Pakistan’s political elite suffered yet another body-blow yesterday, with the assassination of the government’s only Christian minister, Shahbaz Bhatti, gunned down outside his home by thugs in vernacular costume.

In a sign of the retreat of the ruling party on the question of enacting more tolerant laws, Prime Minister Gilani pledged in Parliament earlier this year that the government had no intention of pursuing the reform agenda on the blasphemy laws. An alliance of conservative religious parties showed their strength in the major cities in early February, staging rallies of tens of thousands that called the government lackeys of the United States, and too reliant on a reform agenda. Alarmed by the rising tide of militant sentiments, senior American officials suggested to Mr. Zardari and Mr. Gilani that they make public speeches on the need for tolerance — “Churchillian” presentations, said one diplomat — but the leaders had cited lack of security and fear for their lives.

Mr. Bhatti had expressed nervousness about speaking out and had shunned public appearances, his aides said. One of Mr. Bhatti’s favorite sayings came from the inaugural address in 1947 of the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who declared that Pakistan would not be a theocracy, and all religions would be respected. “I am receiving threats on speaking against the blasphemy law but my faith gives me strength and we will not allow the handful of extremists to fulfill their agenda,” Mr. Bhatti said shortly before his death.

The international advocacy group Human Rights Watch said on Wednesday that Mr. Bhatti’s killing represented the “bitter fruit of appeasement of extremist and militant groups” in the last several months. It called for an “urgent” reappraisal of the “political cowardice” that had overtaken the ruling party in the government, the Pakistan Peoples Party.

We’re reminded of Omar Ali’s epitaph-in-waiting for Pakistan’s ruling class: “They have armed, trained and encouraged their own executioners in the course of a demented scheme of trying to wrest Kashmir from India while laying the foundation for a mini-empire in central Asia.”

We are totally wowed. Even though we knew something of the polymathy of Natalie Portman, Natalie Angier’s report makes us gasp.

On Sunday night, the gorgeously pregnant Natalie Portman, 29, won an Oscar for her performance as Nina, a mentally precarious ballerina in the shock fantasy “Black Swan.” Among the lesser-known but nonetheless depressingly impressive details in Ms. Portman’s altogether too precociously storied career is that as a student at Syosset High School on Long Island back in the late 1990s, Ms. Portman made it all the way to the semifinal rounds of the Intel competition.

For those who know how grueling it can be to put together a prize-worthy project and devote hundreds of hours of “free” time at night, on weekends, during spring break and summer vacation, doing real, original scientific research while one’s friends are busy adolescing, the achievement is testimony enough to Ms. Portman’s self-discipline and drive.

Yet there’s more. While carrying out her investigation into a new, “environmentally friendly” method of converting waste into useful forms of energy, and maintaining the straight-A average she’d managed since grade school, Ms. Portman already was a rising movie star. She’d been in films directed by Woody Allen, Tim Burton and Luc Besson, appeared opposite Julia Roberts, Jack Nicholson, Matt Dillon, Uma Thurman, Drew Barrymore and I’m getting tired of typing celebrity names here. She took on the major role of Queen Amidala in the Star Wars prequel trilogy that rocketed her to international fame. And then she went on to Harvard University to study neuroscience and the evolution of the mind.

“I’ve taught at Harvard, Dartmouth and Vassar, and I’ve had the privilege of teaching a lot of very bright kids,” said Abigail A. Baird, who was one of Ms. Portman’s mentors at Harvard. “There are very few who are as inherently bright as Natalie is, who have as much intellectual horsepower, who work as hard as she did. She didn’t take a single thing for granted.”

No wonder we like The Other Boleyn Girl so much.

My one quibble with The Price of Everying: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do, Eduardo Porter’s wonderfully readable survey of the function of pricing, is that he didn’t put his last chapter, “When Prices Fail,” at the beginning of his book; I also wish that he had dealt a little more aggressively with the toxic strain of Chicago thinking exemplified by Eugene Fama. Mr Fama says that talk of economic bubbles “drives me nuts”; it’s his Panglossian belief in efficient markets that drives me nuts. The first thing to learn about prices is that they are often wrong, and wrong for the very reason the existence of which thinkers of Mr Fama’s persuasion deny: neither buyers nor sellers have enough information to set a correct price. Market prices, moreover, are always somewhat arbitrary, in that they’re spot prices, reflecting the needs of the moment. There is no way for the buyer and seller of a barrel of oil to develop an agreeable estimate of the environmental cost of the use of that oil, whether as fuel or otherwise. Environmental costs are necessarily determined outside the market. We are still pricing oil as if they did not exist — as if the twenty metric tons of carbon dioxide that the average American produces every year were not a problem. 

