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Sherpas have a great reputation as the world's best climbers. "Sherpa" is not some sort of honorific or title; it's the name of an ethnic group — a tiny one. There are around 150,000 of them in Nepal.

While they fight for their lives on treacherous mountain terrain, Sherpas also struggle to keep their community — and its values — alive.

If you are a Sherpa, it's noted right in your name, like Ang Galgen Sherpa, who lives in Queens, N.Y., home to the largest community of Sherpas in the U.S.

Galgen has driven a yellow taxi in New York City for 12 years, but he used to guide people through the Himalayas.

"Every time a customer gets in, they look at my name [they say]... 'Are you a Sherpa? You can't be a Sherpa! Are you really a Sherpa?' " he says. "I say, yeah, I'm really a Sherpa."

The next question is usually about whether or not he has climbed Mount Everest. Galgen has not, but the question makes him feel incredibly proud.

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Ben Pickering can't believe his luck.

"Holy cow," he keeps saying. "Man, that's just incredible. That's just amazing."

Pickering won a drawing for an Ambush rifle, an $1,800 AR-15-style model. Pickering already has a lot of weapons — "I honestly could not count," he says — but he's still excited to be given this new one.

Pickering loves guns, but he's also happy that the National Rifle Association's annual meeting, being held this weekend in Indianapolis, has given him the chance to meet up with family members who live in other states.

The same sort of thing is true for a lot of people. There's plenty of talk about politics and gun laws, with Republican politicians such as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal addressing the crowd on Friday.

But for many among the 70,000 in attendance, meeting up with family, friends and like-minded people is more important than talking about this year's elections. It's also a chance for enthusiasts to check out all the latest in guns, custom barrels and binoculars.

"It's kind of like a big window-shopping thing," says Bill Slike, an engineer from neighboring Noblesville, Ind.

Most people — including Pickering — aren't actually going to walk away from the show with new weapons in hand, due to federal licensing requirements.

But, with the exhibit hall being billed as "nine acres of guns and gear," they can certainly do plenty of comparison shopping. The event is a showcase not only for major manufacturers such as Remington and Smith & Wesson, but smaller companies taking advantage of the chance to show off their wares to thousands of potential customers.

"You can handle the guns and make an informed purchase decision," says safety instructor Sig Swanstrom. "I'm from San Antonio and there are 1.4 million people, but there's no way to make this kind of comparison."

It's A Family Affair

The meeting is free for NRA members, who pay anywhere from $10 to join for a year to $500 for a lifetime membership. The crowd is overwhelmingly but not exclusively white, well into middle age or older, with more men than women.

A few men wear suits and ties, but most people are casually dressed in polos or plaids, some wearing t-shirts with slogans such as "Choose wisely: Glock, paper, scissors."

The aisles are so crowded that it can be difficult to move around, but a few parents patiently push their kids around in strollers. One little boy sits cross-legged against a wall, wearing an orange ball cap that says "Gun Auction" and sucking on a lollipop.

Todd Homan, a gun dealer from St. Henry, Ohio, has brought each of his eight children to an NRA meeting at least once. His son, Charlton, is making a return visit this year.

Back in 2001, when he was 5 weeks old, Charlton was held up on stage at the NRA meeting by his namesake, the actor and NRA President Charlton Heston, who died in 2008.

His parents carry around a small photo album, showing off pictures of that moment. Charlton Homan admits he's "kind of" sick of hearing the story.

Todd Homan says all his kids receive hunting safety instruction. Other parents stress the importance of safety, clearly enjoying sharing their interest in shooting sports with their kids.

"It's been something we've been doing for a fairly long time," says Jimmy Trout, a 16-year-old from Carlisle, Ohio, who's such a fan of the Browning Buck Mark line of weapons that he has its logo shaved into the back of his head.

Step Right Up

Trout's design excited the people at the Browning booth and helped get him a picture with Matt Hughes, a mixed martial arts champion who endorses the product. Trout also picked up an autographed poster from race car driver Jessica Barton at the EAA Corporation booth.

With hundreds of booths at the show, exhibitors try all sorts of things to attract attention. One sword company has its staff dressed up like pirates, while an ammunition manufacturer is holding a drawing for a helicopter pig hunt.

MGI Industries is based in Maine, so it's offering to ship two live lobsters with any rifle purchase.

"You try to entice people to see it, touch it," says Steve Henigan, MGI's vice president of sales and marketing. "We do get a lot of interest, and hopefully that interest turns into sales down the road."

In addition to rifles, slings and cleaning equipment, various companies are trying to interest attendees in other products and services. The NRA Wine Club advertises that "every sip supports the NRA" at its booth; the club pays the association 10 percent of its revenues in exchange for access to the group's massive email list.

At Booth 3603, Lucinda Bailey is trying to get passersby interested in her gardening books and heirloom seeds. "After guns and bullets, you gotta eat, right?" she says.

Maybe Next Time

Unlike many people in attendance, Bailey is not interested in what she calls "the boy toys" — the high-caliber weapons on offer, or the vehicles on display with machine guns mounted on top.

Bailey wanted to find a modest weapon that would help rid her garden of pests. "I found a gun I wouldn't be able to get back home," she says. "I'll be able to get anything from squirrels to feral hogs."

It's All Politics

Bloomberg Seeks To Alter Gun Debate With $50 Million, And Moms

Need a good laugh? Try Chicago.

The Humor Research Lab at the Leeds School of Business at University of Colorado Boulder (and doesn't that sound like it was created by The Onion?) concocted an algorithm to rate America's funniest cities.

Humor researchers calculated factors like the number of working comics and comedy clubs per capita, funny local tweeters and visits to funny websites. They asked people to assess what they called their "need for levity."

Adrian Ward, a co-author of the study, says it's not all algorithms. "A city's sense of humor is a living, breathing thing created by everything from coffee shop conversations," he says, "to the laughter that erupts at comedy clubs."

Chicago ranked first, not surprisingly. It's home to great comic institutions like Second City, The Onion, Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!, and the Chicago City Council.

Boston is No. 2. Boston is a lot like Chicago, but smaller and better educated.

Washington, D.C., is fourth, perhaps because Americans like to watch the antics of official Washington the way they laugh at monkeys in a zoo who fling feces and scratch themselves.

Portland, Ore., is fifth; a nice nod to an engaging place. An unnamed Portlandian told researchers, "We enjoy Darth Vader wearing a kilt riding a unicycle playing the bagpipes."

Make that a line-caught, free-range, shade-grown unicycle in Portland.

New York is sixth. I bet it would be higher if they'd considered just Brooklyn, which, like Chicago, is it's own punch line. But it's too expensive to be funny in Manhattan.

Nothing deflates laughs like algorithms and analysis. But you might notice that all the cities atop this humor survey possess personality. You wouldn't confuse Chicago with Portland; or Portland with Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco, which are also among the top 10. Each of those cities puts a stamp on the people who live there, and humor is an important part of character.

I spent a lot of time last summer with a loved one in the intensive care unit of a Chicago hospital. One middle of the night, I came downstairs to the 24-hour Starbucks. Everyone in line looked wet-eyed and anxious. Spending all night in a hospital didn't seem like a happy occasion for anyone.

A Motown hit came on. And when Martha and the Vandellas sang that summer's here and the time is right, all us strangers joined in to sing a line to make us smile: "They're dancin' in Chicaaago ..."

Ballerina Misty Copeland is one of the greatest dancers performing today; she's a soloist at the American Ballet Theater, and she's accomplished all this despite starting ballet at the age of 13. By that age, most kids who dream of dancing have already given it up and resigned themselves to a career in public radio.

