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In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, President Obama stepped up to a podium before Congress and the country and declared that the state of our union was strong.

"Here are the results of your efforts: The lowest unemployment rate in over five years; a rebounding housing market; a manufacturing sector that's adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s," the president said.

“ A lot of the gains of the recovery that we've seen have gone to the people at the very top, particularly the top 1 percent.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's political team is going on the offensive against charges that he knew more than he admits about a plan to use lane closures on the George Washington Bridge as part of a political vendetta.

In an email to donors and journalists headlined "5 Things You Should Know about the Bombshell That's Not a Bombshell," on Saturday, political aides to the governor pushed back on accusations by David Wildstein, a former Port Authority official who oversaw the lane closures.

In a letter from the attorney for Wildstein, who resigned as the scandal broke, the former official claimed that evidence exists to show that Christie knew more. In the email sent Saturday, the governor's aides suggested that Wildstein was grasping at straws: "David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein."

The Associated Press says:

"Christie's team denies that Christie knew about the traffic jam or its political motive until after it was over and bashes Wildstein, a former mayor who later became an anonymous political blogger."

"Much of the letter quoted previous newspaper articles that took critical looks at Wildstein, including a 2012 article in The Record of Bergen County [that] says Wildstein 'was a very contentious person.'"

"But the email does not mention other comments about Wildstein in that same story, including from Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak: 'He is there in that job because he is well suited to the task of playing a role in reforming the Port Authority in accordance with the governor's goals,' Drewniak said. 'If he's not liked for that role, and if he's accused of being zealous in that regard, then we plead guilty.'"

But, of course, what I didn't understand at 13 — or, to be more precise, I understood in the wrong way — was the pain Edie was in, the emotional instability from which she suffered: bouts of anorexia, two brothers lost to suicide, shock treatments. And her dark addictions — those famous racooned eyes pinned from amphetamines, then cocaine. Eventually, she found heroin. As Vogue editor Diana Vreeland said, "Edie was after life, and sometimes life doesn't come fast enough."

And death came: In 1971, at age 28, Edie died from "acute barbiturate intoxication."

"Everything I did was really underneath, I guess, motivated by psychological disturbances," Edie confided in audiotapes recorded for her movie Ciao! Manhattan not long before her death. She describes how her trademark look was her way of making "a mask out of my face. I practically destroyed it." She cut off her hair, stripped it silver, doing anything she could to change herself.

Edie herself was pained by the very aspects of her I found so glorious — but that fact was lost on me. Her self-awareness was part of her glamour; her madness felt exciting. Her descent felt dramatic, the stuff of grand tragedy. Now, as an adult, it seems unbearably sad.

At 16, I first visited New York City. Wearing my Edie t-shirt and my long earrings, I sought out the site of Warhol's famous Factory. Standing in front of the building, I had a moment of feeling like I was a part of it, that world. Her world.

Somehow it seems fitting that I would realize, a decade later, after New York became my permanent home, that I'd stood in front of the wrong building. It hadn't been right at all.

Megan Abbott's next novel, Fever, will be released in June. Her latest novel, Dare Me, is now out in paperback.

Maximilian Schell, who won a best actor Oscar for his role in the 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, has died in his native Austria after what doctors describe as a sudden illness. He was 83.

He was also nominated for best actor for the 1975 The Man in the Glass Booth and for best supporting actor in Julia in 1977, The Associated Press says.

But the Vienna-born actor's most famous role was as Hans Rolfe, a defense attorney representing accused Nazi war criminals at the post-World War II Nuremberg trials. In it, Rolfe delivers a courtroom monologue condemning those who acquiesced or promoted Hitler's rise to power. You can see a clip here.

Kerry Skyring, reporting for NPR from Vienna, reports:

"Handsome and charismatic, the son of a Swiss playwright and an Austrian stage actress, he was raised in Switzerland after Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany."

"Schell ... went on to become a film producer and director. His recent appearances include the films The Freshman and Telling Lies in America.

"He died in the Austrian city of Innsbruck."