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On one black-comically terrible Christmas

It's painful, but it's not lacking in its humorous elements. Scott had just gotten out of a three-year stint in prison for various drug offenses, and my mother — though I had warned her repeatedly — took him into her house, and I went home for Christmas. And, well, I was about to say that everything that could have gone wrong did, but it was pretty predictable: He wrecked his car ... on the way back from the liquor store, so he had a pretty healthy cache of liquor. The police obligingly drove him back to us. He got drunk, he terrorized my mother, the next day I took my mother to the police station, and we arranged to have Scott removed as a trespasser.

But what people may not know if they don't have a, you know, psychotic drunken brother, is it's very hard to get a restraining order. So all we could do was have the police remove him. He could come back. So as soon as the police removed him — and that was an interesting scene — we went and bought a gun, and stopped to have a martini at a Chinese restaurant, and I coached my mother: Tell him to sit down, and if he doesn't sit down, you're going to have to shoot him.

Author Interviews

Revisiting John Cheever's Suburban Unrest

When Pete Olsen talks about drought on his fifth-generation dairy farm in Fallon, Nev., he's really talking about the snowpack 60 miles to the west in the Sierra Nevada.

The Sierras, Olsen says, are their lifeblood.

That is, the snowmelt from them feeds the Truckee and Carson rivers and a tangle of reservoirs and canals that make this desert bloom. Some of the highest-grade alfalfa in the world is grown here. And it makes perfect feed for dairy cows, because it's rich in nutrients.

But like much of the far West, northern Nevada is in the grips of a historic drought. The federal government has declared much of the region a disaster area. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is at historically low levels. That means feed will be in short supply, which is a big deal, because the alfalfa that's grown here doesn't just stay local. There's demand for it in California, Asia and beyond.

"Depending on how bad it is, it could be daunting to try and find all the feed that we need," Olsen says.

Even As Dairy Industry Booms, There Are Fewer And Fewer Farms Feb. 6, 2014

Many people may think of a "remote worker" as a harried mom in her bathrobe or a 20-something at a coffee shop. But that image doesn't actually reflect who is working outside the office, according to a new study.

"A remote worker, someone who does most of their work outside of their employer's location, is not a woman, is not a parent and is not a Gen-Y millennial," says Cali Williams Yost, a workplace flexibility strategist and CEO of the Flex+Strategy Group.

A Remote-Working Gender Gap

In fact, the study she commissioned finds that three out of four remote workers are men — of all ages – and just as likely to have kids as not. Yost and others attribute part of this gender gap to the kind of work women are more likely to do: jobs that can't be done remotely, like teaching and nursing.

The study, a national survey of full-time employed adults, finds that 31 percent of full-time employees do most of their work away from their employer's location, like at home, at a business center, shared office space or coffee shop.

The study also finds women are much more likely to work in a cubby or open office space, rather than a private office.

"And those cubicle, open-office-space workers were significantly more likely to say they did not increase or improve their flexibility last year, for fear of being perceived as not working hard, and [out of] fear it will hurt their career," Yost says.

To unscientifically test all this, I ventured into a Starbucks near my home in Washington, D.C. There in the back I spot a middle-aged man with a grande drink and a laptop.

Turns out it's Michael Gerson, a columnist for The Washington Post. "I do have an office, but I do most of my writing in coffee shops," he says.

All Tech Considered

Does Working From Home Work? It Helps If You Like Your Teammates

When Ukraine President Viktor Yanukovych fled Kiev, he left a trove of documents at his estate; many were thrown into a large reservoir. Journalists called divers and spent the weekend going over soggy papers in a house they had long been forbidden from entering. With the help of volunteers, more than 20,000 pages are now online.

Before they came to the expansive estate last week, reporters "had only been allowed to the front door to receive cakes on journalism day," as Drew Sullivan writes for the Global Investigative Journalism Network.

Within hours of the president fleeing this past weekend, anti-Yanukovych activists from the Maidan group occupied his opulent estate, called Mezhyhirya. The images that emerged from that site depict excess, with gilded surfaces and expensive fittings.

Despite feelings of anger toward the former leader and resentment at his lifestyle, his estate hasn't been ransacked.

From the AP:

"The protesters' self-defense units were deployed inside the compound to maintain order and prevent any looting or damage to the property. One of them, a middle-aged man, could not hide his anger: 'Look how he lived, son of a bitch.'"

Cut to 1942, when Russians are sneaking across the Volga to strike German positions. To stop them, German Col. Peter Kahn (Thomas Kretschmann) manages to blow up a fuel dump, setting many of the attackers afire. In a deliriously impossible scene, blazing Russian soldiers continue their offensive, killing Germans as their own bodies char.

This brutal sequence is as sweeping as anything in Enemy at the Gates, the 2001 English-language Stalingrad epic. But then the movie shifts to a more intimate (and affordable) scale. A few survivors of the onslaught take shelter in a bombed-out apartment house. For most of the rest of story, they hold their position against the much larger German contingent outside. Eventually, only five Russian fighters remain, each waiting for a chance to demonstrate his noble spirit of self-sacrifice.

Just one tenant has survived the fighting: Katya (Maria Smolnikova), who's almost 19. To the Russian soldiers, she's everything they're fighting for — country, sisters, mothers, wives. Radio operator Sergey (Sergey Bondarchuk Jr.) is particularly taken with the girl. When not battling the Germans hand-to-hand in kung fu-style brawls, the men plan Katya's birthday party.

To balance this sentimental tale, there's a harsher one about another woman: Masha (Yana Studilina), who's reluctantly under Kahn's protection. Compared to his abominable commanding officer, the Colonel is almost a nice guy; he bristles at his fellow Germans' brutality toward civilians, but intervenes to help only Masha, a blonde beauty who reminds him of his late wife. The fate of one of these women will ultimately be revealed on the movie's concluding trip to Japan, which is just as disorienting as the first one.

This is the first Russian production to be presented in IMAX 3-D, technology that doesn't add much to the film but does distinguish it from the 1989 Russian Stalingrad (which starred Fedor Bondarchuk) and the 1993 German Stalingrad (which starred Thomas Kretschmann).

The spectacle, literally amplified by Angelo Badalamenti's strident score, helped make Bondarchuk's movie a hit not just in Russia but also in China. It faces much dicier prospects in the United States, whose filmgoers didn't grow up on the heroic national legend of Stalingrad — and lately haven't shown much taste for gory war sagas unless they feature aliens, superheroes or the undead. Indeed, for all of Stalingrad's curious developments and bewildering gestures, the strangest thing about the movie may be that it's even being released in the U.S.

There has been no talk of compensating people for their loss, the priest says. "So how can we talk about forgiveness and reconciliation where there is no justice?"

Now for the past few months, Muslim civilians have been hunted down in the Central African Republic. This is usually explained as a collective spasm of Christian-led revenge. But Mbarta says there is a deeper reason.

