In an often-overlooked 1992 novel with perhaps the most intentionally dull title in literary history — “Memories of the Ford Administration” — John Updike has fun with an issue that long deviled his career. He introduces a secondary character named Brent Mueller, a “rapid-speaking fellow with the clammy white skin of the library bound” who had “deconstructed Chaucer right down to the ground.” Mueller serves as antagonist to the novel’s narrator — both are history professors at a New Hampshire college — and becomes a campus cult figure by deeming every masterpiece “a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage.” Updike’s protagonist, in return, cuckolds the deconstructionist throughout the novel. This caricature was the author’s way of playfully pushing back at his critics and detractors. Updike’s death last week was met with the usual fulsome praise and sighs of sadness. But the writer, who was regarded as a gracious, decent man, was not unanimously loved or respected in the literary world. Over the years, he had become a symbol of the out-of-touch, tweed-wearing realist to younger, more experimental writers.

more from the LA Times here.

It’s not merely that Jacob finds women’s feet attractive. It’s that, for him, “the feet were the breasts, the legs, the buttocks, the genitals.” Simply hearing the words “size 8” or “size 9” can get him excited. Like a man partial to a particular breast size, Jacob also has his ideal foot shape: a high arch, a wide instep and a staircaselike progression of toes. Once when he was stalled in traffic, the woman in the car next to him had her feet up on the dash — his version of a naked swimsuit model — and he climaxed seconds later. Distraught, Jacob ends up in the office of a nationally renowned expert on sexual disorders — a psychiatrist known for his empathy, even with patients like a necrophiliac who worked at a funeral parlor, a gynecologist voyeur and reviled characters like Jeffrey Dahmer and Michael Ross. Of Ross, who confessed to raping and killing eight girls and young women, the doctor explains, as Bergner puts it, that Ross was “a man who had, in effect, restrained himself except for those eight . . . acts of primal gratification — such a tiny fraction of the number that most adults seek and find.” Jacob can relate. “No matter where you go,” he tells Bergner, “there are people, and people have feet. Unless I lived in a center for amputees. That would be peace.”

more from the NY Times here.

From britishschoolriyadh:

Very few, if any, African-Americans accepted their status as slaves. Most, if not all, slave-owners were completely aware of this and, in general, they lived in fear of the African-Americans under the control. They were constantly afraid of the slaves running away, rebelling etc. Yes, there were rebellions. Here are 2 main ones:

Gabriel Posser: he was a deep Christian and definitely against slavery. He lay many plans to abolish slavery, however, he was defeated. However, this rebellion laid out the fear over the slave-owners… He was definitely an example, which inspired other people to rebel like he did.

Denmark Vesey: he was an African-American and came from the ‘upper class of slaves’, who worked as engineers, craftsmen etc. Still, he was FILLED with anger about the way people treated the black slaves. In 1821 he began to build up his own revolt. He organized a group of working lieutenants (Gullah Jack, Peter Poyas). By 1822, almost all the slaves around joined. Their plan was very simple. The rebels would all station themselves at the doors of European-Americans and, late at night, a group of rebels would start a major fire. When the men came out their doors, the rebels would kill them with axes, picks, or guns. They would then enter the houses and kill all the occupants. Like Prosser's revolt, they almost won. They were betrayed early in the game, but the cell structure prevented officials from finding out the plot itself or identifying any of the leaders. It was only the day before that a slave, who knew the entire plot, betrayed Vesey. He and his co-leaders were hung, but only one confessed.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson writing in June 1861 in The Atlantic:

Denmark Vesey had come very near figuring as a revolutionist in Hayti, instead of South Carolina. Captain Vesey, an old resident of Charleston, commanded a ship that traded between St. Thomas and Cape Français, during our Revolutionary War, in the slave-transportation line. In the year 1781 he took on board a cargo of three hundred and ninety slaves, and sailed for the Cape. On the passage, he and his officers were much attracted by the beauty and intelligence of a boy of fourteen, whom they unanimously adopted into the cabin as a pet. They gave him new clothes and a new name, Télémaque, which was afterwards gradually corrupted into Telmak and Denmark. They amused themselves with him until their arrival at Cape Français, and then, “having no use for the boy,” sold their pet as if he had been a macaw or a monkey. Captain Vesey sailed for St. Thomas, and presently making another trip to Cape Français, was surprised to hear from his consignee that Télémaque would be returned on his hands as being “unsound,” — not in theology nor in morals, but in body, — subject to epileptic fits, in fact. According to the custom of that place, the boy was examined by the city physician, who required Captain Vesey to take him back; and Denmark served him faithfully, with no trouble from epilepsy, for twenty years, travelling all over the world with him, and learning to speak various languages. In 1800, he drew a prize of fifteen hundred dollars in the East Bay Street Lottery, with which he bought his freedom from his master for six hundred dollars, — much less than his market value. From that time, the official report says, he worked as a carpenter in Charleston, distinguished for physical strength and energy.”Among those of his color he was looked up to with awe and respect.

More here.

Martin Woollacott in The Guardian:

The great virtue of Tyler's book is that it is so relentlessly personal. It may be criticised by some for the limited attention it pays to underlying causes, such as America's determination to secure oil resources and the constraints of the cold war, or to cultural factors, such as the west's early infatuation with Israel's military successes, and, more recently, the Christian right's beliefs about the end of the world. But Tyler is a reporter, not an academic. He is interested in moments – moments when confused and angry leaders and their counsellors swear at one another, weep, get drunk, or tell outrageous lies.

Moments such as the one where William Sullivan, the American ambassador to Iran, irritated by Zbigniew Brzezinski's pursuit of the chimera of a last-minute military coup to save the shah's regime, told him there was not the faintest chance of such a thing, adding cuttingly: “Do you want me to translate it into Polish?” Moments such as the one where Bill Clinton, still just president, rang Colin Powell, the incoming secretary of state in George W Bush's new administration, to tell him that Yasser Arafat was “a goddamned liar” who had destroyed the chances of peace. The blame for the failure at Camp David, as Tyler writes, belonged to Ehud Barak and Clinton rather than to Arafat but, cheated of the achievement that might have balanced the Lewinsky scandal, a self-righteous and self-deceiving Clinton was intent on “poisoning the well”.

Or moments such as the one where Henry Kissinger, entrusted with a message from Nixon to Brezhnev calling for joint superpower action to end the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then proceed to a just settlement of the Palestinian question, simply decided, in mid-flight to Moscow, not to deliver it. Nixon's message, Tyler writes, “threatened to undermine the record Kissinger was seeking to create; that he and Nixon had run the Soviets into the ground and they had protected Israel”. The truth was that the Russian leaders had reacted cautiously and moderately when war broke out, and that Nixon himself had a statesmanlike grasp of what was necessary. But a joint US-Russian initiative “would have thrust Kissinger into the thankless and perilous task of applying pressure on Israel”. So he simply dumped the message. He later encouraged Israel to violate the ceasefire that was supposed to end hostilities so that it could better its military position. With these acts of disobedience – acts which were also, as Tyler says, arguably unconstitutional – Kissinger closed off the possibility that the 1973 war could have been ended on terms which would have left Israel in a less powerful position, making it more amenable to an ensuing push for a settlement by the Americans and the Russians.

More here.

Graeme Wood in The Atlantic:

Mullah Masood Akhundzada, guardian of the Shrine of the Blessed Cloak of the Prophet Muhammad, in Kandahar, is wary of guests. When his brother was the guardian, 13 years ago, he accepted an insistent visitor. Today, a youngster with a Kalashnikov shadows Mullah Masood around the shrine, just in case the visitor, Mullah Omar, or any of his friends return.

The mosque itself is a modest cube with filthy blue-and-gilt mosaics. But in a poor city, it is an outpost of opulence and safety. When Masood and I relax in the courtyard, sipping imported packets of Iranian cherry juice, it seems as if we’re at the estate of a country lord. Its most aggressive resident is the goat that mows the lawn. Aside from the bodyguard, there’s little hint of the dangers outside: the area’s main boulevard is Khuni Serok, or “Bloody Road”; on the way to the shrine, I passed the blackened divot left by a suicide bombing.

More here.

