THE CITY AND ITS NEW PILLARS
Richard Friedman was installed as the head of National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) at the end of last year. In that capacity, he has considerable say over the design and construction of new buildings and monuments in Washington, D.C. As the Boston Globe puts it, the commission's powers are "sweeping … It has the right to approve or disapprove any proposed building or monument in the District of Columbia, public or private, if the building has an impact on the federal interest, and 'impact' can mean anything from looks to shadows to traffic." In a statement found on the NCPC's Web site," Extending the Legacy: Planning America's Capital for the 21st Century," the commission says they hope to "preserve … the historic character and open space of the Mall and its adjacent ceremonial corridors while accommodating growth and new development." In an interview with the Globe, Friedman outlines his views: "There are already 100 monuments in Washington, and dozens more are proposed. They can't all go on the Mall. If you put too many in one place, you get a memorial ghetto. … I want to site them in less active places, where they can be triggers for new development… I feel as if I've been training all my life for this job. If we're the greatest country, we should have the greatest capital. Washington should be one of the 10 greatest cities in the world. " A bold ambition, but to what extend can (and should) a non-elected federal official hope to carry out such a plan? Is a great city one where citizens do not have their say?

NO REST FOR THE WICKED
Peter Kallinder runs the Christopher Hitchens Web, a site devoted to the work of the British author and journalist. Many of the links currently found at the head of this page relate to Hitchens' two-part Harper's article on Henry Kissinger and why the former secretary of state should be tried as a war criminal. ( Britannica.com has posted an overview of the charges on its Web site.) In the Atlantic Monthly, Hitchens discusses Kissinger with James Fallows. Another of Hitchens' familiar targets is Bill Clinton, who he believes cannot be trusted, and just now, with a pardons imbroglio in full swell, who does? An editorial in today's New York Times, which is almost Hitchens-like in its stridency, says that Clinton "throws our political and legal systems into arrest because he constantly comes up with new ways of skirting the law or misrepresenting the facts that would never have occurred to anyone else in his position." Which is, one imagines, precisely what Hitchens would also say of Henry Kissinger.

ANALYZE THIS
In a letter to the London Review of Books (scroll down), Michael Neve recalls meeting the psychoanalyst and translator of Freud, Alan Tyson, at a dinner at Oxford. "He leant over to me and [said]: 'What I didn't tell that boring fellow is my great secret. My name is an anagram of NO ANALYST.' Part of me seems to remember that later in the evening he also said that this anagram news had come to him in a dream. Which would be even better and (a rare thing) perfectly Freudian. But an ocean of wines and digestifs had been well at work by then and I have probably made that part up, being by that stage—as was my host—at least three finches short of a species."

HANNI-BILL
What do Bill Clinton and Hannibal Lecter have in common? Both are eminent in their respective fields—politics and serial murder; both like to press the flesh, in one way or another; and both are heroes or anti-heroes, depending on your point of view. But the shared ground doesn't stop here. In his review of Ridley Scott's movie version of Thomas Harris' novel, Slate's David Edelstein suggests that "the world of Hannibal has been reduced to the dictum, 'Eat or be eaten,' " which is, of course, not dissimilar to a refrain heard in Washington, D.C.—that one must destroy one's enemies or be destroyed by them. Few politicians have as many enemies as Bill Clinton does, and although one can argue about how effective he was at destroying them, part of the former president's appeal was that at least he managed to elude his pursuers, not unlike Hannibal. In an article about the significance of Clinton's move to Harlem, Adam Mansbach writes about the former president's popularity among black Americans and why the he seeks their support. "Clinton has … come to expect an almost maternal response from the black community—understanding, unequivocal welcome no matter what time of night he shows up soaking on the doorstep, rebuke only in the form of kindly tut-tut headshaking—and thus, like many who are privileged with such love, he has realized he can get away with anything." It remains to be seen whether Clinton's Harlem, unlike Hannibal's Florence, will prove to be a haven beyond the reach of his enemies, many of whom, like the villainous Mason Verger, seem intent on hunting their quarry to the ends of the Earth.