Later that afternoon, he meets me behind the closed door of my hotel room. He's brought with him a scruffy-looking guy named Joseph Baba, who wears a thick coat despite the equatorial heat. From the pocket of that coat emerges a square of pink tissue paper. Unfolded, it reveals six uncut diamonds.

The Central African Republic, the priest says, is awash in diamonds and gold. For various historical and cultural reasons, most of the traders of those jewels have been Muslim. Over the decades since independence, he says, there's been growing resentment of the middleman traders by the mostly Christian miners. Even the priest isn't immune to it: His father was one of those villagers who eked out a living by panning gold from the rivers.

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On a sunny Friday in August last year, Judah Abughorab paddled a small, flat boat over the blue Mediterranean Sea about 100 yards off the Gaza Strip's sandy shore.

He doesn't really like to eat fish, but catching them is the unemployed construction worker's favorite pastime.

That day, he netted a half a dozen. Then, through the clear water, he spotted something that made him look again.

"It looked like a person," he says. "Eyes, a face, hands, fingers."

Abughorab says he was scared, but dove five yards down to have a closer look. One touch told him the human form was made of metal.

"I realized it was a statue," he says. "I tried to move it, but it was so heavy I thought it was tied to the bottom."

Cutting defense spending in Washington is about as popular as proposing Social Security cuts. In other words, not very.

Which explains why, following Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel's announcement Monday that the Obama administration's new budget would propose shrinking the Army, closing bases and ditching weapons systems, the responses from Capitol Hill lawmakers have been some version of "over my dead body."

Wholly different was the reaction of two former federal officials who don't have to worry about electoral politics anymore: Samuel Skinner, who was Transportation secretary under George H. W. Bush, and former Rep. James Bilbray, a Nevada Democrat who served on the Armed Services, Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees.

In 2005, both were members of the Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC), a bipartisan panel that recommended defense-base closings to Congress.

The difficult politics and intense lobbying surrounding defense cuts explained why BRAC existed to begin with: Congress essentially outsourced base-closure recommendations to the panel because it was politically impossible for members to do the job themselves. Lawmakers had to vote to either accept or reject the entire list. They accepted it.

Both Skinner and Bilbray, now with law firms in Chicago and Las Vegas, respectively, told It's All Politics the Obama administration's proposed defense cuts are a necessary corrective to the surge in defense spending that occurred after 9/11 as the U.S. fought two wars.

"Something's got to be done," Skinner said. "Unfortunately as a result of a lot of decisions that were made over the last 10 years... we've continued to ramp up defense spending at an unprecedented level. It's got to come down. You can argue where the cuts should be made. But everybody knows it's unsustainable going forward. Somebody's going to have to make some hard calls here."

Bilbray echoed those remarks: "The fact is, as the military, as they totally get out of Iraq and close down in Afghanistan, I think it's going to be a natural consequence that the size of the military will shrink," he said.

In a testament to how politics were never far from the process, both men recalled how President Bush had to use his recess appointment powers simply to get them on the base-closure panel.

Their nominations were delayed by senators, including Trent Lott, a Mississippi Republican, who sought to stall the process because they objected to plans to close facilities in their home states.

When they finally were able to get to work, they were left with only three months to complete their work, Bilbray said.

But even that was better than the current situation. Obama has proposed a new base-closing commission. For two years running, however, Congress has rejected it. Skinner said his understanding is Congress doesn't want to again lose control of the process.

Even so, the Obama budget due to be released next week will once again propose a BRAC that would go into action in 2017 — meaning it would avoid raising hackles in 2016, a presidential election year.

There's plenty of outrage already from Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

Skinner said the pushback was fairly predictable.

"It's very difficult for senators where there are strong military installations to come out and say we should make these cuts," he said. "They're trying to defend their constituents from some of these cuts. But everybody's going to have to take some of these cuts. They're going to happen."

It's not just Capitol Hill where political leaders have torn into the Obama administration's proposed cuts — the resistance reaches to the state capitals. Republican Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina and other governors have bridled at cuts proposed for their state National Guard units. Those units play indispensable roles during disasters, they contend.

Bilbray suggested that's not the entire explanation for why many governors will resist cuts to their guard units.

He offered a story by way of illustration. Bilbray once got into a dispute with a Mississippi congressman for proposing reductions in guard units similar to those being proposed for active duty forces.

"You would have thought I had asked to sleep with his wife," Bilbray said. "He was really angry about it. The National Guard is sacred in many of the Southern states. There's a tradition. The father, grandfather and great grandfather served in the guard."

For that reason, National Guard units are traditionally much easier to fill in the South than elsewhere. Military officials once told him it might take six months in the South to fill a division that might take five years anywhere else.

"That will explain the resistance you'll see from some of those Southern senators" and governors in coming weeks, he said.

Tensions continue to rise in Ukraine. Thursday's news includes word that:

— "Dozens of heavily armed gunmen seized control of local government buildings in Ukraine's Crimea region early Thursday and raised the Russian flag, mirroring the three-month protest movement that drove Ukraine's pro-Russian president into hiding last week." (The Associated Press) There were no reports of injuries at the sites in Simferopol, the local capital. Ukrainian security forces established a security perimeter around the area.

As the Parallels blog has written, Crimea "is an autonomous part of Ukraine, [that has] strong emotional ties to Russia and [where] a majority of people identify themselves as Russian.

Crimean lawmakers were reported to be preparing to enter the government buildings, possibly to vote on whether to seek to split from Ukraine and seek a union with Russia.

In July of last year, a man named Sidney Sealine went to see the Mona Lisa in Paris.

The idea was to spend some time with the picture, see for himself the special spark that made the painting so famous.

But Sealine couldn't even get close.

In his video of the visit, you see people of every race and nationality crowded around the barricades that separate them from the painting. They're holding cameras over their heads and snapping pictures like paparazzi at a movie opening while the Mona Lisa gazes out at them.

A surprisingly small portrait, it is separated from the crazed crowd by a series of wooden railings and an enormous slab of darkly tinted bulletproof glass.

It's a painting so successful it requires constant protection from the public, and so it can hardly be seen.

Why Is The Mona Lisa – Or Any Piece Of Art – Successful?

The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world because people believe that there is something profoundly special about it, some quality so distinguishing that it deserves to be as famous as it is.

But is that true?

Several years ago, Princeton professor Matthew Salganik started thinking about success, specifically about how much of success should be attributed to the inherent qualities of the successful thing itself, and how much was just chance. For some essentially random reason, a group of people decided that the thing in question was really good and their attention attracted more attention until there was a herd of people who believed it was special mostly because all the other people believed that it was, but the successful thing wasn't in fact that special.

“ It is hard to make things of very poor quality succeed — though after you meet a basic standard of quality, what becomes a huge hit and what doesn't is essentially a matter of chance.

