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In the classic American story, opportunity is always in front of you. You finish school, find a job, buy a home and start a family; it's a rosy dreamscape.

But that world is one-dimensional. Income inequality is just about as American as baseball and apple pie. And though the economy has improved in the past few years, the unemployment rate for black Americans, now 13.2 percent, is about double that for white Americans.

“ Whites disproportionally hold the best jobs, the jobs with the highest incomes, and we still live in a quite segregated society.

The writer Pearl S. Buck emerged into literary stardom in 1931 when she published a book called The Good Earth. That story of family life in a Chinese village won the novelist international acclaim, the Pulitzer, and eventually, a Nobel Prize. Her upbringing in China as the American daughter of missionaries served as inspiration for that novel and many, many others; by her death in 1973, Buck had written more than 100 books, including 43 novels.

Last December, Buck's son Edgar Walsh — who now manages her literary estate — received an email with some unexpected news. A 44th novel by his mother had been discovered in Texas.

"Someone, and I do not know who, took the manuscript from the house in which [Buck] died in Vermont and went away with it," Walsh says. "Whoever that person was wound up in Texas, rented a storage unit and put the manuscript in there. And that's where it was found."

The family had some trouble over the years, he tells NPR's Jacki Lyden, but things have been pretty good lately. His mother's work experienced a resurgence of attention in 2004 when Oprah selected The Good Earth for her book club.

Walsh didn't know Buck had spent her final years writing this novel.

"And I certainly didn't know someone had spirited the manuscript out of the home in which she had lived her last years in Vermont," he says, "and had concealed it from me and the family for 40 years."

Two manuscripts of the novel, titled The Eternal Wonder, were found — one typewritten and one written in the author's own handwriting. Fortunately, Walsh says, the estate was able to acquire the manuscripts without too much trouble.

"I contacted an attorney in Philadelphia [named] Peter Hearn," Walsh says. Hearn had helped Walsh with other disputes over Buck's work. "And [I] said, 'We will not give her what she's asking for, but we will pay her a modest sum of money, and we want it returned immediately.' That worked."

More About Pearl Buck:

The Two-Way

Book News: Newly Found Pearl Buck Novel To Be Published This Fall

West Point alum Donna McAleer was at her Utah home last week when she got a call asking if she'd "seen the latest."

A male Army sergeant, a friend told her, had just been charged with secretly photographing and videotaping at least a dozen female cadets at McAleer's alma mater.

Many of the women were naked; some images were taken in a bathroom at the U.S. Military Academy in New York. The revelations followed a rash of recent incidents, among them stunning reports that at least three ranking male officers overseeing military sexual assault prevention programs have themselves been charged in the past month with crimes ranging from sexual battery to stalking.

"How many of these stories are we going to hear?" asks McAleer, a field admissions officer for the academy. "I want to be able to, with confidence, encourage people — daughters and sons — to serve their country."

As the nation prepares to honor the war dead this Memorial Day weekend, a seeming epidemic of sexual assault and abuse reports has severely shaken that confidence.

A new Pentagon study estimates that 26,000 people in the Armed Forces were sexually assaulted last year. It's not entirely clear top brass understands the scope of the crisis: Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh suggested in recent Senate testimony that the spike in reports of sexual assaults in the military could be blamed on the "hook up mentality" of the country's young people.

Welsh has since apologized, but not before fanning outrage that's been building on Capitol Hill and beyond over the military's long failure to repair a system that has placed service members, especially women, in more danger of sexual assault than battlefield injury.

Obama's View

From President Obama's commencement address Friday at the U.S. Naval Academy:

Every day, our civil servants do their jobs with professionalism — protecting our national security and delivering the services that so many Americans expect. But as we've seen again in recent days, it only takes the misconduct of a few to further erode the people's trust in their government. That's unacceptable to me, and I know it's unacceptable to you.

And against this backdrop, what I said here four years ago remains true today: Our military remains the most trusted institution in America. When others have shirked their responsibilities, our Armed Forces have met every mission we've given them. When others have been distracted by petty arguments, our men and women in uniform come together as one American team.

And yet, we must acknowledge that even here, even in our military, we've seen how the misconduct of some can have effects that ripple far and wide. In our digital age, a single image from the battlefield of troops falling short of their standards can go viral and endanger our forces and undermine our efforts to achieve security and peace. Likewise, those who commit sexual assault are not only committing a crime, they threaten the trust and discipline that make our military strong. That's why we have to be determined to stop these crimes, because they've got no place in the greatest military on Earth.

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles. You can read their full stories below and find other stories on our Three-Minute Fiction page or on Facebook.

I found your journal in my car. A slim, Moleskin, six by ten centimeters, soft cover, blue, curving upwards at the edges like an incredibly shallow bowl, or a key dish. By the concavity in its form, the book seemed to be suggesting it was capable of carrying something. Something real. Not much. A few pennies. A handful of nails. One heavy pen cradled at that depression in the center, which had dropped out of the flatness of the book from riding around in the back pocket of your jeans.

The journal had slipped from that pocket onto the black leather of my car seat. You had not felt its absence as you climbed out and gathered your belongings from the space where your feet had recently been. A backpack, a tote bag and a travel coffee cup, blue, white letters advertising Rudy's Deli faded from washing.

The journal's pages are rounded and secured to the spine with thread. Did I see it slip from your pocket? And if so, why did I fail to draw your attention to it?

Perhaps I feared giving you the impression I had been looking at that pocket as you climbed from my car. Burnt orange thread edging dark denim. A small tear at the bottom left corner spilling white — not orange — thread. Why?

Right before I opened your book, it occurred to me that you had intended for me to find it, that you felt it slip from you, saw the blue cover on black leather and left it anyway, that you felt — as I felt — a desire to collapse the space between us. A desire to come closer. I could touch that pocket, I often thought, watching how it advanced towards me and then withdrew as your body sloped up and then out of my car. I could touch that pocket except for in the space between my hand and that dark denim half-diamond, the world drops off. Perhaps you — like I — had been perseverating over this distance and the implications it had for Euclidean geometry.

Because the shortest route from Point A — my hand resting lightly on the gearshift — to Point B — your pocket — was not a straight line. The distance could not be traversed before first traveling to some other point not on that line. It occurred to me, as I opened the pages of your book, that you not only recognized the fact of that other point, but also that I did not know how to find it. The journal was a map you had constructed to help me get there. I felt, as my fingers slipped into your pages for the first time, an overwhelming sense of gratitude that you would do this for me.

In India, some of the most entertaining reading on a Sunday afternoon is found in the classified ads. Page after page, the matrimonial section trumpets the finer qualities of India's sons and daughters.

Parents looking to marry off their children often place ads such as this one: "Wanted: Well-settled, educated groom for fair, beautiful Bengali girl, 22, 5'3"."

The matrimonial ads are a hallowed tradition in the quest to find a life partner — part of the institution of matchmaking that is as old as the country itself.

But in India, rising economic wherewithal and aspirations of a new generation of women are giving that ancient institution a modern twist.

Making Matches En Masse

In this new India, picture water gentling lapping at a launch in Mumbai, where some 45 young men and women clamor aboard yachts for a sunset sail. Organizers Simran and Siddharth Mangharam say they were deluged by takers eager for a spot on one of the four sailboats captained by former members of India's Olympic sailing team.

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It's difficult for an American president to govern through nuance especially when it's necessary to persuade a majority of the people that certain actions are essential for national security. And effective persuasion usually requires clarity.

That's how you arrive at President George W. Bush's stark formulation "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists," after Sept. 11 and much of that sprang from it.

But if President Obama's newly recalibrated counterterrorism strategy as outlined in his speech Thursday demonstrates anything, it is his penchant for nuance.

It's a tendency required by the times. After more than a decade of two large-scale wars, Americans long ago hit the kind of war weariness that made them open to the notion of downsizing what Obama's predecessor had described as a global war on terror that could last decades.

But there are still enemies who seek to wage an asymmetric fight against the U.S. Thus the need for the kind of complex U.S. approach — in short nuance — that can be hard to explain or easy to misstate in the Twitter era.

For an example of this nuance, just take Obama's new guidance for when the U.S. will target individuals for destruction by drone. In the past, a terrorist suspect could apparently be targeted for that fact alone.

But the administration's new guidance, according to a White House fact sheet, requires that a suspected terrorist only be targeted if he's a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons. It is simply not the case that all terrorists pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons; if a terrorist does not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force."

That's a distinction that's difficult to imagine the Obama administration's immediate predecessor making, with its more cut and dried approach.

But part of Obama's appeal to many Americans when he was first elected in 2008 was his promise of a smarter approach to counterterrorism than Bush's, one that would improve the U.S.' image abroad. That was a vow that appeared challenged, at least when it came to the Obama administration's controversial use of drones.

Obama greatly expanded the use of the remotely controlled unmanned vehicles, with their Hellfire missile payloads, far beyond anything that occurred under Bush. The result? Growing anger towards the U.S. in unstable places like Pakistan and Yemen and in other nations with Islamic majorities across the region.

While the use of the high-tech weapons has engendered outrage elsewhere in the world, Americans have mostly embraced the tactic.

Recent polls indicate a majority of Americans support drone attacks on terrorist suspects. Civil libertarians and human-rights activists like Code Pink protester Medea Benjamin who interrupted the president's speech Thursday may question the killing by drone of U.S. citizens abroad or of the innocent but that doesn't appear to be a majority concern.

It's this widespread support of U.S. drone warfare among the public that has given Obama the latitude he has enjoyed until now to increasingly conduct these attacks. The president didn't mention in his speech the popularity of the drones with Americans among the reasons for continuing their use. Americans' support of the use of drones certainly has made this part of his counterterrorism policy easier than it would be otherwise.

