isn't as confused and isn't as excited; she's legitimately got her own vibe. The writers figured out that marching to the beat of one's own drummer is supposed to feel like a choice; if you're doing it because you're too dumb to walk and listen to drums at the same time, that's not the same thing.

Then, about three-quarters of the way through their second season, they decided to do one of the toughest things in the world to get right: they head-on addressed whether something was maybe going to flare up between Jess and Nick, who had done both a lot of platonic bonding and a lot of slightly less platonic bonding as time went on. Now, the legitimate dangers of getting characters together are overblown as a general matter and the Moonlighting curse is a fiction (at least as applied to Moonlighting). But with these two, who had begun at the opposite ends of the spectrum of normalcy and function, where Nick was the level-headed roommate and Jess often came off like an alien from a polka-dotted planet, the trick was to make it seem like he wasn't a grown man hooking up with an intellectual 12-year-old because she was pretty and simple. She could not continue as a person who couldn't stand up in high-heeled shoes or successfully step onto an escalator; to have an adult relationship, even in a comedy, she had to be written as an adult.

In that sense, while the fear is always that delving straight into your will-they-or-won't-they dynamic is detrimental to the chemistry of your show, it was hugely helpful to this one. Persuasive romances require some level of parity between personalities, and sexy ones require everyone to seem like they've completed adolescence. It was very canny to make the first Nick/Jess smooch, in the episode "Cooler," surprisingly hot rather than warmly awkward, which it easily could have been. For them to kiss like nervous teenagers would have been kind of expected; for them to kiss like that actually added something.

The writers have continued to make unexpected choices and provide incremental progress, mixing episodes in the Nick-Jess story that seemed chemistry-driven with ones that seemed friendship-driven, so that it was presented as the thing that would create the most challenging problem for true friends: a blistering desire to make out grounded by a bond that's important enough that nobody wants to mess it up. That's meant that the romance outwardly happens in fits and starts and impulsive decisions, but also, underneath, moves along an unnerving but steady emotional track.

It's been pretty terrific storytelling, and pretty romantic and sexy, and for a show that started out seeming like Dumb Snow White And The Three Patient Older Brothers, it's quite an accomplishment.

O'Brien's writing career, fame and considerable beauty all blossomed and peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, not long after her harrowing fight to win back custody of her two sons. Oddly, O'Brien never comments on her striking good looks and their effect on her life, but stunning photographs scattered throughout this book, including Lord Snowdon's dreamy portrait for The Sunday Times of London in 1970, suggest they must have played a role.

It was during this heady period that O'Brien, who was regularly turning out novels and plays, threw weekly parties attended by such luminaries as Len Deighton, Roger Vadim, Jane Fonda, Sean Connery, Shirley MacLaine and Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing — under whose treatment she disastrously experimented with LSD. She describes a one-night stand with actor Robert Mitchum and chaste nights with Marlon Brando and Richard Burton. Paul McCartney once accompanied her home and sang a lullaby to her sleepy sons.

Hear An Excerpt

Studios are putting most of their eggs in $100 million baskets these days, even as American independent filmmakers go hungry from lack of mainstream attention. But two of my favorite American indie writer-directors, Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani, have new films with bigger stars than they've had before — films they hope will break through to wider audiences. The results, at least artistically, are impressive.

Nichols' first feature, Shotgun Stories, was a small masterpiece, the story of a blood feud between half-brothers that turns tragic. His second, Take Shelter, featured Shotgun star Michael Shannon as a man eaten alive by fear of losing his wife and child to apocalyptic forces. They're in very different keys, and Nichols' latest, Mud, is in still another. It's his Huckleberry Finn picture: It has a boy protagonist, it's set on the Mississippi River, and its narrative is both fluid and full of surprising twists.

The extraordinary Tye Sheridan plays 14-year-old Ellis. He lives on an Arkansas houseboat, where his mother is on the verge of leaving his father and selling the creekside home Ellis loves. One morning, he and a ruffian pal called Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) head to a river island on which Neckbone has spotted a boat in a tree, evidently thrown up there by a storm. It turns out there's a man living there, and his name is Mud.

More On Jeff Nichols And Ramin Bahrani

Movies

Young And Old, Driven 'Solo' Beyond Themselves

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

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sold the rights to his memoir to HarperCollins, the publishing house announced Tuesday. The book will be "a full and frank look at his public and private life — from his formative years in Queens, New York, his long record of fighting for justice and championing government reform, his commitment to public service, and his election and service as the 56th Governor of New York State," according to a statement. The New York Times quoted an anonymous source at HarperCollins claiming that the publisher is now trying to drop a biography of Cuomo by New York Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker because of a potential conflict of interest. Asked about the Times' report on Dicker's book, HarperCollins spokesperson Tina Andreadis said in an email that "All I can say that right now [is that] we have a book under contract."

Richard Brody explains "Why The Great Gatsby Endures" in a New Yorker article: "The Great Gatsby is, above all, a novel of conspicuous consumption — not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle."

A lost poem by Vita Sackville-West — the English writer most famous for her love affair with Virginia Woolf — was discovered when it fell out of a book as scholars were doing conservation work in her library. A love poem written in French, it is addressed to her mistress, the writer Violet Trefusis. According to a translation printed in The Guardian, it reads in part: "I tear secrets from your yielding flesh/Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress."

Caspar Henderson writes about the (unexpectedly fascinating) history of the octopus in Western literature: "Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty."

For The Millions, Michael Bourne looks at the changing role of literary critics: "However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less."

A relatively weak 119,000 jobs were added to private employers' payrolls last month as federal spending cuts and tax increases began to bite, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report.

And there was more potentially troubling news about the health of the economy in Wednesday's data: ADP, which provides payroll and other services to companies around the world, revised down its estimate of U.S. job growth in March. It now says private employers added 131,000 jobs to their payrolls that month, not the initial figure of 158,000.

In the ADP report, Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi says:

"Job growth appears to be slowing in response to very significant fiscal headwinds. Tax increases and government spending cuts are beginning to hit the job market. Job growth has slowed across all industries and most significantly among companies that employ between 20 and 499 workers."

Look at photographs from the Bangladesh garment factory collapse, and you can see clothing in the rubble destined for a store called Joe Fresh, one of the many retailers using supercheap fashions made overseas to keep shoppers buying often.

But in the aftermath of the tragedy, would customers pay more if they knew the clothes were made by workers treated fairly and safely?

At the Joe Fresh store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, customers are bombarded with pastel polo shirts, button-down shirts and chino pants. On one shelf, you might find clothes made in Peru, Vietnam and China. Toward the back, there are piles and piles of shorts, just $19 each, and each made in Bangladesh.

Outside the store, Reene Schiaffo emerged with a bag full of Joe Fresh merchandise. She says she knew about the Bangladesh factory collapse but gives the company the benefit of the doubt.

"It didn't affect my sale, because I know a lot of times these retailers don't exactly know where the stuff is being made," she says, "but they have to pay attention more because that's not acceptable."

Of course, Joe Fresh has many competitors. Nearby Herald Square has become a kind of mecca for what the industry calls fast fashion — clothes so cheap they are almost disposable. On a block with Zara, H&M, Gap and Uniqlo, I asked shoppers if they'd pay more if they knew the clothes came from safe factories that treated workers well.

Most, like Ingrid Lelorieux of France, said yes.

"If it's between 5 and 10 percent, I will," she says.

Enlarge image i

On cable TV, there's a whole truckload of reality shows that make fun of working class, white Southern culture. They are some of the most popular and talked about new shows, too, such as Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty.