Just three years after protesters and the Egyptian military drove Hosni Mubarak from power, the revolution hasn't delivered what many Egyptians expected, and hopes are fading that it ever will.

Military commander Abdel Fattah al-Sisi is widely expected to announce his candidacy for president any day now. The charismatic strongman would be the frontrunner and his candidacy would be a landmark in the ongoing military crackdown now restricting many of the freedoms Egyptians hoped for when toppling Mubarak.

To recap: The Tahrir Square revolution captivated world attention and eventually prompted the military to escort Mubarak from office on Feb. 11, 2011. A year later, the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohammed Morsi became the first freely elected Egyptian president. But his term quickly soured with accusations that his government was an economic failure and that it tried to monopolize power for an Islamist agenda. Protesters prompted a military coup last July 3.

The military then decided to lead from behind — appointing a president, prime minister and cabinet. Parliament remains dissolved.

The violence has been worse than any time during Mubarak's rule. The security forces say they are engage in a battle with terrorists and more than 1,400 people have been killed since last summer. But a majority appear to be demonstrators and victims of what Amnesty International calls "excessive" force.

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This year we decided to observe Black History Month by hearing from a wide variety of people with roots in Africa, who are changing the world, all over the world.

The series was produced by Tell Me More's Freddie Boswell. She joins us now to help us close the series, along with our Executive Producer Carline Watson.

We're heading into the home stretch to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act this year. The open enrollment period ends March 31 for most people.

But there are exceptions. And they are the subject of many of our questions this month.

For example, Diane Jennings of Hickory, N.C., has a question about her young adult daughter, who's currently covered on her father's health insurance. "When she ages out of the program this year at 26, in October," Jennings asks, "she'll have to get her own insurance through the exchange. But as she [will have] missed the deadline of March 2014, will she have to pay a penalty?"

There shouldn't be any penalty. Turning 26 is one of those life changes that allows you to buy insurance from the health exchange outside the normal open enrollment period. In this case, since the daughter knows when this will happen, she can make the switch in advance; you can sign up as many as 60 days before you'll need coverage.

This is a function the federal government just recently added to the Healthcare.gov website. When you log into your account there's a new button that's marked 'report a life change.' You click on that button and it should guide you through the process.

Kaitlyn Grana of Los Angeles is also a young adult on a parent's plan – her mother's. She and her husband are expecting a baby in June. Her husband has insurance through his employer. But, she says, "He doesn't really love his insurance, so we're thinking about covering baby through Covered California," the state-run exchange. "My question is, how soon do we need to do this, and what options are available to us?"

We have several questions from young women on their parents' plans who are pregnant. And it's important to know is that while the health law requires that employer health plans cover their workers' young-adult children, that requirement does not extend to their children's children (although a few state laws require it). So Kaitlyn won't be able to get her new baby covered through her mother's plan.

“ While the health law requires that employer health plans cover their workers' young-adult children up to age 26, that requirement does not extend to their children's children.

A few times a year, the Treasury Department publishes a long list of names announcing all of the Americans who have lately abandoned their U.S. citizenship.

According to the legal website International Tax Blog, the number hovered around 500 a decade ago. Last year, it hit a record high of nearly 3,000.

This was not a gradual change. It was a sudden spike. It's a story of dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.

The first domino fell in 2008, when federal prosecutors accused the Swiss bank UBS of helping wealthy Americans hide their money tax-free in overseas accounts. It was a big case, leading to indictments, fines and prison time.

The U.S. Congress wanted to make sure it didn't happen again. During the economic recession, lawmakers saw a chance to bring in massive sums of money and stop tax cheats at the same time.

"They just found UBS in a terrible scheme to encourage tax evasion," Barney Frank, the Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, told NPR in 2009. "I think there are clearly tens of billions that can be recovered there."

The next year, in 2010, Congress passed the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act. The law affects every foreign bank that does business with the U.S. And not just banks: It also applies to retirement accounts, mutual funds, and more.

Renouncing citizenship is not as easy as throwing a passport onto the fire. It's a lengthy process, involving interviews, paperwork and legal procedures. So people who do it generally have a compelling motivation. And while individual reasons for renouncing may vary from person to person, experts in the field say the recent dramatic spike has more to do with the 2010 tax law than any other factor.

Wisconsin financial adviser David Kuenzi works with Americans overseas who are affected by the law.

"[Congress] said to all of these institutions, 'You need to follow this set of criteria to determine all of the Americans who are your clients," says Kuenzi, "and you need to report directly to us on their holdings.' "

Shut Out Of Foreign Banks

Foreign banks looked at the new law and decided that the regulations would be a huge hassle. Many of them decided to wash their hands of American account-holders.

"They canceled the accounts of just about every American in Europe," says retiree John Mainwaring, "including me."

Seventy-year-old Mainwaring grew up in Ohio, served in the U.S. Army, and has lived in Munich, Germany, for about 40 years.

After his old German banks kicked him out, he tried to find new ones that would take him in.

"I went everywhere," he says, "to every bank in Germany. The problem is, the ones here don't deal with Americans."

Congress wanted to catch tax cheats. But the net also snagged Americans whose foreign bank accounts let them pay their bills in the countries they now call home.

U.S. Taxes Americans, No Matter Where They Live

The United States is very unusual in this respect. Most countries in the world don't tax their citizens living abroad. So, for example, a Spaniard living in Canada won't pay Spanish taxes. Instead, he'll pay Canadian taxes. But the U.S. taxes American citizens wherever they are in the world.

"If I can compare it to romance, I say the U.S. is like Fatal Attraction," says Suzanne Reisman, a lawyer in London who advises Americans abroad. "Once they've got you, they never let you go. You have to renounce your citizenship, or you have to die."

So today, Americans who don't like the Fatal Attraction relationship are giving up their U.S. citizenship in record numbers.

In Switzerland, so many people want to renounce their citizenship that the U.S. Embassy actually has a waiting list.

"I want to be clear: It's not about a dollar value of taxes that I don't want to pay," says Brian Dublin, a businessman who lives near Zurich. "It's about the headache associated with the regulations, filing in the U.S., and then having financial institutions in the rest of the world turn me away."

Dublin says he is ready to renounce, despite the ties he feels to the country of his birth. "I grew up in America. I love my country. But I just feel that the current regulations are onerous."

Officials from the Treasury Department, the State Department, the IRS and Congress spoke on background for this story. None would talk on tape.

They all generally agree on the facts of the situation. Even so, there is very little pressure to change it. As one Senate staffer pointed out, nobody in Congress represents overseas Americans. And government officials think this law is succeeding at catching the tax cheats. That may be worth the side effect of losing a few thousand American citizens every year.

One of Bitcoin's largest trading exchanges shut down Tuesday, and you probably couldn't care less.