There is no reason to expect us to be any better at setting environmental prices than we are. Until three or four hundred years ago, the long-term consequences of human activity were limited to the supply of fertile soil. We could, as the Mayas did, run out of the resources needed to support civilization, but exhausting the environment was a temporary thing. It is only with the large-scale industrial and engineering projects of the Nineteenth Century that we began to test the limits of the natural world’s recuperative powers, and we were understandably slow to assess our impact. Blake’s dark Satanic mills were objectionable for their human costs; nobody seems to have thought what caused those famous London fogs until the town ceased to belch tons of coal soot into the air every day. Anyone who foresaw what the proliferation of vehicular traffic would do to air quality in Los Angeles or Denver would have been dismissed as a crank. 

As Porter shows us, Sir Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, has been dealt a more polite version of crank-dismissal by William Nordhaus, a Yale professor who does not doubt that we’ve got to do something to reverse course on climate change, but who questions the importance of preventing damages set to accrue after the year 2800. These are early days indeed for the economics of stewardship. 

The recommendations to combat climate change in the Stern Review stand uncomfortably alongside this principle of social justice. If income per person were to grow by 1 percent a year over the next two centuries, less than half the pace of growth of the last century, peeople in the year 2200 would be 6.3 times as rich as they are today. Why should the poorer people of the present scrimp and save in order to protect the environment for their richer descendants, who could afford more environmental investments than we can?

It’s the asking of questions like this that highlights the importance of The Price of Everything. The important thing to do right now is not to stop carbon emissions — important as that certainly is. Before embarking on any ambitious schemes to curtail this environmental damage or to encourage that environmental boon, we need to match our anxieties about the future with an awareness of the past, the history of which has only begun to be written. How did we get here? What were we thinking? In “The Price of Work,” Porter analyzes the worker-friendly policies of bygone giants such as AT & T and Eastman Kodak. Today’s corporations, he writes, 

can no longer afford the generosity of the corporate leviathans of the early twenieth century, which relied on a unique feature of American capitalism of the time: monopoly profits. As a dominant company in a new industry with high barriers to entry, Eastman Kodak haad a near monopoly over photographic film. Ford also enjoyed fat profits unheard of in the cutthroat competitive environment of today. 

Monopolies can be good, in other words, for workers. That they may not be optimal for consumers is a consideration that has to be balanced on the recognition that consumers are workers, too. In what circumstances might monopolies serve consumers as well as they do workers and (of course) investors? It may be time for a fresh inquiry. (It’s my view that the facilities for delivering power and water to consumers ought to be municipal monopolies maintained at public expense, and geared to local demands. What’s also needed, if this is to happen, is an improved model of political accountability, one that deftly blends the virtues of transparency with the operational baffles that protect administrators from the whims and caprices of popular enthusiasm.) Everything that a person of my age was taught in school is probably wrong forty-odd years on. Just like every other aspect of human affairs, economic conditions change over time. Searching the marketplace for scientific principles with the eternal applicability of Newtonian physics is misguided, simplistic, and childish.   

Readers who aren’t much interested in the dismal science will find an incredibly interesting extension of the very idea of pricing in “The Price of Faith.” In Porter’s hands, religion looks a lot like a luxury brand that becomes more appealing as it becomes more expensive, not less. Why should that be? Because “more expensive” means “more exclusive,” naturally enough. A religion that imposes personal sacrifice and ritual burden on its members is more likely to hold onto them — as the Catholic Church found out after Vatican II, a loosening — price reduction — that went too far for some communicants but not far enough for others. The history of the Roman church also shows that it is never a good idea to substitute money prices for those sacrifices and burdens — a very undogmatic development that triggered the heart of the Protestant disaffection. 

The Price of Everything is an intelligent book that, for all its surprising nuggets of information, avoids the contrarian and the counterintuitive. But it is  enormously provocative, because it encourages the reader to approach the prices in every aspect of life, and to recognize that money only one way of making payment. The most common alternative to money is time, and the more you have of the one, the more willing you’ll be to spend it for the other.  

