Brace yourself. Caitlin Flanagan has an exceedingly perceptive and well-done essay in the Atlantic! Sure, there is a psychologically deep-seated and somewhat deranged whiff of/riff on gender essentialism (boys like Hunter Thompson and girls like Joan Didion!), but hey, that's at least a little true. For one thing, she draws well the obvious connections that Didion and John Gregory Dunne were the most extreme caricatures of their generation of parents (in short: rather terrible), the parents who made their childrens' generation into helicoptering nightmares.

Every screenwriter in Hollywood's mind exploded last night, with the news that the CIA recruited a doctor in Pakistan to launch a fake hepatitis vaccination program in order to veryyyy slowly gain access to the bin Laden compound so as to collect DNA. There's a hot role there for, I dunno, Sheetal Sheth or Mindy Kaling or someone, because: A nurse known as Bakhto, whose full name is Mukhtar Bibi, managed to gain entry to the Bin Laden compound to administer the vaccines. According to several sources, the doctor, who waited outside, told her to take in a handbag that was fitted with an electronic device.

Now the [...]

The single greatest real estate transaction failure came to pass overnight, with Tishman Speyer actually giving up crazy purchase Stuyvesant Town instead of filing for bankruptcy. Now, the property was entirely a lended and borrowed deal, though everyone talks "Speyer this" and "Speyer that." Of the $5.4 billion raised, Tishman Speyer only put up $112 million, and for some reason I don't understand, there was also $56 million as well from Mr. Jerry Speyer and his goodlookin' son. (Why bother? They clearly weren't good for much more.) Their pals in the real estate wing at BlackRock, the immense investment management services, scraped together $3 billion in secured debt and [...]