We've invited Copeland to play a game called "Hey Nonny Nonny" — three questions about a form of English folk dancing called Morris dancing, which scholars believe originated one night in the Middle Ages when some guys got really, really drunk.

There was a time when rum was considered rotgut. Blackbeard the pirate liked to mix his cane alcohol with gunpowder and light it — Rum and croak.

Fast forward a few centuries to rum respectability — specifically, to Rob Burr's patio deck in Coral Gables, South Florida.

From the waterfall pond to the tiki bar, Burr's deck sets a mood not for swilling rum, but for tasting it. Not the way spring-breakers chug Captain Morgan but the way cognac drinkers sip Napoleon: Not with Coke (or gunpowder) but neat, in a snifter.

Burr, his wife Robin and their son Rob Burr Jr. are one of the most expert teams of rum aficionados in South Florida. Their house is a virtual repository of the stuff. Says Rob Burr Sr., "There are probably a thousand or 1,200 rums sitting around here."

The Burrs appraise all of it, pouring their notes into the authoritative Rob's Rum Guide.Those tasting notes lay the groundwork for the annual Miami Rum Renaissance Festival, or Miami Rum Fest, which they'll host this weekend at the Doubletree Hotel near Miami International Airport.

The event, which drew 12,000 visitors last year, has become a central stage for what you might call the rum revolution — the recent ascent of high-end, premium rum. Don't let the name Rum Fest fool you. It's not a college beach bacchanal; it's rum for grown-ups, for people who know that most aged rums today are distilled as masterfully as fine cognacs and single-malt Scotches.

"We'd call it a renaissance," Burr Sr. says. As he puts it, part of the festival's mission is to "change the perception of rum. It's perceived as ordinary when in fact it's fascinating."

The trend is most of all a Caribbean coming-of-age party. There's hardly a country or island in the basin these days that doesn't produce an upmarket aged rum — whose prices can range from $25 to $250 or more per bottle.

Among some of the best, Burr says: Santa Teresa 1796 from Venezuela; Matusalem from the Dominican Republic; Bielle Rhum Vieux from a speck on the map called Marie-Galante.

Many rum master blenders are now industry rock stars. Lorena Vsquez blends one of the most acclaimed rums, Zacapa, in Guatemala. "These rums," she says, "have become some of the Caribbean's most prized ambassadors. They're a marvelous reflection of our culture."

But if this is about a new boom in the spirits industry, it's also about a new bond between the Caribbean and South Florida. Very little rum is actually made in Miami. Still, as the Rum Fest suggests, rum reputations are made here. The city today is rum's premiere showcase, as evidenced by the more than 80 fine rums on the menu at Ortanique, a Caribbean restaurant in South Florida.

"It's almost a natural for Miami and South Florida to be the Mecca of rums," says Joel Garcia, Ortanique's bar manager. "It's always been the depot for the Caribbean, whether it's the melding of people or the melding of spirits."

One of Garcia's favorites is "Pyrat, from the British West Indies, if you wanna try something that will blow you away in a snifter."

Despite the almost cult following these rums are building in the 21st Century — reminiscent of the craze for The Glenlivet and similar silky Scotches at the end of the 20th — sales of premium rums aren't yet blowing away cognacs or single-malts. But they are rising year after year. And ironically, that's partly because rum in general carries a younger, hipper cachet than those other spirits do.

That may help explain why spirits giant Bacardi of Puerto Rico released its own line of premium aged rums last year. The most expensive, called Paraso, sells for $250 a bottle.

"This really for us was a critical move to share with the world what we believe rum can truly be," says Toby Whitmoyer, vice president for rum at Bacardi USA.

Imbibing rum the way wine connoisseurs savor Bordeaux might sound pretentious. But spend a tasting session with the Burr family and you do realize how rich and complex the spirit's character can be when it's not tied to a Mai Tai or when it's liberated from a Cuba libre.

The bounty their noses and palates glean from rum — from dried fruit to cola notes, pineapple to vanilla, chocolaty port to balsamic-y wood seems to capture all the flavors of the Caribbean.

Like the Burrs, Vsquez of Zacapa likes to point out that rum is a product of terroir– not just its prime material, sugar cane, but the soil, climate and faster barrel-aging involved in the tropics. "To achieve those special aromas and flavors," Vsquez says, "we're as careful as cognac-makers are."

Makes sense. After all, many argue rum's real renaissance started in 1862, when French cognac-maker Dupr Barbancourt, heartbroken over his wife's death, emigrated to Haiti and helped refine the way rum is made.

Hence one of Rob Burr's favorite new bottles: "A special 150-year anniversary of Rhum Barbancourt," he says. "This is actually closer to cognac."

But it's rum. Vive la diffrence.

It's easy to find goat milk and goat cheese in Vermont. Goat meat, not so much.

That's frustrating for the refugees, immigrants and others who've settled in the state and are accustomed to eating fresh goat meat. Though it's not so common in the U.S., it's a mainstay in many African, Asian and Caribbean diets.

But there's a movement afoot to meet the demand for goat meat throughout New England.

A project called the Vermont Goat Collaborative is providing new Americans with the opportunity to raise and sell goats to members of their community. Now in its second year, the collaborative makes use of an abundant — and often unwanted – class of animal: male baby goats from goat dairy farms.

The Salt

Eat It, Drink It, Wear It: Goat Is Good

It's easy to find goat milk and goat cheese in Vermont. Goat meat, not so much.

That's frustrating for the refugees, immigrants and others who've settled in the state and are accustomed to eating fresh goat meat. Though it's not so common in the U.S., it's a mainstay in many African, Asian and Caribbean diets.

But there's a movement afoot to meet the demand for goat meat throughout New England.

A project called the Vermont Goat Collaborative is providing new Americans with the opportunity to raise and sell goats to members of their community. Now in its second year, the collaborative makes use of an abundant — and often unwanted – class of animal: male baby goats from goat dairy farms.

The Salt

Eat It, Drink It, Wear It: Goat Is Good

India's Bollywood film industry is known for romantic, over-the-top musicals that increasingly are reaching a world-wide audience. To highlight the international appeal, the industry holds its annual awards ceremony every year outside of India.

This year, Bollywood, its glittering stars and its legions of fans, have come to Tampa, Fla. It's the first time the International Indian Film Academy (IIFA) Awards have ever been held in the U.S.

At nearly all of the events held this week in downtown Tampa, the soundtrack has been throbbing Indian pop. At an outdoor dance concert, several thousand people — mostly Indian-Americans — gathered at a park on Tampa's waterfront.

DJs provided the music and there were food vendors, families on blankets and even a flash mob courtesy of a couple of dozen young people breaking out into a choreographed dance routine.

In the past, these Bollywood awards have been held in international cities like Bangkok, Amsterdam and Singapore. Tampa, although on one of Florida's most beautiful bays and experienced with hosting large gatherings, isn't exactly an international capital.

Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn says one selling point for IIFA was how well the city did two years ago hosting the Republican National Convention.

"They wanted to introduce the Bollywood brand to the United States," Buckhorn says. "It had never been here before, so they picked a city where there's a big Indian-American community, with the biggest media market in the state of Florida. So it made sense for a lot of reasons, and one thing we know how to do is put on a big show."

But even the mayor concedes, Bollywood awards are nothing like a GOP convention.

"The Republican convention looked like me: a bunch of stuffy old white guys in suits," he says. "This is nothing but glitz and glam and lights and music and beautiful people."