Ironically, the one part of his counterterrorism policy in which Obama showed the least nuance has arguably been the most vexing — his campaign promise to close Guantanamo, freeing those detainees deemed as not dangerous while transferring the rest to the U.S. mainland for trial.

It's not by choice, of course. He ran into fierce congressional resistance when he first tried to make good on his promise in 2009 shortly after entering the White House and all indications are that Republican lawmakers will do their best to thwart him again. And with most Americans agreeing with them that Guantanamo should remain open, their chances of winning are probably better than Obama's.

That doesn't really work to the film's detriment, though: Even a skin-deep biography of Plimpton is more fascinating than a deep dive about most people. Indeed, just hearing Plimpton lecture or read from his own work — which happens throughout the film, hence the subtitle — is engaging enough for a documentary of its own.

The directors spend much of the film's first half running chronologically through Plimpton's impressive CV: founding editor of the Paris Review; author of popular books and articles on his misadventures in the sporting life; friend to the Kennedys and one of the men who tackled shooter Sirhan Sirhan at the scene of RFK's assassination; star of an eponymous series of TV specials; advertising spokesman for everything from video game consoles to microwave popcorn.

It's these latter ventures that cause some consternation among Plimpton's colleagues and contemporaries. Despite the loving tone of the film as a whole, the directors do address the question of how much damage the prime-time specials and the corporate shilling may have done to his reputation. In an interview, novelist James Salter goes even further, confessing that though he may have been unfair to label Plimpton a dilettante in his younger days, "he was writing in a genre that really doesn't permit greatness."

If Plimpton's chosen genre didn't permit greatness, Bean and Poling make the case that the totality of his unique career and legacy certainly did. Whether it's the importance of the Paris Review in tapping talented new writers, the explorations into the creative mind that he navigated in his interview series for the magazine, or his role as one of the early pioneers of participatory journalism, the film portrays Plimpton as someone devoted to illuminating how talent and creativity work — both for himself, and for the rest of us.

1. Newton's Laws Of Motion

2. The Reluctance Of Brilliant Criminal Masterminds To Freely Confess

3. The Inability Of Two Things To Coexist In The Same Physical Space

4. The Integrity Of Vending Machines

5. Gravity

6. Gina Carano's Ability To Snap Most Of These People Like Twigs Pretty Quickly, If We're Being Honest

7. The Hardness Of Cars, Which Are Actually Kind Of Uncomfortable To Land On From Great Heights

8. The Assumption That Even Innocent Bystanders Who Do Not Have Speaking Parts Have To Not Die In Order For The Good Guys To Be Considered Entirely Successful

9. The Conservation Of Mass

10. The Concern That Former Models Are Often Not That Funny In Movies

11. The Tendency Of People To Be A Little Down After Witnessing Devastating Car Crashes

12. The Fact That In Most Circumstances, A Truck Is Unlikely To Contain A Tank

13. How Much It Hurts To Be On Fire, To The Point Where Strutting May Become Difficult

14. Amnesia ... Something Something Something

15. The Loss Of Velocity Of An Enormous Object Traveling At High Speed That Collides with Another Enormous Object

16. The Difficulty Of Completing A Fistfight While You're In One Moving Car And The Other Guy Is In Another Moving Car

17. The Likelihood That Even Conventionally Trained, Rule-Following Law Enforcement Officers Occasionally Learn Something Of Value They Can Successfully Use Against Criminals

18. That Guy Reminds Me Of Somebody, But I Really Don't Think It Can Be "Luke Evans," Because I Don't Know Who That Is ... Wait, Who's The One Who's Not Tom Hardy?

19. Relativity

20. Indemnification

California just unveiled a wide array of choices for the 5.3 million people expected to qualify to purchase coverage through its online marketplace established by federal health overhaul.

It's the first disclosure of prices in the nation's most populous state for individual health insurance that complies with the Affordable Care Act, and the menu of affordable options surprised some consumer advocates and analysts who had been expecting premiums to be much higher.

"I'm impressed," said Betsy Imholz, director of special projects for Consumers Union. "I actually think they are good prices," she said, especially for those who will receive federal insurance subsidies.

The worry had been that shoppers in the individual insurance market would face sticker shock when the sweeping changes of the health law take effect beginning in January 2014. The law prohibits health plans from rejecting people with pre-existing conditions and doesn't allow insurers to charge women and sicker people more.

Nearly three dozen health plans submitted bids to sell their products in the competitive marketplace, and 13 were selected. But California exchange officials, authorized by state lawmakers to negotiate on behalf of consumers, rejected bids that were too expensive, they said, or failed to include enough choices of doctors and hospitals.

"We've hit a home run for consumers," said Peter V. Lee, the executive director of the California exchange, known as Covered California.

The companies approved to sell individual insurance on the exchange include the state's dominant commercial players, such as Anthem Blue Cross, Kaiser Permanente, HealthNet and Blue Shield of California. A number of regional and quasi-public health plans that rely on public and university hospitals and community health centers to deliver medical care to low-wage workers were also approved.

The proposed premiums still get the OK of state insurance regulators. Three of the nation's largest players in the employer-sponsored insurance market — UnitedHealthCare, Cigna, and Aetna — aren't going to be selling on the California exchange.

The proposed premium prices vary depending on where in California the buyer lives. Other factors that affect pricing include the consumer's age and the richness of benefits.

Under the premiums unveiled Thursday, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles could choose a Health Net catastrophic plan for $117 a month or a more comprehensive plan for $147 a month from L.A. Care, the nation's largest public health plan.

People making less than about $45,600 per year would qualify for a subsidy that would lower the premiums further.

More than half of Californians shopping for insurance through the state-run marketplace will be eligible for federal income tax credits. Those credits will help offset the price of private insurance: a 40-year-old individual in Los Angeles, for example, who earns $1,915 a month, or 200-percent of the federal poverty level, would pay a monthly premium of $90 for a Health Net HMO "Silver" plan in 2014, according to the rates released by Covered California.

At a media briefing in Sacramento, which had a celebratory air, exchange officials said the restrained premiums largely reflected deft negotiating by the health plans with thousands of doctors and hospitals, including powerful hospital chains whose market clout has been blamed for rising health care costs in California.

"We made the pitch that we can't sustain the current system with 7 million Californians not being insured," said Paul Markovich, president of Blue Shield of California. "We felt there was a rate at which they could still be financially viable, but it would make rates much more affordable for this population."

The rate for an individual plan offered by Blue Shield of California will increase an average of 13 percent for existing customers, said Markovich. But the benefits, he said, as mandated by federal and state regulators and uniform across all health insurance packages, will look more like the comprehensive insurance workers receive from employers.

Health care analysts said simply calculating how much an individual's premium might increase next year was an incomplete — and faulty — assessment of the competitive marketplaces the federal health law was meant to unleash in each state. Caroline Pearson, a vice president at Avalere Health, a consulting firm Washington, said she judged California's performance by whether residents would have access to insurance products priced around $5,200 a year, the Congressional Budget Office's estimate for an average individual market premium.

And every region in California, based on her analysis, will offer plans below $4,000 a year. The offerings "strike me as very competitive," said Pearson. "It speaks to the number of carriers that were attracted to the market, and that the exchange created competition to drive down prices."

For the first time in seven years, the U.S. Senate has confirmed a judge to sit on the important federal appeals court for the District of Columbia. The Senate unanimously confirmed Deputy Solicitor General Sri Srinivasan on Thursday for the seat previously held by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

Srinivasan was confirmed because he had huge bipartisan support in the legal community and because he served in both the Bush and Obama administrations, while having no record in partisan politics. But the federal appeals court for the District of Columbia still has three vacancies.

Two previous Obama appointees, Goodwin Liu and Caitlin Halligan, also had stellar legal credentials but were filibustered by Republicans who portrayed them as judicial activists. Halligan was opposed primarily because as New York solicitor general, she represented the state's pro-gun control positions in court. After Liu's nomination was blocked, California Gov. Jerry Brown quickly nominated him to the California Supreme Court, where he now serves.

The partisan war over judicial nominees has accelerated in recent years as Republicans have stalled and, in some cases, filibustered record numbers of appeals court and trial court nominees. It took nearly a year to win confirmation for Srinivasan, who had no formal opposition.

At the same time, the Obama administration has been slow to fill vacancies.

There are three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit, out of 11 seats. The last D.C. Circuit judicial nominee to win confirmation was Brett Kavanaugh in 2006. He had previously served in the Bush White House counsel's office and as a top assistant to then-special prosecutor Kenneth Starr during the investigation of President Clinton and his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.

In the current politically polarized atmosphere, nominees to the D.C. Circuit face particular scrutiny because so many of them go on to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Four of the current Supreme Court Justices — Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — all served on that court first. And a fifth justice, Elena Kagan, was nominated to the circuit court by President Clinton but never got a vote.

Srinivasan, 46, is the first South Asian ever to serve on an appellate court. Born in India and raised in Lawrence, Kan., he likely would be high on the short list for a Supreme Court vacancy should one occur.

The state of Texas is turning down billions of federal dollars that would have paid for health care coverage for 1.5 million poor Texans.

By refusing to participate in Medicaid expansion, which is part of the Affordable Care Act, the state will leave on the table an estimated $100 billion over the next decade.

Texas' share of the cost would have been just 7 percent of the total, but for Gov. Rick Perry and the state's Republican-dominated Legislature, even $1 in the name of "Obamacare" was a dollar too much.

