¶ Our eyebrows cocked at the mention of an understandably surreptitious luxury private club in the Jian Fu Palace Garden of the Imperial Palace in Beijing. We hope to hear more about this operation, which appears to be the backwash of a preservation project designed by Pei Partnership Architects and funded by Hong Kong jillionaires. Forbidden fun in the Forbidden City! Doesn’t get any better. All they need is DSK. ¶ Sometimes, it’s hard to tell the goose from the golden eggs — which is the one that will work better in your portfolio? Silicon Valley’s ground assault walkers (Google, Facebook, &c) have been buying up start-ups not in order to own the latest gizmos but to shut them down and “acqhire” the engineers who designed them. It will be interesting to see if the fizz kills the whiz. ¶ Now it can be told: Elaine Kaufman’s eponymous eatery, long a watering hole for literary lions, wasn’t doing so well even before she died. Not six months later, her heir, Diane Becker, is closing the joing. “The nature of a business is to make a profit.” Hemingway himself couldn’t have put it more concisely.

¶ Sign of a slow news day: two tabloid-worthy tales on the front page of the Times. The arguably ewwier one is a  report by Timothy Williams on the countrywide thefts of human hair, which “perplexed” law enforcement officials. (You’ll be relieved to know that the hair in question is not attached to human scalps.) Mr Williams ventures, by way of explanation, the new respectability of hair extensions. ¶ More sordid, somehow, is Daniel Wakin’s pickup of an Irish Times exposé of bogus symphony orchestras touring the American heartland under the auspices of Columbia Artists Management, who would undoubtedly staff their class acts with roller derby queens if they thought they could get away with it. A tale of switcheroo immigration manifests in which the members of the Dublin Philharmonic are mostly Bulgarians. (Maybe they meant Lublin Philharmonic.) The Photoshopped image of the “Tschaikowsky St Petersburg State Orchestra” (which they’ve never heard of on the banks of the Neva) is particularly toasty.

Never, ever, have I found the Metropolitan Museum of Art as packed with people as it was today. Never! It was almost impossible to cross the Great Hall, so thick were the lines snaking back from the ticket counters. (The advantage of membership at any level is the convenience of getting an entry pin from the members’ desk, just outside the gift shop, without delay.) Upstairs, the line of visitors waiting to see the Alexander McQueen show stretched the full length of the Chamber of Horrors, all the way down to the Assyrians. I’ve never seen such a line!

Happily, Ray Soleil and I were interested in the Eighteenth-Century pastel portraits. No crowds there. Lots of lovely things, but lots of not-so-lovely things as well, including one piece of rather dreadful kitsch by Anton Mengs, the bust of an éphèbe with rancidly liquid eyes and a crown of roses — the template for a thousand ghastly late-Nineteenth Century candy boxes. Most of the beautiful things are French — a Nattier, some Coypels, a few Quentin de la Tours — but what caught my interest most was a pastel by Gainsborough, who didn’t do much in the medium. It’s a small, half-length portrait of the fourth Duchess of Marlborough. Her head and hair are finely modeled; her dress and lace shawl are a riot of impressionistic strokes. In reproduction — the Museum Bulletin for Spring 2011 is effectively this exhibition’s catalogue — the picture has an anemic air, because the palette is almost that of grisaille, with shades of blue and pink emerging only after your eyes adjust (the duchess’s face, it must be said, is grey); but in the life it is a formidably attractive portrait.

Among the Quentin de la Tours, there was a sketch for his portrait of Louis XV — a sketch that is fairly finished enough for most purposes. What’s striking about the artist’s portraits of the king is the care that they take to show the royal five-o’clock shadow. This can only be meant to reassure us that beneath the powder and the finery there pulses what Fossil calls a manly man. We are certainly not supposed to think that Louis needed a shave. The effect is quite indecent.

On our way to the pastels, Ray and I stopped in at the Rooms With a View show, which occupies a small quarter of the old-master special exhibition space. Like most shows with a theme, this one features works of widely varying quality, with the result that the really good things stand out all on their own, without your having to know anything about them. (If you want to know how great Mozart is, listen to Salieri or Gluck.) It’s no surprise to cross the room, drawn by a dream of romantic concision, and find that it’s the work of Caspar David Friedrich.

Two of the pictures are views from the Villa Medici — which still accommodates, according to Wikipedia, the French Academy in Rome — that feature St Peter’s and Castel Sant’ Angelo off in the distance, the Castel looking rather small in both. One is a painting (1817) by Jean Alaux, and one is a watercolor (1863) by Constant Moyaux. Both artists were Prix de Rome winners. We wondered what had become of the Prize, and were distressed to learn later that André Malraux put an end to it in 1968, that awful year for the French establishment. “Stupid,” said Ray, when I told him.

