What's new

Though seemingly designed to appeal to liberals — the governor's anti-Wall Street platform is emphasized, as is the lesbianism of Paul's Korean-American assistant, Kerstin (Jamie Chung) — Knife Fight avoids partisan stumping. The story (by Guttentag and political consultant Chris Lehane) is too busy lathering itself up over moral choices that someone like Paul would have made peace with long ago.

And when a saintly doctor (Carrie-Anne Moss) decides that toiling selflessly in a poor-folks clinic is excellent training for a gubernatorial bid, and Paul harshly attempts to dissuade her, the film's tonal schism widens to Grand Canyon proportions.

This is a shame, because when Guttentag and Lehane get things right, the results are pleasurably sharp. A series of fake campaign ads peppered throughout are perfectly tuned just a hair over the top, and scenes with West Wing veteran Richard Schiff, playing a grizzled private investigator, are impossible to fault. But not even Schiff can rescue a film so intent on laying claim to both sides of the moral divide.

Are we supposed to be pleased that Kerstin is so moved by the doctor's determination to serve that she willingly risks innocent lives to garner media attention for her candidate? And how do we respond to a screenplay that includes both a high-mindedly complex political wife and a crudely lingering shot of Kerstin's pencil-skirted behind?

Soulless and two-dimensional, Knife Fight is a black hole of disillusion and spin. Unable to decide if Paul deserves our contempt or admiration, the writers turn him into a smooth-talking cipher whose successes are presented as both laudable and deplorable. He's a shark who freezes midbite to ask, "What would Machiavelli do?" even as Kant is tugging at his perfectly tailored sleeve.

When presented with a tempting buffet of French food, not overeating can be a challenge. But a new study by researchers in Lyon suggests there are strategies that will help people resist temptation.

People trying to keep off excess weight are frequently told that it's better to eat small amounts of food frequently during the day, rather than the typical breakfast, lunch and dinner. The idea is that more frequent eating will stave off hunger pangs that may lead to overeating.

The problem with this advice, according to Xavier Allirot, a research scientist at the Institut Paul Bocuse, just outside Lyon, is that there's not much evidence supporting it. "There is no scientific consensus as to the optimum number of meals we should have for weight management and speculations regarding this are often contradictory," he and his colleagues explain in the online edition of the journal Physiology & Behavior.

So Allirot and colleagues from several French research labs decided to do a controlled experiment. They invited 20 men to take part. The men were on average 27 years old, and of normal weight. The researchers gave the men a breakfast of 674.8 calories consisting of a slice of white bread, a croissant (remember, this is France), some strawberry jam, a pat of unsalted butter, 4 ounces of orange juice, a spoonful of sugar and black coffee or tea.

On some days they were given the entire 674.8 calories at once, on other days they got a quarter of the calories (168.7, if you've forgotten your long division) once every hour for four hours.

The researchers found that the men who had the four mini-breakfasts were less hungry at lunchtime. This was corroborated by changes in two food-related hormones in the men, ghrelin and GLP-1, that are consistent with decreased appetite.

So, would they still eat less when faced with a free and tempting meal? Yes indeed, the researchers found. The subjects were offered a buffet lunch after their experimental breakfast(s) consisting of grated carrots, pt de campagne, rice, French beans, fried potatoes, sausages, chicken breast, cottage cheese, cheese (Comt), stewed fruit, chocolate cake, white bread and sugar.

The men consumed less of the buffet on the days when they had eaten the multi-mini-breakfasts. So eating small, but often, does seem to help prevent overindulging. At least in France.

Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney in New York who prosecuted terrorists responsible for the bombings of the World Trade Center and U.S. embassies in Africa, will be nominated by President Obama to head the Securities and Exchange Commission.

NPR's Scott Horsley gets that word from a senior White House official. Other news outlets are being told the same thing. The president is expected to make the announcement this afternoon. White would succeed Mary Schapiro, who stepped down last month.

White was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for nine years, until January 2002. That year, she joined the New York-based law firm Debevoise & Plimpton. She has been a director of the Nasdaq Stock Exchange.

Obama is also expected to say he will renominate Richard Cordray to lead the newly created Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last January, Obama used a "recess appointment" to put Cordray in that job while the Senate was on vacation. Republicans had been trying to block Cordray's appointment.

Update at 10:43 a.m. ET:

"The SEC plays an essential role in the implementation of Wall Street reform and rooting out reckless behavior in the financial industry, and White's background in enforcement and record of success make her the perfect choice to lead the agency at this important time," a White House official said.