"Texas will not be held hostage by the Obama administration's attempt to force us into this fool's errand of adding more than a million Texans to a broken system," Perry said.

Texas Republicans have moved steadily to the right — to where the very concept of public health insurance of any kind is looked at through narrowed eyes. Still, it's not easy to walk away from $100 billion from the federal government to help your state's poor, elderly and disabled, especially when you have powerful stakeholders like hospitals, doctors and cities clamoring for the state to take the money for their sakes.

Texas hospitals stand to lose about $7 billion.

"I don't think we will be OK, actually, especially when you consider the state cut us about $700 million a year in Medicaid payments because of the budget shortfall," says John Hawkins, a senior vice president at the Texas Hospital Association. "Now we're dealing with sequestration, which is another 2 percent.

Shots - Health News

Texas Medicaid Debate Complicated By Politics And Poverty

A day after school officials approved shutting down 50 schools, the Chicago Teachers Union and community activists say they'll hold a voter registration and education campaign. The union is agitated that Mayor Rahm Emanuel, school board members and some lawmakers failed to listen to parents, teachers and others who called for the schools to remain open.

Before they voted yes on the sweeping school closure plan, school board members faced a torrent of criticism Wednesday. Protesters tried to conduct a sit-in at the front of the boardroom, but security officers escorted them out.

Sonya Williams, a parent who had come to testify in defense of her school, said she understood the passion and the outbursts.

"It's just like going to a long funeral and no one will close the casket yet," she said. "The fate of your position, the fate of your job, the fate of your children are up in the air, and they're based on a few people making a decision."

This was the last time before the vote that people could make their pitch to keep schools open. Chicago Alderman Bob Fioretti was among them.

"Substantial research shows that closing schools and moving students increases the dropout rate and the incidence of street violence," he said.

Chicago's 'School Utilization Crisis'

The arguments did not deter Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, who, along with Mayor Emanuel, has argued that Chicago has to "right-size" its school district. They have said demographic shifts in mostly black neighborhoods left schools underutilized — plus, the district faces a budget deficit of a billion dollars.

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Then Shira's mother, terrified of losing the sister's newborn baby when the widower, Yochay (Yiftach Klein), considers marrying a widow in Belgium, sets about engineering a match between between Shira and Yochay. Desolate enough at having her own hopes dashed, Shira is downright paralyzed by the ethical and emotional implications of marrying her beloved sister's husband, whom she has loved as a brother.

Other complications intrude to stack the deck against an orderly transition to a settled life; none of them, though, involves a direct challenge to a social order that many secular people argue consigns women to secondary roles as helpmeets.

And it's true that the stakes are low here. Shira's dilemma may be agonizing for her, but it involves no violation of Jewish law, threatens no status quo. The community's kindly rabbi implores her to consult her own feelings. One wonders how he would respond to a request to take a year off to travel by herself, or to train as a rabbi.

In light of the recent violent protests among ultra-Orthodox men (and women) against women who claimed the right to pray as men do at Jerusalem's Western Wall, some would call Kill the Void a roaring case of special pleading. And perhaps Burshtein does take a willfully rosy view of women's standing within the Haredi community. But if she may be willfully blind to politics, she excels at setting before us, in passionately intimate detail, a world to which she is devoted — and one in which women are placed front and center.

Ambience is everything in this director's gorgeous scene-setting. There's nothing remotely monkish or drab about the lavish physicality and rich lighting that infuses a sexually modest subculture with sensual pleasure and — yes — romance. In one achingly lovely scene, Shira squeezes out her grief in the plaintive notes of an accordion as Yochay sways in a hammock, his baby slumbering peacefully on his chest.

Elsewhere a richly soulful Hebrew rendition of Psalm 137 ("If I forget thee, O Jerusalem ...") underscores the transformative power of communal ritual, whose central premise — act, and the feelings will follow — guides Shira toward a decision.

There's nothing pat about this: In the final shot of the movie, on her wedding night, a young woman stands with her back against a wall. What is that look on her face? Is it doubt about the choice she's made? Fright? Or awe before the mystery of her own, and all, existence?

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

American author Lydia Davis was awarded the Man Booker International Prize, worth about $90,000, at a ceremony Wednesday in London. Davis is renowned for her works of (very) short fiction. One story, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant," reads in its entirety: "that Scotland has so few trees." Another, called "Certain Knowledge from Herodotus" says, "These are the facts about the fish in the Nile:" Sir Christopher Ricks, chairman of the judges, is quoted in the official announcement: "Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts? Aphorisms, or even apophthegms? Prayers, or perhaps wisdom literature? Or might we settle for observations?" (In any case, Samuel Johnson was indignant about the lack of trees in Scotland, and Herodotus had some odd conceptions about the breeding habits of Nile fish.) Other finalists included American writer Marilynne Robinson, who was considered the frontrunner (her novel Gilead won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005), and the French novelist Marie NDiaye, whose Three Strong Women made a splash in 2012.

Keith Richards, the wraith-like Rolling Stones guitarist, told The Sun tabloid that he owes 50 years' worth of library fines. The Sun said "experts" (economists? librarians? other irresponsible library patrons?) estimate that means about $30,000 in fines.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts will write a book about "fighting for the middle class," according to a press release sent out by her publisher, Henry Holt. Although parts will be autobiographical, it adds, "the main focus of the book ... will be the conflict America now faces between giant institutions and the needs of everyday citizens." The Democratic lawmaker's book, not yet titled, will be published in 2014.

It's rumored that Republican Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin also is coming out with a book. A report in the National Review cites "a source close to Ryan" who stressed that the book won't be a "tell-all" about the failed Romney-Ryan presidential campaign, but a combination of policy and autobiography.

Amazon announced Wednesday that it will let writers of fan fiction sell their work through its site, though authors will share profits with the original copyright holder and with Amazon. Long a staple of Internet subculture, fan fiction has slowly begun to receive more serious academic consideration. (Check out Katherine Arcement's great essay about it for the London Review of Books.) But until now, it was illegal to sell fiction based on copyrighted works — books such as Fifty Shades of Grey, which began as Twilight fan fiction, needed to be substantially altered before they could be sold for profit.

Get recipes for Butterscotch Budino With Caramel Sauce And Salt, Butterscotch Breadcrumb Cake and Butterscotch Cream Pie.

[Note: Before Midnight is an especially difficult movie to write about, simply because for some people, even what has become of Jesse and Celine since Before Sunset is information that they don't want. But it's impossible — absolutely impossible — to write about the movie without talking about where they stand and what the premise is. I did my absolute best to spoil as little beyond that as possible. But if it's extremely important to you not to know whether he missed the plane, whether they've seen each other in the last nine years, or the rest of the table-setting that happens in the film's first few minutes (and if you've managed not to know until now), stop here.]

It took three movies for the stunning series made up of Before Sunrise, Before Sunset and now Before Midnight to go back to the beginning.

And what was the beginning?

In 1995's Before Sunrise, directed like the other two films by Richard Linklater, Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) spend a single romantic night together in Vienna. But that's not the beginning. Before they can spend that night together, they have to get off the train together. And before they get off the train together, they have to talk. And before they talk, they have to meet. And before they meet, that's the beginning.

Remember? They're on the train, and Celine gets up from her seat and moves, ultimately plunking herself down right across from Jesse and going back to the book she's reading. And he spots her out of the corner of his eye, an impossibly beautiful French girl, and he makes a little goggle-eyed smile into his book, because it's all just a little too unreal.

But that's not actually the beginning either.

In the very beginning, the reason Celine gets up and moves is that the middle-aged couple sitting near her is fighting in German, and she's tired of listening to it, even though she can't understand it. She winds up next to Jesse specifically because she's quietly but firmly put off by the ugliness of couplehood that's been corroded by years of togetherness; by familiarity that has bred contempt. The first conversation they ever have is about that couple, and the fact that Celine has heard that in time, couples literally lose the ability to hear each other — men lose their hearing of higher tones, and women of lower ones.

It took three movies and 20 years for Jesse and Celine to be the ones having the fight, and to worry that now that they've passed 40, they are becoming the couple they ran away from when they'd just passed 20. It's not hard to reshoot that scene in your mind's eye, with the 2013 Jesse and Celine fighting in the foreground while, in the background, the 1995 Jesse and Celine huddle to roll their eyes at those people who can't hear each other.

See, it turns out Jesse really did miss that plane at the end of Before Sunset, and he never really went home. They've been a couple ever since, and they have twin daughters, conceived shortly after they got together. His son and ex-wife live in Chicago and he's published more books; she's still a professional environmentalist. We meet them here in Greece, at the end of summer.

And they've learned, perhaps unsurprisingly, that if you think being separated for nine years is hard, you should try being together. Their relationship, originally so perfectly preserved and gorgeous in memory, has gotten scuffed and noisy and complicated. It's not just the two of them in a listening booth in a record store now. It's them and their daughters, and his son, and his ex-wife, and their friends, and their work, and ultimately everybody with the ability to intrude, which is ... everybody.

The neat trick of Before Sunrise was that as between the two of them, there were no obstacles for Jesse and Celine. They were perfect according to each other's greedy and generous interpretation. Everything that happened made them like each other more; every conversation they had made them seem more mutually well-suited. It's an almost perfect document of the intoxication of first meetings, of the sense that every time your phone wasn't ringing, this is the person who was supposed to be calling you, and every time you felt a space next to you, this is the person who was supposed to be in it.

The obstacles were simply guts and time; he had to get on a train in the morning so he could catch his flight home, and if they weren't going to get lost, somebody would have to find the nerve to say something before they parted. (Note, if you are under 25: we didn't have Skype or smartphones or Facebook then, so sometimes people we really liked got lost. P.S. Looking for them is one of the first things we did with Google.)