Indian-Americans and some non-Indian fans have flocked to the Bollywood events this week. Tickets to Saturday night's awards spectacular at Tampa's baseball stadium go from a hundred dollars into the thousands. More than 20,000 people are expected, and IIFA estimates the worldwide TV audience in the hundreds of millions.

But there are also red carpet events this week, where fans can see their favorite stars up close. One of those stars is Anil Kapoor. He is well known even to Western audiences for his role in Slumdog Millionaire, emphatically not a Bollywood musical. Kapoor was everywhere in downtown Tampa this week; dancing, cutting ribbons and doing his best to charm fans and the media.

"Congratulations to all the people of Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay, we love you, you're the best," he said to excited fans.

To attract the stars of India's film industry to Tampa, it takes more than charm — it takes money. The city and IIFA got significant financial help from a local philanthropist, Kirwan Patel. Patel is a Tampa cardiologist who admits he's not a huge fan of Bollywood films, but he says he jumped at the chance to help bring a wellspring of Indian culture to his hometown.

"Culture and art is a great medium to cross barriers of race, religion [and] ethnicity," Patel says. "And I felt that this is a good way of promoting a cultural spirit of India and introducing it to the United States."

At all the Bollywood events this week, the cultural spirit of India was irrepressible.

General Motors has announced a big hit to first-quarter earnings, largely due to costs for recalls. Profits dropped nearly 90 percent from last year, with the company making a razor-thin profit of $100 million, GM said Thursday.

Meanwhile, GM has yet to explain why it took 10 years to issue one of the recalls for a defective ignition switch. Some critics believe the automaker's dysfunctional culture is to blame.

But the recall crisis could speed up a culture shift that's already underway.

Customer-Focused

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It is never not awkward to talk about a film after one of the stars has died. That's perhaps never any more true than it is in the case of Brick Mansions, one of the last films of Paul Walker. Walker died in November of last year after a career that included a lot of movies like this one: silly, hyper action thrillers that often included, as this one does, moments in which everybody in the theater chortled at their insane, cartoonish brutality.

There is no way to make there be anything elegiac about Brick Mansions, or out of the experience of seeing it. To try to make it a celebration of life or to find in it any lessons whatsoever would be absurd and, in its way, disrespectful to the 50 percent serious (plus or minus one percent) way in which it's made.

Brick Mansions is a remake of the 2004 French film Banlieue 13, which you can find for rent in the United States as District B13 — a film for which the dialogue is so relatively insignificant that they serve it up dubbed rather than subtitled. District B13 came from screenwriters Luc Besson and Bibi Naceri, who also wrote Brick Mansions. What's more, the original and this remake share a star: French actor and stunt coordinator David Belle, one of the originators of Parkour, a discipline that sends guys running through the streets, flipping and climbing walls for the benefit of, very often, YouTube.

In this version, Belle plays Lino, the honest man who happens to be the only person left who really cares about Brick Mansions, a Detroit housing project that's been walled off by the police and left to rot. The place is run by Tremaine (RZA), who you know is the ringleader because at the police station, it says "RING LEADER" next to his picture. Lino takes some of Tremaine's drugs and destroys them, Tremaine kidnaps Lino's girlfriend, and Lino teams up with cop Damien — played by Paul Walker — who also wants to bring down Tremaine and save the girl.

Fighting ensues. Running ensues. Jumping ensues. There's a bomb with a prominent readout. Back flips ensue. Bonking each other with props ensues. And at the end, there's an intriguing little twist that's intended to inject a little social commentary.

But mostly, it's a fighting movie. If you've always wondered why more guys don't beat each other with steering wheels, this is your movie! If you've always wondered how you could gruesomely kill someone from inside a cell, this is your movie! If you've always wondered how two smaller guys might defeat a huge guy, this is your movie!

There's a sort of good-natured goofiness to Brick Mansions, and particularly to how ill-equipped Walker really is to keep pace with Belle (who, himself, may be ill-equipped to keep pace with himself from ten years ago). There are a couple of nice references to the fact that Lino's way of navigating Fake Detroit is pretty intimidating, even to a cop who earlier pulls off a rousingly entertaining unauthorized entry into a speeding car.

Parkour is really fun to watch; that's why YouTube likes it. The guys who do it are crazily, anti-gravitationally athletic, and it doesn't need a lot of kinetic editing to look kinetic. It is kinetic already, and in the original District B13, while there's still more editing than it probably needs, the camera does sometimes pause long enough to watch Belle do his thing, which is why the people are there.

Of course, that was 2004. We are now in 2014, and chaos cinema — as a fine video essay by Matthias Stork called it — is dominant. Post-Bourne, post-Michael-Bay, and, yes, post-six Fast-And-Furious movies, action sequences are typically shot with such a manic camera that you can barely keep track of what's happening. When all you're missing out on is cars flipping and regular actors having a fight, it's one thing. But when you're missing out on David Belle doing Parkour, it's hugely frustrating, because — again — it's the best reason to see the movie.

Furthermore, Brick Mansions suffers from another weird tic of action directors and cinematographers, which is that weird, jumpy, sticky effect that I have long recognized but only recently came to know by the apt name "staccato shutter." It's the camera effect Steven Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski used to get a sort of ultra-real look at the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, and it's also often associated with Gladiator. It creates stuttery-looking action scenes, and Brick Mansions uses it a lot. Not only that, but they use a more extreme version of it than I can remember seeing in the past, so that you're getting a very disorienting shutter effect combined with the crazy-fast editing that's disorienting already. (You can see it in this clip. Spoiler alert: there's punching.)

And all of this has the effect of dampening the impact of what Belle is bringing to this movie that's legitimately different from what you get in most action movies. It's too bad, though the movie still has some enjoyably over the top sequences and some funny moments between Walker and Belle. It feels like it was fun to make. It feels like, despite being a remake, it was made with some zazz and with, at the least, some desire that it be a hoot to watch. And it is a hoot to watch, even if, to be honest, there's little reason for it to exist.

There is a moment in The Other Woman in which Leslie Mann and Cameron Diaz, playing a wife and her husband's former mistress – now friends — fall into a hedge together. When they're spotted, there's a little bit of physical business that's legitimately funny. If you can ignore the fact that the moments of this kind scattered through the film are decorating such a conceptually odious, stupid-to-the-bone enterprise, some of them may make you laugh.

But it may also occur to you just how bad – how bad – it is that this is what we have to offer Mann and Diaz, who show themselves in these moments to be really able comic actresses: a story in which they play idiots with no interests of any kind except bickering over an utterly charmless man and then satisfying themselves that giving him explosive diarrhea and prominent nipples constitutes satisfying revenge for his having apparently robbed both of them of whatever souls and outside interests they once possessed.

It is the most grotesque pantomime of girl power, these beautiful women clinking glasses and ultimately trading what must be the weakest and least earned high-five in cinema history after executing a plot made possible by one of their daddies and done with considerably more panache in the painfully generic but at least mildly agreeable 1987 Michael J. Fox film The Secret Of My Success.

When we first meet them, both Kate (Mann) and Carly (Diaz) believe they are happy women, because they are both under the spell, such as it is, of Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau), a man with all the inscrutable charisma of a tennis ball with a face drawn on it. Kate babbles at him and pees in front of him and doesn't know she should groom her intimate areas, because that's how wives are, right? Carly has wine with him at sundown and has lots of impetuous sex with him and talks to her secretary (Nicki Minaj) about him, because that's how lady lawyer mistresses are, right?