As you can see, those horrible concrete garden statues are still gracing the portal of the Duke-Semans Mansion at 1009 Fifth Avenue, right across the street from and a smack in the ey of the Museum. It would probably be going to far to say that the house is currently being gutted, but evidence suggests that the new owner has contracted for an extensive renovation. Since the statues of Feebus and Phlora were not the first things to go, we hope that they’ll be the last. We will miss them, mostly because, when they’re gone, no one will believe us when we say that they were ever there.

¶ Senator John Kerry’s visit to Pakistan appears to have calmed our roiling relationship with that perfidious ally — for the moment. Interestingly, what the Pakistanis appear to have wanted was an assurance that the United States has no designs upon its nuclear capabilities. As usual, Pakistan is thinking about its epic rivalry with India, not about the United States and its problems. ¶ New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has requested “information and documents” relating to mortgage securitization at Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Gretchen Morgenson doesn’t tell us why Mr Schneiderman’s move, which seems too good to be true (we’d given up on seeking bankers brought to justice), and which was apparently launched a few weeks ago, is news today.

In a review, at The Nation, of twelve recent books about the plight of higher education, William Deresiewicz writes, 

Our system of public higher education is one of the great achievements of American civilization. In its breadth and excellence, it has no peer. It embodies some of our nation’s highest ideals: equality, opportunity, self-improvement, useful knowledge and collective public purpose… Now the system is in danger of falling into ruins.

After meditating on this passage for a few days, I’ve decided that it provides an accurate mission statement for the great American state universities (and the larger private ones as well), but that its objectives have never been persistently realized. Ideals are targets, and American leaders of the past can be praised for having aimed at “some our nation’s highest” in the design of a public university system. But in order to approximate ideals in reality, you have to understand the reality that you’re working with, and candid self-assessment has never been a marked feature of the American character. We’re optimists and visionaries who don’t in fact see very clearly with our eyes. The system has always been in danger of falling into ruins, much like an overheated real estate development that never gets to the point of housing a living tenant. 

I am not a scholar; I haven’t studied facts and figures. I’m willing to rely on those who have, such as William Arum and Josipa Roksa, whose Academically Adrift, which figures among the books under Deresiewicz’s review, suggests that students aren’t learning much of anything in college these days. But my willingness is born of experience: when I look round the Internet, for example, I see hosts of very bright young people who are teaching themselves things that they ought to have been taught in college. The only thing that’s new about this state of affairs is that the Internet provides a medium for observing it on a much larger scale than was available before. Even in the days when students put in longer hours studying than they do now, the objective was rarely to attain true understanding of a subject. The point was to pass tests. Then as now the only way to learn about something was to write about it in a manner that would meet a modest level of critical inquiry; then as now the only way to evaluate such writing was to read it and to grade it, something most intelligent people would rather not do. Most writing is not pleasant to read. And when it is, the disappointment of a gifted student’s sudden unsuspecting drop into error can be maddening. With very, very rare exceptions, young minds have little of interest to contribute to the general discussion of ideas. But they must be educated if that discussion is to continue, and the fact that educating them is in large part a tedious slog must be faced squarely. Going to college may be fun overall, but education is always going to be as painful, and in much the same ways, as any other form of demanding exercise. Clever students have been getting better and better at avoiding the rut of education for nearly fifty years, ever since the introduction of course evaluations. That really has to stop.

I was a very clever student: I managed to avoid ever having to parse Caesar’s Gallic Wars. I was also bright enough to see where this cleverness would lead me if unchecked, and before it was too late I signed up for a Great Books Program, five semesters of talking about thinkers from the pre-Socratic to the post-Revolutionary. (As I recall, I bluffed my way through discussions of only one book, Moby-Dick, a book that, forty years later, I put down as utter rubbish; everything else I mostly read.) In other words, I surrendered my options and read what I was told to read. I doubted that the reading list was as good as it might be, but flush with youthful arrogance as I was I was also determined to get something out of school beyond a passel of interesting personal experiences. I’m reminded of a nightmare that used to trouble me: The print in a book that I was reading in my dream would grow fainter and fainter, as a realization slowly dawned that the words were becoming invisible because I hadn’t written them yet. This always woke me up with a shudder. That’s what college seems to have become for many students: an environment in which they produce everything out of themselves. 

The American university system underwent a tremendous expansion after World War II; so did the foundations of learning, which would soon support such unimagined realms as the superstructure of information technology. The old model of university education, germinated in Enlightenment Germany and polishe d to a high gloss at dozens of late Nineteenth-Century colleges and research universities, was primarily an apprenticeship system in which the stock of knowledge was transmitted from teachers to students. The stock of knowledge was known to be expanding, but the expansion was thought to be manageable because professors increased their sub-specialities. After World War II, it was increasingly understood that the unknown — the unmanageably learnable — vastly outbulks the masteries of credentialed professors. In 1800, it might not have been possible to read all of the books that were thought to be important, but it was certainly possible to house them all in a library. This was not the case in 1950, by which time the authority of transmission that foremerly underwrote the virtue of traditional education had evaporated. But the model remained, and to some extent it still with us in the liberal arts graduate departments with which Deresiewicz begins his review. It made so little sense, however, that the sprawling American university saw no reason not to corrupt itself by recruiting graduate students as the underpaid teachers of undergraduates. That was the end of the apprenticeship system: graduate students took the jobs that former students a couple of years older, on the other side of completing doctoral programs, ought to have had. It hasn’t taken long for this cannibalism to create a small but powerful class of tenured professors who have no more interest than any other powerful group in expanding their ranks and diluting their privileges. Whether this class is dooming itself to extinction is only a variant of the question that confronts most modern institutions, which, as mature institutions always and everywhere do, have concentrated power in ever fewer hands and increased the inequality of access to resources of all kinds. 