Bloomberg noted that White's nomination "is a departure for the agency, because it has tended to be run by lawyers steeped in financial policy making and the securities industry."

Her nomination "could signal a move to get tougher on Wall Street," The Wall Street Journal reported. "It also could help quiet criticism that Mr. Obama isn't putting enough women or minorities in key posts in his second term. The SEC chairman, who leads an independent agency, isn't a member of the president's cabinet, but the post is a key link between Washington and the nation's financial markets, hedge funds and banks."

White's husband, John W. White, is an SEC veteran, The New York Times notes. "From 2006 through 2008, he was head of the S.E.C.'s division of corporation finance, which oversees public companies' disclosures and reporting," the Times said.

When compared with its neighbors Coney Island and the Rockaways, Manhattan seemed hardly touched by the waters and winds of Superstorm Sandy in late October. But almost three months later, areas of lower Manhattan are still laboring to recover.

Earlier this month, a museum devastated by Sandy finally reopened. About 800 people packed the lobby and upstairs galleries of the South Street Seaport Museum in lower Manhattan as Mayor Michael Bloomberg addressed the crowd.

"The best days are yet ahead," he said, pulling out various sailing references. "We did not crash on the shoals, and the river finally went down. God bless, let's all get back to work."

From an outsider's perspective, the crowd reflected a vibrant, active neighborhood. But with the exception of the museum, every single store on the block of Fulton Street is closed and boarded up. Even the museum is limping along.

Sandy swept up to 6 feet of water from the East River to the museum lobby, taking out the elevators, escalator, and heating and air conditioning units.

"But the worst of everything is that the basement was completely submerged in water, and that is where all of our electrical equipment comes in and the water pumps," says Jerry Gallagher, the museum's general manager.

The museum, he says, was able to reopen because of temporary heaters powered by kerosene on the back of the building.

Struggling Stores

At night, the hum of generators is a now-familiar sound for passersby on neighboring streets. A few blocks from the museum, the Bowne & Co. print shop is one of the businesses that's open. It's a glorious space, filled with 19th century presses, handprinted stationary, and shelves of wooden and metal type.

Master printer Robert Warner has his foot on the treadle of a press from 1901, printing cards with the simple word "love" for Valentine's Day. "There is nothing quite like the smell of the ink and the sound of a 19th century machine at work," he says.

Superstorm Sandy: Before, During And Beyond

Post-Sandy: Atlantic City Wants Its Tourists Back

Playing Mozart to young children will make them smarter, right?

Probably not. When it comes to media hype and intuitions about intelligence and early childhood, some skepticism is in order. A paper published just this month by John Protzko, Joshua Aronson and Clancy Blair at NYU reviews dozens of studies on a topic likely to be of interest to parents, educators, and policy-makers alike: what, if anything, one can do in the first five years of life to raise a child's intelligence.

The authors combed the research literature to identify studies of children's intelligence that met their strict criteria for inclusion. Among other things, the study had to be a randomized controlled trial (RCT), typically considered the gold standard for making causal claims about the efficacy of medical or educational interventions (but see Stuart Kauffman's discussion here). They also focused specifically on IQ and associated tests of intelligence, so more general conceptions of intelligence weren't considered, let alone emotional or social intelligence. This search yielded over 70 studies that the authors subsequently analyzed to better understand what does — and what doesn't — boost a young child's IQ.

The results are a little surprising. When it comes to nutrition, there's not much evidence that multivitamins do any good, but having pregnant and lactating moms and young kids take Omega-3 fatty acid supplements (particularly DHA) likely does. Just having books in the home might not help, but interactive reading with children under 4 could boost IQ by around 6 points.

As for music, the one study that met the criteria for inclusion didn't find a relationship between systematic exposure to music and IQ. However, other research suggests advantages to early music training when it comes to some cognitive skills, such as spatio-temporal reasoning, and correlational studies with older children do find an association between music lessons and IQ. So the jury is still out, but any music-lover will attest that developing a love of music is its own reward.

What about loving and supportive parents, a stable home? The paper couldn't analyze factors like these because practical and ethical considerations make an RCT virtually impossible to administer. One would have to randomly assign children to parents who are or aren't loving and supportive; to households that are or aren't stable. Parents aren't exactly lining up to hand over their newborns, and no ethical review board would allow children to be raised in a deliberately unsupportive environment.