(As a side note, while the need to advertise the themes of competitive pettiness is understandable, it seems like a dreadful missed opportunity that they didn't call this Right, Fellas?: The Movie. Someone in marketing was not keeping his [probably his] eye on the ball.)

The women discover each other, at which point the cold one (the one who works in an office) is mercilessly stalked by the baffled, out-of-touch, nerdy, sexless one (the wife), until they become friends and eventually discover the young, large-breasted, dumb one – the other mistress, Amber, played by supermodel Kate Upton. At first, the two women over 40 naturally respond to the beautiful woman in her twenties by attempting to physically attack her out of jealousy (right, fellas?), but particularly once they learn that Amber is so stupid she doesn't know which end of a pair of binoculars to look through, all three team up because they hate Mark, and what better animating principle is there for female friendship than being humiliated by the same man and having nothing better to do than feel miserable about it?

Now granted, all three of these women will ultimately need rescue from men in order to move on to the next phases of their lives – and again, they wouldn't know what to do to Mark without advice they receive from Carly's father (Don Johnson), which he delivers over a meal in a restaurant where Asian women give massages while you eat and feed you by hand. But don't let that harsh your "sisters are doing it for themselves" mellow, ladies. HERE'S TO FRIENDSHIP!

It is a film that features a vomiting scene, a farting scene, a huge dog taking an extravagant, full-view dump on an apartment floor, the aforementioned diarrhea and nipple segments, a joke – the approach of which is visible from space — when a man is sexually humiliated by a transgender woman, and plenty of appreciative ogling of Kate Upton's caboose.

It does not, however, manage to pass the Bechdel test, the laughably low bar that asks these questions: (1) Does a film have two women in it? (2) Do they talk to each other? (3) About something other than a man?

Yyyyyyyup. That's right. The Other Woman is 109 minutes long, and at no time do any of these women – including Carly and her secretary, who only know each other from work – pause for a discussion, even for a moment, of anything other than a series of dudes: Mark, Kate's brother, Carly's father, the secretary's husband, Carly's other boyfriends ... it is truly, no fooling, all they talk about for 109 minutes.

As has often been observed, there is nothing about the Bechdel test that is magical: plenty of good movies don't pass it, and heaven knows plenty of terrible movies do. But the fact that a large studio like Twentieth Century Fox – not to mention an actual non-joke director like Nick Cassavetes – can make an ode to female empowerment that at no time involves any women relating to each other about anything other than men?

It's deliciously, almost poetically, perhaps polemically depressing. The Other Woman is no charming film about lady buddies, the way they'd like it to be, but it is a gift-wrapped boon to critics who have been looking for an opportunity to explain the miserable circumstances in which genuinely talented comic actresses – even powerful ones, even proven ones, even ones doing the absolute best they possibly can – still very often find themselves.

There are isolated funny moments: that's just the truth. Mann is a gloriously, unabashedly weird presence in the best way, always, and Diaz continues to be an often funny mix of glamorous and goofy, just like she's been since she was a young actress-model herself. The audience I was with laughed at this movie sometimes. They looked at it – twice – and said, literally, "This [excrement] is funny." And were it wrapped around a story that was 50 percent, 20 percent, even 10 percent less corrosive and gross, maybe that would be easier to endorse.

I know what you're thinking: "Enough beating around the bush. Just tell us whether you liked it!" Consider this, which I will say in terms this movie would understand: If you were on an airplane, The Other Woman might not be preferable to simply staring into your empty airsick bag, but it has enough nicely executed physical comedy that in the event you become ill, it is definitely preferable to staring into your occupied airsick bag. This is what we've got, girls. This is what's on offer. Use your judgment.

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

Going to the library gives people the same kick as getting a raise does — a 1,359 ($ 2,282) raise, to be exact — according to a study commissioned by the U.K.'s Department for Culture, Media & Sport. The study, which looks at the ways "cultural engagement" affects overall wellbeing, concluded that a significant association was found between frequent library use and reported wellbeing. The same was true of dancing, swimming and going to plays. The study notes that "causal direction needs to be considered further" — that is, it's hard to tell whether happy people go to the library, or going to the library makes people happy. But either way, the immortal words of Arthur the Aardvark ring true: "Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card!"

Richard H. Hoggart, scholar and key witness in the 1960 obscenity trial involving the U.K. publisher of Lady Chatterley's Lover, died on April 10. He was 95. A defense witness for Penguin Books, Hoggart argued that D.H. Lawrence's novel about Constance Chatterley's affair with a gamekeeper was "puritanical, poignant and tender." He explained that the book was "puritanical" not because it was rigid or prudish, but because it carried "an intense sense of responsibility for one's conscience." Penguin was acquitted.

French economist Thomas Piketty's 700-page book on income inequality has attracted rapturous media coverage since it became the top selling book on Amazon. But in an article for The New York Times, Justin Wolfers asks whether Piketty has "kicked off a broad national conversation about inequality, or is the book being read mostly in the East Coast liberal echo chamber?" Wolfers used data from Google searches to show that people in Washington, D.C., did far and away more searches for Piketty, followed by Massachusetts, New York and Connecticut — pointing to a coastal, not a nationwide trend.

The shortlist for the 2014 Caine Prize for African Writing, which awards the author of the winning short story 10,000, was announced this week. The list includes work by Diane Awerbuck, Okwiri Oduor, Billy Kahora, Tendai Huchu and Efemia Chela. According to a press release, the head of the judges, Jackie Kay, said this is "a golden age for the African short story," adding that the shortlisted works were "compelling, lyrical, thought-provoking and engaging." She said, "From a daughter's unusual way of grieving for her father, to a memorable swim with a grandmother, a young boy's fascination with a gorilla's conversation, a dramatic faux family meeting, to a woman who is forced to sell her eggs, the subjects are as diverse as they are entertaining." The full list, with links to each story, is here.

When Regitze Visby, a tourist visiting San Francisco from Denmark, searched for accommodations for her trip and saw she could stay at one of the famed "painted ladies" on Alamo Square through Airbnb, she took it.

At $135 a night, "it was a good deal," she says.

But does she know if she's paying a transient occupancy tax or a hotel tax? "I have no idea," she says.

Visby would know if she were staying in a hotel. It's 14 percent per room. Places like Airbnb's that are like hotels usually don't bother with it, even though they should.

Property manager Emily Benkert — whose short-term rental business, Guesthop, has grown from five to 50 listings since October — says while she is aware of the hotel room tax, she's not planning to pay it until she has to.

"I personally have decided to wait until the city was actually enforcing it, and Airbnb was collecting it," she says.

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With the Mount Everest climbing season increasingly in doubt, Nepalese tourism officials traveled to base camp Thursday to negotiate with Sherpas who want to walk off the job after an avalanche killed 16 of the mountain guides.

Friday's avalanche — the worst ever recorded on Everest — has exposed an undercurrent of resentment by Sherpas over their pay, treatment and benefits.

"The main objective of this trip is to attempt to avert the shutdown of the mountaineering season and convince the Sherpas not to cancel their climb," said Keshav Pandey of the Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal, which was taking part in the meeting.

The negotiations will likely be tricky, however, because the Sherpas have no single leader and the motivations for their walkout range from honoring the dead to holding out for more substantial benefits.

While it was unclear just how many of the 400 or so Sherpas on the mountain had joined the walkout, at least three major expedition companies have already canceled their climbs.

Most attempts to reach Everest's summit are made in mid-May, when a brief window normally offers better weather. Without the help of the Sherpas, the tiny Himalayan community that has become famous for its high-altitude skills and endurance, it would be nearly impossible for climbers to scale Everest. Many climbers will have to forfeit most or all of the money they have spent to go up the mountain — $75,000 or more.