I don’t believe that the modern research university has ever justified itself as a provider of the kind of education that matters in civil society, which, as I’ve said, is a matter of training young minds to participate in public discussion. (I shy away, in these polarized times, from all thought of “debate”). It seems obvious that a solid grounding in the history of the nation’s problems would be the one indispensable subject, but this has never been on offer in the way that, say, art-history survey courses used to introduce students to centuries of imaganative creation. From what I can tell, colleges and universities have dismissed history surveys as belonging to the high-school curriculum. But what high school students can’t be expected to digest is the contentiousness of American historiography: true history is never settled, and can never be reduced to the tenets of a creed. (Doubtless it would be grand if high-school students could be required to memorize a lot of dates, freeing college students to explore their significance.) Nor has the research university been adept at inculcating social values, perhaps for the simple reason that the academic knowledge is diffracted into shards of sub-specialty. The ideal university, it seems to me, would prepare students for what I call the social paradox: the strength of any society is a function of its constituents’ cooperative pursuit of distinctions and differences. “Knowing thyself” is only part of what a good education imparts; figuring out where you might fit and what you might improve — matters that require learning a lot about other people — is just as important. 

I see no reason for higher education to be as expensive as it is. The current university, like some sort of interplanetary rocket, consists of three stages, with an athletic and quality-of-life stage consuming most of the resources, a capital-intensive stage of scientific research consuming most of the rest, and only a tiny nugget of money going to the actual teaching of undergraduates. I don’t see why these three stages ought to operate as parts of a unit. Graduate professional schools ought to be free-standing, and vastly less numerous than undergraduate schools. To me, the model college professor is a more sophisticated high-school teacher, not a grudging research scientist. It is likely that secondary and higher education might be unified, with some sort of non-academic national service interposed at varying points. As for athletics, their presence on the academic campus has always been the snake in the garden. How wonderful it would be if national service, and not education, were infused with the atmospheric attractions of today’s university life!

The origins of the university stretch back a thousand years, and its rich heritage must not only be preserved but kept alive. But whether the university has ever been or will ever be suited to equipping the citizens with the knowledge and intellectual habits that a liberal democracy depends on is a question that ought to be answered without reference to ideals.

¶ Less shocking, sadly, than the news of DSK’s downfall, “Your So-Called Education” is nevertheless a great deal more disturbing. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa measured college students at the beginning of their first year, at the end of their second, and upon graduation. 36% of the students failed to gain the equivalent of even one point over their entire undergraduate career. Almost as upsetting, 36% of a smaller group — students who reported spending five hours or fewer on weekly studying — maintained grade point averages of 3.16. This is what consumer-driven education must inevitably lead to: zero product.

¶ Junot Diaz’s essay, in the Boston Review, on Haïti’s apocalypse — a social, not a natural disaster — is this week’s legendum. In an anaphoral passage that is powerfully reminiscent of our Declaration of Independence, Diaz encapsulates the sins that have been visited on the country’s body since the time of the French. The worst of it is that Haïti’s abyssal social inequality looks more and more like everyone else’s future. (via The Morning News) ¶ Historian Richard Evans writes about looting through the ages, and about emerging guidelines for restitution. The idea that works of cultural significance are to be treated differently from other property can be traced explicitly to Union Army policy in the American Civil War. (The National Interest; via Brainiac) ¶ Josh Jacobs, who lost a brother on 9/11, is troubled by the “mercifulness” of his Facebook friends in the wake of the bin Laden take-out. Clarity is not the object of this essay; never have we seen the thickness of grief presented so masterfully. (The Awl)

¶ Gary Antonacci writes about “the world’s first index fund.” We were tickled to death. (Optimal Momentum; via The Reformed Broker) ¶ David Cain’s No-Procrastination policy is so fierce that we can tell just how big and bad the problem of putting things off has become for him. We’re glad that “disorganization” heads his list of pitfalls. (Raptitude) ¶ Frédéric Filloux haruspexates the tweeting that preceded the announcement of Osama bin Laden’s death, and argues that it spells the end of such media concepts as “edition” and “deadline.” (Monday Note) ¶ The wisdom of Felix Salmon: “The more that both publishers and advertisers concentrate on the creative side of things, and the less they worry about the distractions of granular economics, the more successful both are likely to be.” Down with the the Math State!