What do Wal-Mart, Duke University, and the Environmental Protection Agency have in common? They’re three among the thirty founders of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, a research institute that will investigate the conditions in which clothing is produced — a complicated business, to be sure (where was that zipper fabricated?). Reporter Tom Zeller cannot entirely conceal the too-good-to-be-true press-releaser quality of this news, but at least it will make an interesting failure, if fail it does.

The coalition’s tool is meant to be a database of scores assigned to all the players in the life cycle of a garment — cotton growers, synthetic fabric makers, dye suppliers, textile mill owners, as well as packagers, shippers, retailers and consumers — based on a variety of social and environmental measures like water and land use, energy efficiency, waste production, chemical use, greenhouse gases and labor practices.

A clothing company designer could then use the tool to select materials and suppliers, computing an overall sustainability score based on industry standards. If the score exceeds the company’s own sustainability goals — or if competitive pressures arising from a consumer label are compelling the company to bring scores down — designers could revise their choices with the tool.

Such a tool is a work in progress. It draws heavily from two earlier efforts — an environmental design tool developed by Nike, and an “Eco Index” begun by the Outdoor Industry Association last year. But these afford only a partial or approximate look at the potential effects of discrete industry segments.

Julie Bosman follows Paris Review editor and Grub Street sex symbol Lorin Stein on a literary debauch.

Money is a running concern. His own salary, around $150,000, is generous by literary-world standards. The magazine’s occasional fund-raisers, subscriber dollars, newsstand sales and private donations provide enough money to cover costs, and an endowment has been untouched since 2006. But Mr. Stein is under pressure not only to raise the magazine’s profile, but to lure more paying customers, relentlessly promote it and its writers, and dream up new ways of getting attention.

Sometimes, that means asking for favors from famous writer friends. At the Harper’s party, he spotted Ms. Smith, looking tall and elegant with her hair swept back.

Mr. Stein pounced. “You and Nick,” he said, referring to her husband, the writer Nick Laird. “I want you to be my guests at the magazine gala.”

She looked skeptical. “So you want my money?”

“No, we want to pimp the two of you,” he said. “You’ll have so much fun. We’ll pay for the baby sitter.”

Of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture Oscars, I’d seen nine — all but Toy Story 3  (which I’m sure that I’ll enjoy on DVD at some point) — in the course of last year’s moviegoing. I’d like all of them — not equally, certainly; but without having any standout favorites. The Social Network turned out to be one of those movies that packs its greatest wallop the first time you see it. The King’s Speech bemused me — or, rather, its popularity did. It’s a perfectly nice movie, with a stringingly honed performance by Helena Bonham Carter; otherwise, it’s pretty much all uplift, and a mousy-looking uplift at that. (I have never seen so much brown; even the green trees in the park scene seemed brown.) The Fighter surprised me, given the almost complete lack of sympathy that I have for its milieux (and my disapproval of attempts at glorifying same): not only was I wholly engaged by the drama of the piece, but the boxing was actually interesting to watch!

I could go on. I’m happy enough that Colin Firth won Best Actor, because he deserved it for A Single Man. But my passions ran low at this year’s Oscar awards because two movies that I liked very much were out of the running. True, Jeremy Renner was nominated for his supporting role in The Town, and you can’t expect Hollywood to reverse course on Ben Affleck on the strength of one movie. But the other movie I more than liked. To my mind, it was easily the best picture of the year: Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer.

If there was a more thrilling movie in 2011, I didn’t see it and I never heard of it, either. The Ghost Writer shows Polanski at his most disciplined; if anything, the first viewing is likely to be underwhelming, at least until the final ten minutes or so. It’s when you know what’s going to happen that movies like this open up and swallow you. The first time, you don’t know what’s going on any more than does the poor hero, played with an almost businesslike understatement by the typically flamboyant Ewan McGregor. The second time. you know a little more: you know how the movie ends. It’s only with the third viewing that you begin to see how it’s done — especially by the witchily engrossing ladies in the cast, Olivia Williams and Kim Cattrall. When The Ghost Writer came out on DVD, I slipped it into my kitchen apparatus and watched it, stopping and starting, about twenty times. I stopped only when prudence warned that one more viewing might make me stick and unable to watch it again.

One guess as to why The Ghost Writer received no nominations.