Sherpas are key guides and also haul tons of gear up the mountain.

Dave Hahn, who has scaled Everest more than a dozen times, said on Rainier Mountaineering's website that he met with other climbing team leaders and guides before deciding to halt the climb.

"Those meetings convinced us that the right course was to give up on Mount Everest for spring 2014," Hahn wrote from base camp, adding that the risks outweighed the possibility of success.

Nepal's government has been heavily criticized for not doing enough for the Sherpas in the wake of last week's disaster.

Immediately after the avalanche, the government said it would pay the families of each Sherpa who died 40,000 rupees, or about $415. But the Sherpas said they deserved far more — including more insurance money, more financial aid for the victims' families and new regulations to ensure climbers' rights.

Nepal's government appeared to agree Tuesday to some of the Sherpas' demands, such as setting up a relief fund for those who are killed or injured in climbing accidents, but the proposed funding fell far short of the demands.

It has been a very good 12 months for Lupita Nyong'o: piles of awards (including an Oscar for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of Patsy in 12 Years a Slave), a contract to be the face of Lancme Paris cosmetics, and now this: the cover of People's annual "50 Most Beautiful" issue.

Counting Nyong'o's new crowning, there are now three black women who have been on People's cover in the 25 years the "Most Beautiful" issue has been published. Halle Berry was first in 2003, followed by Beyonce in 2012. But as Wall Street Journal columnist Teri Agins says, Nyong'o is not racially ambiguous: "She has African features, she's dark-skinned with nappy hair. And — she's beautiful."

"Validation by the mainstream media is what makes this big," says Agins, who has been on Lupita Watch for months. People's accessibility and reach is part of the reason why Nyongo's newest title is so significant. "It's the ultimate validation that someone of deep color, with African features, has been declared beautiful," Agins says.

What hath the Bard wrought? William Shakespeare was a word-nerd if we ever saw one, and he's left a legacy of terms and idioms that have since diffused throughout pop culture, writing and colloquial speech. You've probably been quoting language Shakespeare helped popularize ("eyeball", "lonely", "gossip"), without even knowing it. Though some phrases may have lost their Shakespearean "sound," or are devoid of their original contexts, it's hard to overstate his profound influence on the way we speak to one another in the 21st century.

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As Shakespeare Turns 450, 'Hamlet' Tour Makes The World A Stage

Seven years after a violent split, the two main Palestinian factions said Wednesday that they are attempting to reconcile and form a national unity government within five weeks.

The factions, the Palestine Liberation Organization and Hamas, have tried several times to resolve their feud, but those efforts quickly unraveled.

So will this attempt fare any better?

The plan, announced after talks in Gaza City, calls for a unified government by the end of May, ending a rift dating to 2007 that left the PLO in charge of Palestinian affairs in the West Bank while Hamas has controlled the Gaza Strip.

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An American journalist operating in eastern Ukraine has been kidnapped by pro-Russian gunmen, the separatists said Wednesday.

Simon Ostrovsky, working for Vice News, was seized at gunpoint early Tuesday by masked men in the restive eastern Ukrainian city of Slovyansk.

Stella Khorosheva, a spokeswoman for the insurgents confirmed Wednesday that Ostrovsky was being held at the local branch of the Ukrainian security service, seized more than a week ago, according to The Associated Press.

"He's with us. He's fine," Khorosheva told the AP, who said the journalist was being held because he's "suspected of bad activities," which she refused to explain. She said insurgents were holding the journalist pending their own investigation.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said the U.S. is "deeply concerned" about the reports.

"We condemn any such actions, and all recent hostage takings in eastern Ukraine, which directly violate commitments made in the Geneva joint statement," Psaki said.

The reports come in the same week as a visit by Vice President Joe Biden to Ukraine.

For more than a year, GOP Sen. Rand Paul has been staking out positions on issues that resonate in the black community, including school choice and prison sentencing reform. And he's been showing up in some unexpected — for a Republican — venues, including historically black colleges.

It's stirred an unusual degree of curiosity about the freshman Kentucky senator — and 2016 GOP presidential prospect — among the Democratic Party's most reliable voting bloc.

"He's a different voice in the arena that we don't traditionally hear," says Lorraine Miller, acting head of the NAACP, who expects to invite Paul to speak at the organization's July national conference in Las Vegas.

"He's an engaging guy — that's why we want to talk to him," Miller says. Miller is not the only black leader who has been intrigued by Paul, whose father, former Texas Rep. Ron Paul, had three unsuccessful presidential runs and amassed a fervent Libertarian following.

Miller's predecessor, Benjamin Jealous, has previously hailed Paul's position on reforming drug and sentencing laws, which disproportionately affect African-American individuals and families. And Jealous has pointedly noted that while an NAACP poll last year showed that a majority of African-Americans believe that Republicans "don't care at all about civil rights," about 14 percent indicated they would vote for a GOP candidate if he or she were committed to civil rights.

Democrats have little worry about maintaining their vise-like grip on the African-American vote come 2016 — since 1964, no Democratic presidential candidate has gotten less than 82 percent of the black vote. But Paul is speaking both directly and indirectly to black voters in a way the community hasn't seen in decades from a prospective GOP presidential candidate.

"He's done what most conventional Republicans would be too fearful to do — dive into situations that would make them uncomfortable," says Ron Christie, an African-American lawyer and GOP commentator who worked in the George W. Bush administration.

"I find it fascinating that he has gone into communities where Republicans typically don't connect, and don't listen," Christie says.

Paul went into those communities with some baggage. After winning Kentucky's GOP Senate primary in 2010, he said in an interview on MSNBC that he believed, as a proponent of limited government, that private businesses should not be forced to adhere to the nation's civil rights law.

As criticism rained down, Paul quickly shifted gears, issuing a statement that said he supports the Civil Rights Act because, "I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws."

It was just over a year ago that Paul made a much-ballyhooed appearance at Howard University, one of the nation's top historically black colleges. His speech included a few stumbles — he drew groans when he asked those in the packed auditorium if they knew that black Republicans founded the NAACP. But Paul also elicited applause when he said that the nation has drug laws and court systems that "disproportionately [punish] the black community."

Miller, the NAACP chief, and other African-American leaders refer to the issue as "mass incarceration," and its prominence as an issue in the black community can't be understated.

"I've been traveling and talking to audiences about the effect of mass incarceration," Miller says. "There is hardly a person who hasn't been affected by it; what we do about it is the question."

"It is such a pervasive issue in our community, and, quite honestly, if we can get the ear of someone like Rand Paul, that helps us in trying to find solutions that make sense," she says.

Since that speech, Paul has — along with Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont — led legislative efforts on Capitol Hill to revamp mandatory sentencing laws.

Paul has likened the effects of such laws on black Americans to the racist policies of the nation's Jim Crow era, and has said that laws preventing felons from voting is tantamount to voter suppression.

In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, Paul said this: "If I told you that 1 out of 3 African-American males is forbidden by law from voting, you might think I was talking about Jim Crow 50 years ago. Yet today, a third of African-American males are still prevented from voting because of the war on drugs."

"The majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white," he said, "but three-fourths of all people in prison for drug offenses are African-American or Latino."

Paul has since promoted in Detroit what he calls his "Economic Freedom Zone" plan, which would lower taxes in economically devastated areas like the Michigan city. He spoke at Simmons College in Louisville for the historically black institution's biblical higher education accreditation event. He recently criticized the Obama administration's record on domestic surveillance, pointedly invoking the government's snooping on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as an example of the perniciousness of the practice.