¶ Mary Snydor, a descendant of Eng Bunker (the Siamese twin of Chang), visits Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum, where her progenitor’s liver is on display. Yes, it’s awkward. (The Smart Set)

The guide became excited. He asked me if I had told any of the museum staff and I mentioned that I had the last time I came, but no one seemed to be too interested. For a few moments, he quietly contemplated the display with me, but then things started to get awkward. Outside the museum, people couldn’t be more fascinated about my heritage; inside, no one ever knows quite what to say. It’s hard to be impressed with my tie to Chang and Eng when you’re staring at the their grimacing faces and preserved liver.

¶ Richard Crary reminds us (sorry! we’re late) that last Thursday was International Midwife Day. (The Existence Machine) ¶ Mr Wrong diets on CLIF bars — tacitly raising the question, when are they going to invent an energy bar for people who sit at desks all day and who don’t need the energy so much as something to fill you up? (The Awl) ¶ Mother’s Day with lots of mommies. (Philly Post; thanks Philip!) ¶ Meet James Priest, the English ex-pat gardener who’s about to take over at Giverny. (Telegraph; via Arts Journal)

¶ Josh Kurp does some virtual spelunking and unearths what information there is about the lost DuMont television network, which came to an end in 1956. We remember it!But we didn’t know that it was the same Dr DuMont who invented radar.  (Splitsider) ¶ Kevin Nguyen discovers that the only way to read Harper’s on an iPad is to subscribe to the print edition. (Zinio sucks, apparently.) The good news is that Kevin thinks that it’s worth it. (The Bygone Bureau) ¶ At The Neglected Books Page, a few words about Theodor Fontane, whose Irretrievable has just been published in a fresh translation by NYRB. ¶ Francine Prose talks to The Paris Review about one of our favorite books, her new novel, My New American Life. “[N]othing has ever happened to me. I had to go to Albania; I couldn’t make it up.” (Thanks, Ms NOLA!)

New: ¶ College fraternities: “notorious sites of anti-intellectualism, alcohol abuse, and sexual assault,” in the words of Historiann. Why do good schools tolerate them? (via MetaFilter)

Have a Look: ¶ “I Want to Support My Local Bookshop,” @ The Age of Uncertainty. ¶ The Final Edition. (via The Morning News) ¶ “Transformer Apartment” @ Joe.My.God.

Noted: ¶ “My Two Days As a Russian Tabloid Sensation,” from Michael Idov’s “forthcoming” book about Russia. WDKWTLOC. (The Awl) ¶ Superman renounces American citizenship, @ Naked Capitalism.

¶ So long as the Republican Party is in the grip of plutocratic ideologues, we will never cast a vote for one of its candidates in a national election. In our defense of this arguably simplistic policy, we point to the Supreme Court, which has been reduced to Gilded Age dementia by the appointments of the three Bush administrations. Today’s editorial, “Gutting Class Action,” points to the latest in a long linie of judicial monstrosities. Nor is trhe evil confined to the Supreme Court. Not until 2040 at the earliest will the Federal Bench be purged of right-wing judges — and that’s of course assuming that wingnut-financed Republicans never hold the White House or Congress again.

With Bridesmaids, Judd Apatow’s school of middle-American humor opens its female wing; and the maiden flight begins with a wonderful flourish that’s just as funny as anything in the boys’ movies even while it informs us of a slightly different climate. The essence of the joke is having Jon Hamm play a jerk. He’s an amiable, cuddly jerk; he’s no smarmy narcissist. But his ears don’t work. He makes love the way he likes to make love. It’s not great for his girlfriend — who is not only not his girlfriend, as we find out right away, but just his “Number Three,” as he calls out after she makes him let her out of the car and he leaves her in the dust. But we can see right away why this woman would come back for more, because he is, after all, Don Draper. 

And she has nothing better to do. In a briskly summarized back-story, we learn that her real boyfriend left her in the lurch when the two of them were running a bake shop in downtown Milwaukee. Whether it was his defection or the recession that closed the place, Annie (Kristen Wiig) has lost her way since. She’s not good at the jewelry-shop job that an AA member gave her as a favor to his sponsor, Annie’s mom (the late Jill Clayburgh, looking great, considering). She has a scary roommate situation that involves an English brother-sister team that seems dropped-in from an aliens nightmare (What are Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson doing in Milwaukee?). And now her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), is getting married. 

Lillian is marrying a well-placed young man from Chicago. His parents belong to a ritzy country club, as does his boss, whose new wife, Helen (Rose Byrne), has gratiously taken Lillian — a poor Milwaukee girl, after all — under her wing. We misspelled “graciously” on purpose, because Helen’s sweetness is as grating as a bed of sugar cubes. It’s unfortunate that Lillian has asked Annie to be her matron of honor, because Helen is second only to Martha Stewart in the expertise department, and she knows how to deploy correct politeness as a deadly weapon. Annie and Helen quickly fall into a duel for Lillian’s soul, and the movie’s second act passes in a blaze of animosity that makes the bitchery of The Women look very antique indeed. 