***

Just Go With It will not be nominated for an Oscar, although it may be mentioned in some late-in-life accolade of Nicole Kidman’s career. Did you know that Nicole Kidman is in Just Go With It? I didn’t. At first, when the comely redhead waved across the beach to Jennifer Aniston, I thought that Christina Hendricks had landed a nice little part in an Adam Sandler vehicle. But as the figure approached, she grew taller and slimmer — and taller. What were the odds, I wondered, of finding a Nicole-Kidman look-a-like who’s as tall as Nicole Kidman? I couldn’t let the question go, because what was Nicole Kidman doing in this movie? Having fun, you could say. Playing a brittle and competitive sorority sister, Kidman makes Aniston look as soft and cuddly as Audrey Hepburn.

Which is all the more interesting because it’s the other Hepburn that Aniston calls to mind. Despite a relenteless blizzard of sophomoric crudities, Just Go With It is a genuine screwball comedy with a romantic drift that’s not unlike that of Bringing Up Baby. The guy’s in a jam; the gal tries to help him out but only makes things worse. One is not altogether startled when it turns out that the gal wants the guy for herself. All right; I exaggerate. There is nothing ditzy about Jennifer Aniston’s Katherine. She may be a little bit exhausted, what with raising two high-concept children on her own while serving as nurse/office assistant to Danny, a  Beverly Hills plastic surgeon (Adam Sandler). But she makes up for the missing looniness with her trademark ability to make herself over, going from Plain Jane to Impossible Dream, with movie-star ease.

In a way that’s the-same-as-but-opposite-to Irene Dunne’s role in The Awful Truth, Katherine transforms herself from a pleasant woman to a terrifying bacchante, but in Just Go With It the metamorphosis comes much earlier. For reasons too ridiculous to go into here, Danny needs Katherine to impersonate the wife whom he is in the process of divorcing — a person who does not in reality exist. Once Katherine has socked Danny for the price of plausible threads from Rodeo Drive boutiques, she shows up for drinks with Danny and the girl whom he wants to marry (and who wants to be sure that he’s getting unmarried) bathed in the aura of killer glamour that she brought to her bad-girl role in Derailed. And that’s just what she looks like. The minute she sits down, she aims a fusillade of belittlements at Danny that would be unpleasant if it didn’t underline the already established fact that Katherine and Danny (who loses no time giving tit for tat) like being together. 

It quickly becomes obvious that Katherine is a lot more interesting to Danny than his girlfriend Palmer (Brooklyn Decker) is. Just Go With It probably wouldn’t have anywhere to go, in fact, if it were blandly formulaic instead of racketingly miscellaneous. From among the abundant choices, I will point to Nick Swarsdon’s encounter with the sheep — does administering the Heimlich Maneuver to animals constitute bestiality? — as a scene that does not really belong in this movie,  or that wouldn’t belong if there weren’t so many others like it. And we must hope that young Bailee Madison will live down her flourishing cockney accent. In any case, these distractions are there to be enjoyed on a kind of dare. Don’t stay away for fear of them.

 

 

Scott Shane takes a look at the role of Al Qaeda in the downfall of the Middle East’s autocracies — which, so far, has been “absolutely no role.” Have these upsets consigned militant jihadism to the dustbin, or have they on the contrary worked up some new opportunities for terrorists?

Abu Khaled, a Jordanian jihadist who fought in Iraq with the insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, suggested that Al Qaeda would benefit in the long run from dashed hopes.

“At the end of the day, how much change will there really be in Egypt and other countries?” he asked. “There will be many disappointed demonstrators, and that’s when they will realize what the only alternative is. We are certain that this will all play into our hands.”

Michael Scheuer, author of a new biography of Mr. bin Laden and head of the C.I.A.’s bin Laden unit in the late 1990s, thinks such enthusiasm is more than wishful thinking.
Mr. Scheuer says he believes that Americans, including many experts, have wildly misjudged the uprisings by focusing on the secular, English-speaking, Westernized protesters who are a natural draw for television. Thousands of Islamists have been released from prisons in Egypt alone, and the ouster of Al Qaeda’s enemy, Mr. Mubarak, will help revitalize every stripe of Islamism, including that of Al Qaeda and its allies, he said.

All we can ask is that younger American voices will have a greater role in shaping this country’s responses to events on the fly. At bottom, what’s happening more or less violently in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere is bound to happen somehow or other all over the world, as the surging demographic of young people challenges the status quo not in the spirit of boredom and caprice that bedeviled the late 1960s but rather in the earnest pursuit of meaningful careers. Today’s kids want to grow up.