MTV tried cashing in on the redneck TV trend with its own hyped-up platform for young Southern kids behaving badly, Buckwild. It played like a Southern-fried version of Jersey Shore. Its stars were a dimwitted crew of young people in West Virginia drinking hard and riding pickup trucks through ditches filled with mud.

Then, one of them died, along with two other people, in a vehicle stuck in mud. The show wasn't shooting at the time, but Shain Gandee's death was enough to make MTV stop production.

Still, there are plenty more places to see blatant stereotypes of white subcultures, beyond the hicksploitation served by Buckwild. Over on VH1, Mob Wives are the cliche in-your-face Italian mafia matriarchs. AMC has backward, barely educated rural kids wandering around New York City in Breaking Amish. And barely legal prospective brides brag about marrying their cousins in My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding on TLC.

That's a big pile of the worst stereotypes about white, working class people around.

And here's the thing: There aren't nearly as many new shows like this about African-Americans or Latinos, especially if they are working class. Shows like Real Housewives of Atlanta and Love and Hip Hop Atlanta, show off more lavish lifestyles and have been around longer.

Late last year, the Oxygen channel tried to create a new one, developing a pilot featuring rapper Shawty Lo bragging that he had 11 kids by 10 different women. It was supposed to be called All My Babies' Mamas.

The backlash against this travesty was immediate and powerful. Radio personalities complained on air, harsh coverage came from CNN and Fox News, and more than 30,000 protesters signed a petition against the show on Change.org.

It worked. Oxygen announced it wouldn't develop the series.

So why haven't these other shows stereotyping white people seen protests just as strong?

I suspect it's because too many folks see stereotypes as a problem mostly for people of color.

We've got lots of practice criticizing degrading images of black and brown people. Activists know how to gather the news stories, book the media appearances and assemble the petitions to press their case. Advertisers get nervous and programmers think twice.

What many forget is that it can be just as easy to stereotype white, working class folks, and just as hard to scrub those stereotypes off your TV screen.

Eric Deggans is the TV and media critic for the Tampa Bay Times, a freelance contributor to NPR and author of the new book, Race-Baiter: How the Media Wields Dangerous Words to Divide a Nation, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

This week, major retailers including Wal-Mart, Gap and others met with labor activists in Germany, hoping to hammer out a deal to improve working conditions in Bangladesh.

The meeting came less than a week after a devastating building collapse in the Bangladeshi capital, Dhaka, killed more than 400 workers. At the meeting, activists pushed retailers who use factories in Bangladesh to start spending their own money to make those workplaces safer.

The proposed deal would have an enforceable arbitration clause, would require the use of highly qualified fire and safety inspectors — and require those inspection reports to be made public. It would also mandate that the Western brands pay for any needed repairs. Workers would also have the right to refuse to enter buildings they believe are unsafe.

Tchibo, a large German retailer, and PVH, which owns Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger, signed onto the agreement several months ago. But because the deal requires four signatories, labor activists need two more companies to sign on before it could go into effect. They've set a deadline of May 15 to strike a deal.

According to some of the meeting negotiators, among the U.S. retailers in attendance, Gap is probably closest to the labor activists on the details of the deal. A couple of European retailers caught up in the recent scandal surrounding the building collapse are now under a lot of pressure and could also end up signing on.

But Wal-Mart, the 900-pound gorilla in the industry, is still pretty far away from making any such detailed commitments.

What Auditors For Wal-Mart Found In Bangladesh

Most factory audits are never made public. These — paid for by Wal-Mart — were salvaged from the site of the Tazreen factory fire in Bangladesh, which killed 112 last November.

During the housing bust, taxpayers were forced to bail out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But thanks to the real estate recovery, Fannie Mae could end up paying tens of billions of dollars back to the Treasury this summer.

That's just one of the factors behind a better bottom line for the federal government. This week, the Treasury Department announced it will pay down some of its debt for the first time in six years.

Washington has been so preoccupied with warnings of exploding deficits in recent years that John Makin of the conservative American Enterprise Institute was caught off guard when he actually checked out the numbers.

"I'm surprised that more people who talk a lot about it haven't looked carefully at where we find ourselves," he says.

The federal deficit is shrinking rather quickly — both in absolute dollars and as a share of the overall economy. The Congressional Budget Office projects the deficit will drop below 4 percent of GDP next year, and below 2.5 percent in 2015.

Greg Valliere of Potomac Research says the improvement could come even faster, thanks to rising government tax receipts and shrinking government payouts.

"There are two really big spending stories that are changing the fiscal outlook in Washington," he says. "The first is that there's no new spending. Anything the president proposes will get rejected by the House. Secondly, through sequester and other cuts, domestic discretionary spending is actually falling."

In a way, policymakers backed into this shrinking deficit. Both the spending cuts and the tax increases are more the product of government stalemate than any deliberate action.

The economy is paying a price in slower growth. Even some conservatives like Makin are now warning that austerity has gone far enough.

"Deficit reduction means slowing the growth of spending and raising taxes. And nobody likes that. So you have to be telling the story of ... we're doing some short-run pain for long-run gain, but we're not doing too much of it," he says. "And that's why I think we've done enough austerity for now."

Liberal economists argue that government has gone too far in its belt-tightening. Jared Bernstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities hopes the rapidly improving budget picture will help to silence deficit alarmists.

"If that diminishes the urgency to recklessly cut spending in the short term, that's actually a good thing," Bernstein says. "Because we've actually over-cut in the near term and that's hurting the weak economy and people who depend on some of these benefits."

Bernstein notes that government spending on unemployment, for example, fell by 25 percent in the first quarter from a year ago. That's good news for those who went off the rolls because they found jobs. But not for those whose benefits simply ran out or were cut back indiscriminately.

"There are millions of people across the country who are seeing their unemployment benefits reduced because of sequestration," he says. "They don't have a job. In fact, they're still legitimately on unemployment insurance. But the sequestration is taking a chunk out of their benefit check at a very bad time for them."

That's also less money circulating in the economy.

One byproduct of the falling deficit is that the government won't bump up against the debt ceiling so quickly. Steve Bell of the Bipartisan Policy Center says forecasters initially thought Congress would have to raise the debt ceiling this summer. Now that's been pushed back a bit.

"I think we will be able to see them get into fall before we have the confrontation between the Congress and the president over the debt ceiling," Bell says.

What's not clear is whether fall's cooler temperatures will lead to cooler heads at the bargaining table. Despite the improvement in the short run, the federal government still faces long-term deficits, mostly tied to health care costs.

AEI's Makin says policymakers now have more time to address that challenge. But that could be a blessing or a curse.

"The fact that Congress is not operating under the gun, the White House is not operating under the gun here, gives them some time to sit down and be thoughtful about restructuring entitlements and [the] tax system," he says. "I think many people fear that if you take the pressure off, Congress moves on to other things."

That lack of long-term thinking is a different kind of deficit that Washington has yet to overcome.

There's free range and then there's free rein — around your house.

When Julie Baker's backyard birds started spending more time inside, it was tough to keep them clean. So she got innovative.

She sewed up a cloth diaper — chicken-sized, of course — added a few buttons and strapped it onto her little lady.

One thing led to another, and eventually, a business was born.

Enlarge image i

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

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sold the rights to his memoir to HarperCollins, the publishing house announced Tuesday. The book will be "a full and frank look at his public and private life — from his formative years in Queens, New York, his long record of fighting for justice and championing government reform, his commitment to public service, and his election and service as the 56th Governor of New York State," according to a statement. The New York Times quoted an anonymous source at HarperCollins claiming that the publisher is now trying to drop a biography of Cuomo by New York Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker because of a potential conflict of interest. Asked about the Times' report on Dicker's book, HarperCollins spokesperson Tina Andreadis said in an email that "All I can say that right now [is that] we have a book under contract."