In the break between the first movie and Before Sunset, the big lingering question was whether they kept their promise to meet again six months later so they wouldn't get lost. The answer? They didn't. Life had intruded, and they'd gotten lost. That second leg of the story started with a broken promise, which announced that we were in a different place with these two. They knew more; more had happened to them. Still, they fell instantly into those same talks and walks. The obstacles were still external but more complex — professional obligations, other relationships, timing, geography, and the assorted bullpucky of life that keeps most things from ever happening. They had the opportunity to take a regret and transform it into a rescue, it seemed.

Did You Show Up in Vienna?
Before Sunset — MOVIECLIPS.com

Add this to the list of Democratic worries surrounding the wave of Obama administration scandals: the downstream effect.

It's prime candidate-recruiting season right now — the period in the two-year election cycle when officials in both parties fan out across the map in hopes of persuading prospective candidates to run for Congress. Issues and money always get plenty of attention, but the ability of party leaders to attract strong, capable candidates is vital to success on Election Day.

And that makes the timing of the political storm front especially inconvenient for Democrats.

It's not easy convincing candidates to put themselves through the grueling process of running for high office. Aside from the personal and family dimensions of the decision, there are more prosaic concerns: Will the party help with fundraising? Is the job worth the trouble or is Washington too broken to accomplish anything?

Prospective candidates also want to know about the end game. In other words, what are their chances of victory?

That's where the scandal trifecta fits in. Given the sacrifices candidates must make and the amount of time and energy required to run a top-notch campaign, some are leery of making a bid when the national political atmosphere threatens to be a significant drag.

"The environment really does matter in the recruiting process," said Guy Harrison, a former executive director with the National Republican Congressional Committee and a veteran of the candidate courtship game. "This is constantly going to be coming up in conversations. ... Recruitment isn't necessarily finding people to run. People bubble up to the surface. You work to reduce the barriers to running. That's why atmospherics matter so much."

So far, there isn't much evidence that potential Democratic candidates are spooked. The party committees whose job is electing Democrats to the House and Senate insist the scandals aren't a problem and haven't required any additional hand-holding.

"The recruiting environment isn't about daily ups-and-downs because the deciding factor for our top candidates is the prospect of ending the dysfunctional, chaotic and obstructionist reign of House Republicans," said Emily Bittner, press secretary for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "In fact, House Republicans themselves are our greatest recruiting tool, and there is no sign that they will get their act together and finally be more popular than head lice anytime this century."

Still, the recent decisions of two A-list Democratic Senate prospects not to run in 2014 sparked speculation that, at least in some red states, the 2014 outlook is gloomy. While former Rep. Stephanie Herseth of South Dakota and Rep. John Barrow of Georgia made their announcements before the three administration scandals took full shape, they served as a reminder that red state Democrats would be saddled with some Obama administration policies that may not play well in culturally conservative states.

Equally important is the burden of history. The 2014 elections will occur against the backdrop of the "six-year itch," which refers to the tendency of the party controlling the White House to suffer big losses in the sixth-year of a president's tenure.

And there's yet another reason for prospective Democratic candidates to pause before jumping in. If historical trends hold true, the demographic composition of the 2014 midterm electorate will look considerably different than the one that re-elected Barack Obama in 2012: It's likely to be a more Republican-friendly electorate.

If the current controversies are going to depress recruiting efforts, it's more likely to be reflected in House races than in Senate ones since House elections are more easily influenced by national political forces — think Watergate in 1974 or Obamacare in 2010 — than Senate contests.

"Unlike House races, Senate campaigns have the resources to introduce new information about themselves and their opponents and distinguish the race from the national environment," said Matt Canter, communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

When it comes to the House, where seats go before the voters every two years, there's more incentive to sit out an election cycle than in the Senate, where opportunities come up much more infrequently.

Given the present conditions, Harrison explained, "Candidates will say, 'Why wouldn't I wait another two years for the next presidential election?' "

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is confident the spate of controversies won't have an effect on recruitment at any level.

"In spite of this being the worst, most polarized environment I've seen in 20 years, there are still opportunities to make a difference," she said. "These so-called scandals are not going to stick or adhere to individual candidates and ultimately Republicans' continued desire to see Obama fail will backfire."

Arrested Development returning via Netflix? Just another old-media brand reviving itself on new media.

The TV show, which originally ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and unveils new episodes on Netflix next weekend, finds itself in splendid company. Radiohead, Louis C.K., Veronica Mars — all found their audiences with promotion and distribution from big studios and networks. Radiohead was signed to a major music label. Louis C.K. enjoyed HBO specials and TV shows. And Veronica Mars ran on two TV networks for three years.

But Radiohead defied industry norms in 2006 by selling its album In Rainbows directly to fans for whatever price they chose — and the band made millions. Louis C.K. took a similarly successful route with a comedy special in 2011, charging viewers five dollars to download the special online. And Veronica Mars fans contributed more than $5.7 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — almost three times the stated goal — to pay for a movie adaptation.

Author Grady Hendrix says these models aren't exactly replicable. These are mid-list, old-media artists, not blockbuster celebrities. But their fan bases and name recognition furnishes them with a new-media edge that won't be shared, he says, "[by] some band from Cleveland that has a small following looking for Kickstarter funds for their album."

Inevitably, some old-media brands still manage to do it wrong. The blandly impersonal Kickstarter page of actress Melissa Joan Hart might as well have been written by a publicist's intern. The former star of Sabrina The Teenage Witch is soliciting funds for a new romantic comedy, but as Hendrix points out, with the slightest of smirks, "It's raised $50,000, and it's doing really badly."

On the other hand, a Kickstarter campaign from actor Zach Braff simply oozes kinship with fans. And they've rallied, giving more than $2.7 million to support a follow-up to his 2004 movie Garden State and surpassing his goal by hundreds of thousands of dollars. "There are shots of him and his brother and all these behind-the-scenes things," Hendrix notes," And you feel like, 'Hey, Zach Braff is going to answer my emails!'"

A sense of ownership and connection leads people to donate money to movies ultimately benefiting the major studios that make them. But it's important to recognize that Warner Brothers will still invest many millions in producing, distributing and promoting a Veronica Mars movie, even with Kickstarter's help.

And there could be more to come. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities points out that rumors have swirled that late show Heroes might be resurrected by Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. "And the only way you'll be able to watch," he says, "is on Xbox."

Giving still-grieving fans hope for new Xbox or Netflix episodes of their canceled darlings such as Caprica, Chuck or Firefly.

Chuck used to sell marijuana in California. But the legalization of medical marijuana in the state meant he was suddenly competing against hundreds of marijuana dispensaries. So he moved to New York, where marijuana is still 100 percent illegal. Since making the move, he says, he's quadrupled his income. (For the record: His name isn't really Chuck.)

He spends pretty much every day dealing what he calls "farm-to-table" marijuana. On a recent afternoon in his dimly lit New York apartment, he was just about to complete a daily ritual: loading about 50 baggies of marijuana, worth a total of about $3,000 into his backpack, before heading out to make deliveries. "We're helping keep people stoned on a Friday night in New York City," he said.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have now legalized marijuana, either for medical use or for fun. And, it turns out, when one state brings an underground market into the mainstream and another doesn't, there are economic consequences in both places.

Dealers aren't the only ones with an incentive to move marijuana out of California. The legalization of medical marijuana led to a rush of pot farmers with permits to grow marijuana legally. That in turn led to a supply glut — and plummeting wholesale prices. Some growers haven't been able to unload all their crops at the price they want on the local, legal market. So they break the law and send it out of state.

Special Agent Roy Giorgi with the California Department of Justice is supposed to stop the illegal flow of marijuana in California. That can mean crouching in the brush in some remote part of the mountains, or it can mean heading to a FedEx or UPS in California's pot country to take a look at all the outgoing parcels and try to detect marijuana inside.

He estimates that 1 in 15 packages he examines has marijuana in it. "Right now, Northern California bud, that trademark, that stamp, is really some of the best in the world," he says.

Of course, all of Giorgi's efforts to catch marijuana growers and dealers tend to drive people out of the illegal marijuana business. That, in turn, means Chuck has less competition — and can charge higher prices.

Chuck sells marijuana for about $60 for an eighth of an ounce; in California, it would be anywhere from $30 to $45. With his New York customers, Chuck talks about marijuana like it's a rare California wine. When he pours out the contents of his backpack to reveal strains with names like Girl Scout Cookies and AK47, his clients are wowed.

Because Chuck is working in an illegal market, his customers have a hard time finding other marijuana retailers. "There's plenty of weed in New York; there's just an illusion of scarcity, which is part of what I'm capitalizing on," he says. "This is a black market business. There's insufficient information for customers."

This is what economists call information asymmetry: Chuck knows more about the market than his customers do. If weed were legal, his customers could comparison shop — they could look at menus and price lists and choose their dealer. As it is, once they find Chuck, they're likely to stick with him.

Note: A version of this story originally aired as part of the WNYC series The Weed Next Door. The headline on this post was inspired by @MichaelMontCW

Chuck used to sell marijuana in California. But the legalization of medical marijuana in the state meant he was suddenly competing against hundreds of marijuana dispensaries. So he moved to New York, where marijuana is still 100 percent illegal. Since making the move, he says, he's quadrupled his income. (For the record: His name isn't really Chuck.)

He spends pretty much every day dealing what he calls "farm-to-table" marijuana. On a recent afternoon in his dimly lit New York apartment, he was just about to complete a daily ritual: loading about 50 baggies of marijuana, worth a total of about $3,000 into his backpack, before heading out to make deliveries. "We're helping keep people stoned on a Friday night in New York City," he said.