There are two other nice ladies in the wedding party (played by Wendi McLendon-Covey and Ellie Kemper), and then there is the groom’s sister, Megan, who is played by Melissa McCarthy. Ms McCarthy is built, to put it nicely, like a fireplug, and she has a direct sense of assaultive humor to go with it. (More than once she struck me as the American, female counterpart to Ricky Gervais). The buzz about Bridesmaids is that a good deal of improvisation was encouraged, and Ms McCarthy not only brings the freshness of stand-up to proceedings but she makes it work. Although wildly implausible as any kind of bridesmaid, she throws herself at you with irresistible conviction. (Sometimes, she throws other characters at you.) The air marshals of America, meanwhile, are going to have to work on their cover.

Romance eventually taps Annie’s shoulder in the form of a policeman who pulls her over because her tail lights are out. He turns out to be Chris O’Dowd, who played the sad-sack disk jockey in The Boat That Rocked who was conned into marrying January Jones. (The Mad Men linkages are going to ramify densely in the coming years.) His character, Rhodes, is portrayed as sweet-natured and vulnerable, and we don’t know whose side to take when Annie walks out on him during what ought to have been a nice morning-after scene. His offense? To presume on her baking abilities (he was a satisfied customer of her bake shop). Bridesmaids would have been just about perfect if this cloud in Annie’s past were cleared up — we watch her do enough baking to agree with Rhodes that it’s probably what she ought to be doing, so what’s the big problem? — but we can be thankful that the point is not belabored. 

I found Bridesmaids the movie to be a lot funnier than Bridesmaids the trailer. The trailer includes at least two so-so jokes that got dumped from the final feature, much to its improvement. Still, for all its riotous moments, this is not a sidesplitting movie. Comparisons will be made, I expect, to Mr Apatow’s Funny People, in which Adam Sandler made frequent crossings of the frontier between drama and comedy. Ms Wiig, one of the great character actors of all time, plays Annie more or less straight, which is only fair, since the point of the film is to demonstrate that women can be just as funny at being losers as men can (if they’re funny). But there are bathtubs of momentary pathos that would never be tolerated in a boys’ movie, and it will be interesting to see how well audiences digest the many moments at which Ms Wiig looks like a homesteader lost in the dust bowl. Without saying a word (almost), she conveys the awfulness of being the one who isn’t getting married, the one whom nobody wants to marry. These moments don’t last long. Bridal mayhem persistently intervenes. And when Annie begs Rhodes to turn on his patrol car’s siren at the end, you wonder if there are any justices of the peace in the neighborhood who are working late.

¶ Although we can’t claim to have been “distracted by flooding along the Mississippi, warfare in Libya or the latest on Newt Gingrich,” we didn’t know about the James Tate Prom Saga until we read about it this morning. Our verdict: “grim-faced” headmaster Beth Smith should be thrown into a Polish space capsule for 1000 hours of community entertainment. ¶ And what, pray tell, is Arthur Newmyer’s lawsuit against Sidwell Friends doing in the pages of the Times? We should have thought that Mr Newmyer is too old to carry on like James Tate, but, sadly not.

¶ Vitaly Borker, the online eyeglasses merchant who couldn’t resist boasting to David Segal  about his deplorable business practises, may be regretting his Iron Curtain cheekiness. Having plead guilty to High Crimes and Naughtiness, he now faces sentencing of up to six years.

¶ What with the piles of books that sprout in every room, we worry about hoarding. Our closets, cabinets, and even the refrigerator are stuffed almost to the point of disorganization. The worst thing about holding on to something because it might come in handy someday is that every now and then it actually does. But we have never given much thought to the children of hoarders, who, it turns out, have some not very surprising tics, such as a disinclination to give parties. The impulse to hoard can lead its victims to choose their clutter over their children. Yikes!

The other night, at a cocktail party, I excused myself from holding forth about Pakistan so that I could refill my wine glass. While I stepped away, the gentleman to whom I was talking whispered to Kathleen, “Your husband sure knows a lot.” Indeed, I was shamelessly gratified, the next morning, to find nearly everything that I had said echoed (as it were) in Lawrence Wright’s latest contribution to The New Yorker‘s Annals of Diplomacy, “The Double Game.” I did know a lot — and I learned almost all of it from reading articles at 3 Quarks Daily. 

I recommend the site highly, especially to Zalmay Khalilzad, the Afghan diplomat whose Op-Ed piece in the Times, “Demanding Answers From Pakistan,” struck me this morning as almost hygienically pure of common sense, not to mention common knowledge about Pakistan. Mr Khalilzad envisions diplomacy as a sort of chess game, which every nation plays in the same way and with a single purpose. Did diplomacy ever function in that way? I understand that treaties are designed to pretend that it does, but beyond that I have always understood that each nation plays the diplomacy game according to its characteristic bent. It would be treason not to do so. Every sovereign power owes a far greater duty of care to its subject people than it does to other sovereigns, and most sovereign powers represent multiple constituencies with inconsistent, sometimes colliding interests. And while it is laudable to encourage one’s own sovereign to play the game fairly and candidly, it is childish to expect other sovereigns to do so.  