Atul Gawande in The New Yorker:

In every industrialized nation, the movement to reform health care has begun with stories about cruelty. The Canadians had stories like the 1946 Toronto Globe and Mail report of a woman in labor who was refused help by three successive physicians, apparently because of her inability to pay. In Australia, a 1954 letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald sought help for a young woman who had lung disease. She couldn’t afford to refill her oxygen tank, and had been forced to ration her intake “to a point where she is on the borderline of death.” In Britain, George Bernard Shaw was at a London hospital visiting an eminent physician when an assistant came in to report that a sick man had arrived requesting treatment. “Is he worth it?” the physician asked. It was the normality of the question that shocked Shaw and prompted his scathing and influential 1906 play, “The Doctor’s Dilemma.” The British health system, he charged, was “a conspiracy to exploit popular credulity and human suffering.”

More here.

A letter to Barack Obama from an Israeli woman:

Sean Carroll in Cosmic Variance:

If you’re like me, all too often while relaxing and watching a good procedural drama on TV you find yourself wondering, “How did they solve that differential equation so quickly?” That’s why we need more hit prime-time TV shows with web pages that explain the mathematical content underpinning each episode.

As far as I know, the only show that rises to this challenge is NUMB3RS, the CBS drama featuring Charlie Epps, a math professor at a suspiciously Caltech-esque university who teams up with his FBI-agent brother to solve crimes. The shows creators, Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, had a goal from the beginning of creating an entertaining hour of television that would involve science in an intimate way. (I suppose math is almost as good.) As part of the effort, they’ve partnered with Wolfram Research to follow each episode with a web page delving into the various mathematical concepts that were discussed, including Mathematica notebooks to illustrate the various ideas:

The Math Behind NUMB3RS

Episode 11 this year was entitled “The Arrow of Time.” Here’s the opening:

You can see the full episode here; the math page is here. This stuff would make a great topic for a book.

From Nature:

Researchers in Sweden have revealed a surprising change in brain biochemistry that occurs during the training of working memory, a buffer that stores information for the few second required to solve problems or even to understand what we are reading. The discovery may have implications for understanding disorders in which working memory is deficient — such as schizophrenia and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Working memory depends on the transmission of signals in certain parts of the brain by the chemical dopamine and one of its receptors, the D1 receptor, particularly in the parietal and frontal regions of the cortex. The efficiency of working memory drops off as people age. But the 'use-it-or-lose-it' adage holds true — working memory can be improved through training. Torkel Klingberg, a neurologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, and his colleagues studied what happened to D1 receptors in the brains of healthy young men during such training.

More here.

For Edward Gibbon, the decline of the Roman Empire was a matter of blame. He did not hesitate to condemn a fatal combination of violent barbarian invasion and the growing popularity of Christianity with its pious preference for monasticism over militarism and its eagerness to welcome the end of the world. For Victorians, the fall of an imperial superstate was, above all, a matter of morality. Here was a lesson for all empire-builders: effete rulers intoxicated by the vain pomp of their glittering court ceremonies would inevitably be overwhelmed by their more vigorous and manly enemies. The Roman Empire had collapsed under the rotten weight of its own degeneracy. Many modern historians – sometimes smugly non-judgemental – have preferred to think instead in terms of the movement of peoples (rather than the invasion of barbarians) and the transformation (rather than the decline and fall) of the Roman Empire. The emergence of medieval Europe is not a matter of fault. No one needs to be held responsible. It is to Chris Wickham’s great credit that he has stepped boldly and decisively away from these old disputes. The groundwork was laid in his magisterial Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean, 400-800 (Oxford University Press, 2005), which surveyed the complex social and economic changes that shaped the period.

more from Literary Review here.

“The martini evolves,” says cocktail historian David Wondrich. “It has evolved since it was born.” Sadly, it has become stunted and mutated in recent decades, and so to celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, perhaps it’s best to go back to the beginning and start the evolution all over again. If the era of American exceptionalism truly is coming to a close, I sincerely hope the postwar-era dry martini goes with it. The Greatest Generation was great for many reasons. But can we finally, at long last, be honest about one crucial thing? That generation’s taste in martinis is awful. Does any cocktail invite more bloviation than the Very Dry Martini? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know how you take your martini, Gramps: no vermouth. I should just whisper the word “vermouth” while I mix it? Never heard that one before!

more from The Washington Post here.

///

Soleá *
Randolyn Zinn

No singing. No dancing.