What we do know is that certain interventions are only effective for children from low-income homes, presumably because they provide some source of environmental support or stimulation that children in wealthier homes are already getting. In particular, attending preschool and early educational interventions that teach parents how to scaffold cognitive and linguistic development can boost the IQ of children from low-income homes by as much as 7 points.

The take-home lessons for parents are relatively modest: consider some Omega-3 supplements and sit down with your toddler and a good book for some interactive reading.

But the implications for voters and policy-makers are profound. Teaching parents to engage in interactive reading and elaborative conversations with their little ones and improving access to high-quality preschool could go a long way towards eliminating economic disparities in intelligence test results in early childhood.

As if the federal budget process isn't confusing enough, now we get the fog of partisan war created by the charges and countercharges flying between congressional Democrats and Republicans.

Republicans accuse the Democrats who control the Senate of shirking their duty by not producing "a budget" in recent years; Democrats accuse Republicans of not telling the whole truth.

What's going on? Here are five points to consider.

1) The Budget Control Act

First, it is true that Senate Democrats haven't produced what's called a budget resolution in four years. But they claim they don't actually need to pass what is in reality a nonbinding budget blueprint — and that to have done so in the past two years in particular would have been redundant.

That's because the Budget Control Act of 2011, enacted to solve that summer's debt-ceiling crisis, explicitly said its spending restrictions would take the place of Senate budget resolutions for fiscal years 2012 and 2013.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., made that point at a Wednesday news conference in which he asked journalists to stop repeating the Republican line:

"Any comments, any conversation, any statements made by the Republicans about our not having a budget is false. It's untrue. We passed the Budget Control Act. We passed it with the help of Republicans. We didn't have to do a budget. You folks listen to that. Stop taking that bait."

A recently-published menu for Abraham Lincoln's lavish second inaugural ball in 1865 provides an interesting look at how different the nation celebrated its new president just seven score and eight years ago.

Smoked tongue en gele and blancmange (a firm custard) shared room on the buffet table with roast turkey and burnt almond ice cream.

As Yale food historian Paul Freedman told Smithsonian Magazine writer Megan Gambino, the cuisine could best be described as "French via England, with some American ingredients."

President Obama's second term officially begins Sunday: He took the oath of office in an intimate ceremony at the White House, fulfilling the constitutional requirement to take the oath before noon on Jan. 20.

NPR's Ari Shaprio reported on the swearing-in for our Newscast unit. Here's what he said:

"Family and a few close friends gathered in the Blue Room of the White House. The president placed his hand on a family Bible and recited the oath with Chief Justice John Roberts.

"The president hugged his wife and daughters and said, 'I did it.' The vice president was sworn in earlier in the day. They will repeat the oaths in public on Monday."

Ask yourself this question: How weird would it be if you changed your hair and it was on the news?

No, seriously. Pull back from everything you know about celebrity and pretend it's about you. You change your hair. You decide, "Hey, you know what? It's been long for a while; what if I went a little shorter?" And so you go a little shorter. And then it is on the news.

That's what happened to Michelle Obama when new photographic evidence emerged that proved — no paperwork needed, no investigative journalism, no shoe-leather reporting — that she has bangs. SHE HAS BANGS! If this were an old black-and-white movie, this would be the part where you'd suddenly see people madly running to telegraph machines and reporters hurrying to the phones to call their editors, and you'd hear "beeeeep-be-deep-deep-beetle-deep-deep" as the news began to spread. SHE HAS BANGS! BANGS BANGS BANGS! The headline "Breaking: Michelle Obama Has Bangs!" really exists. As does the headline "Michelle Obama's Bangs Sparking Hair Revolution." As does, inevitably, a headline beginning "She Bangs." (That's a Ricky Martin reference, youngsters.)

It's not just current first ladies to whom this happens, either. If you don't believe me, Google "Hillary Clinton scrunchies." Or check out the entire Daily Beast slideshow from 2010 called "First Lady Hair."

You know who else's bangs caused a stir recently? Kate Middleton's.

And in fact, as stern as Americans are about not having or believing in royalty, and about presidents not being kings, it's remarkable how much first ladies feel, at least in pop culture, like prominent members of a royal family — particularly modern ones like Middleton or, for that matter, Princess Diana. The role of first lady has become essentially to (1) engage in attention-grabbing advocacy for a chosen cause or causes, (2) try to be an ambassador of likability, (3) get your picture taken a lot while people fuss disproportionately over what you're wearing, and (4) have lots and lots of people hate your guts and complain about your uselessness and/or profligacy while others admire you to the point where they will line up to see you.