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[Hopefully, we don't have to point out that a piece about the Breaking Bad finale contains information about the Breaking Bad finale. But here we are.]

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan signaled in interviews leading up to Sunday night's series finale that those who craved some redemption for Walter White were the ones most likely to leave happy.

"We feel it's a satisfying ending," Gilligan told Entertainment Weekly. "Walt ends things more or less on his own terms."

For Gilligan, those things were self-evidently connected: the satisfaction of the ending and the degree to which the terms of that ending are set by Walt. And that's probably true for broad segments of the show's legions of fans who continued to root for Walt at some elemental level, or least to root for him to become root-able again.

It's not just true for the darker elements of "Team Walt" — the holders of the unsettling view that Walt was always simply killing people who deserved it, a brilliant and good man forced into bad deeds by the foolishness of others. It's also true for fans who fully recognize the monstrousness of Walt's deeds but craved a glimmer of hope that even people guilty of the worst deeds can find a modicum of grace, perhaps grace in love and death.

This is, for instance, the view taken by Emily Bazelon in Slate, who sees in the finale repeated acts of love: Walt figuring out how to get the money to his family, Walt accepting that he can't be forgiven, Walt saving Jesse. It doesn't make up for his misdeeds, but it represents redemption of a kind and the reassuring flicker of his humanity.

I think that's what Gilligan saw in the finale he wrote: no undoing of consequences, but moments of grace and mercy nonetheless. The show was, to the end, a Western of sorts, and Walt ended his life as the lonely cowboy, the desperado finally able to come to his senses, tragically alone but no longer lost — now found.

I wish I'd been able to love it on those terms. I wish I'd been able to respond to how fundamentally sympathetic the finale was to Walt. I wish I'd felt like I was vibrating on the same frequency Gilligan was. Because normally, I do crave those moments of grace — in fact, here's what I said about the finale of Lost (which I consider woefully over-loathed and underappreciated):

There is emotional heft to the idea that after all your struggles and battles and mistakes, you will have the opportunity to give and receive love and to gain perspective on what you've experienced. And while there have certainly been missteps in the final season (and in previous seasons) and not everything worked in the finale, that last sequence in the church is based on a very old and widely honored idea of grace in death.

The Vatican said Monday that it has set April 27, 2014, as the date that popes John Paul II and John XXIII will be "raised to sainthood."

Their canonization will come on "the Second Sunday of Easter and Divine Mercy," the Holy See added.

That date has significance because in 2000, as AmericanCatholic.org writes, Pope John Paul II celebrated at the canonization of St. Faustina Kowalska, and declared that "from now on throughout the Church this Sunday will be called Divine Mercy Sunday." The Polish-born Helena Kowalska, who as a young woman became Sister Faustina, reported seeing visions of Jesus Christ and "devoted the rest of her life to spreading the message of divine mercy and the growth of popular devotion to it."

John Paul II was pope from October 1978 until his death in April 2005. John XXIII was pope from October 1958 until his death in June 1963. Pope Francis announced in July that they would be made saints. As we wrote then:

"A committee of theologians [recently] approved a second miracle attributed to Pope John Paul II's posthumous intercession — a sine qua non for sainthood. That miracle involved a Costa Rican woman. It's believed she was cured of a severe brain injury after her family prayed to the memory of the late pope. ...

"Pope John XXIII is being made a saint even though theologians have not attributed two miracles to him — as normally required for sainthood. Pope Francis has apparently decided to make John XXIII a saint in part because of the work that pope did during the Second Vatican Council and the reforms that followed."

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

Marcella Hazan, the author of bestselling cookbooks that brought Italian food to America, died Sunday at age 89. A scientist by training, she began cooking after moving to the United States and finding that much American food was sold prepackaged at the supermarket. "I never saw a supermarket in Italy," she told NPR's Linda Wertheimer in a 2010 interview. "The chicken, they were arriving from the farmer and they were alive. And at the supermarket they were very dead. They were wrapped. It was like a coffin. Everything was not natural." NPR's Scott Simon had visited Hazan in 2005 while she was teaching at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan. He reported: "Marcella Hazan's cooking is traditional Italian — nothing nouveau. She believes in cooking vegetables until they are limp, but not lifeless. She ladles on butter and olive oil generously enough to make anyone say a pre-meal prayer. And she believes that salt sharpens everything."