This is why the second prong of Mr Khalilzad’s “two-stage strategy” for obliging Pakistan to behave more like an ally is so fatuous.

Then we should follow up with demands that Pakistan break the backbone of Al Qaeda in Pakistan by moving against figures like Bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri; remove limits on the Predator drone campaign; uproot insurgent sanctuaries and shut down factories that produce bombs for use against American and Afghan soldiers; and support a reasonable political settlement in Afghanistan.

This assumes a sovereign unity in Pakistan that simply does not exist. Lawrence Wright quotes the late Benazir Bhutto’s description of the powerful Inter-Services Intelligence directorate as “a state within the state.” Then he proceeds to write about S Wing, a supposedly secret organization comprised of retired ISI officials that operates within (or alongside) the ISI. It is thought that if Osama bin Laden had any support from Pakistani officials, it was the men of S Wing who knew where he was and who respected his cover. It would seem that the official government of Pakistan has little or no say in the doings of S Wing. The Predator drone campaign is understandably unpopular with Pakistani people, and expanding it in any way would increase the unpopularity of the government, which whatever its party affiliation or campaign promises is invariably drawn from the wealthy, largely feudal (landowning) elite. This ruling class has undertaken for decades to distract disaffected Pakistanis with the pursuit and acquisition of Kashmir, which was foolishly allotted to India in the last hours of the Raj. Pakistan’s dealing with Afghanistan — another country that, as we have found to our cost, harbors a number of mutually hostile elements that jockey for nominal control of the nominal government — are in contrast cloudy and multifarious. It is unclear what Pakistan stands to gain from “a reasonable political settlement” in Afghanistan, and Mr Khalilzad’s blather actually serves to underline this point. 

It is in neither America’s interest nor Pakistan’s for relations to become more adversarial. But Pakistan’s strategy of being both friend and adversary is no longer acceptable.

While Mr Wright and many others entertain the possibility of withholding financial aid to the government of Pakistan, in retaliation for the double game that Pakistan appears to have been playing (against itself as much as the United States), that option figures nowhere in Mr Khalilzad’s four-pronged backup plan (in case the “two-stage strategy” fails). Doubtless his diplomatic proposals are pregnant with significance for diplomatic insiders, not so much for their patent content as for their timing (and Mr Khalilzad is in any case far more concerned about Afghanistan than he is about Pakistan). But I can’t imagine what use the editors of the Times expected the bulk of their most educated and well-informed readers might make of Mr Khalilzad’s boilerplate. It’s almost criminal of them to make precious Op-Ed space available to a writer who has so little genuine information to offer.  

¶ They say that Nicolas Sarkozy is not happy about La Conquête, a new movie that’s about him — “the story of a man who wins power and loses his wife.” The film opens nationally and at Cannes next week, along with Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a film in which Carla Bruni, the president’s current wife, has a small role. Ms Bruni has plead pregnancy as her excuse for missing the film festtival. ¶ Princess Chulabhorn Walailak, the youngest daughter of Thailand’s ailing King Bhumibol thinks that flattering coverage of royal family news ought to be given ten more minutes of daily air time. We can only imagine what her father’s subjects think about that, because unflattering coverage of the royal family is prohibited by law. Somsak Jeamteerasakul, a history professor who spoke out against princess (on the Internet), has been charged with violating the country’s draconian laws forbidding lèse majesté. ¶ Manuel Zelaya is going home, sometime soon, to Honduras. How we’ve missed him!

The first unambiguous laugh comes on the second page of Francine Prose’s delicious satire, My New American Life. We’ve been introduced to the point of view of Lula, a young Albanian woman who, a day after learning that her residence in the United States is “legal,” espies a black SUV from a window in the suburban home of her employer, whom she calls “Mister Stanley.” 

Raindrops beaded the SUV as it trawled past the house where Lula lived and worked, taking care of Mister Stanley’s son Zeke, a high school senior who only needed minimal caretaking. In fact Zeke could do many things that Lula couldn’t, such as drive a car. But since Mister Stanley believed that teenagers shouldn’t be left on their own, and since he went off to Wall Street at dawn and didn’t return until late, he had hired Lula to make sure that Zeke ate and slept and did his homework. Mister Stanley was very safety-conscious, which Lula found very admirable, but also dangerously American. No Albanian father would do that to his son and risk turning him gay. 

The second laugh comes moments later, just a few lines down. “On the way, Zeke gave Lula driving tips: who went first at an intersection, how to speak the silent language that kept drivers from killing each other like they did constantly in Tirana.” The object of satire here is not suburban life in New Jersey but the sentimental attachment that Lula and her Albanian friends maintain for their murderous homeland, which is always described as a nightmare in terms too cartoonish to take quite seriously. Just considering Albania as a homeland takes on an oxymoronic quality. “No one in Albania went near a court unless they were in handcuffs or were suing to get back their land.” Lula herself has absolutely no desire to return, but when her quondam boyfriend is deported, his chums are happy for him, because he’ll have lots of girlfriends and, besides, his mother is a great cook. 