Eighteen states and the District of Columbia have now legalized marijuana, either for medical use or for fun. And, it turns out, when one state brings an underground market into the mainstream and another doesn't, there are economic consequences in both places.

Dealers aren't the only ones with an incentive to move marijuana out of California. The legalization of medical marijuana led to a rush of pot farmers with permits to grow marijuana legally. That in turn led to a supply glut — and plummeting wholesale prices. Some growers haven't been able to unload all their crops at the price they want on the local, legal market. So they break the law and send it out of state.

Special Agent Roy Giorgi with the California Department of Justice is supposed to stop the illegal flow of marijuana in California. That can mean crouching in the brush in some remote part of the mountains, or it can mean heading to a FedEx or UPS in California's pot country to take a look at all the outgoing parcels and try to detect marijuana inside.

He estimates that 1 in 15 packages he examines has marijuana in it. "Right now, Northern California bud, that trademark, that stamp, is really some of the best in the world," he says.

Of course, all of Giorgi's efforts to catch marijuana growers and dealers tend to drive people out of the illegal marijuana business. That, in turn, means Chuck has less competition — and can charge higher prices.

Chuck sells marijuana for about $60 for an eighth of an ounce; in California, it would be anywhere from $30 to $45. With his New York customers, Chuck talks about marijuana like it's a rare California wine. When he pours out the contents of his backpack to reveal strains with names like Girl Scout Cookies and AK47, his clients are wowed.

Because Chuck is working in an illegal market, his customers have a hard time finding other marijuana retailers. "There's plenty of weed in New York; there's just an illusion of scarcity, which is part of what I'm capitalizing on," he says. "This is a black market business. There's insufficient information for customers."

This is what economists call information asymmetry: Chuck knows more about the market than his customers do. If weed were legal, his customers could comparison shop — they could look at menus and price lists and choose their dealer. As it is, once they find Chuck, they're likely to stick with him.

Note: A version of this story originally aired as part of the WNYC series The Weed Next Door. The headline on this post was inspired by @MichaelMontCW

"I've never been anywhere that felt so old and so traditionally American as the Carolina Piedmont, which is the region that Dean comes from. It's tobacco country; there used to be textiles and furniture-making. And then tobacco, as we know, fell with the '90s and the investigations and the tobacco buyout and it kind of laid waste to what had been a very intact middle class and working class part of the country. Dean Price is a son of that region. His father was a Bible Belt preacher; his whole family had been tobacco farmers since the 18th century; they all live within about 10 miles of each other in Rockingham County, N.C.

"And again, around the time of the financial crisis, Dean, who had this truck stop business, watched his business fail — so he turned to biofuels. And he has this whole vision, which I think is a very American vision, of resurgence, a kind of renaissance of the countryside through alternative energy. But he's doing it on his own. No one is telling him to; there's no organization he's part of; there's no union or business trade association or newspaper that he's connected [to]. He's a loner out there; he's a Johnny Appleseed spreading biodiesel across the countryside."

On how American communities are suffering

"As Dean said to me while we were walking around Madison, N.C., the town that he grew up in, the shoe store was closed down, the pharmacy was shuttered, the restaurants were closed, there were just a couple people on the sidewalk — you see this in little towns all across the heartland. He said the guys who used to own those stores were the pillars of this community — they coached the little league teams, they were on the town council. They're gone and communities can't suffer that way without great consequences."

More From George Packer

The Two-Way

George Packer, On Covering Washington

It's true enough that there's plenty wrong with Gatsby Le Magnifique, as the French are calling the latest from director Baz Luhrmann. But what better film could there have been to open the sensory onslaught that is the Cannes Film Festival than one orchestrated by that patron saint of overstimulation?

It's not just that you might see four films a day at Cannes, from directors as different as plainspoken American satirist Alexander Payne (here with heartland father-son drama Nebraska) and hyperliterate French maximalist Arnaud Desplechin (who has enlisted Benicio Del Toro for the wonderfully titled Jimmy P. — Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian).

It's the chaos outside the theater on the French Riviera, with women on roller skates swooping at you to hawk trade magazines, and red-carpet photo calls set to Daft Punk. Crowds scrambling for a glimpse of stars, even if it's only through the smartphone camera screens held up by everyone up front.

With the right party invitations, Cannes is not unlike Gatsby's unhinged introduction scene for Leo DiCaprio, where the star smiles wide as the Gershwin swells behind booming fireworks: Even if it's all a little tacky, you're still stunned by the ridiculous grandeur and glamour of it all.

Without the right invitations (read: if you're me), on the other hand, the Gatsby resonance comes from the time spent staring at lights on distant piers, scenes of parties much classier than whatever you've hustled your way into — though you'll find enough cheap booze for a bootlegger either way.

The overheated atmosphere has a way of inducing delusions of grandeur in everyone here, including film critics. Indeed, the history of media coverage at Cannes is full of examples of exaggerated, oversimplified pans and ill-considered snap judgments — especially post-Twitter. (My favorite historical example, just to prove that antisocial media were hardly paragons, might be the now-shuttered British Daily Herald, reporting on the prize awarded to Federico Fellini's classic La Dolce Vita: "ORGY FILM WINS TOP AWARD."*)

It's enough to make it clear why Ingmar Bergman, upon learning that The Virgin Spring was playing at Cannes, wrote that he "hate[s] that place of meat market[s] and mental humiliation. At a festival you can really despair of the motion picture as an art." (That he ended up winning a prize that year did not change his view.)

In any case, a good critic does what she can to keep an even keel. But it's hard for a certain kind of film fan to not get giddy when the lineup features new work from the Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh, Jim Jarmusch, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Winding Refn (director of Drive) and Asghar Farhadi (director of the phenomenal Oscar-winner A Separation).

Festival head Thierry Fremaux has also taken steps this year to address one common complaint that has dogged the festival — the underrepresentation of female directors, though he's done it in a way that raises issues of its own. There are eight female directors in the official competition categories (compared with three last year), but seven of them, including art-cinema heavyweights like Sofia Coppola and Claire Denis, have been relegated to the secondary Un Certain Regard category.

Fremaux has shrugged off criticism about this strange disparity by saying that Un Certain Regard is just as important as the flagship competition, but few people here really believe that. (Just look at the name! It's like a half-step above the "I Guess It's OK" awards.)

And for anyone who'd suggest that it's a matter of those films being less accomplished, Coppola's The Bling Ring is at least one terrific counterexample, having already outclassed some of the competition films in the first two days here. The film is based on the titular gang of real-life teens who used gossip rags and Twitter feeds to find out when celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan would be out of town, then ransacked their homes. It helped that those gleaming glass edifices on L.A. mountainsides were usually unlocked — when celebrity culture has made the rest of these lives transparent, is it a big surprise that their homes weren't any different?

Barriers of any kind are a foreign concept for gang ringleaders Nicki, Rebecca, and Marc (Emma Watson, Katie Chang and Israel Broussard), whom Coppola portrays here in an ultra-specific satirical snapshot. Designer brand names and Kanye West lyrics are their native tongue, and "The Secret" — that method of attaining all your desires through the power of positive thinking — is the equivalent of their morning prayers; they prefer entitlement to enlightenment. (Watson in particular has a blast putting on a Valley-girl accent and yammering about "expanding as a spiritual human being," though Coppola has actually toned down the ridiculousness of her real-life inspiration).

Bored with even the excess of nightclub visits and house parties, these kids decide to try on the lifestyles of their heroes as if they were so many Prada heels. At first, it's by taking their things and partying in their homes, but soon they follow the imitation to its logical conclusion — carefully chosen court-date outfits and lawyer-scripted apologies in the manner of their DUI-charged idols.

And why wouldn't they, when the consequences of their actions seem to be nonexistent? Or they are for the kids with the right lawyers, at least. Like the similarly themed Spring Breakers, this is partially a story about class and social-climbing, in which the inevitable hammer comes down hardest on the least fortunate. For the others, life is but a shopping spree.

Summer is almost here, and with it comes the army of interns marching into countless American workplaces. Yet what was once an opportunity for the inexperienced is becoming a front-line labor issue.

More and more, unpaid and low-paid interns are feeling their labor is being exploited. Some are even willing to push back — with lawsuits.

One of the most high profile intern-versus-employer lawsuits suffered a setback last week that could have implications for other cases. A judge in New York ruled that a group of 3,000 unpaid interns could not sue the Hearst Corp. as a class, but would have to file individual cases against the company.

"It is important, and it is a setback in the sense that it becomes harder for groups of interns to get together, and it makes it less likely that lawyers will take those cases," Ross Perlin says.

Perlin knows the plight of the unpaid intern well. A former intern himself, Perlin was inspired by his experiences to write his first book, Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.

"The internship has become virtually a requirement for getting into the white-collar workforce, certainly. It's something that the majority of students at four-year colleges do at least once before they graduate. Many do it two, three, four more times," Perlin says.

"An estimated quarter or third of all internships are unpaid, many more are low-paid as well," he adds. "So those are the ones we're really focusing on because there are thousands of internships each year in the U.S. that are illegal according to the law."

Perlin offers a few red flags to look out for when deciding on an internship program. "If they're asking for somebody who has deep experience with Photoshop, can design websites, and has lots of other experience, and then they're saying, 'Oh, sorry, we're actually not going to be able to pay.' "

If a company's offering school credit, Perlin says, that should also raise a red flag because school credit is given out by schools. "That really shouldn't come into play unless there is a real relationship between an employer and a given college," he says.

