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French economist Thomas Piketty became a publishing superstar this year by putting two and two together and concluding: the rich are getting richer.

His bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, uses mountains of data to calculate western wealth over the last two centuries. He says the historical statistics, drawn from many sources, show unrestrained capitalism inevitably leads to immense income inequality.

But on Friday, The Financial Times, a respected British newspaper, said it has reviewed the book's data. And it finds Piketty "got his sums wrong."

Chris Giles, the FT's economics editor in London, writes: "The data underpinning Professor Piketty's 577-page tome, which has dominated best-seller lists in recent weeks, contain a series of errors that skew his findings ... there are transcription errors from the original sources and incorrect formulas. It also appears that some of the data are cherry-picked or constructed without an original source."

And the story quotes Piketty's response. "I have no doubt that my historical data series can be improved and will be improved in the future ... but I would be very surprised if any of the substantive conclusion about the long-run evolution of wealth distributions was much affected by these improvements," Piketty said.

And with that, we launch a thousand PhD dissertations as young economists scramble to sort out who is right about the data's accuracy and import.

The final "X" in the 20th Century Fox logo glows for an extra second as X-Men: Days of Future Past gets started, but what follows is darker than dark — a bleak, dire future in which all of Manhattan is a mutant prison camp. The Sentinels (soldier-robots crafted with shapeshifter mutant DNA, and therefore adaptively lethal) are hunting down the few mutants still on the loose, while Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart) and Magneto (Ian McKellen) are hatching a scheme with Kitty Pryde (Ellen Page) to send Hugh Jackman's Wolverine — or at any rate, his consciousness — back in time to the Nixon years to stop the mutant-war before it starts.

"What's the last thing you remember?" wonders the professor in a whisper at one point, and though he's addressing Wolverine, that's not an idle question where the audience is concerned, at least those of us who've stopped reading comic books.

Kids, who maybe can't memorize state capitals, have no trouble keeping straight the names and powers of dozens of mutants in this series, not to mention the twice-as-many actors who've played them in six pictures across 14 years. Me, not so much, so when I went to see the movie, I took along a 16-year-old, and when I had problems, I'd whisper "who's that?" and she'd whisper "Quicksilver" and I'd be okay.

Quicksilver (Evan Peters here, though the vagaries of studio contracts mean that he'll be played by Godzilla-chaser Aaron Taylor-Johnson in Warner's Avengers 2) is the coolest of this picture's new guys, zipping around so fast in a niftily conceived, enjoyably prankish slow-mo sequence in the Pentagon kitchen that he can taste soup, rearrange guards' limbs, and nudge bullets off their trajectories all in the time it takes to blink.

Everything about him is crystal clear. But X-Men: Days of Future Past is, as that title suggests, deliberately tricky — designed by director Bryan Singer to allow the audience to geek out as comic-book tropes get rejiggered and previous movies sidestepped through time-travel.

It's all but impossible to talk about the plot without spoilers, so I'll just say that everybody's acting up a storm (not to be confused with Halle Berry's briefly seen character, Storm), that someone should've thought of more for Jennifer Lawrence to do, that the special effects, while spectacular, have nothing on Mark Camacho's terrific Nixon impersonation, that the film is awesomely urgent and utterly forgettable all at once, and that it left the 16-year-old I went with bouncing with adrenaline even as she snorted derisively at what she regarded as crazy plot mis-steps.

She has, let me just say, the makings of a fine critic.

Remember your childhood? Seriously, do you really remember, way back to when you were tiny? And if you do, what are those memories shaped by? Chances are, they're influenced not just by what you truly remember, but by old photos and family stories.

And those family photos are often a starting point for a narrative we're either told by older family members or that we construct in our minds. (We've been exploring some of these ideas in our series, Photography and Memory.)

Inspired by this concept, we asked our followers on Instagram to share their "constructed" memories with us. We called it #fakememory, and received some incredibly poignant stories.

Faren Shear, of San Diego, is about 2 years old in the family photo she submitted. She's sitting on her grandmother's lap as her mother smiles down on them.

"We don't look related, because we're not — I'm adopted," Shear says. "So I always think these pictures are funny because I'm this super blonde tall child in a family or short, dark-haired people. "

For Shear, this and every other image of her mother has huge significance.

"My mom died when I was 5, so I actually don't think I saw a picture of my mom until I was maybe 16," she says. "All that stuff just got put away, and my dad got remarried and nobody talked about it, or her, or anything.

"And so all I can do is make up a story. It's like, I have the pieces, but everything else is in my head," she explains.

Part of Shear thinks she remembers this moment in the photo, but in truth, she says she has no memories of her mother that aren't posed and still. For Shear, the images mean the difference between having her mother in her life or not remembering her at all.

The family photo Olivia Howell submitted reminds her of her own mortality. It was taken when she was about 8 months old, the morning before she went into the hospital for open-heart surgery — a life-threatening prospect.

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If the judicial nomination of Michael Boggs gets derailed, at least one of Georgia's senators says it won't unravel a deal the two senators entered with the White House to select seven nominees for the federal bench in Georgia.

"The deal was we agreed on seven nominees for seven judicial appointments and asked for all of them to get a hearing at the same time, and that was the deal," said Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson of Georgia. "Everybody lived up to what they said."

Boggs, a Georgia state judge who's been nominated to fill a district court seat, has drawn strong pushback from Democrats in both chambers of Congress, as well as from the civil rights community. During his tenure in Georgia's House of Representatives more than 10 years ago, Boggs supported keeping the Confederate emblem on the old state flag, called for a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage and voted for legislation to restrict abortion – including one provision to force doctors to publicly disclose how many abortions they perform.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has come out forcefully against Boggs, even saying that he might not allow Boggs a floor vote if his nomination makes it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Then House Democrat John Lewis of Georgia – a civil rights icon – added fuel to the fire this week when he released a written statement saying that Boggs' record is "in direct opposition to everything I have stood for during my career."

Boggs' nomination was the result of an agreement between the White House and Georgia's two Republican senators, Isakson and Saxby Chambliss. Under the "blue slip" tradition, prospective judicial nominees must receive the approval of home state senators before the Senate Judiciary Committee will process the nomination. That custom forces the White House to negotiate with home state senators as to whom it will nominate for the federal bench.

White House spokesperson Eric Schultz says Isakson and Chambliss specifically recommended Boggs.

"In the case of Georgia, we have been trying to fill these judicial vacancies for more than three years, but two of the President's nominees were blocked for nearly 11 months and returned at the end of 2011," said Schultz in an email. "Our choice is clear: do we work with Republican senators to find a compromise or should we leave the seats vacant? Four of these vacancies are judicial emergencies, and we believe it would be grossly irresponsible for the president to leave these seats vacant."

If Boggs, whose confirmation hearing was last week, doesn't make it out of committee – or if Senate leaders deny him a floor vote – Isakson said, as far as he's concerned, he won't object to the advancement of the other six Georgia nominations. The deal did not mandate that all seven nominees be treated as one inseparable package.

"We agreed to sign blue slips on all seven, if they'd agree on all seven to get a hearing. So everybody's getting an equal opportunity to get a vote and that's all we asked for," said Isakson.