Richard Brody explains "Why The Great Gatsby Endures" in a New Yorker article: "The Great Gatsby is, above all, a novel of conspicuous consumption — not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle."

A lost poem by Vita Sackville-West — the English writer most famous for her love affair with Virginia Woolf — was discovered when it fell out of a book as scholars were doing conservation work in her library. A love poem written in French, it is addressed to her mistress, the writer Violet Trefusis. According to a translation printed in The Guardian, it reads in part: "I tear secrets from your yielding flesh/Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress."

Caspar Henderson writes about the (unexpectedly fascinating) history of the octopus in Western literature: "Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty."

For The Millions, Michael Bourne looks at the changing role of literary critics: "However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less."

This Saturday, May 4th, is Free Comic Book Day, the comics industry's annual attempt to sail out past the shallow, overfished shoals where Nerds Like Me lazily and inexpertly spawn, to instead cast their line into the colder, deeper waters where Normals Like You swim free, blissfully unconcerned about the myriad nettlesome continuity issues surrounding Supergirl's underpants.

Yes, Free Comic Book Day is about you, O person who hasn't set foot in a comics shop in years, or ever. It's the industry's attempt to change that state of affairs: Walk into a participating shop this Saturday, and they will hand you a bunch of free comics. Or maybe just one free comic. Or maybe they'll let you pick from a table heaped with piles of free comics.

The point is: Free comics! Woo!

This year there are a whopping 52 different FCBD comics that stores may have in stock, most of which you can preview on the Free Comic Book Day site. On this same site, you can enter your zip code and find the closest participating shop.

Understand that not every shop will have every comic. There are 12 titles that most shops will likely carry (those designated "Gold Comics" on the FCBD site) and 40 others that some shops will order, and others will not (designated "Silver Comics").

That's a lot of books to choose from, and that's where the staff comes in: Tell them what you like — what movies, books, television shows you seek out, and they'll be able to find something that should line up with your tastes, whether or not it's an FCBD offering.

Herewith, however, is Monkey's See's annual FCBD Cheat Sheet. Below, we'll list several different kinds of prospective FCBD customers and match them with the Free Comic Book Day comics best suited to them. Find yourself, or a reasonable analogue thereof, on the list below, and hie your butt to the nearest FCBD-participating comic shop this Saturday.

Yes, let's begin with you, there, with the peanut butter on your sweater.

A. I've got kids. I want them to read good things.

Excellent! Some really nice all-ages comics on offer this year:

Marble Season – An excerpt from the great Gilbert Hernandez's new semiautobiographical graphic novel. When your kids are done with it, read it for yourself.

Mr. Puzzle – Chris Eliopoulos' stretchable, bendable superhero.

Molly Danger – Jamal Igle's all-ages book about a brave and resourceful ten-year-old superhero. Great for girls, boys and parents and non-parents who're looking for a fun, light book amid the current glut of grim, depressing spandex fare.

Top Shelf Kids Club – The usual suspects show up in this sampler for younger kids – Owly! Johnny Boo! Korgi! Pirate Penguin vs. Ninja Chicken! But in this case, the usual suspects are some of the very best kids' comics out there. So: Win.

Scratch 9 – Superhero cat who can summon each of his nine lives to fight eee-vil. (Ben 10? Scratch 9? See what they did there?)

Rated Free For Everyone – Sampler comic from Oni Press featuring a story from Chris Schweizer's historical tales of the Crogan clan, and an introduction to Mermin, the mer-boy.

Mouse Guard/Rust Flip Book – Archaia's collection includes original short stories from Mouse Guard (a great book), an upcoming Jim Henson's Labyrinth graphic novel, and an adventure of Jet Jones the rocket-boy.

World of Archie – The continuing adventures of America's favorite sweater-vested, tic-tac-toe-headed ginger.

Dragon Ball and Rurouni Kenshen Restoration – The Viz Comics sampler looks to be the only manga represented on FCBD, which makes precisely no sense, but these two series are hugely popular in Japan, having spawned anime series, films, video games, etc. Don't know if these specific stories make for particularly good jumping-on points, but at the very least you and your kids might get a sense of what all the fuss is about.

Finding Gossamyr – A special FCBD story that rounds out the world of the popular fantasy web series, in which a math prodigy is transported to a world where mathematics are magic.

Action Time Buddies – A web series that parodies Adventure Time, My Little Pony and many, many more.

BEST BETS: Marble Club, Molly Danger, Top Shelf Kids Club.

Ok? Yes, you there. In the mini-van.

B. I've got kids, too. But the backseat DVD player just conked out, and we're driving to Tampa. So.

So quality isn't the looming issue for you.

Right.

You want books you know they will read.

Yes. Quietly.

... What am I, Supernanny over here? Let's leave it at: books you know they'll read because they're already familiar with the characters. So we're talking licensed tie-ins of existing properties, then. Of which there are a kajillion. But you should —

Look, could you speed this up? Our youngest is getting that look on his face. We shouldn't have bought them the Pixie Stix back in Raleigh-Durham, I see that now.

Fine, fine. I was saying: You should know that licensed tie-ins have a spotty track record. But as long as you go into it knowing that there's no knowing how good they'll be –

Oh god, they're gnawing on each other's feet now. This is going downhill fast. Game over, man, game over—

Hold on, help is on the way!

It's An Ugly Doll Comic And Other Stuff – It's got, like, Pokemon in it.

Kaboom! Summer Blast – Grab-bag collection of such beloved properties as Adventure Time (which, let's just note, is a very, very good comic in its own right), Regular Show, Peanuts, Garfield, Ice Age, etc.

Sponge Bob Freestyle Funnies – Nickolodeon's wildly popular member of the phylum Porifera in square ... well, technically they're shorts, no?

Pippi Longstocking Color Special – Fairly crude reprints/translations of Swedish Pippi comics first published in the 1950s.

Bongo Free For All Comics – Dependably great Simpsons/Futurama comics.

The Tick – All new stories of the greatest superhero to ever boast an eating-utensil-based battle cry.

Sesame Street and Strawberry Shortcake – Together at last! I guess!

The Smurfs – Belgium has given the world two things: Thick crunchy delicious waffles, and this sobering account of a ruthlessly paternalistic socialist dystopia.

Star Wars/Captain Midnight/Airbender – Darth Vader and Boba Fett hangin' out, sipping blue Mandalorian space-Prosecco, getting mani-pedis, just having a girls' night out. Um, presumably. Also a story of Captain Midnight (yes, the radio guy), and a tale from Avatar: The Last Airbender Totally Not the Blue Cat People Whose Tails Are USB Ports Or Whatever.

NFL Rush Zone: Season of the Guardians – This is a comic based on an animated series that premiered in 2010, and about which I know precisely nothing. Here's the synopsis of the show's second episode. I have not made any of the following up:

"After school, Ish revisits the Chargers' stadium where he learns about the history of the Shards, the Rusherz and a powerful object called the Core; The Rusherz' home planet which held the Core was peaceful, until an evil overlord named Sudden Death attacked the planet to take the Core for himself, but the Rusherz stopped him by drilling to the Core at the center of the planet and freeing it, destroying the planet in the process and casting the Core and the Rusherz into space. The Rusherz followed the Core to Earth, where it crashed upon landing and broke into 32 Shards (which are recognized as the symbols of the 32 NFL teams). Knowing Sudden Death would not stop until he had the Core, the Rusherz each took a Shard, built the 32 NFL stadiums to hide each one in and assigned the 32 teams to guard their respective Shard in those stadiums. If Sudden Death retrieves all the shards and rebuilds the Core, he'll use the Core's power to turn everything into Blitzbots."