And this week, he's speaking in Chicago and Milwaukee about school choice and his support for vouchers. In anticipation of the trip, he posted last week on Twitter a video of an African-American teenager's struggle to seek an education better than one offered in her poor South Side Chicago neighborhood.

Brian Doherty, who chronicled Ron Paul's rise in the book Ron Paul's rEVOLution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired, says it is too early to tell how or whether the younger Paul's efforts will resonate with the "new coalitions" he's trying to build. Paul is also courting young voters — another demographic Democrats dominate — by highlighting his opposition to government surveillance programs.

"Rand Paul is openly attempting some fresh policy entrepreneurship with the Republican Party," Doherty says, "trying to appeal to big and important constituent groups where the party pretty much has nowhere to go but up."

"So anything he can do that's both true to his party's supposed dedication to liberty and constitutionally limited government — and appeal to a classic American sense of self-reliance and self-help — isn't likely to hurt," says Doherty, a senior editor at the libertarian publication Reason, "even if we can't be sure it's going to work in a big way."

In the meantime, says Christie, the former Bush staffer, Paul has "shaken up what purports to be conventional wisdom and thinking in targeting voters."

Those voters aren't a monolith, and, like most, aren't typically single-issue voters, says the NAACP's Miller.

"This issue, sentencing and mass incarceration, doesn't make him the civil rights Republican candidate, in my humble opinion," she says. "But we're in no position not to hear from other voices out there in the public venue."

"Let's talk," she says. "People are rational and can make up their own minds about whether he's selling wolf tickets, or really has something we can work with."

At a time when fast food workers make an average of about $9 an hour, what are the chief executives bringing home?

According to a new report, YUM! (owner of KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut) compensated its CEO $22 million in 2013.

Chipotle's CEO took home $13.8 million in total compensation. And McDonald's CEO compensation totaled $7.7 million. (Compensation includes salary, bonus and the value of exercised options.)

Overall, the average compensation of fast food CEOs has quadrupled since 2000. The figures in the report are based on data from Standard & Poor's ExecuComp database and company proxy statements.

The report, by the public policy group Demos, concludes the fast-food industry has the most extreme pay disparity of all the sectors in the U.S. economy, with a CEO-to-worker pay ratio now exceeding 1,000-to-1.

By comparison, the ratio in the retail sector is about 304-to-1, meaning the CEOs in this sector make about 304 times the income of the average worker. And construction company CEOs make about 93 times that of the average worker.

In the years since the recession ended, "fast food firms have exhibited spectacular growth in CEO compensation, while wages for their front-line workforce actually declined," the report concludes.

"Rising pay inequality has dire consequences for workers in New York City and beyond," said Scott Stringer, the New York City comptroller who joined a conference call to release the findings. "I am also concerned with the impact of pay disparity on the city's pension funds, which have long recognized that excessive pay disparities pose a risk to share owner value."

As we've reported, fast food workers have been rallying against their low wages that make it hard for them to afford basic necessities such as rent, food and health care.

And economists have documented the burden on us taxpayers, who foot the bill for the federally-funded assistance programs that many fast food workers rely on.

A report released last fall found that 52 percent of fast food workers are enrolled in, or have their families enrolled in, public assistance programs, such as SNAP (food stamps).

"Taxpayers are subsidizing the CEO pay plan," Nell Minow of GMI Ratings said during the conference call releasing the new report. "And that's simply intolerable."

The sponsor of a bill that would have made the Holy Bible the official book of Louisiana has withdrawn the measure ahead of a full vote in the state House of Representatives, saying the proposed law has become a distraction.

As we reported last week, a mix of Republicans and Democrats had moved the largely symbolic bill, sponsored by Rep. Thomas Carmody of Shreveport, out of committee on an 8-5 vote.

The bill had been scheduled for a floor vote on Monday, but Carmody said he'd told the constituent who asked for the bill that he "was going to go ahead and return the bill to the calendar [on Monday] and concentrate our efforts on those things that are much more important."

The Times-Picayune reports:

"In introducing the legislation, Carmody always maintained he was not taking steps to establish a state religion, but rather to educate people. Critics have accused him of foisting faith inappropriately into the government sphere. Others thought such a designation would trivialize the Bible and its importance.

"Initially, Carmody had just been intending to designate a specific, historic copy of the Bible, which he thought could be found in the Louisiana State Museum, as the official state book. But lawmakers amended Carmody's legislation two weeks ago to propose making any copy of the 'Holy Bible' the official state book."

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday testing whether states can make it a crime to lie about candidates during an election campaign.

At issue is an Ohio law that imposes potential jail time or a fine for the first offense, and possibly loss of the right to vote for anyone convicted twice. The case before the court, however, involves not a person, but an organization.

During the 2010 midterm elections, the anti-abortion Susan B. Anthony List wanted to put up a billboard ad targeting then-Rep. Steven Driehaus, D-Ohio, for his vote on the Affordable Care Act.

The ad said, "Shame on Steve Driehaus! Driehaus voted FOR taxpayer-funded abortion."

In fact, Driehaus and other anti-abortion Democrats supported the health care bill only after President Obama agreed to issue an executive order that specified insurance plans in the health care exchanges would not use tax dollars for abortion, except in cases of rape, incest or when the life of the woman would be endangered.

Driehaus filed a complaint with the Ohio Elections Commission, and the commission found probable cause of a violation. The ad never went up because the advertising company that owned the billboard space refused to allow it.

Driehaus subsequently lost his re-election bid, and his complaint to the state Elections Commission was withdrawn. The Susan B. Anthony List, however, continued its legal challenge to the Ohio election law, contending it would chill similar speech in future election campaigns.

The lower courts dismissed the suit, concluding that the anti-abortion group could not show it had suffered any actual harm. Because the group had not been prosecuted, the lower courts said, any claimed harm is purely "speculative."

The Susan B. Anthony List appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, contending that its free speech rights had been violated. The group argues that under our constitution, the government cannot decide what is false speech in the context of a political campaign.

First, though, those challenging the Ohio law have to jump an important procedural hurdle.

The Supreme Court's five most conservative members have, in the past, been very strict about requiring a showing of actual harm to justify getting in the courtroom door. But the same justices have also been aggressive in protecting the First Amendment right of free speech.

Just two years ago, the high court struck down a federal law that made it a crime to lie about having been awarded military medals. And earlier this month, the conservative majority invalidated a cap on the overall amount of money donors can give, in the aggregate, to political candidates and parties. That decision, too, was in the name of free speech.

In the Ohio case being argued Tuesday, civil libertarians on the right and left have filed briefs opposing the law against lying, and by extension, similar laws in about one third of the states.

The Cato Institute and satirist P.J. O'Rourke contend in their brief that falsehoods "are cornerstones of American democracy."

To make the point, the brief opens with statements or messages from five past presidents:

"I am not a crook." (Richard Nixon)

"Read my lips: no new taxes!" (George H.W. Bush)

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman." (Bill Clinton)

"Mission accomplished." (George W. Bush)

"If you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it." (Barack Obama)

Whether each of these statements was made knowing it was false is at least debatable. But just listing them makes the point that falsity in politics may be hard to define.

A decision in the case is expected by June.

Chinese couples who are unable to have children are turning to a surprising place for help these days: America. By hiring American surrogates, Chinese couples get around a ban on surrogacy in China as well as the country's birth limits.