So what if rumors are circulating that millions of dollars' worth of Bitcoin are stolen? If you don't understand Bitcoin in the first place, it's hard to figure out why this matters. So we're using this as an opportunity to go back to the basics: what this b-word means, where it came from and why it just might matter.

The Birth Of Bitcoin

This is the stuff of a Dan Brown novel.

Bitcoin emerged from the work of Satoshi Nakamoto. The hook is, no one actually knows who Satoshi Nakamoto is. (It's inaccurate, of course to say "no one," but the people who do know aren't talking.) In 2008, he/she/they released a detailed concept for a self-regulating crypto-currency, wrote a whole bunch of incredible code to support it. Satoshi Nakamoto stopped responding to emails in 2011. It's been a wild goose chase ever since.

Satoshi Nakamoto's concept is that of a democratically organized currency: no government regulation, no centralized bank. It's been embraced by, among others, libertarians trying to undermine monetary regulation policies and entrepreneurs trying to avoid financial corruption in developing countries.

While it's a difficult concept to grasp — we'll get to that in a second — it's worth at least getting familiar with because Bitcoin will continue to be covered regardless of whether the media understands it, says Vili Lehdonvirta, a research fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute.

"It's the perfect story. It has the mysterious background, started by a pseudonymous character," he says. "As humans, we like to dream about how things could be different. ... I think that for many people Bitcoin allows them to dream those dreams."

Not to mention, there's a lot of money involved. After all, it fundamentally is about money. Think of this as a Hollywood "inspired by a true story" blockbuster waiting to happen.

We recommend: Motherboard's Who Is Satoshi Nakamoto, The Creator Of Bitcoin?

OK, I'm Hooked. So What Is It?

In the great words of Shrek, Bitcoin is like an onion: It has layers. At its most superficial, it's a virtual currency, allowing you to transfer money to other people anywhere in the world without any physical exchange of dollar bills — just as you can with, say, PayPal or online credit card payments.

But the system behind it is much different. There's no central organization, like a bank or government treasury, organizing and keeping track of it. The bookkeeping is completely decentralized and is supposedly impossible to bamboozle, the way a bank could cook its books without anyone else looking. There's no intrinsic value, the way you could make a necklace out of gold, or government backing, the way modern "fiat" money has. And it's completely anonymous — you never have to give anyone your name or Social Security number or credit card number.

The whole process is made much more complicated by the technical aspects of how it works on a molecular level. There's lot of encryption and computational power involved. I don't pretend to be an expert in it, so I'll refer you to the source: Satoshi Nakamoto's original whitepaper.

We recommend: Medium's Explain Bitcoin Like I'm Five and, once you've mastered that, Quartz's By reading this article, you're mining bitcoins. If you want to delve into the murky world of Bitcoin mining, check out the New York Times' Into The Bitcoin Mines.

Trials, Tribulation

Ready for more of the Hollywood blockbuster plot line? Bitcoin's intrinsic anonymity makes it a prime currency for shady dealings. A Texas man who allegedly ran a Ponzi scheme used Bitcoin. An online black market called Silk Road, which the FBI shut down in October, used Bitcoin.

Silk Road got back into business shortly after, but earlier this month, hackers allegedly exploited a Bitcoin glitch to steal millions from customers. The value of Bitcoin fluctuates wildly, at one point dropping from $1,200 to less than $600 per coin after the Chinese government denounced it.

On top of all these, the failure of one of its largest exchanges, MtGox, led some to speculate that this would ruin Bitcoin's legitimacy for good. But William Luther, an economics professor at Kenyon University in Ohio, says this might actually help Bitcoin in the long run because it forces people away from this first-generation business to more sophisticated exchanges.

"Now there will be an air of professionalism surrounding Bitcoin that wasn't there before," Luther says.

Bitcoin is also accepted by a growing number of businesses — including Overstock.com, two casinos in Las Vegas and a Subway sandwich shop in Allentown, Pa. Overstock's executive vice chairman, Jonathan Johnson, says the MtGox news won't affect whether the company continues to accept the currency.

In fact, he says, Bitcoin has been great for business. It brings in new customers and prevents online shopping fraud. And Overstock converts bitcoins to dollars immediately after payment, so the fluctuations don't really affect the company.

It also has cut Overstock's credit card transaction fees, Johnson says. That's a benefit that could very well appeal to everyday consumers, too.

We recommend: NPR reporter Alan Yu's How Virtual Currency Could Make It Easier To Move Money

The Bigger Benefit

This stumbling and growing revolution has done something remarkable: In order to truly wrap your head around the concept, you are forced to contemplate how money works.

Is assigning value to a piece of paper any different than assigning value to encrypted electronic signals? Can we have a sustainable currency without the backing of powerful people assuring us that our money's good? Are there ways to secure money outside of banks?

Luther, the economics professor, calls himself a "Bitcoin skeptic" — he's not convinced it will last — but he says questions like these are worth the ride.

"Bitcoin has brought the question of alternative currencies back to the table, and I think that's a good thing," he says. "Money is a very old concept, and it's difficult for me to think that there's not a better way to make transactions."

In a scene from the new season of the popular Netflix political drama House of Cards, the elegant Claire Underwood catches her soon-to-be vice president husband puffing an e-cigarette.

"You're cheating," she says, referring to their efforts to quit smoking.

"No, I'm not," Congressman Francis Underwood replies. "It's vapor....addiction without the consequences."

A Washington-based drama with an implicit endorsement of "vaping" – the practice of partaking in nicotine without burning tobacco?

It could have been ripped directly from the playbook of lobbyists working Capitol Hill and Washington regulators on behalf of the estimated $1.7 billion-and-growing e-cigarette industry.

Eric Criss of the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group (ECIG), laughs off the suggestion that his Florida-based organization, which recently opened a lobbying office in suburban Washington, orchestrated the House of Cards scene.

"No, we did not have anything to do with that product placement," Criss says, or with the Golden Globe Awards gag last month where Julia Louis-Dreyfus ostentatiously puffed a blue-tipped e-cigarette. (Pro-"vaping" sites lit up with comments about the House of Cards moment since the show has become almost synonymous with product placement.)

As e-cigs continue to embed themselves in popular culture, lobbying efforts are heating up around the issue of how government will ultimately regulate the nascent battery-powered nicotine delivery system. All eyes are on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which, in concert with the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to soon release a long awaited proposal for regulating e-cigarettes.

Selling D.C. On A New Cig

Debate over the product's health effects continue. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover on e-cigs captured the discussion with this tagline: "They're new. They're blue. But will they still kill you?"

Because e-cigarettes don't burn tobacco, cancer-causing tar isn't delivered to users' lungs. But there are concerns that the electronic version could serve as a "gateway" to traditional cigarettes for young people, and that the full health effects of inhaling the nicotine vapor have yet been studied.