... Does, uh ... does that help?

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: New Animated Adventures – A comic book based on an animated series which is an update of an animated series that was based on a comic book.

Sonic The Hedgehog – A comic based on a video game.

Disney Fairies – A comic based on a series of DVDs.

Grimm – A comic based on a television show which might be a little grim/dark/gory for little kids.

BEST BETS: Bongo, The Tick

Ok. You there, in the back?

C. I used to read superhero comics when I was a kid, but then I discovered (girls/boys) and haven't really spared them a thought since. I keep hearing there's some good stuff, there.

There's some great superhero books you need to check out. Fantastic Four, Hawkeye, Daredevil, Young Avengers, Wonder Woman, Invincible, Batgirl, Dial H for Hero. None of them are FCBD offers this year, I'm afraid. Here's the ones that are:

Infinity – A preview of Marvel's big summer superhero event.

Superman Special Edition – Includes a preview of an upcoming Superman comic, and a reprint of a December 2006 story which reintroduced the character of General Zod into DC continuity. A continuity that has since been disposed of. Not once, but twice. But hey, who's counting? (Me. I am counting. Me.)

DC Nation Super Sampler – Stories introducing two new animated series, Beware the Batman and the (welcome! Groovy!) return of Teen Titans, Go!

Hulk and the Agents of SMASH/Avengers Assemble – Two stories from comics based on two Marvel animated series.

Absolution: The Beginning – Reprinting the first two issues of the Christos Gage/Daniel Gete "superheroes gone bad" series, which began in 2009.

Stan Lee's Chakra The Invincible – Set in Mumbai, this new series follows a young technological prodigy who develops a mech-suit capable of unlocking his mystical chakras. But not in the sexy way.

The Red Ten – A spandex-clad take on Agatha Christie's "Ten Little Indians."

Valiant Masters - Reprints of stories from the 90s, the XXXXTREEEEME!!! era of Poochie-fied, hyperviolent comics storytelling. Your mileage may vary, but I find this stuff testosterrible.

BEST BET: I dunno. Teen Titans Go was a great series. The Red Ten, maybe? And Chakra, for at least taking the genre in a different direction?

Yes, you there, with the ear-trumpet.

D. I remember, back when I was a but a barefoot boy with cheek of tan, taking a shiny-new Indian-Head nickel over to Ol' Mr. Crumblefeather's Feed Store every Saturday morning, where I'd buy me a fizzy drink and some penny candy and Li'l Orphan Annie comic book.

Uh-huh.

Then, with the change I got back, I'd take myself over to the five and dime to buy my mother some ribbons and buttons and lotions, after which I'd head over to the motion picture show and –

Okay, gramps, we get it. You harbor fond, if frankly economically and numismatically questionable, memories of comics in the olden-timey days. So for you:

Buck Rogers – Reprints of old Buck Rogers comics from the pre-TV, pre-Twiki, pre-Erin-Gray-in-the-white-catsuit, era. You were warned.

Prince Valiant – Reprints of ye olde Arthuriane comicse.

BEST BETS: Either. Both.

E. I like science fiction. It never really occurred to me to try a comic, though.

Atomic Robo and Friends – This is your best bet on Free Comic Book Day. Ask for it if you don't see it. It's great. Fun and funny. Both at once.

2000 AD Sampler – Several comics from Britain's long-running science-fiction anthology comic, including a new Judge Dredd tale. But if that doesn't fill you with enough Dredd....

Judge Dredd Classics — ... you can always pick up this sampler of old-school JD comics.

Valiant 2013 — Excerpts from Valiant's current line of science-fiction comics.

Aphrodite IX – In a post-apocalyptic world, there be dragons. If you need to know more than that before committing, this probably isn't for you.

Endangered Weapon B and the Tentacles of Doom – So is steampunk considered science fiction, nowadays? I can never keep up with you crazy kids and your rigid taxonomies. Anyway – dirigibles, a grizzly bear in a mech suit, the lost Library of Alexandia, squid-thingies-that-are-probably-aliens, more. As if more is needed.

The Steam Engines of Oz – Preview of an upcoming series set 100 years after Dorothy offs the Wicked Witch of the West. Also previews several titles in Arcana's new steampunk line of comics.

BEST BET: Atomic Robo and Friends. Seriously.

F. I Am A Disaffected Narrow-Chested Self-Styled Intellectual Given to Wearing Knit Hats Out-of-Season Who Disdains Superhero Comics As Puerile Fodder for Idiot Children And Who Finds Science Fiction And Other Genres Asinine Who Much Prefers To Read Mature, Richly Nuanced Literature About Narrow-Chested Self-Styled Intellectuals Given to Wearing Knit Hats Out-of-Season.

... You seem fun.

Who Are Also Maybe Starting a Band.

I see. Okay, gimme a minute. Because this isn't going to be easy. Historically, Free Comic Book Day has dutifully reflected the current status of the comics marketplace, which is to say: wholly dominated by superheroes, licensed tie-ins, and genre fare.

But this is a once-in-a-year opportunity to show the truly limitless breadth of comics storytelling, and FCBD offerings have never done a particularly good job of representing that. There are plenty of comics that fit your description, trust me. You'll just have buy them.

Let me get back to you on this one, okay? Yes, you there, with the clear-eyed gaze and friendly expression.

G. I'm just curious to see what's out there. I have no particular interest in superheroes, but other genres – Western, Thriller, Horror, Fantasy, whatever – are fair game. I like a good story.

Well, aren't you just exactly who comics shops hope to meet on Saturday.

Kellerman/L'Amour Sampler – Two excerpts from upcoming comics adaptations – an Alex Delaware thriller by Joe Kellerman, and a "Louis L'Amour" Western yarn that's actually a new story.

The Walking Dead – You've seen the show and wished they'd stop wringing their hands and maybe kill a freaking zombie already. Now read the book.

Mass Effect/Killjoys/RIPD – If you go by the cover, this looks like just another adaptation of a video game, which would mean it belongs up with licensed tie-ins. But it also includes two other stories, Killjoys and RIPD, both of which – but especially RIPD, about a police force that enforces supernatural law – show a bit more promise.

Damsels – A Fables-ish take which examines the life of fairy tale characters (in this case, The Little Mermaid) outside the tales we know.

FUBAR – Sampler-pack of "American History Z" stories about the American Experience ... and zombies, including an incident at Valley Forge.

Ramayan Reloaded Preview – A series of short stories providing background information on the various characters and settings featured in the series Ramayan 3392AD, which serves up a clever post-apocalyptic take on the events and characters of great Hindu epic, The Ramayana.

The Strangers – Here's how writer Chris Roberson describes this new series: "Swinging sixties supernatural super spies." Here's how I feel about that: "I'm in."

BEST BETS: Walking Dead, Damsels, Ramayan Reloaded, The Strangers.

Yes, you there. Clutching that beat-up old issue of Maxim with a strange fervor.

H. I like boobs. And guns. And chicks with boobs and guns.

Got just what you're looking for:

Worlds of Aspen 2013 – Here's what we know: The preview on the FCBD site is just a series of pin-ups. It may be all we need to know.

BEST BET: I can't help you here, buddy.