Of course, good internships aren't illegal or exploitative. If the company has an established intern-training program, has a designated intern coordinator and details the skills interns will learn, Perlin says, chances are that intern will have a good experience.

Across the country, cash-strapped state and local governments are not just cutting services — they're also cutting access to courts. The tip of the iceberg may be small claims courts.

These courts, dealing with disputes involving small sums of money, are the workhorses of the judicial system. There are thousands of such courts across the country, but perhaps nowhere are they being cut more dramatically than in California.

Small claims courts were created in the mid-20th century to allow people to resolve monetary disputes that are small in the greater scheme of things but huge to people of limited means.

And they're unique in how efficient they are. Defendants and plaintiffs don't need a lawyer and judges usually make their rulings on the spot, often in 30 minutes or less. They're meant for people like Mark Delnero, the owner of a charter fishing boat company.

In December, Delnero drove to the San Joaquin County Courthouse, plunked down a $30 fee and asked the small claims court to give him justice. He claimed a customer stiffed him with a bad check for $740. Then, he says, the court let him down, too. "Nothing like being shafted twice," Delnero says. "Once by the bad-check bouncer and then by the Stockton court."

'Your Case Sits And Goes Nowhere'

The court told him he would receive notice of a hearing in 90 days, Delnero says, but he never heard anything. So he called the small claims courts after 90 days and then again after 120 days.

Both times, he says, the court told him his case still wasn't scheduled. "I don't have faith in how the courts work," Delnero says. "I'm just in awe. I don't know what to think."

“ In our county, if you file a small claims case it simply sits in the proverbial box waiting to get a trial date. Your case sits and goes nowhere."

The man Art Review magazine named the most powerful artist in the world is trying his hand at rock-stardom. In 2011, the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei spent 81 days in detention. He was later let go and charged with tax evasion. Now, he has released his first heavy metal song, based on his time in police detention.

The video for the song, "Dumbass," opens with a scene showing Ai Weiwei sitting in a chair, a black hood over his head. Written on the hood are the words "suspected criminal." As he paces the cell, two guards pace with him. As he sleeps, one stands over his bed. Even seated on the toilet, they are just feet away, always present.

These scenes dissolve into the fantasies of one of the prison guards, including plastic blow-up dolls taking Ai's place in his bed, and the whole video ending with Ai, head shaved, dancing in drag. Ai says this dystopian nightmare — shot by cinematographer Christopher Doyle — reflects his detention experience,

Enlarge image i

"I've never been anywhere that felt so old and so traditionally American as the Carolina Piedmont, which is the region that Dean comes from. It's tobacco country; there used to be textiles and furniture-making. And then tobacco, as we know, fell with the '90s and the investigations and the tobacco buyout and it kind of laid waste to what had been a very intact middle class and working class part of the country. Dean Price is a son of that region. His father was a Bible Belt preacher; his whole family had been tobacco farmers since the 18th century; they all live within about 10 miles of each other in Rockingham County, N.C.

"And again, around the time of the financial crisis, Dean, who had this truck stop business, watched his business fail — so he turned to biofuels. And he has this whole vision, which I think is a very American vision, of resurgence, a kind of renaissance of the countryside through alternative energy. But he's doing it on his own. No one is telling him to; there's no organization he's part of; there's no union or business trade association or newspaper that he's connected [to]. He's a loner out there; he's a Johnny Appleseed spreading biodiesel across the countryside."

On how American communities are suffering

"As Dean said to me while we were walking around Madison, N.C., the town that he grew up in, the shoe store was closed down, the pharmacy was shuttered, the restaurants were closed, there were just a couple people on the sidewalk — you see this in little towns all across the heartland. He said the guys who used to own those stores were the pillars of this community — they coached the little league teams, they were on the town council. They're gone and communities can't suffer that way without great consequences."

More From George Packer

The Two-Way

George Packer, On Covering Washington

Artifacts that once belonged to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the Indian independence leader who took a vow of poverty, could fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction.

A pair of sandals, a shawl, a drinking cup, Gandhi's will and various other documents associated with the leader are all up for auction. Guide prices range from 200 for "a rare British Parliament paper declaring Gandhi a terrorist" dating from 1932, to 40,000 for his will. A sample of Gandhi's blood is also on the auction block at Britain's Ludlow Racecourse in Shropshire.

This is not the first time that objects belonging to Gandhi, who was assassinated in 1948 less than a year after India gained independence from British rule, have gone up for auction. It's at least the sixth such auction since 1998, according to the BBC.

The BBC says:

"At numerous Gandhi auctions around the world over the past decade, the Indian government has insisted it should have the right of first refusal because the artifacts are a national treasure."

Arrested Development returning via Netflix? Just another old-media brand reviving itself on new media.

The TV show, which originally ran on Fox from 2003 to 2006 and unveils new episodes on Netflix next weekend, finds itself in splendid company. Radiohead, Louis C.K., Veronica Mars — all found their audiences with promotion and distribution from big studios and networks. Radiohead was signed to a major music label. Louis C.K. enjoyed HBO specials and TV shows. And Veronica Mars ran on two TV networks for three years.

But Radiohead defied industry norms in 2006 by selling its album In Rainbows directly to fans for whatever price they chose — and the band made millions. Louis C.K. took a similarly successful route with a comedy special in 2011, charging viewers five dollars to download the special online. And Veronica Mars fans contributed more than $5.7 million on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter — almost three times the stated goal — to pay for a movie adaptation.

Author Grady Hendrix says these models aren't exactly replicable. These are mid-list, old-media artists, not blockbuster celebrities. But their fan bases and name recognition furnishes them with a new-media edge that won't be shared, he says, "[by] some band from Cleveland that has a small following looking for Kickstarter funds for their album."

Inevitably, some old-media brands still manage to do it wrong. The blandly impersonal Kickstarter page of actress Melissa Joan Hart might as well have been written by a publicist's intern. The former star of Sabrina The Teenage Witch is soliciting funds for a new romantic comedy, but as Hendrix points out, with the slightest of smirks, "It's raised $50,000, and it's doing really badly."

On the other hand, a Kickstarter campaign from actor Zach Braff simply oozes kinship with fans. And they've rallied, giving more than $2.7 million to support a follow-up to his 2004 movie Garden State and surpassing his goal by hundreds of thousands of dollars. "There are shots of him and his brother and all these behind-the-scenes things," Hendrix notes," And you feel like, 'Hey, Zach Braff is going to answer my emails!'"

A sense of ownership and connection leads people to donate money to movies ultimately benefiting the major studios that make them. But it's important to recognize that Warner Brothers will still invest many millions in producing, distributing and promoting a Veronica Mars movie, even with Kickstarter's help.

And there could be more to come. Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities points out that rumors have swirled that late show Heroes might be resurrected by Microsoft as an Xbox exclusive. "And the only way you'll be able to watch," he says, "is on Xbox."

Giving still-grieving fans hope for new Xbox or Netflix episodes of their canceled darlings such as Caprica, Chuck or Firefly.

Pakistanis have coped with — even rioted — over the country's frequent power cuts. Now, the government is feeling the impact, too. The country's caretaker prime minister has banned air conditioners in government offices and instituted a dress code for civil servants. Among his recommendations: no socks.

"There shall be no more use of air conditioners in public offices till such time that substantial improvement in the energy situation takes place," according to a Cabinet directive, cited by Reuters.

The News newspaper reports:

"The dress code includes white or light coloured (beige, light grey, sky blue, off-white, cream) shirt/bush shirt (full-sleeved or half sleeved) with light coloured (as prescribed for shirt) trouser or shalwar kameez with waist coat, moccasins (shoes without laces) or sandals (shoes with straps) without socks."

The people of Portsmouth, England, on Monday turned out to bid farewell to the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, destined for a Turkish scrap yard after its decommissioning two years ago.

The Invincible class carrier was a victim of a 2010 defense review that recommended scrapping the vessel and selling its Harrier jump jets (they were subsequently sold to the U.S.). Ark Royal's sister ship, HMS Illustrious, is due to be decommissioned next year, and a new class of British carrier, designed to launch and recover the F-35 joint strike aircraft, won't come into service for nearly a decade.

The Daily Mail offers a bit of history on the vessel:

"HMS Ark Royal led UK naval forces during the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and saw active service in Bosnia. The Invincible-class aircraft carrier was built by Swan Hunters in 1981 on the River Tyne and was named by Queen Elizabeth.

"Nearly 30 years later, the government then axed the famous warship in the 2010 Strategic Defense and Security Review. It is the most expensive warship built in the United Kingdom, costing a staggering 320million.

"There had been hopes HMS Ark Royal could be preserved as a museum ship, but the Ministry of Defense said she was in too poor a condition.

"Other proposals to reuse the ship included turning her into a commercial heliport, nightclub, school, or a casino."

The most unforgiving criticism in sport is directed at any athlete who fans believe is celebrated too excessively above his true talent level — especially those stars who are gloried because they're such pretty people.

To wit: As David Beckham retires, so much attention is being devoted not to how good he was but to how good he was not. I never saw that emphasized with a fine athlete before. Likewise, while celebrity athletes are hardly new, in Beckham's case, he is so outlandishly notorious that it's been just impossible for many people to allow for the fact that he, like any good product, could be judged independently for his value on the one hand and his marketing on the other.

Becks came as quite a contradictory package. A huge, rich star, he was, nevertheless, a disciplined, hard worker dedicated to his craft. His teams won four championships in four countries. He was not only a sports celebrity but a social crossover — the acclaimed metrosexual. His wife — Posh Spice, the most visible of what the British sports press wonderfully call WAGs, wives and girlfriends — is the exemplar of whatever is the opposite of "shy and retiring." But your Mr. and Mrs. Beckham nevertheless managed a fairly scandal-free tabloid life.

