Taking about 8,400 words to arrive at a puzzled shrug, Steve Brill conducts patient readers of this week's New York Times Sunday magazine through the elaborate reckonings of executive pay that have convulsed the seven firms benefiting from the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program. Brill, the former publisher of American Lawyer and able chronicler of the Washington bureaucracy's response to Sept. 11, homes in on the agons of Kenneth Feinberg, the former 9/11 compensation master now tasked by the Treasury Department with the thankless work of serving as TARP's "compensation czar."