I. I wish to know more of these strange ... "comical books" of which you speak.

Bleeding Cool Magazine – An online gossip/news (but mostly gossip) comics site has published a guide to collecting comics.

Overstreet Comic Book Marketplace – Overstreet's guide is a staple of FCBD, and offers a dispassionate series of tips for the beginning collector.

BEST BET: Overstreet.

... And that's everything. Good. Now go forth ...

F. Wait, What About ...

You again. Yeah, okay, listen, Mr. Mature, Nuanced Relationship Story Blah Blah Superheroes Are Dumb Blah, you're just gonna have to suck it up and buy something, I'm afraid. Maybe next year, the FCBD organizers will wise up and throw you a bone, but not this year.

Happily, most stores will stock lots and lots of great somethings in which adults very like you negotiate the world of jobs, relationships and mortality utterly without the aid of spandex, magic, or rayguns. Without knowing exactly what kind of stories you like, I can't reliably guide you to them – that's something to discuss with the staff on Saturday. But here's some titles to ask them about:

Love and Rockets. Strangers in Paradise. Blankets. Habibi. Box Office Poison. Jimmy Corrigan. Fun Home. Are You My Mother? You'll Never Know. Too Kool To Be Forgotten. Make Me a Woman. Ice Haven. Ghost World. The Voyeurs. Marbles. The Underwater Welder. Heads or Tails. Stitches.

Okay? We good? Now, you and all the rest of you. Take yourself, and your kids, to the nearest comics shop on Saturday. Talk with the staff. Ask them questions. Answer theirs.

Discover something.

We physicists are all romantics. Don't laugh; it's true. In our youth we all fall deeply in love. We fall in love with a beautiful idea: beyond this world of constant change lies another world that is perfect and timeless.

This eternal domain is made not of matter or energy. It's made from perfect, timeless mathematical laws. Finding those exquisite eternal laws — or better yet, a single timeless formula for everything — is the Holy Grail we dedicate our lives to.

Unless we lose faith in that Grail. That's what's happened to physicist Lee Smolin, author of the new book Time Reborn. As he puts it:

I used to think my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula. Now I see my faith in its existence as a kind of mysticism.

On the benefits of converting to digital projection

"I'm the guy doing the work here, so I won't have to splice movies together and carry film cans up and down stairs. I see one of the great benefits as being when a movie is made and opens at 1,000 theaters all at once, they won't have to have 1,000 prints printed; they'll only have to make 1,000 discs, or maybe they'll even do it all over the Internet and there will be no discs."

On what he plans to do next

"Well, I'm a jack-of-all-trades, licensed at none. I'll keep doing that; and I build straw-bale houses, so I'll keep doing that."

On what will take his job's place

"Well, I'm not sure what happens next, but my feeling is that the skill set involved in being the projectionist is going to be being able to push a button. Therefore, I've been telling the other projectionists that if they want job security here, they better learn to pop popcorn."

Hollywood Jobs

Private Screening: How Hollywood Watches Its Work

Studios are putting most of their eggs in hundred-million-dollar baskets these days, even as American independent filmmakers go hungry from lack of mainstream attention. But two of my favorite American indie writer-directors, Jeff Nichols and Ramin Bahrani, have new films with bigger stars than they've had before — films they hope will break through to wider audiences. The results, at least artistically, are impressive.

Nichols' first feature, Shotgun Stories, was a small masterpiece, the story of a blood feud between half-brothers that turns tragic. His second, Take Shelter, featured Shotgun star Michael Shannon as a man eaten alive by fear of losing his wife and child to apocalyptic forces. They're in very different keys, and Nichols' latest, Mud, is in still another. It's his Huckleberry Finn picture: It has a boy protagonist, it's set on the Mississippi River, and its narrative is both fluid and full of surprising twists.

The extraordinary Tye Sheridan plays 14-year-old Ellis. He lives on an Arkansas houseboat, where his mother is on the verge of leaving his father and selling the creekside home Ellis loves. One morning, he and a ruffian pal called Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) head to a river island on which Neckbone has spotted a boat in a tree, evidently thrown up there by a storm. It turns out there's a man living there, and his name is Mud.

More On Jeff Nichols And Ramin Bahrani

Movies

Young And Old, Driven 'Solo' Beyond Themselves

In the early days of New Girl, Jess Day (Zooey Deschanel) was a toddler-sized tutu made flesh: cute, affected, hard to actually dislike, but earning grins largely by doggedly evoking childhood's clumsy and doomed attempts at grace. Building a comedy around her resulted in a one-note dynamic in which her three male roommates were forever goggle-eyed at the things she didn't know, couldn't do, or couldn't bear to think about, only to find themselves ultimately unable to really relate to her but also unable to resist her, the way you might be unable to resist a sudden infestation of baby koalas.

But as the show matured through its first season, it emerged as much more of an ensemble, with the flavor of Jess' social idiosyncrasies adjusted from scorched-sugar bitterness to something more complex, while those of Schmidt (Max Greenfield) and Nick (Jake Johnson) emerged more sharply. (Candidly, the show has yet to find a bead on Lamorne Morris' Winston, who changes from week to week while Schmidt and Nick become just as indelible and oddballsy as Jess.)

The writing got sharper, everybody stopped putting all their creative weight on Deschanel's ability to open her eyes even wider than last week, and it began to feel like a real show. It wasn't just that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt funny — though they did — it was that they got better at making Nick and Schmidt weird, and lost, and charmingly devoid of grace, just like Jess, so that she didn't have to be that way, all the time, to the utmost degree, about everything.

These days, Jess isn't as confused and isn't as excited; she's legitimately got her own vibe. The writers figured out that marching to the beat of one's own drummer is supposed to feel like a choice; if you're doing it because you're too dumb to walk and listen to drums at the same time, that's not the same thing.

Then, about three-quarters of the way through their second season, they decided to do one of the toughest things in the world to get right: they head-on addressed whether something was maybe going to flare up between Jess and Nick, who had done both a lot of platonic bonding and a lot of slightly less platonic bonding as time went on. Now, the legitimate dangers of getting characters together are overblown as a general matter and the Moonlighting curse is a fiction (at least as applied to Moonlighting). But with these two, who had begun at the opposite ends of the spectrum of normalcy and function, where Nick was the level-headed roommate and Jess often came off like an alien from a polka-dotted planet, the trick was to make it seem like he wasn't a grown man hooking up with an intellectual 12-year-old because she was pretty and simple. She could not continue as a person who couldn't stand up in high-heeled shoes or successfully step onto an escalator; to have an adult relationship, even in a comedy, she had to be written as an adult.

In that sense, while the fear is always that delving straight into your will-they-or-won't-they dynamic is detrimental to the chemistry of your show, it was hugely helpful to this one. Persuasive romances require some level of parity between personalities, and sexy ones require everyone to seem like they've completed adolescence. It was very canny to make the first Nick/Jess smooch, in the episode "Cooler," surprisingly hot rather than warmly awkward, which it easily could have been. For them to kiss like nervous teenagers would have been kind of expected; for them to kiss like that actually added something.

The writers have continued to make unexpected choices and provide incremental progress, mixing episodes in the Nick-Jess story that seemed chemistry-driven with ones that seemed friendship-driven, so that it was presented as the thing that would create the most challenging problem for true friends: a blistering desire to make out grounded by a bond that's important enough that nobody wants to mess it up. That's meant that the romance outwardly happens in fits and starts and impulsive decisions, but also, underneath, moves along an unnerving but steady emotional track.

It's been pretty terrific storytelling, and pretty romantic and sexy, and for a show that started out seeming like Dumb Snow White And The Three Patient Older Brothers, it's quite an accomplishment.