It also guarantees their children something many wealthy Chinese want these days: a U.S. passport.

Tony Jiang and his wife, Cherry, live in Shanghai and couldn't have children naturally. First, they turned to underground hospitals in China for surrogacy.

It didn't go well.

Jiang says one of the surrogates ran away.

"It was almost Chinese New Year's break, she became so homesick so she flew back home," he says. "My wife was just two or three days away from embryo transfer, that was really ridiculous and disappointing."

So Jiang went online and found a fertility clinic in Orange County, Calif.

Three years and $275,000 later, Tony and Cherry have a son and two girls, which, had they all been born in China, would have broken the law.

The couple now works for the clinic, connecting it with Chinese clients, the vast majority of whom, Jiang says, suffer from infertility.

Others clients have included gay men as well as heterosexual couples barred from having a second child in China.

Jiang's first clients were a couple — both Communist Party members — who were leaders at a government-owned firm.

"How could leaders violate this kind of regulation?" he says "You could be easily laid off if somebody knows you already have two kids."

The wife had nearly died giving birth to their first son. The couple did have a second child through surrogacy, who – because he was born overseas – did not violate Chinese law.

Still, they're very cautious about appearances.

"Only their closest friends, relatives, know they have two boys. All their colleagues, leaders, bosses don't know," Jiang says.

Advantages Of American Surrogacy

Chinese women routinely fly to the U.S. to give birth, so their children can get an American passport and enjoy the benefits that come with it, including clean air and a U.S. education. Birth tourism is so common it provided the plot for a popular movie last year, Finding Mr. Right.

Amy Kaplan is the director of West Coast Egg Donation and West Coast Surrogacy, the fertility clinic that helped and now employs Tony Jiang.

Kaplan says Chinese surrogacy took off in recent years through word of mouth. Her clinic saw their first Chinese client in 2009. Now, 47 percent of clients waiting for a surrogate are from mainland China, she says.

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Last Friday's tragedy on Mount Everest in which at least 13 Sherpa guides were killed in an avalanche has led others among that group of Nepalese who lead foreigners up the world's tallest mountain to issue some demands — and threaten to boycott the soon-to-start climbing season if their requests aren't granted.

Time reports that:

"Sunday's call to action comes as the Nepalese government mulls calling off the 2014 climbing season on the world's highest peak. According to the Himalayan Times, a total of 334 mountaineers have been issued permits to attempt to climb Everest this season. If the trips are canceled the Nepalese government is required to reimburse the permits, which cost approximately $10,000 each."

Win Tin, a former newspaper editor who became Myanmar's longest-serving political prisoner for his pro-democracy activism, has died. News reports gave his age as 84 or 85.

The Associated Press reports that he'd been hospitalized since March 12 in Yangon with respiratory problems. The cause of death was organ failure.

Win Tin founded the National League for Democracy in 1988 along with Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. They were both arrested the following year. Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest. Win Tin was sent to prison. His sentence, which was extended twice, totaled 21 years, of which he served 19. Much of his time in prison was under harsh conditions. The Los Angeles Times reports:

"Win Tin was jailed in 1989 and harshly treated — tortured, denied medical treatment and kept in solitary confinement. He would later recount in a memoir how his jailers refused him pen and paper, so he ground up bits of brick into a paste that he used to write poetry on the walls of his cell."

[This post discusses the plot of Sunday night's episode.]

Once Mad Men moved into the early-middle part of the 1960s, people began to ask an increasingly urgent question: where was the civil rights movement? Where were the black people? Was Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce) (And Partners) really so sheltered that race barely touched its tiny world?

Mad Men's very first scene, in fact, had found Don Draper attempting a conversation with an African-American server at a bar — whom Don was pumping for information about cigarette purchasing — only to be interrupted by a white manager eager to apologize for the server's inappropriate chattiness. Race has been there, at the very edges, for a long time.

And sometimes, it's gotten more attention, as it did when Don's agency interviewed black women in the wake of a civil rights protest and wound up hiring Dawn, who became Don's secretary. But for the most part, race has reared its head primarily to demonstrate the clumsiness and blithe racism of almost every white character's approach to it.

Sunday night, however, both Dawn and Shirley — a recently added black secretary who, unlike Dawn, rocks very short dresses and natural hair — got their very own conversation, just the two of them, that subtly realigned the show's consideration of race from one that was primarily about the experiences of white people to one that was at least curious about, if not yet diving deeply into, the experiences of black people, and specifically black women.

Dawn's story began with a bang as we learned that Don, despite being on an involuntary leave of absence about which he's told very few people, is still meeting up with Dawn to get updates about what's going on in the office — not to mention having her take his calls and keep Megan from finding out he's not working.

We saw a scruffy, robe-wearing, boozing Don put on his full Don Draper drag, from hair to tie to shoes, just to briefly greet Dawn at the door. She knows he's not working, so he's not literally trying to fool her, but it was fascinating to see Don trying so hard to maintain the illusion of his status to an audience consisting solely of his black secretary, whom he appears to trust a great deal, meaning it probably really was for her benefit, and not to avoid gossip. That gussying-up process demonstrated a strange, twisted respect for her — and concern over what she thinks — to which it would probably be hard for him to admit.

When Sally made a surprise visit to the office to visit her father and had to be dealt with by Lou Avery, Avery took it out on Dawn, demanding that she be reassigned. And as he demanded that Joan reassign Dawn, he said — right in front of her — that he knows Dawn can't be fired. Dawn knew what he meant, and quite reasonably, she took offense to the implication that she gets special treatment, particularly special positive treatment.

Meanwhile, Peggy, who continues to humiliate herself over Ted and flounder in Don's absence, mistook the roses Shirley had received from her fiance for ones meant for Peggy herself. Shirley, not wanting to make waves and counseled by Dawn to drop it, let her boss steal her Valentine's Day flowers. Was Peggy grateful? Certainly not. When Peggy found out the mistake she'd made, she took out her embarrassment on Shirley and — you guessed it — went to Joan and demanded a different secretary. So after beginning the day with bosses who probably didn't deserve them, Dawn and Shirley both found themselves pushed out of their gigs for reasons primarily related to their bosses' huge egos.

Joan responded by moving Dawn to reception, but right on cue, Bert Cooper made it clear to her that he was not ready for "colored people" to "advance" as far as the face of the agency. So now Joan had both Dawn and Shirley to reassign, and she had had it. She was saved when Jim Cutler, a character who's remained a bit obtuse thus far, suggested that she, Joan, needed to drop her dual responsibilities as a partner/account "man" and head of personnel and move up — move on up? — to a higher floor. He told her to find someone to take over personnel juggling, and to make it someone who didn't mind not being liked.

Having just seen Dawn barely restrain herself from well and truly giving it to Lou Avery, Joan gave Dawn her old job and gave Lou — Lou, of the obnoxious "can't be fired" remark — Shirley.

On the one hand, this was a story of the good people getting the upper hand over the bad ones, in that Dawn grinned to herself as she sat in Joan's office, promoted in part as a result of her obviously thick skin and even temper. Shirley got away from the rudeness that Peggy directed at her and got a new assignment — and got to keep her flowers.

On the other, the show went to some pains to show a conversation between Dawn and Shirley early in the episode that suggested they are friends, but they are also allies of a sort whether they want to be or not, as they are treated as interchangeable at work. (Wryly, Dawn calls Shirley "Dawn," and Shirley calls Dawn "Shirley.") They support each other, they give each other advice, they gripe to each other — they are office pals in the way everyone needs office pals.