Let the spores multiply on the dishes. My feet won’t move.

Outside the window celadon leaves tremble against the glass

but they don’t comfort me. It will take stillness to recover

from yesterday’s news. What was I supposed to do…?

Oh yes, limes and plums. There are mouths to feed.

But first le me mark out the counts of your absence,

Palm against palm.

Uno dos quatro cinco siete _ nueve _ un dos…

Hands lay quiet in my lap now, fingers won’t make

a flower, and dreams are no help. I looked for you

all night in tablaos, found a shawl you might have worn once

strewn across the floor of an empty house in Càdiz.

I was strangely happy in the search.

“Por ti

las horitas de la noche

me las paso sin dormir…”

I haven’t forgotten the tangos, the siguiriyas,

the sequence of arms, right crossing left,

snapping pitos keeping time, awake all night.

The fleetest hours were yours.

I want to hear my shoes—black, with nails hammered

into wooden heels–pounding out zapateados as crisp

as machine gun fire. And my skirt—the tiny house I lived in,

my silk casita, dyed the color of blood to attract the bull,

swirling open from the cries of Gypsies.

¡Ay, ay! ¡Ole¡ ¡Asi se canta! ¡Asi se baila! ¡Ole.!

I could walk down the hill and buy a bottle of Rioja

to drink tonight at sunset, but my feet won’t move.

When I close my eyes, your face quivers on my lids,

in time with the echo of your song.

(* in flamenco, a song or dance of pathos, usually performed as a solo )

///

Pakistan is struggling to keep from drowning under an ever-growing wave of violent terrorism at the hands of Islamic extremists (some the creation of their own government). Just yesterday more than 30 people were killed in a sectarian bombing in the central Punjab. Not that this will be enough, but people are starting to speak out against these evil and ignorant murderers. Let us join them. Go here to sign the petition against terrorism. Waseem Mahmoud at yehhumnaheen.org:

I am amazed that what started as a simple song has gone on to become an unprecedented anti-terrorism movement.

The inspiration for the song came from my children who were tired at the way a minority of misguided young people were vehemently putting forward a message of radicalization and terrorism that was at odds with what the majority of Muslims believe. It was time to re-address the imbalance, and from the smallest child to the oldest person, Yeh Hum Naheen sought to give a voice to the voiceless.

I was truly humbled by the number of people who have wanted to be involved in the project. From world icons such as Muhammad Ali to the nameless masses, the fact that so many people feel the same way has led to the setting up of the Yeh Hum Naheen Foundation, which seeks to bring this message of tolerance, communication, and harmony to a wider audience…

It is all too easy to hold faceless agencies or foreign hands responsible for the rise in terrorism in Pakistan, but for me simply finding someone else to blame is not the way to resolve this problem. The fact remains that the perpetrators of these heinous acts are from amongst us. It has become not only the civil but also the religious responsibility of each individual to ensure that nobody from our family, our friends, our neighborhoods, our schools or our colleges gets sucked into committing these acts.

The foundation is totally unconnected to any political party nor will it accept donations from any government. The power to stop these atrocities lies with us, the people not at the door of politicians or government. It is up to us to root these people out and let them know in the strongest possible way that what they do, they do not do in our name.

More here. Waseem Mahmoud's organization has so far collected more than 62 million signatures for their petition against terrorism. This is greater than the number of people who voted in the last election in Pakistan. The previous world record for most signatures on a petition was 24 million. And finally, here's the moving song:

From pbs.org:

Dred Scott first went to trial to sue for his freedom in 1847. Ten years later, after a decade of appeals and court reversals, his case was finally brought before the United States Supreme Court. In what is perhaps the most infamous case in its history, the court decided that all people of African ancestry — slaves as well as those who were free — could never become citizens of the United States and therefore could not sue in federal court. The court also ruled that the federal government did not have the power to prohibit slavery in its territories. Scott, needless to say, remained a slave.

Born around 1800, Scott migrated westward with his master, Peter Blow. They travelled from Scott's home state of Virginia to Alabama and then, in 1830, to St. Louis, Missouri. Two years later Peter Blow died; Scott was subsequently bought by army surgeon Dr. John Emerson, who later took Scott to the free state of Illinois. In the spring of 1836, after a stay of two and a half years, Emerson moved to a fort in the Wisconsin Territory, taking Scott along. While there, Scott met and married Harriet Robinson, a slave owned by a local justice of the peace. Ownership of Harriet was transferred to Emerson.