Lula went to the magazine rack and was soon engrossed in an article about a Texas dynasty literally and figuratively screwing each other for generations, when they weren’t crashing cars and jumping off the room. The story cheered Lula. It sounded like a family you might hear about at home, though the money would have been different, as would the trees and cars and roofs.

The writing is what’s funny: what the first sentence grants, the last appears to retract. It was the same but different. Marking a distinction in the types of roof that crazy relatives are jumping off us is absolutely funny prose. Exaggeration telescopes in both directions, from overstatement to understatement. The humor never lets up for more than a page or two as Lula plummets through a slow-motion adventure that’s set in reverse. 

For Lula has no idea what she’s going to do when she is no longer needed by Mister Stanley. She only knows that continuing to live in his house will snuff the life out of her; it already feels like a tomb. Nothing ever happens in Baywater, the close-in Jersey town where he lived with his wife and son until one fine Christmas Eve when his wife ran off. (This uneventfulness is just as stylized as the recklessness of Albania.) Ever since she started working for Mister Stanley, nothing has happened to Lula. She isn’t nostalgic about waitressing at La Changita, the Alphabet City bar where she worked illegally before reading Mister Stanley’s ad at Craigslist, but she does miss her best friend, Dunia, whom she hopes has gone back to Tirana. Dunia has dropped from sight and beyond email range, and in dark hours Lula fears that she may have fallen into worse hands than those of the INS. Until the black SUV drives up to Mister Stanley’s house, Lula’s only connection to the outside world is an amiable librarian a few blocks away, and Mister Stanley’s childhood chum, Don Settebello — the immigration lawyer who has arranged Lula’s wonderful “legal” status. 

This turns out to be what has attracted the guys in the SUV. Two of them are heavies, but the third one, Alvo, reminds her of an old boyfriend. He asks her to do a “teensy favor” for him — to hide a pistol. She doesn’t dare to refuse, but she doesn’t really want to refuse, either, because Alvo is cute, and Lula has been alone for a long time. (At 26, she considers herself to be “old.”) She will spend most of the book dreaming about Alvo, and thinking that it’s odd of him to break into Mister Stanley’s house from time to time, to take a shower, or perhaps to finish one of the stories that, encouraged by her boss and Don, she has taken to writing. The stories are old Balkan folktales that Lula repackages as personal history, appalled that life in America has made such a liar out of her but also tickled by her daring. As it turns out, of course, the mysterious burglar isn’t Alvo at all, but a foreseeable-in-retrospect surprise guest who pops out of hiding at the most inopportune time. 

But nothing really terrible (or frightening) ever happens.  Lula’s safe and secure life at Mister Stanley’s is such a successful American dream that it enables her to outgrow it. Where a more biting satirist such as Gary Shteyngart might interpose some gruesome or humiliating personal detail, Prose highlights Lula’s longing to live in a place where loving-kindness is a real possibility and not an absurd fantasy — her Albanian dream. Although the narrative pace never lags, the novel is not particularly plot-driven; what happens is not as interesting as what Lula thinks about what’s happening. (A longer title might well have been What My Old Albanian Mind Makes of My New American Life; formally, the book is a masterpiece of point-of-view discipline.) Whether or not she ever takes control of her destiny is not something that we care very much about; what we want is for Lula to go on thinking and talking like Lula. And she does not disappoint us. 

¶ It took the whole length of the story for Jesse McKinley to mention the bitter child-custody battle that might have disturbed the unnamed son of neo-Nazi Jeff Hall enough to make him shoot his father dead. What this story is doing on the front page of the Times is beyond us — unless, that is, it’s another Idiocracy alert. ¶ Westie gangleader Jimmy McElroy died recently in prison (sentence: “forever and a day”) but got a nice send-off Holy Cross, just off Times Square, occasioning an hommage à la manière de Joseph Mitchell by Jim Dwyer. ¶ Omar bin Laden and three of his brothers have “lashed out” at President Obama for killing their unarmed father. In a statement that, if not quite politely phrased, was presumably politely delivered, Mr bin Laden reminds us that he disavowed his father’s violent undertakings; by the same token, he feels that his father ought to have stood trial. We agree, although we’re glad for Barack Obama’s political career that  that is not what happened. What we’d really like to see is the complete destruction of Pakistan’s military resources. We paid for it, after all, and it would send a message to other potentially perfidious allies.

¶ Doreen Carvajal ends a bittersweet story about the chuetas of Majorca — Jewish families that pretended to be Christian in response to the Inquisition (which burned three of them alive in 1691) but that didn’t fool the neighbors, who taught their children a taunting rhyme containing fifteen surnames, including that of (did you know?) Joan Miró — with the rather ouchmaking news that 78-year old Bernat Pomar has recently undergone conversion to Judaism, if you know what we mean by that.