The question occupying both ECIG, which represents small producers of e-cigarettes, and tobacco giants like Reynolds American, which has a growing e-cigarette subsidiary, is whether the FDA will seek to regulate the nicotine delivery system in the same manner as traditional products that burn tobacco.

"We're focused not so much on the Hill, but more on the regulators," says Bryan Haynes, a partner and tobacco regulation expert at the large national law firm Troutman Sanders LLP and counsel for the ECIG.

"We do want the public to have a comfort level that what the manufacturers say is in the product is actually accurate," Haynes says. "At the same time, we do not believe that e-cigarettes should be regulated in the same way traditional tobacco products are regulated."

The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act includes restrictions on retail and online tobacco sales, limits on advertising and marketing to young people, and assesses user fees based on market share.

Criss, ECIG's spokesman, says that most e-cigarette producers, big and small, agree the product needs to be regulated to prevent its sale to minors, to control its ingredients, and to provide proper and accurate labeling.

He also acknowledges the concerns of anti-smoking advocates who have "worked very long and hard to make smoking not look cool – and this product looks like a cigarette, and has nicotine."

"That is a real concern when it comes to kids," he says, "but it is combusting tobacco that kills people."

The "white hat" message that ECIG is using to persuade regulators and Congress is this, according to Criss: e-cigarettes can "move existing smokers down the ladder of risk."

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has another view. The group claimed this week that tobacco giant Lorillard Inc., in a Sports Illustrated advertisement for its e-cigarette, directly targeted teenage boys.

The ad by Lorillard, which last year spent about $2.8 million lobbying for issues including c-cigarettes, featured a close up of a model in a tiny bikini bottom emblazoned with the company's e-cigarette's logo.

In a blog post on its website, the group called on the FDA to prevent such marketing, asserting that the ad "is just the latest example of how marketing for e-cigarettes is using the same slick tactics long used to market regular cigarettes to kids."

The organization is on record, however, as saying that e-cigarettes could benefit public health if responsibly marketed.

Big Tobacco, New Market

David Howard is spokesman for Reynolds American, the parent company of subsidiaries that include the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of Camel, Pall Mall and Winston cigarettes, and the relatively new R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co., which produces the VUSE e-cigarette.

"We are in this business, and we are going to lobby on issues that affect our business, and we are going to have our side represented," Howard says. "These products are different from traditional tobacco products. There's no tobacco. There's no combustion."

The company, which in 2013 spent about $3.3 million lobbying for issues including e-cigarettes, activated it first statewide distribution of VUSE in Colorado last July. It went statewide in Utah in January, and the company is taking steps for a national rollout, he says.

"We believe there is significant potential in the category," Howard says. "Some analysts say it could be a $5 billion industry in the next handful of years."

When the FDA releases its proposed regulation, it simply begins a lengthy comment period, one that could very well spawn litigation. Howard mentions that R.J. Reynolds successfully challenged a marketing provision in the 2009 Tobacco Act after it was proposed.

So while e-cig lobbying has already been kicked up a notch, the real fight begins when the FDA makes its regulation proposal — any day now.

Many religious leaders are feeling under siege. They believe the Obama administration is at worst hostile but at least "tone deaf" to the demands of faith. In their view, the government is attempting to make them act in ways that violate their convictions.

That is the context in which so-called religious freedom bills are being considered in Arizona and numerous other states.

The bills, which would allow business owners to refuse service to gays or other groups that offend their religious beliefs, appear discriminatory on their face.

John McCain and Jeff Flake, Arizona's two Republican U.S. senators, have called on GOP Gov. Jan Brewer to veto the legislation passed last week.

Whether these bills were born out of fear — or bigotry, as many opponents argue — they are marked by the notion that the culture is changing rapidly, in ways that undermine not just religious doctrine but the ability of individuals to act according to the dictates of their faith.

"There's a feeling that this administration is aggressively trying to restrict religious liberty in the United States," says Gary Bauer, a prominent social conservative. "There's just a pattern here that has led a lot of people of faith to believe that this is a period of the most severe legal challenges to what had previously been seen in this country as a fairly broad right."

A poll released last week by Lifeway Research, which is associated with the Southern Baptist Convention, found that 70 percent of senior Protestant pastors believe that religious liberty is in decline in this country and that 54 percent of the public agrees with them.

"This broader sense of anxiety that many conservative religious people have reaches out to many aspects of politics," says John Green, an expert on religion and politics at the University of Akron.

"There's genuine fear that religious liberty could be severely restricted," he continues. "Whether we believe those fears are justified or not is a different question."

Disappointed In Obama

Next month, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that turns on the question of whether the administration, under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, can force employers to provide birth control coverage even if doing so would violate their religious beliefs.

In 2012, the court ruled unanimously against a position taken by the administration regarding church personnel policies.

"The interest of society in the enforcement of employment discrimination statutes is undoubtedly important," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote. "But so, too, is the interest of religious groups in choosing who will preach their beliefs, teach their faith and carry out their mission."

President Obama's positions on these legal issues — as well as his support for same-sex marriage — has convinced some religious leaders that he and his administration are "the most tone-deaf to religious liberty in recent memory," as Roman Catholic Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia put it to CNSNews.com.

While arguing that religious liberty is "at risk," Chaput and other leaders concede that religious freedom is nowhere near as endangered in the United States as it is in, for example, North Korea, where last week an Australian missionary was detained for leaving religious pamphlets in a Buddhist temple.

But they argue Obama has not been sufficiently vigorous in speaking against religious persecution abroad, including mass killings of Christians in Nigeria.

"The State Department has downplayed the issue, the president has seldom raised it, nor have his representatives raised it in international meetings," says Bauer, a Republican presidential candidate in 2000 and president of the nonprofit group American Values. "They are much more likely to condemn a country for not allowing same-sex marriage, or other items on that agenda, than they are to condemn a country for persecuting Christians."

A Right To Refuse Service?

It's same-sex marriage that is driving the current spate of bills that seek to protect religious freedom at the state level. There have been a few isolated but widely cited examples of businesses — a baker, a florist — sued for refusing to provide services to gay couples who were getting married.

"They feel that the power of the state is being used to force them to engage in things that go against their conscience," says Green, the Akron political scientist.

Further protections are needed, says Terry Fox, senior pastor of Summit Church in Wichita, Kan. He supported legislation — passed by the state House but declared dead in the state Senate — that would give shop owners the ability to choose whether to withhold services to anyone, based on religious beliefs.

Homosexuals "would be included in that," Fox says, but he says the bill was not directed entirely at them. He argues it would have afforded protections to shop owners who are gay.

"What if Fred Phelps" — the notoriously homophobic leader of Westboro Baptist Church — "went to a business owned by a gay person and wanted to order signs, as he often does, saying 'God hates fags'?" Fox asks.

Separating Church And Commerce

Some pastors such as Fox worry that their ability to preach Scripture as they see fit might eventually be impinged upon, or that the government will force them to offer marriage rites to same-sex couples if they perform weddings at all.