Dawn is Shirley's friend, but it took Joan to fix her problem. Shirley is Dawn's friend, but ... same thing. And while Lou didn't get away with his play to get out of having a black secretary, this puts Shirley in the position of working for a boss who thinks she, too, can't be fired. How is she going to fare working for a man to whom she was assigned as a sort of sweet revenge?

These women, as smart as they are, don't have the pull to do anything about Lou's hostility or Bert's concern for appearances. And, in fact, neither does Joan. Dawn still isn't sitting at reception. She got the job Joan was sick of doing, while Joan moves up. Peggy got to grievously mistreat Shirley, and won't need to make it right the way she would need to if she'd mistreated someone with more status in the office.

What they're telling here is in part a story of the complicated way race and gender are interacting for these women. Joan and Peggy would undoubtedly never dream of saying that they're relieved to have somebody in the office with less status than they have in the eyes of somebody like Bert Cooper, but ... they probably are. Joan earned her partnership in part by suffering the gruesome effects of the other partners' lack of respect for her. She knows what it's like to be in a workplace where people treat you as less-than. She's known for years. She's smarter than most of the men who have outranked her; she was key to the creation of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce in the first place. Now, even inside the office with the people she works with directly, she gets to be privileged.

Think about Peggy early in the show's history. Peggy didn't outrank anybody. Peggy was on the bottom of the totem pole. But now, as she finds herself rising through the ranks, does she remember what it was like to have someone's rage vented on you? She doesn't seem to. Does she take her rage out on the people who are causing it, particularly Lou? She does not. She takes it out on her secretary, much the way Don used to take his rages out on her, much the way he treated her as automatically less deserving of respect than he was, as if he was doing her a favor every time he didn't yell at her.

(Perhaps that was what the money was for.)

While there's a long way to go yet in fleshing out these characters and these stories, Dawn's promotion and the complexities of Joan and Peggy's interactions with Dawn and Shirley were a big step forward for Mad Men beginning to take the kind of interest in the way flawed people dealt with race — and what that meant for the people they dealt with poorly — that it has with gender from the start.

Don is not in charge right now; Don is not running the show. Don reveals himself exclusively to the two women he should most easily outrank: his secretary and his daughter. Right now, women are driving the story, all tied to each other not just through story but through imagery — over and over, we saw women carrying flowers.

And where's Don? Well, Don is just trying to get his bearings. It's a welcome change.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has spent a record 14 years in office vanquishing nearly all who dared confront him: political rivals, moms against mandatory vaccines for sixth graders, a coyote in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But with eight months left on the job and a decision to make about the 2016 presidential race, the long-serving governor known for his Texas swagger is now the focus of a grand jury investigation that could cause more difficulty than any adversary has.

What should have been a political victory lap for Perry could now wind up in a final tussle that has implications for his political future.

"Gov. Perry is used to being challenged every step of the way in almost every issue. In that sense, this is not significantly different," said Ray Sullivan, Perry's onetime chief of staff and a former spokesman. "This just comes with the territory."

A judge seated a grand jury in Austin last week to consider whether Perry, who is weighing another run for the White House, abused his power when he carried out a threat to veto $7.5 million in state funding for public corruption prosecutors last summer.

Aides to Perry say he legally exercised his veto power. Others say Perry was abusing his state office and is finally getting his comeuppance.

The state Public Integrity Unit operates under Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, a Democrat who has been the subject of Republican grumbling that the office investigates through a partisan lens. Lehmberg, who took office in 2009, was convicted of drunken-driving last year and filmed in a jailhouse video berating officers following her arrest.

Perry called on Lehmberg to resign and torpedoed the funding when she didn't.

Craig McDonald, whose public watchdog group filed a complaint that a Texas judge took seriously enough to hire a special prosecutor, said the veto embodied a brash governor who's gotten too accustomed to dictating to others.

"He threatened her in broad daylight just like it was high noon," said McDonald, the executive director of Texans for Public Justice. "I think it's indicative of perhaps someone in the office a little too long."

Lehmberg, who served about half of a 45-day jail sentence, has called Perry's attempts to remove her partisan. The public corruption unit, which prosecuted former Republican U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay in 2010 on charges of laundering campaign funds, now runs on a smaller budget with local taxpayer funds and a scaled-back staff.

Special Prosecutor Michael McCrum has said he has specific concerns about the governor's conduct but refused to elaborate. Perry's office has hired a high-profile defense attorney, David Botsford of Austin, who is being paid $450 hourly and with public funds.

The grand jury is impaneled for three months. In the original complaint, McDonald accused Perry of breaking laws related to coercion of a public servant and abuse of official capacity.

Perry never lost an election until his run for the Republican presidential nomination flamed out in 2012. If he makes another bid upon leaving office in January, he's positioned to boast of an even more robust Texas economy and to project a slightly toned down image: he now wears a pair of thick-framed glasses and seldom slides on his cowboy boots anymore.

But the grand jury probe could draw attention back to more contentious issues, even if Perry is not indicted. And if the panel does pursue charges, "that would be very, very hard to overcome, particularly because voters already have a perception of him in their mind, and right now he's been busy cleaning that perception up," said Ford O'Connell, a Republican strategist in Washington. "It would put him on life support as a presidential candidate."

A Texas governor hasn't been indicted since 1917. Democrat James E. Ferguson was eventually convicted on 10 charges, impeached and removed from office for vetoing funding for the University of Texas after objecting to some faculty members.

Some legal experts see the allegations against Perry as shaky.

"If the governor were to pressure someone to not prosecute someone, that would be some violation of some clear legal duty. Pressuring them to quit? That's a little less clear," said David Kwok, a law professor at the University of Houston.

For more than 40 minutes as their ship foundered last Wednesday, crew members of the South Korean ferry Sewol spoke with local maritime traffic services about a possible rescue. The conversation centered on getting help to the ship and on getting its passengers off the ferry, according to a transcript released Sunday.

The radio transcript gives harrowing new detail to a tragedy that has left about 240 people still missing. Chief among the revelations is that early in its plight, the vessel seems to have listed too far to one side to deploy life boats – or to allow passengers to move.

The transcript also suggests the ship's crew had trouble communicating with the passengers and couldn't verify conditions on board, as the ship titled at more than 50 degrees.

The ferry had 476 people aboard, many of them high school students who were traveling to visit a resort island. As of Sunday afternoon in the U.S., the official death toll stood at 58; many expect it go far higher. Divers are working to recover bodies from the wreck.

Two topics – the promise of help from other ships, and the status of the ferry's passengers – dominate the radio transcript South Korea's coast guard released Sunday. The distress call took place between the Sewol and Jindo Island's Vessel Traffic Services Center; other ships in the area are also heard from.

Jindo is a large island off of South Korea's southwest coast where hundreds of passengers' relatives have gathered to await word of loved ones who were on the ferry.

The transcript documents communications between the authorities and unidentified crew members, including an early distress call the ferry had placed to a Vessel Traffic Service center in Jeju, its destination.

That initial call took place at 8:55 a.m. In it, a crewmember says, "Please notify the coast guard. Our ship is in danger. The ship is rolling right now," according to CNN.

From CNN:

"'The ship rolled over a lot right now. Cannot move. Please come quickly,' the person says one minute later.

"At one point Jeju advises the crew to get people into life vests.

"'It is hard for people to move,' Sewol replies."

Twice Juno Schaser asked for a raise. Twice she was turned down, she says. If her group of female friends is any indication, it's a common experience.

" 'At least they'll respect you for trying,' " a friend told Schaser, a 23-year-old museum publicist.

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