A relatively weak 119,000 jobs were added to private employers' payrolls last month as federal spending cuts and tax increases began to bite, according to the latest ADP National Employment Report.

And there was more potentially troubling news about the health of the economy in Wednesday's data: ADP, which provides payroll and other services to companies around the world, revised down its estimate of U.S. job growth in March. It now says private employers added 131,000 jobs to their payrolls that month, not the initial figure of 158,000.

In the ADP report, Moody's Analytics economist Mark Zandi says:

"Job growth appears to be slowing in response to very significant fiscal headwinds. Tax increases and government spending cuts are beginning to hit the job market. Job growth has slowed across all industries and most significantly among companies that employ between 20 and 499 workers."

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, who sparked plenty of discussion about work-life balance when she prohibited telecommuting this past winter, took a step in the opposite direction, Tuesday: Mayer expanded Yahoo's parental leave policy.

Reuters reports:

"Under Yahoo's new policy, new mothers and fathers can take up to 8 weeks of fully-paid leave. If a woman gave birth to the baby, she is entitled to an additional 8 weeks of paid leave, for a total of 16 weeks paid leave.

"Yahoo previously did not provide paid leave to fathers and the total amount of paid maternity leave varied from state to state, but was generally six weeks.

"New parents will now also get up to $500 for expenses such as child care and laundry, Yahoo said."

Last week's factory collapse in Bangladesh killed at least 386 people. Hundreds more are still missing, making it one of the largest manufacturing disasters in history.

This is just the latest horrific accident in the garment industry despite more than a decade of auditing aimed at improving working conditions in the developing world.

Disasters in the garment industry just keep coming. In September 2012, a fire at the Ali Enterprises factory in Pakistan killed nearly 300 workers. Six weeks later in November, a fire in the Tazreen factory in Bangladesh killed 112 people. And then last week, there was the Rana Plaza collapsed.

These factories made clothes for major Western retailers including Benetton, Wal-Mart and J.C. Penney. All of them had been inspected by what are known as social auditors. This social auditing industry once promised to root out the most dangerous and unsafe working conditions in the developing world.

In the past 20 years, it's become a big business inspecting factory working conditions and safety.

The social auditing industry traces its beginnings to child sweatshop scandals of the 1990s.

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has been banned for life from running for political office, a high court ruled on Tuesday.

The move by the Peshawar High Court appears to end the possibility that Musharraf, who returned to the country last month after four years in self-imposed exile, will stand in the May 11 parliamentary elections as he had hoped.

NPR's Julie McCarthy reports that "it is reportedly the first time that a court in Pakistan has imposed a lifetime ban on contesting elections, and Musharraf's lawyers question the legality."

The case against Musharraf, a former general who first seized power in a 1999 military coup, stems from his declaration of martial law and a subsequent campaign against the judiciary in which some 60 judges were placed under arrest.

According to Al-Jazeera, the Peshawar High Court judges:

"... barred him from running and put him under house arrest in connection with a pair of court cases against him.

"One involves his decision to fire senior judges, including the chief justice of the Supreme Court, while in power. The other relates to the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. Government prosecutors have accused Musharraf of being involved — allegations he has denied."

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

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo sold the rights to his memoir to HarperCollins, the publishing house announced Tuesday. The book will be "a full and frank look at his public and private life — from his formative years in Queens, New York, his long record of fighting for justice and championing government reform, his commitment to public service, and his election and service as the 56th Governor of New York State," according to a statement. The New York Times quoted an anonymous source at HarperCollins claiming that the publisher is now trying to drop a biography of Cuomo by New York Post columnist Fredric U. Dicker because of a potential conflict of interest. Asked about the Times' report on Dicker's book, HarperCollins spokesperson Tina Andreadis said in an email that "All I can say that right now [is that] we have a book under contract."

Richard Brody explains "Why The Great Gatsby Endures" in a New Yorker article: "The Great Gatsby is, above all, a novel of conspicuous consumption — not even of appetite but of the ineluctable connection between wealth and spectacle."

A lost poem by Vita Sackville-West — the English writer most famous for her love affair with Virginia Woolf — was discovered when it fell out of a book as scholars were doing conservation work in her library. A love poem written in French, it is addressed to her mistress, the writer Violet Trefusis. According to a translation printed in The Guardian, it reads in part: "I tear secrets from your yielding flesh/Giving thanks to the fate which made you my mistress."

Caspar Henderson writes about the (unexpectedly fascinating) history of the octopus in Western literature: "Appetite, loathing, and lust have certainly played big parts in human imaginings of these beasts. But we should take a cue from the Minoans who portrayed them in images that, even after 3,500 years, almost sing out loud in celebration of their strangeness and beauty."

For The Millions, Michael Bourne looks at the changing role of literary critics: "However critics rise to the challenge of the information overload facing readers today, rise we must, because as much information there is on sites like Amazon and GoodReads and the rest, there is too often precious little real intelligence. This is the paradox of the information age: the proliferation of data points makes smart criticism more relevant, not less."

The ancient statues depict young men, naked and muscled, in their physical prime. The two sculptures were supposed to celebrate the purity and kinetic beauty of ancient sport in a traveling exhibit, "The Olympics — Past and Present."

But when the Greek exhibit reached the conservative Muslim emirate of Qatar, the two statues were hidden by a screen of sheer black cloth.

"The outlines of the statues were visible, but not the details," says Maria Vlazaki, the Greek Culture Ministry's director-general of antiquities and cultural heritage. "They wanted to hide the nudity." Vlazaki was part of a Greek delegation that traveled to the Qatari capital Doha for the opening of the exhibit in March.

One statue is dated to 520 B.C. and is a long-haired kouros from the sanctuary of Apollon Ptoios in Boeotia, says Evridiki Leka, curator of the sculpture collection at the National Archaeological Museum, where both marble pieces are housed.

The other depicts a young athlete with short curls. It's a Roman-era copy of a famous bronze (now lost) by the ancient sculptor Polykleitos, who designed male nudes with mathematical scale and artistic purity.

Vlazaki says the Qatari organizers of the exhibit asked for the two statues, as well as several small bronze nudes that remain on display. But Vlazaki says there were "objections from above" after the statues arrived. The Qatari organizers refused to display them uncovered, as the Greeks requested.

"So they agreed to send them back," Vlazaki says. "It was all done with minimal drama."

Culture Clash

Both countries are playing down the incident as a minor culture clash.

Greece, which is deep in recession and struggling through an epic debt crisis, needs Qatar. The energy-rich emirate said in January that it would invest up to $1.3 billion in a joint fund with Athens.

Meanwhile, the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, bought six private islands in the Ionian Sea for his wives and children.

Others criticized Qatar, which aspires to be a global center of culture. The country has spent billions on museums and art collection, "a remarkably sophisticated exercise at nation-building through art," Hugh Eakin wrote in The New York Review of Books in 2011.

Peter Aspden of the Financial Times wrote that Qatar must "get over its inhibitions" if it ever wants to host the Olympics. (The country led unsuccessful bids for the 2016 and 2020 games).

"There is no understanding of ancient Greek culture and its invention of sporting competition without recognizing its worship of the human form," Aspden wrote. "You just cannot have a serious exhibition on the ancient Olympics without addressing the theme of nudity."

The Qatar Museums Authority said in a statement that the decision was "not due to censorship" but was rather "based on the flow of the exhibition, awareness of the outreach to all schools and families in Qatar, and desire to be sensitive to community needs and standards."