That seems unlikely. But there's still the question of whether religious freedom under the First Amendment — which surely protects the ability of Americans to worship as they wish — trumps concerns about discrimination when it comes to commerce, where interactions with different types of people are a given.

"They all have at their core this idea that a person's religious beliefs trumps their need to serve the public," says Robert Boston, the author of the forthcoming book Taking Liberties: Why Religious Freedom Doesn't Give You the Right to Tell Other People What to Do.

Many if not most pastors and priests argue that believers should be able to live according to the principles of their faith in the public marketplace, as well as in private spaces.

"Freedom of religion has always been more than the right to practice prayer and rituals within the confines of a home or sanctuary," says the Oregon Family Council, which is sponsoring a ballot measure to protect religious liberty. "It's a right to have faith expressed in meaningful ways throughout the public square."

Supporters of the religious liberty bills say they support the Civil Rights Act and other laws intended to protected racial and ethnic minorities from discrimination in public accommodations.

Many of them argue that homosexuality is different. Fox, for instance, says that being homosexual is a choice, despite all scientific evidence to the contrary. It's not like being born, he says, as an African-American.

"There's certainly a consensus in our society that discrimination based on race, when you're operating a business is and should be unacceptable," Bauer says. "But when it comes to asking business people to cooperate in activities that they might find morally reprehensible and in violation of their religious beliefs ... is against everything the country is built on."

Coping With Change

The broader context to the whole debate is the fact that the country has experienced fairly dramatic cultural and demographic changes over the past couple of generations. There's nothing new about the argument that traditional values are being undermined, but it's become a particularly acute concern for social conservatives with the spread of same-sex-marriage rights.

"From the perspective of religious conservatives, there has been too much change, too quickly," says Boston, communications director for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

He says that conservative Christians are uncomfortable with the ways in which recent civil rights movements are changing America into a more open — and more secular — place.

"There's a great deal said in our country about tolerance," says state Sen. Phillip Gandy, a pastor and sponsor of a religious freedom bill passed by the Mississippi Senate last month. "It seems to me that people of faith are asked to be tolerant, but many people don't want to be tolerant of us and be respectful of our beliefs."

Get recipes for Paczki, Fasnacht, Beignets and Cenci.

In a scene from the new season of the popular Netflix political drama House of Cards, the elegant Claire Underwood catches her soon-to-be vice president husband puffing an e-cigarette.

"You're cheating," she says, referring to their efforts to quit smoking.

"No, I'm not," Congressman Francis Underwood replies. "It's vapor....addiction without the consequences."

A Washington-based drama with an implicit endorsement of "vaping" – the practice of partaking in nicotine without burning tobacco?

It could have been ripped directly from the playbook of lobbyists working Capitol Hill and Washington regulators on behalf of the estimated $1.7 billion-and-growing e-cigarette industry.

Eric Criss of the Electronic Cigarette Industry Group (ECIG), laughs off the suggestion that his Florida-based organization, which recently opened a lobbying office in suburban Washington, orchestrated the House of Cards scene.

"No, we did not have anything to do with that product placement," Criss says, or with the Golden Globe Awards gag last month where Julia Louis-Dreyfus ostentatiously puffed a blue-tipped e-cigarette. (Pro-"vaping" sites lit up with comments about the House of Cards moment since the show has become almost synonymous with product placement.)

As e-cigs continue to embed themselves in popular culture, lobbying efforts are heating up around the issue of how government will ultimately regulate the nascent battery-powered nicotine delivery system. All eyes are on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which, in concert with the White House Office of Management and Budget, is expected to soon release a long awaited proposal for regulating e-cigarettes.

Selling D.C. On A New Cig

Debate over the product's health effects continue. A recent Bloomberg Businessweek cover on e-cigs captured the discussion with this tagline: "They're new. They're blue. But will they still kill you?"

Because e-cigarettes don't burn tobacco, cancer-causing tar isn't delivered to users' lungs. But there are concerns that the electronic version could serve as a "gateway" to traditional cigarettes for young people, and that the full health effects of inhaling the nicotine vapor have yet been studied.

The question occupying both ECIG, which represents small producers of e-cigarettes, and tobacco giants like Reynolds American, which has a growing e-cigarette subsidiary, is whether the FDA will seek to regulate the nicotine delivery system in the same manner as traditional products that burn tobacco.

"We're focused not so much on the Hill, but more on the regulators," says Bryan Haynes, a partner and tobacco regulation expert at the large national law firm Troutman Sanders LLP and counsel for the ECIG.

"We do want the public to have a comfort level that what the manufacturers say is in the product is actually accurate," Haynes says. "At the same time, we do not believe that e-cigarettes should be regulated in the same way traditional tobacco products are regulated."

The 2009 Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act includes restrictions on retail and online tobacco sales, limits on advertising and marketing to young people, and assesses user fees based on market share.

Criss, ECIG's spokesman, says that most e-cigarette producers, big and small, agree the product needs to be regulated to prevent its sale to minors, to control its ingredients, and to provide proper and accurate labeling.

He also acknowledges the concerns of anti-smoking advocates who have "worked very long and hard to make smoking not look cool – and this product looks like a cigarette, and has nicotine."

"That is a real concern when it comes to kids," he says, "but it is combusting tobacco that kills people."

The "white hat" message that ECIG is using to persuade regulators and Congress is this, according to Criss: e-cigarettes can "move existing smokers down the ladder of risk."

The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids has another view. The group claimed this week that tobacco giant Lorillard Inc., in a Sports Illustrated advertisement for its e-cigarette, directly targeted teenage boys.

The ad by Lorillard, which last year spent about $2.8 million lobbying for issues including c-cigarettes, featured a close up of a model in a tiny bikini bottom emblazoned with the company's e-cigarette's logo.

In a blog post on its website, the group called on the FDA to prevent such marketing, asserting that the ad "is just the latest example of how marketing for e-cigarettes is using the same slick tactics long used to market regular cigarettes to kids."

The organization is on record, however, as saying that e-cigarettes could benefit public health if responsibly marketed.

Big Tobacco, New Market

David Howard is spokesman for Reynolds American, the parent company of subsidiaries that include the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., maker of Camel, Pall Mall and Winston cigarettes, and the relatively new R.J. Reynolds Vapor Co., which produces the VUSE e-cigarette.

"We are in this business, and we are going to lobby on issues that affect our business, and we are going to have our side represented," Howard says. "These products are different from traditional tobacco products. There's no tobacco. There's no combustion."

The company, which in 2013 spent about $3.3 million lobbying for issues including e-cigarettes, activated it first statewide distribution of VUSE in Colorado last July. It went statewide in Utah in January, and the company is taking steps for a national rollout, he says.