Jumping the Broom is a movie about a poorly planned wedding. I don’t mean the arrangements for the service and the reception (although the latter are in the care of a frazzled blonde, played by Julie Bowen, whose comic potential is scratched deeply enough only to be cringe-making). I mean planning as something that you do for people whom you care about. Only idiots would wait until the rehearsal dinner to introduce parents of such wildly divergent social backgrounds, and neither Sabrina (Paula Patton) nor Jason (Laz Alonso) is an idiot. Their oversight and/or wishful thinking is never explored, because the wild divergence in their social backgrounds, aside from being something that they have personally triumphed over, is there for comic effect only. But the laughter never really muffles the cruelty of the embarrassment to which the mothers of the happy couple are subjected. 

The duel of the mothers, played by Loretta Devine (his, poor) and Angela Bassett (hers, rich) calls for the two actresses to do everything they can think of to make themselves unsympathetic. Ms Devine looks mean and dowdy most of the time, and Ms Bassett always looks like Medea. You just wish that they could don a couple of T shirts and get down to the mud wrestling. Instead, the rich mom speaks French and declares, with odiously unsociable conceit, that not only were her forebears never slaves, they owned slaves. Happily, I suppose, the beady self-righteousness of the poor mom is enough to keep your dislike of these witches in perfect balance. Postal workers and Martha’s Vineyard homeowners had, until Jumping the Broom, little common ground for outrage, but this screenplay, by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibbs, has filled the lack. 

Ms Patton is adorable in the same way that Amanda Peet is adorable in Something’s Gotta Give; close your eyes, and you would never guess that these girls didn’t grow up in the same well-tended garden. Mr Alonso’s performance is awkward in exactly the manner of a jeune premier in a Broadway musical comedy; when he tries to sound sincere, it would be better if he could just sing. I mean it as a compliment: it’s only right that an actor should cough and burp when his character is asked to declare respect for a fiancé’s silly primness. The couple’s more estimable achievement is holding center stage while competing love interests sprout to either side, between his mother’s colleague, the genuinely funny Tasha Smith, and her cousin from Yale, played by Romeo Miller; and between her bridesmaid, Meagan Good, and the catering chef, Gary Dourdan. (The ineptness of the latters’ love scene in the kitchen, while pone burns, ought to be taught, prophylactically, in film schools.) Valarie Pettiford, Mike Epps, DeRay Davis, Pooch Hall, and a rather tired-looking Brian Stokes Mitchell do what they can to push the stone uphill, while a pixieish Vera Cudjoe cajoles one into wondering if Cicely Tyson is doing another cameo. All in all, the cast gives this bad film the visual pizzaz to make it well worth sitting through. It’s only when the screen goes dark that you ask yourself what all that was about.

I feel somewhat impertinent criticizing Jumping the Broom, because it struck me as sending a fusillade of coded messages to an intended black American audience. Without atttempting any deciphering, I’ll just point out that the movie is given to pretending that its true subject is pre-marital continence. At one awful moment, Sabrina apologizes to Jason’s penis for arousing an erection that cannot be — what’s the word? “eased”? — until the next day’s ceremony. At another, equally awful moment, the bridesmaids speculate about Jason’s fortitude in the face of Sabrina’s virginal vows; maybe he’s on the down low! The juxtaposition of raunch and respectability curdles the fun; Jumping the Broom is neither the farce nor the comedy of manners that it might have been. The whole idea of “saving it for marriage” seems wrong-headed if not delusional, resting as it does on the presumption that, since two sexy-looking people are sure to find erotic satisfaction in one another’s arms, they might as well wait until they’ve bound themselves together. I no longer live in a world in which such a view seems moral; indeed, it seems quite immoral. What a message! 

¶ Although there’s not much real news in today’s Times, there are lots of interesting items about personal technology, such as the really very intriguing story about the Polara golf ball, which is dimpled in a directional manner that reduces slices and hooks. It’s also “illegal” — not permitted in official tournaments. The substrate of the story is an anxiety about making the pastime attractive to young man who are inclined to play in cargo shorts and whose sense of the rules is flexible at best. Will golf develop a hardball/softball divide? ¶ After months of dithering, Condé Nast and Apple have finally come up with a subscription model for The New Yorker. Not that we’re excited. The great thing about the print issue is that you don’t need a connection to read it. And while the online archives make it unnecessary to stack unread issues or even to clip favorite articles, you still have to type out anything that you want to copy — cutting and pasting are not enabled. Makes you feel like it’s the Middle Ages! ¶ Further proof that it was the tablet, and not the personal computer, that would save trees (because reading a tablet involves the same body moves as reading a book) is forthcoming in Martha White’s story about Ativ Software, an outfit that packages conference materials in a tidy app. (Sell Staples!) ¶ Facebook 2.0: in which the Zuckerberg competes with a crowd of “anti-oversharing” alternatives.