A Doha Debates poll last year showed that 60 percent of Arabs support censorship of art that could be "inappropriate" and offend "religious beliefs."

Vlazaki says she respects Qatar's decision on the statues and says she still views the exhibit as a success.

"Qatar is still opening itself to Europe and the West," she says. "It accepts a lot, but there are still things that it's not ready to accept."

The statues are now back in Greece's National Archaeological Museum.

"The Olympics — Past and Present" runs until June 30 at the Alriwaq Doha exhibition space near the Museum of Islamic Art.

For Jason Collins, coming out just might prove a winning career strategy.

Before this week, the NBA center seemed like just another second-tier professional athlete, slouching toward retirement while still in his 30s. But all that changed overnight when Collins acknowledged he was gay in an interview with Sports Illustrated magazine published Monday.

Now everyone from President Obama on down is talking about him, and most of the words have been supportive. That kind of attention could well prove bankable, says Marc Ippolito of Burns Entertainment, a firm that brings together Fortune 500 companies and celebrities for endorsement.

"It makes him recognizable and definitely puts him in a much more unique place for a marketer," says Ippolito.

Bob Witeck, a gay-marketing strategist and corporate consultant was less cautious in his assessment, telling Newsday that Collins stands to reap millions of dollars from speaking engagements and endorsements from companies seeking to capture more of a U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender adult population whose annual buying power he pegs at almost $800 million."

Even so, openly gay is largely an "untested area" when it comes to sports endorsements, says Glenn Selig, chief strategist for The Publicity Agency. He thinks a lot depends on whether Collins, who becomes a free agent after this season, plays next year.

As USA Today's Jeff Zillgitt writes, "At 34, Collins' career is nearing its conclusion. If this was his last season, will it be because there is no longer a spot for Collins because of his diminishing skills or sexual orientation?"

But Bob Dorfman, editor of Sports Marketers Scouting Report, told CNN that while he doesn't think Collins is "going to be a major spokesman ... he could certainly earn seven figures off this."

Collins already has a sponsorship contract with Nike Inc., which was quick to praise Monday's revealing announcement, saying it admires his "courage" and is "proud that he is a Nike athlete."

"Nike believes in a level playing field where an athlete's sexual orientation is not a consideration," says Brian Strong, a spokesman for the footwear and clothing giant.

According to Adweek:

"On a pure advertising level, [Collins'] only known sponsor, Nike, seems like the perfect company to push the Washington Wizard center's courageous public stance as an opportunity to further solidify the brand's recent history of supporting gay rights. Last week, Nike signed WNBA rookie Brittney Griner to what's reportedly a big contract only days after she stated her homosexuality. And 10 months ago, the sneakers giant held its first-ever Nike LGBT Sports Summit in its Portland, Ore., hometown."

In Rio de Janeiro, tourists are drawn to Copacabana for its wide beach and foliage-covered cliffs. But a month ago, not far from the tourist hub, an American woman and her French male companion were abducted. She was brutally gang-raped; he was beaten.

Perhaps what was most shocking to Brazilians, though, was the age of one of the alleged accomplices: He was barely in his teens.

"Why? That's what you ask yourself," says Sylvia Rumpoldt, who is walking with a friend at dusk by the sea in Rio. "It's horrible. It's criminal energy."

Her friend, Maria de Paula, agrees. What's happening with children in Brazil is barbaric, she says.

Crime in the South American nation has been in the headlines recently, especially as it prepares to host two major sporting events — the World Cup in 2014 and the Summer Olympics in 2016.

But a recent spate of attacks by minors has kicked off a heated debate here. Children increasingly aren't only the victims of violence in Brazil, they are often the perpetrators — and the country is struggling with what to do about it.

Enlarge image i

We physicists are all romantics. Don't laugh; it's true. In our youth we all fall deeply in love. We fall in love with a beautiful idea: beyond this world of constant change lies another world that is perfect and timeless.

This eternal domain is made not of matter or energy. It's made from perfect, timeless mathematical laws. Finding those exquisite eternal laws — or better yet, a single timeless formula for everything — is the Holy Grail we dedicate our lives to.

Unless we lose faith in that Grail. That's what's happened to physicist Lee Smolin, author of the new book Time Reborn. As he puts it:

I used to think my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula. Now I see my faith in its existence as a kind of mysticism.

Look at photographs from the Bangladesh garment factory collapse, and you can see clothing in the rubble destined for a store called Joe Fresh, one of the many retailers using super-cheap fashions made overseas to keep shoppers buying often.

But in the aftermath of the tragedy, would customers pay more if they knew the clothes were made by workers treated fairly and safely?

At the Joe Fresh store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, you're bombarded with pastel polo shirts, button-down shirts and chino pants. On one shelf, you might find clothes made in Peru, Vietnam and China. Toward the back, piles and piles of shorts, just $19 each, and each made in Bangladesh.

Outside the store, Reene Schiaffo emerged with a bag full of Joe Fresh merchandise. She says she knew about the Bangladesh factory collapse, but gives the company the benefit of the doubt.

"It didn't affect my sale, because I know a lot of times these retailers don't exactly know where the stuff is being made," she says, "but they have to pay attention more because that's not acceptable."

Of course, Joe Fresh has many competitors. Nearby Herald Square has become a kind of Mecca for what the industry calls fast fashion — clothes so cheap they are almost disposable. On a block with Zara, H&M, Gap and Uniqlo, I asked shoppers if they'd pay more if they knew the clothes came from safe factories that treated workers well.

Most, like Ingrid Lelorieux of France, said yes.

"If it's between 5 and 10 percent, I will," she says.

Enlarge image i

Get recipes for Strangozzi Al Tartufo (Strangozzi Pasta With Black Truffle Sauce), Minestra Di Zucca, Farro E Verdure (Squash And Farro Soup With Greens), Penne Alla Norcina (Penne In The Style Of Norcia) and Insalata Di Farro (Cold Farro Salad).

There were solid increases in home prices during the month of February across all 20 major cities where that data is tracked, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices report.

"Despite some recent mixed economic reports for March, housing continues to be one of the brighter spots in the economy," economist David Blitzer, who directs the work done by S&P Dow Jones Indices, says in the report.

Some of the data:

— The average home price in the 20 cities rose 9.3 percent from February 2012 to February 2013.

— From January to February alone, prices rose 0.3 percent.

— "Phoenix continued to stand out with an impressive year-over-year return of 23 percent."

— There were also significant year-over-year price increases in Las Vegas (17.6 percent), Atlanta (16.5 percent) and Detroit (15.2 percent).

Bloomberg News says the report is another sign that "the U.S. housing market is strengthening."

When it comes to culinary matters, France, in many minds, is synonymous with fine dining. So it may surprise you to know that, for the first time, sales at fast food chains have overtaken those at traditional restaurants in the country that gave us the word gastronomie.

That's according to an annual survey of consumer spending, traffic and other restaurant data conducted by Gira Conseil, a food consultancy firm. The latest survey, to be released in May, found that fast food chains now account for 54 percent of all restaurant sales in France.

"In previous years, we could see fast food was gaining ground, but this is the first time it has overtaken restaurants where you are served at the table," Julien Janneau of Gira Conseil, told French newspaper Nouvel Observateur.

Consumption at casual eateries serving burgers, sandwiches, pizza and other fast food has increased 14 percent in the last year alone, according to the survey.
While McDonald's has been in France since the 1970s, many industry observers say it wasn't until the turn of this century that outlets for both American and European fast food chains really began proliferating. The fast food market is now so ripe that Subway says it has opened some 400 stores in the past decade, and Burger King, which shut its 39 French restaurants 16 years ago, recently re-entered the market with great success.