"We believe there is significant potential in the category," Howard says. "Some analysts say it could be a $5 billion industry in the next handful of years."

When the FDA releases its proposed regulation, it simply begins a lengthy comment period, one that could very well spawn litigation. Howard mentions that R.J. Reynolds successfully challenged a marketing provision in the 2009 Tobacco Act after it was proposed.

So while e-cig lobbying has already been kicked up a notch, the real fight begins when the FDA makes its regulation proposal — any day now.

Home prices across 20 of the nation's major metropolitan areas rose 13.4 percent in 2013 from the year before, according to the latest S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Index report.

Overall, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices economist David Blitzer, the index "ended its best year since 2005" — well before the burst of the housing bubble in 2007-08.

But, Blitzer warns, "gains are slowing from month-to-month and the strongest part of the recovery in home values may be over."

In Tuesday's report, Blitzer adds that:

"Recent economic reports suggest a bleaker picture for housing. Existing home sales fell 5.1 percent in January from December to the slowest pace in over a year. Permits for new residential construction and housing starts were both down and below expectations. Some of the weakness reflects the cold weather in much of the country. However, higher home prices and mortgage rates are taking a toll on affordability."

The search for ousted President Viktor Yanukovych continues in Ukraine, where months of protests over his turn toward Russia and away from the European Union, along with public anger over corruption, led to his removal from office on Saturday.

As we've reported, the officials who are at least temporarily filling key offices now want to arrest Yanukovych and charge him with mass murder for the deaths of scores of protesters last week.

Today, there's word from Parliament Speaker Oleksandr Turchinov, who is the nation's interim leader, "that a new government should be in place by Thursday, instead of Tuesday, as he had earlier indicated," The Associated Press says.

It's also being reported that Andriy Klyuyev, who had been Yanukovych's head of administration, resigned from that post on Sunday and was later injured after returning to Kiev from Crimea, where Yanukovych may be hiding.

Russia's InterFax news agency quotes Artyom Petrenko, Klyuyev's spokesman, as saying the former top aide's life is not in danger. The AP reports Petrenko said Klyuyev had been wounded by gunfire. According to the AP, "Klyuyev was among the figures most despised by protesters in Ukraine's three-month political turmoil."

Also Tuesday:

— "The European Union's foreign policy chief is promising strong international support for Ukraine as it works to form a new government," Voice of America writes. "Catherine Ashton spoke at a news conference Tuesday while visiting the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv. She said Western financial institutions are working on ways to help Ukraine's economy recover from three months of political protests. Ashton also urged Russia to let the nation find its own way forward out of its political crisis."

— Reuters writes about Volodymyr Parasiuk, "the lad from Lviv" who is now the "toast of Kiev" because his impassioned address to protesters Friday night may have been the deciding factor in pushing Yanukovych from office.

For those of you keeping track of the headlines detailing sexual assault and hazing at frat houses, it may come as no surprise that fraternities have a dark side. Caitlin Flanagan, a writer at The Atlantic, spent a year investigating Greek houses and discovered that "the dark power of fraternities" is not just a power over pledges and partygoers, but one held over universities as well.

"Fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them," she writes. Alumni do tend to give generously to their alma maters, yes, but it's more than that. The American college system is slave to its need for a continual flow of students, Flanagan says. How else to convince underprepared, soon-to-be-loan-ridden students to attend than by marketing the experience as a major party? Colleges compete for these students with perks, frats and all their glory among them.

Flanagan's piece looks deeper into the tragic and unsavory practices rampant in Greek houses, and the ways in which they protect themselves when serious problems arise.

Scientists have gotten close to pinning down the origin of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, a dangerous respiratory disease that emerged in Saudi Arabia 17 months ago.

It turns out the MERS virus has been circulating in Arabian camels for more than two decades, scientists report in a study published Tuesday.

Shots - Health News

Middle East Coronavirus Called 'Threat To The Entire World'

Ugandan President Yoweri Musaveni signed a controversial bill Monday that makes gay sex punishable by terms of up to life in prison, and accused Western groups of "coming into our schools and recruiting young children into homosexuality and lesbianism."

NPR's Gregory Warner reported on the story for our Newscast unit. Here's what he said:

"The move was framed here as a rebuff to the West, seen as less influential as Uganda discovers oil wealth and increases its trade with China. But the bill was written after a conference in Uganda organized by some American evangelicals who argued that homosexuality was the greatest threat to the cohesion of the African family."

Actor and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah was born in Britain to immigrant parents from Grenada. His dad worked as a factory worker and his mother worked three jobs to send him to private school in the hope he would become a lawyer. "She wanted me to contribute to the upliftment of my community," he tells NPR's Michel Martin.

In 2003, he became the first black Briton to stage a play in London's prestigious West End theater district with his award-winning piece "Elmina's Kitchen." The play tackled gun crime, displacement and racism in East London.

Kwei-Armah says the reaction to his work brought his mother around. "Someone came up to her and started speaking about the effect that my play had on a piece of government policy," he remembers. "She turned to me and she said 'you know, I wanted you to be a lawyer but this playwriting thing, it will do.'"

Three years ago, he decamped to Baltimore to become artistic director of the city's Center Stage theater. "I found Baltimore to be vivacious. I found the audiences to be intelligent and engaging." He says he never planned to take up the role but, "it just felt like it might be a really fun investigation to put all of my art and all of my ideas into one building, and I have to say, I've been having a great time."

[This piece contains information about the plot of Downton Abbey, up to and including Sunday night's fourth-season finale.]

Another season of Downton Abbey has come to a close, and once again, Lady Edith is unlucky. Unlucky in love, unlucky in life. She's unluckier than Bates, and he went to jail for something he didn't do, for what certainly felt like a really, really long time. She's unluckier than Matthew, and he's quite deceased.

Let us return to when we met Edith, four seasons ago. Trapped between beautiful Mary and adventurous Sybil, Edith was the sad one. She was the Jan, as Brady Bunch viewers immediately recognized. And when she actually met someone who liked her, he was driven off by Mary, who was angry at Edith for revealing that Mary's romantic activities were so amazing that they killed a Turkish guy. (A mean thing to do, Edith. Tsk.)

After that, Edith decided to start a little thing with a married farmer, but his wife found out, and it was adios to Old MacDonald.

Then, Edith met Bandages McGee (not his real name, probably), who either was or was not her dead wealthy cousin, making him a perfect romantic prospect. He swore his love to Edith, but nobody else believed he was the dead wealthy cousin he said he was and he bailed out as quickly as a writer who suddenly realizes he has no idea where this plotline is going. So Edith was alone again, naturally.

Then, Edith got engaged to Anthony, the same guy Mary drove off once before, after convincing him she loved him in spite of his war-torn arm. But because Edith is Edith, he dumped her at the altar in front of her horrified family, humiliating her in front of the very people who already felt sorry for her and considered her a lost cause who would be better off as the spinster they expected her to become than as the wife of this older disabled veteran (and shame on them, by the way). Exit Anthony, pursued by Edith's terrible luck.