Scott's extended stay in Illinois, a free state, gave him the legal standing to make a claim for freedom, as did his extended stay in Wisconsin, where slavery was also prohibited. But Scott never made the claim while living in the free lands — perhaps because he was unaware of his rights at the time, or perhaps because he was content with his master. After two years, the army transferred Emerson to the south: first to St Louis, then to Louisiana. A little over a year later, a recently-married Emerson summoned his slave couple. Instead of staying in the free territory of Wisconsin, or going to the free state of Illinois, the two travelled over a thousand miles, apparently unaccompanied, down the Mississippi River to meet their master. Only after Emerson's death in 1843, after Emerson's widow hired Scott out to an army captain, did Scott seek freedom for himself and his wife. First he offered to buy his freedom from Mrs. Emerson — then living in St. Louis — for $300. The offer was refused. Scott then sought freedom through the courts.

Scott went to trial in June of 1847, but lost on a technicality — he couldn't prove that he and Harriet were owned by Emerson's widow. The following year the Missouri Supreme Court decided that case should be retried. In an 1850 retrial, the the St Louis circuit court ruled that Scott and his family were free. Two years later the Missouri Supreme Court stepped in again, reversing the decision of the lower court. Scott and his lawyers then brought his case to a federal court, the United States Circuit Court in Missouri. In 1854, the Circuit Court upheld the decision of the Missouri Supreme Court. There was now only one other place to go. Scott appealed his case to the United States Supreme Court.

The nine justices of the Supreme Court of 1856 certainly had biases regarding slavery. Seven had been appointed by pro-slavery presidents from the South, and of these, five were from slave-holding families. Still, if the case had gone directly from the state supreme court to the federal supreme court, the federal court probably would have upheld the state's ruling, citing a previously established decision that gave states the authority to determine the status of its inhabitants. But, in his attempt to bring his case to the federal courts, Scott had claimed that he and the case's defendant (Mrs. Emerson's brother, John Sanford, who lived in New York) were citizens from different states. The main issues for the Supreme Court, therefore, were whether it had jurisdiction to try the case and whether Scott was indeed a citizen.

The decision of the court was read in March of 1857. Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — a staunch supporter of slavery — wrote the “majority opinion” for the court. It stated that because Scott was black, he was not a citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The decision also declared the Missouri Compromise of 1820, legislation which restricted slavery in certain territories, unconstitutional.

More here.

Coco Ballantyne in Scientific American:

Worms have been living inside the human body since Homo sapiens have been around. About half the world's population (over 3 billion people) are in infected with at least one of the three worms forming what Columbia University parasitologist Dickson Despommier calls the “unholy trinity”—large roundworm, hookworm and whipworm. Most of those afflicted live in developing countries, where there is not enough clean drinking water or effective sanitation systems to keep infected feces from contaminating food and water, and where human excrement is used to fertilize crops. The most prolific parasitic worm in the U.S. and European Union: the pinworm, which is most common during childhood.

Despommier kindly lent ScientificAmerican.com images of the unholy trinity and their worm relatives, which also appear in his book Parasitic Diseases. As you browse through these slides, please remember that all of these infections are treatable.

More here.

Ayesha Nasir in the Christian Science Monitor:

Fazal Rehman's childhood dream was to be a police officer. But after a dozen years on the force in Pakistan's Swat Valley, he has finally turned in his badge.

During his training, Swat, which is located in the North West Frontier Province, about a five-hour-drive from Islamabad, was an idyllic place. Known as the “Switzerland of Pakistan,” it was renowned for lush valleys, ragged mountainsides, and snowcapped peaks.

But in the past two years, Swat has been caught up in the throes of a violent insurgency that has repelled tourists and is forcing locals to manage their lives around curfews and bans – and prompting many to leave the area.

The latest violence struck Wednesday, when militants attacked and destroyed a police station, capturing – and later releasing – some 30 paramilitary soldiers and policemen. A Taliban spokesman said the Taliban had gotten promises from the men that they would quit their jobs.