Moreover, in contrast to his sexy, rakish image, Beckham's game was, in fact, standard, lacking much in the way of stylish invention. Yes, we all know he could bend it, but it was his ability to, in soccer parlance, cross that made him so exceptional. That is, the most glamorous athlete in the world didn't fit the hot-shot attacking mold. Beckham was, at the end of the day, an associate, a sideways guy. And like that, he was sort of equal parts vanity and wonder.

Perhaps in time his reputation will be nudged to the margins, where he will primarily be recalled more for being what we commonly refer to as a "character" — talented, yes, but remembered rather more the way Yogi Berra and Charles Barkley are in America.

But really, that wouldn't do Becks justice. He is a spectacular figure, one of those phenomena that inexplicably pop up in some part of every culture every now and then when the time is just right and the ingredients are all perfectly brewed. Understand, he was not an original. No, David Beckham has simply been more of everything that he had to be to bend himself into planetary eminence.

Sometimes, some things just come to a boil.

Horace Greeley may have suggested at one point that going west might be a good idea, but he probably wouldn't be happy to see what's going on with Los Angeles as of late. The Dodgers are in last place in the National League West, the Angels are hovering near the bottom of the American League West, and the Lakers' appearance in the playoffs was brutally short. Even Jimmy Fallon and NBC are bringing The Tonight Show back to Manhattan, deserting some place called Burbank after 40 years.

Four years later, with Yorty's act wearing thin, Bradley led Yorty in the initial election and beat him in the runoff by 100,000 votes, including a majority of white voters, becoming the city's first African-American mayor.

Bradley is the longest-serving mayor in L.A. history, winning a total of five terms (including a rout of Yorty in 1981). In 1989, Bradley got a majority in the first round and didn't need to go into a runoff, and that hadn't happened with any L.A. mayor in decades. Like Yorty, Bradley sought the governorship twice, but Yorty never managed to win his party's nomination. Bradley was the Democratic nominee in both 1982 and 1986, losing each time to George Deukmejian (R); in '82 he was within an eyelash of becoming governor.

But his fifth term, which was marred by charges of police brutality and a worsening of race relations, all but collapsed in the riots that followed the 1992 trial in which L.A. police officers were acquitted of the beating of Rodney King, riots that led to deaths and massive property damage ... and a great loss to Bradley's leadership and legacy. He retired a broken man in 1993.

Then came Richard Riordan, a Republican who stressed his business experience and his promise to crack down on crime, a clear reference to what had happened to the city in the latter years of Bradley's tenure. Riordan became the first GOP mayor since Norris Poulson was ousted by Yorty in '61, and was re-elected in a 1997 landslide.

2001 brought James Hahn to city hall. Hahn was a long time government insider, serving as city controller as well as city attorney. Perhaps equally important was that he was the son of the legendary Kenneth Hahn, a longtime county supervisor who was well known as a civil rights champion and beloved in the black community. Jimmy Hahn was elected by some 40,000 votes, defeating Villaraigosa, who had been the speaker of the state Assembly. But Hahn made the controversial decision to replace Police Chief Bernard Parks, an African-American, and that cost him dearly with black voters. Villaraigosa, with the kind of charisma Hahn never had, walloped him in the 2005 rematch. He became the city's first Latino mayor since Cristobal Aguilar, who served from 1871-72.

Beijing has long been about the closest thing to an ally that Pyongyang enjoys, but the seizure of a Chinese fishing boat by unidentified North Koreans has threatened to put an already tenuous relationship on even shakier ground.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei was quoted by The New York Times as making it fairly clear that his government was not happy about the development.

China, he said, is "demanding that it properly deal with the matter as quickly as possible and effectively safeguard the legitimate rights of the Chinese fishermen, as well as the safety of their lives and property."

The incident comes close on the heels of North Korea conducting a series of test firings of "short-range projectiles," including short-range missiles and possibly rocket artillery over the weekend.

According to The Times:

"The announcement about the captured boat promptly drew an outcry from Chinese media and citizens online, some of whom have already expressed increasing impatience with North Korea over its nuclear weapons ambitions and threats to the region. ...

"The Chinese media reports said that the boat was seized May 5, with 16 men aboard, and that the North Korean authorities demanded payment of 600,000 renminbi, or about $98,000, to release them and the vessel, apparently on the grounds that it was fishing in waters claimed by North Korea. The deadline for payment was Sunday, the Beijing Times newspaper said.

"The owner of the boat [Yu Xuejun] drew public attention to its capture through messages on Tencent Weibo, a Chinese microblog service. And on Monday he issued a message saying that he feared his crew had been beaten."

Iranians choose a new president next month, and one thing Iran's leaders are intent on avoiding is a repeat of the massive street protests that followed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's controversial re-election in 2009.

The sponsors of those protests, known as the Green Movement, have been effectively silenced inside Iran, but not online. The heroine of a graphic novel about the violent suppression of dissent in 2009 is now launching a virtual campaign of her own.

Her name is Zahra, a wife and mother in Tehran who starred in the 2010 online graphic novel Zahra's Paradise. Zahra's Paradise happens to be the name of a vast cemetery in the Iranian capital, Tehran, where Iranians from ayatollahs to war veterans to student dissidents are buried.

Readers were riveted by Zahra's struggle to find her son Mehdi, who had disappeared during a street protest. As with many real-life Tehran mothers, Zahra's search ended at a graveside in Zahra's Paradise.

The Web comic became a global phenomenon and was translated into 15 languages. Now, Zahra's creators and the human rights group United for Iran have launched a new storyline in which she runs for president.

In the panel below, Zahra's best friend, Miriam, a caustic critic of the government who calls Iran's clerical leaders "clowns" presiding over a circus, urges Zahra to enter the campaign, despite Zahra's sighs that it won't bring her dead son back:

Pakistanis have coped with – even rioted – over the country's frequent power cuts. Now, the government is feeling their impact, too. The country's caretaker prime minister has banned air conditioners in government offices and instituted a dress code for civil servants. Among his recommendations: No socks.

"There shall be no more use of air-conditioners in public offices till such time that substantial improvement in the energy situation takes place," a Cabinet directive, cited by Reuters, said.

The News newspaper reports:

"The dress code includes white or light coloured (beige, light grey, sky blue, off-white, cream) shirt/bush shirt (full-sleeved or half sleeved) with light coloured (as prescribed for shirt) trouser or shalwar kameez with waist coat, moccasins (shoes without laces) or sandals (shoes with straps) without socks."

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

Stephen King says his next book, Joyland, will be available only in print. He recently told The Wall Street Journal: "[L]et people stir their sticks and go to an actual bookstore rather than a digital one." Interestingly, King was actually one of the first mainstream authors to go digital: Back in 2000, Riding the Bullet was released as the first mass market ebook. A New York Times article from that year discussing the quaintly described "Internet-only novella" quotes one prominent literary agent as saying, "That's a fellow sitting up in Maine having fun, but it's not a way to run a business."

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka takes on Western critics who call the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe the "father of African literature" in an interview with SaharaReporters: "It legitimizes their ignorance, their parlous knowledge, enables them to circumscribe, then adopt a patronizing approach to African literatures and creativity. Backed by centuries of their own recorded literary history, they assume the condescending posture of midwiving an infant entity." Achebe died in March.

Raymond Maxwell, one of four State Department officials disciplined following the attack in Benghazi, Libya, expresses his thoughts on the scandal with some vitriolic poetry. One poem, quoted by CBS, reads "The Queen's Henchmen / request the pleasure of your company / at a Lynching - / to be held / at 23rd and C Streets NW [State Dept. building] ...A blood sacrifice- / to divert the hounds- / to appease the gods- / to cleanse our filth and /satisfy our guilty consciences..." Subtle.

The Australian airline Qantas is commissioning novels that supposedly last the precise lengths of their most popular flights. The project, a collaboration with publisher Hachette, is called "Stories for Every Journey."

Judith Thurman considers the legacy of Soren Kierkegaard for The New Yorker: "Either/Or...ought really to be subtitled Neither."

Children's book author Bernard Waber died on Monday, according to his publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Lyle, a crocodile that lives in a bathtub, was the star of Waber's two most famous books, Lyle, Lyle Crocodile and The House on East 88th Street.

In an interview with Guernica magazine, Claire Messud talks about making the protagonist of her latest novel, The Woman Upstairs, a female "fury." She says: "I always loved reading the ranters and the ranters are all boys, and I thought, well, what would it be like?" (You can also listen to novelist Lionel Shriver discuss Messud on NPR's All Things Considered.)

Consider what goes on in your brain when you, for instance, you watch an episode of Mad Men.

First, you have a reaction. "That's weird" is a reaction. So is "yuck." So is "wow." "This doesn't make sense" is a reaction, "that's a great dress" is a reaction, and "WHAT?" is a reaction.

Next, you might choose to push on your reaction until it matures into a thought. "I didn't buy that conflict because I don't think Joan would take that position on this issue, based on past events" is a thought. Or "in the context of this story, that amount of violence seems gratuitous."

And finally, if you like, you wrap up all your thoughts and try to come up with a conclusion: "This season is going downhill." "They don't write well for this character." "That was a brilliantly written episode."

The great thing about communal viewing with the assistance of social media is sharing reactions. Sunday nights — when Game Of Thrones and Mad Men air, and when at other times of year Girls and The Good Wife and Breaking Bad air — are reaction avalanches. The bad thing about it is ... the same thing. Twitter, in particular, is a fantastic reaction bucket. If you want a place to put all those "I'm so tired of this story" moments, Twitter will do the job, and it can be absolutely fascinating when people react the same way you do and even more fascinating when they don't. It's also fun, and often very funny. But Twitter can also magnify and elevate initial reactions so much that they're mistaken for thoughts — or, worse, for conclusions.