PRIVATE PROFIT, PUBLIC LOSS?
The disagreements between the two genome research teams, Celera and the Human Genome Project, have led various commentators to ask whether biomedical research is better when funded by private money rather than by public funds. An editorial in the Economist says: "The founders of Celera Genomics found a way to profit from the genome. … They did their work faster and in some ways better than their public-sector rivals—who would probably still be plodding towards their goal had they not had the spur of competition. The public researchers complain that Celera drew on public knowledge in order to advance their private goals. So it did—that is what public knowledge is for. However, the genome remains a common heritage. … Celera has no proprietary rights over the human genome per se, just over its version of that genome. In short, Celera's pursuit of profit has been good for science, and for man." Robert Goldberg, a columnist in the National Review, writes: "The fact is, the best science and discovery, as a study by MIT professors Ian Cockburn and Rebecca Henderson shows, combines financial incentives with intellectual ones. Firms that want to develop the best drugs must also invest in the best discovery research and sustain a vibrant scientific community. When Cockburn and Henderson studied the National Institutes of Health (NIH) contribution to private firms they concluded that it was indirect and led to companies making bigger investments in 'in-house basic research' in tandem with public sector supported efforts. Private investment and inquiry are not mutually exclusive, they are inseparable."

OF GODS …
If Mayor Rudolph Giuliani renounced religion, would he be shocked by depictions of a near-naked man nailed to a wooden cross? Maybe not, but more probably yes. It's possible to take God out of the guy, but near impossible to remove the angry guy from a man who, in his crusading moments, often aspires to be the ethics commander in chief of New York. Churches and other places of worship, one imagines, would scurry to the friendly, tolerant terrain of, say, the Garden State. But the mayor is, so he says, a man of faith, and it therefore comes as little surprise that the pope of City Hall has taken exception to a photographer named Renée Cox and her work "Yo Mama's Last Supper" now on show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. According to Michael Kimmelman, one person who would have enjoyed the absurd dispute is Balthus (see below for the painter's obituaries). "Once, at his house in the little mountain village of Rossinière, while looking through a book of paintings from the Louvre, unprompted he suddenly plunged into a soliloquy about America's censorious fixation on his paintings of girls. 'I really don't understand,' he said. He insisted that the work wasn't pornographic, and he was baffled by Americans' inability to grasp the essential difference between eroticism or sexuality and pornography. … 'Advertising is pornographic,' Balthus pointed out, meaning especially the American advertising industry. 'You see a young woman putting on some beauty product who looks like she's having an orgasm.' "

… AND MONSTERS
Maggie O'Kane explains why the war criminal Radovan Karadzic eludes his pursuers. "Karadzic does not have to try too hard to evade Nato soldiers," she writes. "Just 300 troops out of a force of 21,324 are in the area where he is hiding. 'Round here you get the impression that picking up these guys isn't the first priority,' says Lieutenant Andreas Kerl, at the German base near Foca. 'Nobody really mentions him.' " In the New York Review of Books, Aryeh Neier assesses various books that address the question of war crimes and how perpetrators, such as Karadzic, should be put on trial. Toward the end of his article, Neier turns to the brave endeavors of Richard Goldstone, a South African judge who became the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and who has now written a book titled For Humanity. As Neier says, "Goldstone understood that somehow he had to create the impression that the Hague tribunal was succeeding; this was essential if he was to win the cooperation from governments that would make it possible for it to succeed. … His achievement is all the more remarkable for having carried out this assignment in a little more than two years before fulfilling his promise to President Mandela to return to South Africa and serve again on the Constitutional Court."