Chris McCandless' death in the Alaskan wilderness was the subject of Jon Krakauer's investigative bestseller Into the Wild. Almost two decades later, McCandless' sister, Carine, is writing a memoir titled The Wild Truth, which The New York Times reports will be published in 2014 by HarperOne. She said in a press release: "In the decades since Chris's death, my half-siblings and I have come together to find our own truth and build our own beauty in his absence. In each other, we've found absolution, as I believe Chris found absolution in the wild before he died."

The Circle, Dave Eggers' latest novel, has been excerpted in The New York Times magazine. The funny (and familiar) excerpt follows Mae, who has just begun work at the Circle, a tech corporation on the scale of Google or Facebook: "It was 6 o'clock. She had plenty of hours to improve, there and then, so she embarked on a flurry of activity, sending 4 zings and 32 comments and 88 smiles. In an hour, her PartiRank rose to 7,288. Breaking 7,000 was more difficult, but by 8, after joining and posting in 11 discussion groups, sending another 12 zings, one of them rated in the top 5,000 globally for that hour, and signing up for 67 more feeds, she'd done it. She was at 6,872, and she turned to her InnerCircle social feed."

The best books coming out this week:

Inspired by the Pendle Witch Trials of 1612, Jeanette Winterson's The Daylight Gate follows 10 women and men who were tried and hanged for witchcraft in 17th century England. The story itself is grimly fascinating, but Winterson is at her best when creating a sense of place — the "untamed" North of England where Pendle Hill sits "low and massy, flat-topped, brooding, disappeared in mists, treacherous with bogs, run through with fast-flowing streams plunging into waterfalls crashing down into unknown pools."

In The Kraus Project, Jonathan Franzen translates and annotates the vicious Viennese satirist Karl Kraus, who was legendary in his time but has been largely forgotten now (at least, in the English-speaking world). It would be easy to dismiss The Kraus Project as one grump meditating on another, dead grump. But Franzen's work is careful, scholarly and engaging. And best of all, like his late friend David Foster Wallace, Franzen elevates the footnote to the status of art.

The General Motors building in Manhattan is a majestic 50-story, white marble building that takes up one full city block. This is prime New York City real estate. A flagship Apple store sits on the ground floor, across the street is the Plaza Hotel and on another corner is an entrance to Central Park.

The GM building is considered one of the most valuable office towers in the U.S. In May, a large piece of it was purchased by a Chinese real estate developer.

That same developer, Xin Zhang, the chief executive officer of Soho China, already owns a significant stake in the Park Avenue Plaza, and other Chinese firms and investors are buying up notable properties across New York.

The buying, however, isn't limited to just New York or Chinese investors. Investors from across Asia are buying up premier commercial real estate, says Christopher Ludeman, who heads up Global Capital Markets at CBRE Group, which handled the GM building sale.

"We have a family in Indonesia that just purchased the US Bank building in Los Angeles for $385 million," Ludeman says. "Within blocks of that you've got the Korean Air group that's just purchased a site in downtown Los Angeles, on which they're going to build a large headquarters facility." He says there are other sites nearby ready for development.

"Each of those instances are from different sources of Asian capital," he says.

Real Estate Trophies

From Florida to Illinois to Hawaii, the market is hot. Canada still buys more commercial real estate in the U.S. than any other nation, but China and other Asian nations are roaring up behind. Dan Fasulo, the managing director of Real Capital Analytics, which studies these sorts of figures, says foreign investment from Asian countries has totaled about $7 billion so far for commercial property in 2013.

"That's about a third of all activity," Fasulo says. "Last year's total was $4.3 billion. So we've almost doubled already last year's activity."

Fasulo says the Asian nations know what they want; he calls them postcard assets. "You know, the pretty picture that they can show around back home and everyone will know what they're looking at," he says.

Fasulo says that includes trophy office towers in gateway cities, luxury hotels and high-street retail like on Rodeo Drive and Fifth Avenue. "Historically that's what they've chased; the more premier properties in prime locations," he says.

This real estate buying binge is reminiscent of the late 1980s, when Japan scooped up everything from Rockefeller Center to Pebble Beach Golf Links, at inflated prices. Many investors were hit with big losses when the real estate market crumbled a few years later.

Hungry To Invest

Today's investors may well take heed of the Japanese experience. But CBRE's Ludeman says Asian nations — investors flush with cash — want to diversify. He says the Chinese in particular are careful investors who do a tremendous amount of research, and the U.S. looks pretty good.

"They like our rule of law, they like the transparency associated with real estate information and they see the U.S., on a relative basis, as being as strong or stronger than the strongest economies in the world," he says.

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