When something is unusually opaque on first viewing, as Sunday night's Mad Men was, there tend to be a lot of reactions very quickly, all of which are valid, few of which are especially enlightening and none of which should be mistaken for actual thoughts. There's really nothing wrong with that in and of itself, and you can't argue much with how a scene hits another person — it's like arguing about whether something smells good or not.

Before TV viewing got so social, you would probably only be exposed to a handful of reactions to a show or a movie during the time when you were trying to process it. Now, you can choose to be absolutely saturated with reactions. And when enough people have the same reaction — in the case of last night's Mad Men, it was perhaps "Whuh?" — it can start to look like a conclusion. Everybody was confused, therefore it was baffling, therefore it was bad.

But that's wrong. Maybe it was bad and maybe it wasn't, but everybody saying "Whuh?" is still just the big reaction bucket, no matter how many people are throwing into it. And if we're thinking about Mad Men as art and not pure diversion, most of the value of reactions to art of any kind comes from interrogating them enough that you can progress to a thought or two. The fact that a reaction is widely shared doesn't make it more than it is. Coming up with thoughts sometimes takes a little time, especially if disorientation is part of what happens initially. I had lots of reactions to that Mad Men episode, and I stand by them (it struck me as kind of self-indulgent, and I'm generally very bored by stories about characters on drugs), but I'm still not sure what I'll wind up thinking about it.

Some things, after all, improve the more you shift from the gut to the more contemplative mind, while others suffer. I enjoyed Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby when I first saw it, but the more I thought about it, the more it fell apart for me. The entire value of good writing, when I'm acting as a reader, is that good writers take their reactions as a starting point and work forward. Or backward. Or up, down, the point is to go somewhere.

There's a constant public conversation about whether Twitter and "everybody has an opinion" means there's no future for writing about culture, but that misses the point. Social media has affected the reaction market enormously, but the critical thought market much less. Reacting publicly and being seen by a lot of people is easier than it's ever been, but doing something interesting with those reactions still takes work and thought. Social media has helped lower the barriers to entry for people who are terrific writers, certainly, who can now be found everywhere. But a thousand context-less thumbs up or down don't replace the act of moving down that line from reaction to thought to conclusion, whether it's being done by a professional or an amateur, in print or in a comment section.

One of the things that made Roger Ebert such a hugely influential writer was that he could make transparent the way he processed his own reactions, and he understood that interrogating them meant acknowledging that they exist and that they're the beginning, not the end, of a conversation. And that's always what reactions are, even when millions of people have them at the same time.

There's a lot of lamenting of the culture of quick reactions, given the way a cascade of negativity (or positivity) can harden into something that seems to defy further examination except by contrarians. That culture is not going away, but it doesn't have to be a menace if we can all agree that there's more to life than the 140 characters that you can put together at 11:04 on a Sunday night.

"It was a beautiful thing. It was a wonderful way to end an attempt to win three championships in a row. And that third one is always a difficult one to win."

On why he writes that basketball is not a game of superstars

"You have to have a superstar on your team to win a championship in this day and age. You may have to have two terrific players to do so. But the reality is, is that they have to incorporate all of their other teammates. We get very focused on that. The NBA has made a real issue about really making these superstars the premium that everybody wants to go to. That's their calling card and their marketing tool. But the coaches at the other end of the sphere are trying to make everyone on the team — even nine, 10, 11, 12[th-best players] — just as important, and have a real role that's meaningful.

"[Those players] are what make the atmosphere, and they are what make the esprit de corps what it has to be to be a genuine team effort. Because if they're pulling the wrong direction, if there's jealousy or there's just not the right attitude, it will eventually work its way into the group. And it's a cancer."

On managing egos and emphasizing fundamental skills

"I think once you're inside the room, you're on the court, you know, everything seems to work out quite OK. I think these players have been brought up in basketball, especially in America right now, where AAU basketball is becoming a dominant force, where they have just an accumulation of talented players — not a whole lot of practice time, and not a whole lot of skill, as far as fundamentals go, but a whole lot of talent and skill as far as shooting and scoring and driving. So this is a different generation that's learned that game and so, as a consequence, a lot of my practices start out with just fundamental work. Learn how to stop with the ball and pivot with the ball and make passes, because that's basically the nuts and bolts of the offense that I worked with."

On how he used a lesson from cellist Pablo Casals to motivate players

"I used to tell the players, 'There's a great musician called Pablo Casals. He was a cello player but he was also a concert conductor. And when asked about, you know, going through a certain piece of music, they said, you know, 'How do you play that?' He said, 'No, no, I don't do that. I start out with the fingering and I go through my fingering for an hour before I start playing a piece of music.'

"And I used to tell players, 'We're going through our fingering. We're going to do our fundamental drills and get ourselves talking basketball language with our body.' "

On whether players rolled their eyes when he mentioned Buddhism or Casals

"They never rolled their eyes, but I know they were going, 'Oh, here he goes again' type of thing. I never saw them rolling their eyes. I got a lot of latitude. The guys gave me a lot of space to work with them and I'm very fortunate for that."

Read an excerpt of Eleven Rings

Gavalda liked it so much that she asked her editor to buy the rights, so she could translate it herself. And the book took off.

"My books sell really well in France," she explained, "so when all the other European editors saw that it was me who translated this book, they were all curious about why Anna Gavalda translated it, and so they all bought the rights."

Back in New York, Frank can only speculate as to why Stoner has so moved European readers like Gavalda.

"[Stoner] resonates I think, partly, because of the art with which the story has been told," he said. "So even as he sets the scene in Columbia, Missouri, at the same time, it could be anywhere."

Poverty has grown everywhere in the U.S. in recent years, but mostly in the suburbs. During the 2000s, it grew twice as fast in suburban areas as in cities, with more than 16 million poor people now living in the nation's suburbs — more than in urban or rural areas.

Elizabeth Kneebone, a fellow with the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, says this shift in poverty can be seen in Montgomery County, Md., right outside the nation's capital.

"Montgomery County is one of the wealthiest counties in the country," she says, noting the streets lined with luxury apartments, big homes and crowded restaurants. "But it also has a rapidly growing poor population."

Kneebone, co-author with Alan Berube of a new book from Brookings, Confronting Suburban Poverty in America, says poverty in Montgomery County has grown by two-thirds since the recent recession. That means 30,000 more residents living below the federal poverty line — about $23,000 for a family of four.

That doesn't buy much in a suburban area with a high cost of living. By some estimates, a family of four in Montgomery County needs more than $80,000 a year to meet basic needs.

Suburban Poverty On The Rise

But two summers ago, they broke that gravitational pull. Chen took his family more than 3,000 miles away from Boston to Rdy, a small granite island jutting from the Norwegian Sea north of the Arctic Circle. Chen's wife, Kristin Botnen, was born in Norway. But she says the move wasn't about returning home — or leaving home, either.

"For us, this was not an escape. We really liked our lives. But we still wanted a year where we could just do something completely different," she says.

Completely different. Winston and Kristin and their two kids, ages 4 and 6, used the daylight that burns into the wee hours to explore the island of fewer than 200 residents. In their home videos, they discover beaches so pristine, they look tropical — except the water is really cold.

They went out to fish for the big cod that roam the Barents Sea. They made chips by frying fish skin. They picked berries that bulged under the long Arctic sun and plucked eggs from seagull nests to cook for breakfast. It was wild, it was pristine. And then it got dark.

During the deep Arctic winter, the horizon held the sun down for months.

"I say the northern lights are the only consolation for the Arctic winter, which is otherwise dark and stormy and cold," Chen says.

"I don't think the cold got any of us," adds Botnen. "But the darkness — I think that could make any stable soul a little bit shaky."

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The news that broke Sunday is now official.

Yahoo confirmed early Monday morning that it is buying Tumblr in a deal worth about $1.1 billion. "Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business," Yahoo added.

In its statement announcing the deal, Yahoo says that:

"Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!'s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they'll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!'s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience."

The news that broke Sunday is now official.

Yahoo confirmed early Monday morning that it is buying Tumblr in a deal worth about $1.1 billion. "Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business," Yahoo added.

In its statement announcing the deal, Yahoo says that:

"Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!'s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they'll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!'s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience."

In China, having too much money is a relatively new problem. But the rapidly growing country is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires, according to Forbes magazine. And now an enterprising company has set up a course for kids born into wealthy families, who are learning how to deal with the excesses of extraordinary wealth.

For a moment, it looks like this high-end shopping mall in the southwestern city of Chengdu has been taken over by baby bankers. Kids in maroon neckties, white button-down shirts and khaki trousers are holding a charity sale to raise money for earthquake victims. They're on a course dubbed a "mini-MBA" at China Britain Financial Education.

"Even for me, for all our teachers, we sometimes feel very surprised to hear how much pocket money they have," says Paul Huang, the head of research and development. "One girl told our teacher that each year at the spring festival, she might have more than 20,000 U.S. dollars as pocket money."

To put that in context, that's almost four times the annual income in Chengdu. Urban incomes in China have rocketed; they're 12 times what they were two decades ago. But still, these kids live in another world. Paul Huang describes the dreams of one student:

"Our teacher asked her, 'What's your ideal life in the future?' She thought about it for a while, say, 'I want to become a princess. I want to have a castle, and I will have lots of servants. I won't do anything, because I've got lots of money, so I just buy whatever I want.'"

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