"We are the second-biggest consumer of fast food, after the U.S.," Camille Labro, a food blogger for Le Monde, tells The Salt.

The rise of fast food has come as the French have grown lax about their notoriously rigid food culture rules. Frdric Maquair, who co-founded Cojean, a Parisian chain of healthy fast food outlets, in 2001, notes that meals never used to be a solitary activity. "Before, people didn't dare go by themselves to a restaurant, eating alone, reading a magazine," he tells The Salt.

Nowadays, he and others say, the French have come to see fast food as freedom from the rigid gastronomical rules that used to bind them to sitting at a table, with other people, at specific times, for multiple courses.

But there's another, more practical concern encouraging the fast food trend: a shrinking lunch break.

The French lunch hour has collapsed from 80 minutes back in 1975, to just 22 minutes, according to a 2011 study by insurer Malakoff Mederic . That, in turn, has hurt business at traditional cafes, where offerings — like the typical 13 euro ($15) multi-course lunch — are still geared toward leisurely eating habits that are, increasingly, a relic of the past.

The number of cafes in France has dropped from more than 200,000 after World War II to just 32,000 today, according to estimates from Gira Conseil.

"The offer has not changed," says Gira Conseil's Devanne Julien, "but the consumer is different." Cafes, he says, "have not been able to adapt and compete with fast food."

Indeed, adaptation has been a key to fast food's success in France — where offerings tend to be healthier than in other parts of the world. There's less emphasis on fried, and more focus on fresh ingredients and local tastes.

At British chain Pret A Manger, known for its sandwiches, a third of the menu is dedicated to French classics like apple tart and the beloved jambon-buerre, or ham and butter — which might be called the French national sandwich.

And as we've previously reported, McDonald's has risen to the top of the fast food pack in France, with more than 1,200 outlets, precisely by fine-tuning its menu to fit the local culture (think grass-fed beef burgers). The company even opened salad-only cafes, called McSalad, 2011, which managed to win over Le Monde's Labro, a firm fast-food opponent. "The dressing was made with hazelnut and balsamic vinegar," she recalls, "just like I make at home."

But American chains like McDonald's and Subway also attract French fans for the ways in which they depart from local customs — at least when it comes to wait staff, says Labro.

French waiters tend to be "so mean and unserviceable that the American way of doing things in fast food places is almost pleasant, even if the workers aren't happy," says Labro. "I'd rather have an automated experience than a waiter ready to throw food in my face. It's more relaxing."

The signing ceremony looked rather simple, but the celebrations seemed joyous Tuesday in Amsterdam as Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands handed over the crown to her son Willem-Alexander.

He becomes, as we wrote Monday, the first Dutch king since Willem III's death in 1890.

There was orange everywhere in Amsterdam, as this Associated Press video shows. The Dutch royal family line is known as the House of Orange-Nassau.

By abdicating, the 75-year-old Beatrix is following a recent tradition. The BBC notes that "Queen Beatrix's mother Juliana resigned the throne in 1980 on her 71st birthday, and her grandmother Wilhelmina abdicated in 1948 at the age of 68."

The new king just turned 46. According to his official bio, "Willem-Alexander Claus George Ferdinand was born in the University Hospital, Utrecht, on 27 April 1967." The new queen is Mxima, "born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 17 May 1971 as Mxima Zorreguieta."

The royal couple have three daughters: "Their first child, Princess Catharina-Amalia, was born on 7 December 2003. Their second child, Princess Alexia, was born on 26 June 2005, and their third child, Princess Ariane, on 10 April 2007."

Being king does not mean Willem-Alexander can weigh in on affairs of state: "Since 1848, the Constitution has laid down that the monarch is inviolable. This means that the monarch is politically neutral and the ministers are accountable to Parliament for government policy."

In the world of television, there's nothing quite like a soap habit. People watch characters evolve not over the 10 or 15 seasons that might mark a long run in prime time, but over 30 or 40 years, until they have kids and grandkids — sometimes played by the same actors the entire time.

That's what has made the cancellation in recent years of big chunks of the soap lineup so upsetting to people — most recently in 2011, when ABC canceled both All My Children and One Life To Live. As All Things Considered reported over the weekend, both of those shows are making their debut today online at Hulu, a streaming service that will carry both exclusively, with much (but not all) of their casts intact.

The question, of course, is whether anybody is going to watch, and if so, who?

Traditionally, soaps are habit-based. People pop the TV on while they're having lunch, or in the break room, or in the dorm room, and the habit reinforces itself. It's not that soap fans didn't embrace VCRs and DVRs and time-shifting in general, but the original soap model is rhythmic; it's about the show fitting into your day somewhere that's predictable. The model for making money off that habit was relatively simple: viewers tune in, they watch ads, the show gets paid for.

Hulu has ads, too, but there are fewer of them, and they can be packaged differently — when I watched AMC this morning, it offered me one long commercial at the beginning in exchange for seeing the rest of the show without any at all — and they can't be skipped, unlike time-shifted ads on a DVR. At the same time, audiences are expected to be smaller; The New York Times reported yesterday that while these soaps pulled about three million viewers on ABC, they'd break even with about half a million when you combine Hulu, Hulu Plus (a paid service that will offer back episodes as well as new ones) and iTunes.

One big question concerns the fact that soaps on television have traditionally skewed toward older audiences. Back in 1994, one Kaiser Family Foundation study found that viewing was highest in young women (18-29) and older women (50 and over). But Reuters reported that as of the end of All My Children's run on ABC, the median viewer age was 57. Hulu, on the other hand, has a younger viewer base — earlier in April, it was reported to have an average age of 38.

So the challenge for Hulu is presumably in two parts: they need a younger audience (candidly, you can't just let the audience age and age and then die), and they need to keep a base level of the older audience that has sustained these shows always. The opening episode of All My Children on Hulu is fairly transparent on that point — it introduces some younger characters and a high school plot, but also focuses on people who were on when I was a teenager, including Angie and Jesse Hubbard, who became a so-called "supercouple" in the early 1980s and are still making out 30 years later. (And good for them.)

The tension shows at times. On the one hand, soaps can be very traditional and very corny, and on the other, Hulu has apparently opened up the opportunity for not only more explicit sex scenes than I remember from TV soaps, but different language. The way they manage it in the premiere is that the young characters swear and the older characters don't. It makes sense in its way (seeing Adam Chandler say "s—-" would be super weird for me personally), and maybe they think younger viewers won't feel like they're watching their grandma's favorite show if it's a little more salty. But if a traditional soap viewer who's been watching since the 1970s makes her way to Hulu and tunes in on the first day, and the first thing she notices is that now Adam Chandler's son says the s-word, how is that going to go over?

They're in a tough spot here. They can afford to sacrifice a certain chunk of the audience, as they've said, and they're already going to lose anybody who won't seek out online television as well as anybody who specifically liked how relatively clean soaps were.

Undoubtedly, there are older fans who previously had no interest in seeking out streaming television who, with their favorite show available nowhere else, might try out viewing on a tablet or a set-top box for the first time. But it's interesting that at the same time the new Netflix episodes of Arrested Development are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's understood to have a niche with those who are most plugged in to what pop culture decides is cool, soaps are representing streaming-only services as a home for content that's treated as hopelessly uncool but is beloved anyway.

Previously online-only television has largely been billed as event television (like Arrested Development) or limited-run (like Netflix's House Of Cards). Soaps will make an interesting test of whether the most traditional of TV habits can be translated from broadcast to online.