Thursday night, Netanyahu offered Clinton “a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy for settlements.”

Op: Moment of truth for American Jews: For the good of both countries, AIPAC has to make it clear that Netanyahu overstepped a line.

Trailer for Gaza Surf Club’s God Went Surfing With the Devil.

Remnick: Israel has no Jewish future without a viable contiguous Palestinian state; we need Netanyahu 2.0.

Temporary marriage in Iran: prostitution promoted by clerics, or a way to flout Islamic law?

Solidarity between D.C. and Moscow about Iran might be considered complete, save for one tiny snafu.

How to build a nuclear weapon.

Pope’s former deputy takes the fall after psychiatrist says the archdiocese was repeatedly warned about abuse.

Swimming with dolphins found to be traumatizing (for dolphins).

Op: Yesterday was the N.C.A.A.’s greatest opening day in history, and even Obama is scratching his head.

Pavement reunion as signifier of the moment when baby boomers lost control of American culture.

Talent and business depart for China, where political will—not just talk—supports clean-energy jobs.

Infographic: Chile’s and Haiti’s earthquakes compared.

For better texting etiquette, treat reaching for your phone like going to the bathroom.

Books in the age of the iPad mean saying good riddance to disposable books.

Snail-mail Google and a card-catalog web: a fin-de-siècle Belgian information scientist’s proto-internet.

Paris Métro map rendered as a star chart.

Video: Robot spends a day in Paris; anime explains British stereotypes.

Also: Video-game composer Hirokazu Tanaka enlists other Hirokazu Tanakas to sing about being Hirokazu Tanaka.

E.U.’s new foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton, visits Gaza.

Op: The only way Israeli liberals can mount an offensive is if America keeps applying heat.

All but one of the missionary-taken Haitian children returned to their parents.

Family behind “David After Dentist” video turns internet fame into college payments.

Remarkable pictures of the 2010 Winter Paralympics.

See also: Photographs of “minor places” in Japan; collection of 366 hand-painted plexiglass petri dishes.

Samples from a “little book of oracles” from a fourth-century-B.C. Egyptian magician.

The Governor of the Ecole Militaire will use six aides to take his place in performing the conjugal service. Reading the blogs of 18th-century France.

Part of the exodus, Paul Ford quits Harper’s and explains why to Choire Sicha.

Choire Sicha’s 50 questions you probably won’t see on the census.

Will you be punished for ignoring the census? Probably not—except by your conscience.

Video: “I Feel Better” by Hot Chip.

Op: How many U.S. officials will be branded anti-Semites before AIPAC and Lieberman realize that Netanyahu screwed up?

Wyoming’s hawkish senator Alan Simpson is back, but Republicans can’t love him in the Tea Party era.

Big banks better than small banks about paying off bailout funds.

Scotland aims to be the “Saudi Arabia of marine energy” with tide and wave power.

Chart: A century of America’s eating habits, 1909-2009.

Object large enough to be visible to the naked eye put into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Amazon plays hardball with Apple and publishers.

Slideshow: Classic publishing print ads.

Of the nearly 1,000 foreign-language films released in the U.S. since 1980, only 22 have grossed more than $10 million.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton, the hitmaker; story about the Butthole Surfers in which Chilton plays a part.

Community of poets lives inside the user-comment sections of New York Times articles.

Today’s long read: Wyatt Mason profile of David Simon and Treme.

Fizzy anticipation over Obama’s visit to Indonesia.

Op: Obama’s education reform is a compromise designed to placate school administrators and teacher unions.

Six suicides in six months at Cornell.

Op: College basketball is a sleazy game; Kentucky’s Calipari is the sleaziest.

The science of free-throw shooting.

David Byrne on collaboration, with pictures of his home studio.

Within a generation, the world’s population will almost certainly be stable.

Photos from a trip across the Atlantic on the Queen Mary 2; photos from a trip around Astoria with Sam Lipsyte.

World’s first skyscraper with built-in wind turbines erected in London.

Story of an accused Jamaican gang boss that the U.S. would like extradited, and Jamaica is slow to part with.

Another reason to celebrate the Irish: “They saved the books of the Western world.”

In the literature on the hold-up problem, vertical integration is one proposed solution. Economics in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Day jobs held by famous writers.

