TNR film critic Stanley Kauffmann expresses regret about some of his earlier pieces of criticism. Try to guess what this refers to: “I’ve been more embarassed about that privately than anything else I’ve ever written…”.

The exhibition of Picasso’s late work at the Gagosian Gallery this spring was a phenomenon. Day after day, Gagosian’s huge space on West 21st Street attracted a remarkably heterogeneous public, a mix of artists, art students, Brooklyn hipsters, well-heeled professionals, and European and Asian tourists, gathered together in a way I do not recall seeing before, certainly not in Chelsea. People did not just come and look. They stayed and talked about the quickening, raucous power of the paintings and prints that Picasso was making in his late eighties and early nineties. Anything by Picasso is of course a draw, and it helped that John Richardson had organized the exhibition. He knew Picasso in his later years, and the Gagosian show, while it surely had its commercial motivations, was given an intellectual lift by Richardson, whose magnificent biography of Picasso, of which three volumes have appeared, is written in a prose as elegant, easy, and exact as any being produced today.

It seems clear that Barack Obama doesn’t consider Darfur a priority. Then again, with so many domestic and foreign policy crises looming, one might ask: Why should he care? Two million people in Darfur still live in camps, but the situation is hardly what it was during the worst days of the genocide, from 2003 to 2005, when the Janjaweed were murdering Darfuris at a rapid pace. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking on Iran’s nuclear program, Pakistan is unraveling, the climate is reaching the point of no return, and the economic situation is dire. Given those crying priorities, why should Darfur rate anywhere near the top of Obama’s to-do list?

Here’s one reason: because Obama needs some clear-cut foreign-policy victories–and his odds of getting such a victory in Darfur (by negotiating a peace deal that guarantees the safety of Darfuris and allows the displaced among them to begin returning home) are better than his odds in so many other places. Yes, that sounds strange. Isn’t Darfur an intractable headache that has defied the good intentions of negotiators and politicians for years? Sort of. But next to the other international items Obama is taking on–Afghanistan, Iraq, North Korea, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to name a few–Darfur might well be a comparatively easy problem to solve.

The gender gap in math scores, particularly at the high end of the distribution, has been well documented and debated, with some suggesting that genetics might be a big reason for the differences we see.

Although some recent research has shown that the average girl and boy in the U.S. perform similarly, when you move away from the center, a surprisingly large gap appears. This chart from a new NBER paper by Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson at MIT shows how the percentage of women getting high scores on the SAT and the AMC (a math competition held at about 3,000 high schools annually around the country) declines sharply with scores:

Quiet Chaos — IFC Films

Washington in the early days of a new administration is a didactic, lesson-drawing place, but even so, it has been striking to see how quickly the commentary on the death of Robert McNamara, defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and architect of the Vietnam war, has turned to abstraction–as if it was not one exceptionally smart man being buried, but a certain kind of smarts itself. “What happened … to Robert McNamara teaches a lesson to all those who talk of governments of all the talents,” editorialized The Times of London. “Vietnam shattered the rationalist’s faith,” concluded David Ignatius in The Washington Post.

While the attention of politicians, pundits, and the people is focused on the increasingly bitter debate over health insurance reform, economic developments will have a more profound effect on the well-being of the nation and the fortunes of the Obama administration. Only an economy that provides a steady stream of new jobs and raises personal income can yield enough revenue to restore public confidence and finance the government we need.

As the economy struggles to stabilize, we find ourselves in a deep hole–even deeper than we knew. For the first time since the Great Depression, Floyd Norris reports that we have endured a decade with no private sector employment growth. In July 1999, there were 109 million Americans with jobs in the private sector; the comparable figure for July 2009 was … 109 million. By contrast, at the depth of the 1981-82 recession, private sector job creation over the previous decade still averaged about 1.5 percent per year. Until the current downturn, Norris finds, the long-term annual growth rate for private sector jobs had not gone below 1 percent for nearly half a century.

Emile Zola never wrote a vampire flick, but if he had, we can assume it would have resembled Park Chan-wook’s Thirst. This is in part because the Korean writer-director’s film is based (very loosely) on an early Zola novel, Therese Raquin, and is, to the best of my knowledge, the only vampire movie to bear this distinction. But there are other echoes as well. Zola examined the darker side of family life: violence, greed, mental illness, alcoholism, and other “accidents” of the “nerves and blood.” The vision Park has laid out in films such as Oldboy and Lady Vengeance has a still harsher, exaggerated brutality, as if by pushing the boundaries of savage metaphor he can shed light on the quieter tragedies of everyday life. Zola had his naturalism; Park, his super-naturalism.

China, it’s rapidly becoming clear, has a trash problem. As the country has gotten wealthier, it’s become the world’s largest producer of household garbage. Packaging, old electronics, newspaper, bottles, plain old junk—all of it’s piling up and there’s increasingly no place to dump it. As Keith Bradsher reported in The New York Times yesterday, “Beijing officials warned in June that all of the city’s landfills would run out of space within five years.”

Simon Johnson, professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, and co-founder of BaselineScenario.com, argues that if Obama does not sell his plan to overhaul financial regulations to the public, all of our futures will be at risk. Watch the video here.