Then she met a newspaper editor named Michael, who offered her a job writing (yay!), and had a thing for her (yay!), but had an institutionalized wife (boo!). In order to divorce his wife, he went off to Germany (as you do in the years following World War I, if you have a taste for adventure), where he disappeared. And, of course, because Edith is Edith, she found herself taking television's most common journey: From Virginity To Pregnancy In One Encounter. Her aunt bundled her off to Switzerland for the mysterious, months-long absence everyone either agreed to consider not suspicious at all or actually did not consider suspicious because they cannot imagine Edith having a sex life. There, at the insistence of Aunt Rosamund, Edith placed her child informally – not legally – with some very nice Swiss people, apparently, but she almost immediately began having second thoughts.

You see, Edith may not be lucky, but she is not stupid, and she had come to understand that when one disappears into post-WWI Germany after being last seen with some disagreeable fellows in brown shirts, one may never be seen again. This would result in Edith taking over for Michael in his business (because that's what he arranged), and she could not bear the thought of not passing any of what he had on to the baby. Also, one senses that perhaps Edith, who kept her daughter for a few months for the sake of the breastfeeding and therefore had likely formed a fairly fully developed bond with her, would rather she weren't quite so far away, and perhaps were even somewhere that Edith might occasionally see her.

And so, Edith undid the informal arrangement and brought her baby back to Downton (while everyone else is away), and placed her with a local farmer and his family. The farmer agreed to pretend to accept her story that this baby totally belonged to a terribly scandalous friend of Edith's, and Edith couldn't keep her in the house because of the terrible shame that would result from her family being associated with this scandalous friend. And he pretty much said, "I feel so sorry for you about your dead imaginary scandalous friend and your terrible shame that I will even lie to my wife about where I got this baby, because although it is quite a few decades early for this expression, I am picking up what you are putting down."

On the surface, this may seem to be the saddest thing of all for Edith, in that it seems to be, for her, a far more profoundly important pain than her various suitors would be alone. But really, this is one of the first times Edith has well and truly made her own decision, in defiance of her family, and has taken care of business, as it were. (I will admit that I skipped some of the middle of this season, while Edith was getting herself into all this mess, and was interested to see her right back in the thick of misery when I returned.)

Aunt Rosamund shame-bullied Edith into the Swiss adoption, which she never wanted, and when it came right down to it, Edith ultimately did what Edith thought was right, for reasons other than wanting to get married already before she gets old. (Which, quite frankly, she already is, to these people.) (This is all leaving aside the fact that Edith's ideas about adoption seem odd, in that an adoptive family, of course, brings its own blessings, meaning the child's life is not simply devoid of joy because she cannot inherit from her birth father.)

The social limitations on and the punishing of the Crawley daughters have always been central themes of Downton – consider Mary's scandal with her literal death bed (the bed of death!), her initial frustration at the idea of marrying Matthew to save the family, Sybil's chafing at the limitations of her life, and Edith's perpetual wheel-spinning over what to do if she doesn't get married. At times, the story of Edith has seemed needlessly sadistic, in that one eventually wonders how many ways (foiled by beautiful sister, dumped at the altar, abandoned in mystery, foiled by wife, foiled by another wife) one woman can be thumped with the giant rubber mallet of life until even the little cartoon birds flying over her head are dizzy.

But in a way, Edith is where you really see the difficulties that the daughters' lack of autonomy brings. Edith is certainly sad that she's not married yet, but it's the limits on her other options that make this life-breakingly depressing for her. Otherwise, she would work, and wait, and hope, and be happy. But because there is such a narrow idea in her family of what constitutes success, her writing career has never been more than tepidly received, and certainly is understood to be a poor substitute for multiple pregnancies when it comes to getting some meaning in her life.

Perhaps the lesson of all these stories of Edith being left and left and left again is nothing brings in misery like being entirely at the mercy of other people's decisions to stay or leave, which is where Edith's father, well-meaning though he may be, has left her. It is oddly her grandmother, the Dowager Countess, who seems to understand most fully that Edith's options are limited, and that this is not to be taken as a happy thing, only one the D.C. would argue cannot be changed.

On the one hand, Edith's story – like Mary's – contains a sort of gross "don't have sex when you're not supposed to or you'll pay a horrible price" lesson. Maybe he'll die! Maybe you'll get pregnant! There is no sexual agency without karmic punishment! But on the other, there is this: In becoming a mother, Edith got out from under the thumb of her father. Given the opportunity to be responsible for something instead of responsible to everyone, she seems remarkably at peace as this season closes. Very sad, but at peace.

Samuel Sheinbein, an American who fled to Israel after murdering a Maryland teenager 17 years ago, was killed in a prison shootout on Sunday during an apparent escape attempt near Tel Aviv.

The Associated Press reports:

"Police special forces rushed to [Sharon] prison in central Israel after Sheinbein stole a weapon and shot three guards, wounding two of them seriously. He then barricaded himself inside the compound where a standoff ensued, with counter-terrorism units dispatched to the scene. The inmate then opened fire again, wounding three more guards, before the forces shot him dead, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said."

Jason Munkel and his father Bill are 39 years apart in age, but since last year, they've been sitting down together to play Call of Duty: Ghosts almost every night.

They also broadcast their gameplay to more than 120,000 followers, who watch the father-son duo pursue and shoot enemies on the screen, and talk to them during the game. Sometimes they do this for six to seven hours a day, and their audience has grown dramatically in just one year, though not all watch every day.

It's not just the Munkels; the site where they stream their games has grown to attract millions of monthly viewers, though the duo does have a unique take on streaming.

"A lot of people heard that these guys talk to you, they make you feel like you're part of the family," Bill Munkel, 57, says. "That's what it feels like: We have a big family."

"We're very competitive, trying to win, but still looking at the chat," his 18-year-old son Jason adds. "Sometimes as I'm looking to kill, I end up dying because I'm paying so much attention to the chat, but you know what, I think it's worth it in the end because people respect that, that we do actually care about the people watching."

Bill started playing Call of Duty several years ago, after watching Jason pick off enemies with a sniper rifle in the game, impressed by how good Jason is. Eventually he took up Jason's offer to teach him how to play. Then he went on to play live matches with his son. After a year of broadcasting their games, Bill now says "streaming is in our blood."

"It's almost like a little kid learning a bicycle," he says. "It felt like I got on a bicycle and I took off, and I never looked back."

i i

On the universality of loneliness

I would say it's a very universal theme. I think situations can be different if you look at different countries, you know, maybe it's famine, maybe it's lack of material richness, but if you look at even in this country, in Western countries, I think young people suffer for the same reason, that they have to make their transition from young people to adulthood and there's so much unknown in the wide world.