More here.

Sandy Tolan in the Christian Science Monitor:

On the surface, the most daunting task facing US envoy George Mitchell in his trip to Israel and the Palestinian territories is strengthening the Gaza cease-fire, and helping Gazans rise from the rubble.

But actually, the super diplomat's biggest challenge, as he wraps up his first trip and lays plans for future journeys, lies in coming to terms with a grim and unavoidable fact: The two-state solution is on its deathbed.

Since the Six-Day War of June 1967, the two-state solution, based on the concept of “land for peace,” has been the central focus of almost all diplomatic efforts to resolve this tragedy. But because of Israel's unrelenting occupation and settlement project in the West Bank, the long-fought-for two-state solution has finally, tragically, become unworkable. Consider:

• In 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat famously shook hands on the White House lawn, there were 109,000 Israelis living in settlements across the West Bank (not including Jerusalem). Today there are 275,000, in more than 230 settlements and strategically placed “outposts” designed to cement a permanent Jewish presence on Palestinian land.

• The biggest Israeli settlement outside East Jerusalem, Ariel, is now home to nearly 20,000 settlers. Their home lies one third of the way inside the West Bank, yet the Israeli “security barrier” veers well inside the occupied territory to wrap Ariel in its embrace. The settlement's leaders proclaim confidently that they are “here to stay,” and embark on frequent missions to seek new waves of American Jews to move to the settlement.

More here. [Thanks to Kris Kotarski.]

In the LRB, Jerry Fodor reviews Andy Clark's Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action and Cognitive Extension:

The best way through Clark’s book is to start by reading the foreword by David Chalmers and the paper by Clark and Chalmers that is reprinted as an appendix. These are short, informal presentations of the so-called ‘Extended Mind Thesis’ (EMT), of which the rest of the book is an elaboration and discussion. Here, then, is a passage from the foreword: ‘A month ago,’ Chalmers tells us,

I bought an iPhone. The iPhone has already taken over some of the central functions of my brain . . . The iPhone is part of my mind already . . . [Clark’s] marvellous book . . . defends the thesis that, in at least some of these cases the world is not serving as a mere instrument for the mind. Rather, the relevant parts of the world have become parts of my mind. My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me . . . When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.

Similarly, later on in the book, we’re invited to consider the cases of Otto and Inga, both of whom want to go to the museum. Inga remembers where it is and goes there; Otto has a notebook in which he has recorded the museum’s address. He consults the notebook, finds the address, and then goes on his way. The suggestion is that there is no principled difference between the two cases: Otto’s notebook is (or may come with practice to serve as) an ‘external memory’, literally a ‘part of his mind’ that resides outside his body. Correspondingly, Otto’s consulting his notebook and Inga’s consulting her memory are, at least from the viewpoint of an enlightened cognitive scientist, both cognitive processes:

Such considerations of parity, once we put our bioprejudices aside, reveal the outward loop as a functional part of an extended cognitive machine. Such body-and-world involving cycles are best understood . . . as quite literally extending the machinery of mind out into the world – as building extended cognitive circuits that are themselves the minimal material bases for important aspects of human thought . . . Such cycles supersize the mind.

James Galbraith in Mother Jones:

So, what should he ask for? How big and far reaching should changes to the economy be? Nearly everyone in Obama's circle agrees that more public spending and tax cuts are needed: a “stimulus package.” The cautious say $150 billion (about 1 percent of gdp), while the bold and the worried say $500 billion (or just more than 3 percent of gdp). Both focus attention on what is needed in 2009—as if the economic problem can be solved in a year.

That is almost certainly wrong.

When the free fall began, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke argued that the problem with the economy was frozen credit. Banks were unable to lend, they said, because they could not get the funds. This was not true, as we discovered when Treasury gave the banks the funds, only to realize that banks had no wish to lend them out. Instead they used the money to build capital and on dividends and executive pay. (Goldman Sachs, which received $10 billion as part of the bailout, got good press when it announced its top seven execs would forgo their year-end bonuses. But a government ban on bonuses was likely coming, and by limiting the sacrifice to top managers, the company retains leeway to spend the estimated $6.9 billion set aside for bonuses on slightly lesser employees.)

Also listen to Galbraith on the stimulus over at NPR, here.