STREET FIGHTING DAYS
Everyone agrees that German foreign secretary Jospeh Fischer played an instrumental role in his country's student politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the intensity of the German debate about the youthful actions of their political leaders shows no sign of abating. The Guardian reports that a German judge believes the attacks on Fischer have been mounted by his political enemies, but as an article in the {{Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung#2:http://www.faz.com/IN/INtemplates/eFAZ/docmain.asp?rub={B1311FCC-FBFB-11D2-B228-00105A9CAF88}&doc={F4749B6F-04B3-11D5-A3B3-009027BA22E4}}} suggests, this is hardly surprising since Fischer is ambitious, ruthless, and an opportunist who has destroyed the party he claims to lead, namely the Greens. "No other German party has a leading personality who is anywhere near as dominant as Mr. Fischer is within the Greens. In some aspects, this is profoundly ironic. It is by no means obvious why a party with such an anti-authoritarian image should pay homage to a leader who has never made a secret of his determined authoritarianism. Mr. Fischer's personal merit as a fighter in the internal battles of the young party was his opposition to the fundamentalism of the party's left wing. … The 'green' Greens were muzzled, and the whole enterprise paid lip service to a coalition concept that, in reality, had long had its day. In that sense, Mr. Fischer's success was very much the Greens' failure—once in government, their own ideas became largely unrecognizable."

SHOUTS AND FALSE RUMORS
Last Tuesday, The New Yorker launched its Web site. A few days later, Ken Layne, a columnist for the Online Journalism Review, crassly suggested that the appearance of the New York weekly on the Internet is conclusive proof that the medium is moribund. "When historians look back on the Internet Bubble, they'll mark February 2001 as the End of Web Publishing. That's because the Web-wary New Yorker has timed the debut of its hideous online edition to coincide with the total collapse of not just the business, but the very idea, of online journalism as some specific thing." If Layne believes his own work represents the "specific thing" that's about to die, then perhaps the death cannot come too soon. (Sneering and whining are among this medium's worst vices.) Like many Web sites in their infancy, The New Yorker's is a work in progress, and one hopes that the editors will make use of the magazine's substantial and interesting archive. Perhaps because of the fluid contractual terms offered to the magazine's staff writers, some of what appears in the print edition will probably appear elsewhere. For example, one can read Jon Lee Andersen's portrait of the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez at Artisticeyereview.com  as well as at Newyorker.com. In today's New York Times, David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, is asked about his hopes for the site.

FAKING IT Balthasar Klossowski, better known as the painter Balthus, has died at the age of 92. In an appreciation of the artist's work that appeared in the New York Review of Books last year, John Russell (who is also the author of the New York Times' obituary) said: "He had a horror of being written about. When he made his American debut in New York in 1938 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, he said, 'If there is any one thing that I hate more than anything else in the world, it is an exhibition preface.' The problem recurred when Balthus had a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1956-1957. James Thrall Soby was in charge of the catalog. 'But,' Balthus wrote, 'I beg him to leave out all the biographical details that are so much in fashion today. Ancestry, parentage, mode of life, etc.—all that seems to me completely superfluous. Just tell the public that I was born in Paris, and that I am forty-six years old. That should be quite enough.' (As a matter of fact he was going on forty-nine, but he thought that that, too, was nobody's business.)" Self-invention is perhaps the best explanation for Balthus fear of biography. In a Spectator article about Balthus, Frederick Raphael addressed the question of the painter's mythmaking. "Isn't modern art all about making one's name? Balthus made himself a fancy one. Even so smart a critic as Robert Hughes was gulled into reporting him as related to the Romanovs, to be the grand-nephew of Lord Byron (like B., he even lived for a season in the Villa Diodati on Lake Leman), descended from the Polish royal family and—of course—the illegitimate son of Rainer Maria Rilke, who was indeed the fatal lover of 'Baladine', Balthus's beautiful and romantic mother (all good cover-stories check out to some degree)." The Guardian's obituary writer says that despite Balthus' "failing health, he painted every day in his studio. 'I am always eager not to tire the canvas,' he once said. 'So many painters today have found a trick. I have never been able to find one.' Perhaps that was his secret. For obituaries in the Los Angeles Times and the Daily Telegraph, click here and here.