Periodic table of science-fiction film and television.

Op: The American demands are reasonable and fair; stagnation in the diplomatic process is a threat Israel can by no means afford.

Rabbis to perform the Passover story on Twitter.

Lions, subsurface fist-fights, and fiancés: Gaza’s tunnel economy.

Video: The life of a Palestinian teenager working in the tunnels.

European mummies found in China.

Chart: Where U.S. foreign aid goes.

Pakistan’s Sialkot produces up to 60 million soccer balls a year without child labor; children make bricks instead.

“Lifestyle audits” sought for South Africa leaders found living high on the corruption hog.

Lockerbie bomber doing much better now, after being released from Scottish prison with only three months to live.

Thai protesters spill blood.

Andrew Young responds to the Rielle Hunter interview, with talk of other women, more sex tapes.

We’re a 12-pack nation that won’t let anybody have a joint. Charles Bowden explains what’s happening in Ciudad Juárez.

Construction will continue in Jerusalem as this has been the case over the past 42 years.

Op: Obama, please tone down the rhetoric; Netanyahu, cancel the building in Ramat Shlomo.

Kim Jong-un is North Korea’s new leader, and anyone else with the name “Jong-un” has been instructed to change it.

“I got him, I got him” translates remarkably well from Arabic, as does “Shoot the motherfucker!”

Instapaper for the commute: Toobin’s profile of Justice Stevens.

Karl Rove’s new book uses a font developed in France.

France’s SNCF says more than 100 died in a train explosion—a training exercise gone awry.

ABE is survived by a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles. A Times obituary for an adventuring robot.

Sooner or later, helium will be more precious than gold, and it’s abundant in America.

Prisoners use cell phones to run gangs and order killings, but jamming cell phones in prisons is illegal.

“Man With Immense Pink Genitalia Sculpture Gently Rebuffed at Museum.”

Development of new racial slurs not keeping pace with mixed-race births.

Videos: PS22 Chorus does Phoenix’s “Lisztomania”; trailer for Treme.

Washington hopes Obama has a strategy for handling Netanyahu; AIPAC allies urge drawdown.

Hitchens: Let’s not forget that Ratzinger made it a crime to report child rape.

Op: China will become the new Middle East, though Beijing appears not yet ready or willing to be a world leader.

Japan has poked USSR. World War II as enacted on Facebook.

Instapaper for the commute: Life of a lady king in Ghana. (See also: That’s what Bea said.)

New white-collar career path: interim executive.

Dick Armey’s history of socialism a tad flawed; Clarence Thomas’s wife starts a tea-party nonprofit (interview).

What you’re really paying for when you buy $300 jeans: L.A. drama.

Roald Dahl was a neurology writer, and even helped design a shunt valve.

You’re cutting off noses now? Set visit for new video by Method Man, Raekwon, and Ghostface Killah.

Video: Piano improvisation on ChatRoulette.

Monuments repaired with Lego.

Op: Because digital networks measure our place, we know exactly who the powerful people are; it’s like high-school, except on a massive scale.

Gunmen believed to be linked to Mexican cartels kill a U.S. consulate worker and her husband.

Ten things to know about Burkina Faso (because why not?).

Op: I am one of those people that believe brands belong to companies; countries have reputations.

Every media company wishes it were the Discovery Channel: lean, mean, and master of its own assets.

One in 10 British children think the Queen invented the telephone, and other adorable statistics.

Op: Replacing Grant with Reagan on the $50 bill would deepen our Civil War/Reconstruction amnesia.

On Chatroulette: Endless horizons of sameness, with the occasional rock to trip you up.

TMN’s Giles Turnbull asks the Chatroulette masses how one knows if one is sexy or not.

Q&A with Chatroulette’s founder.

Since children don’t live in worlds of Newtonian physics, bedtime is that much larger and scary.

Wonderful illustrations from Ernst Haeckel’s 1898 Kunst-Formen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature).

Rooms recreated on ceilings.

Video: Original keyboard-cat creator releases new keyboard-cat video.

Georgia panics after fake TV newscast says the Russians are coming.

Brief profile of world’s biggest bond investor: backs Obama, stiff on Greece.

Guide to Dodd’s financial overhaul bill to finally debut this week.

In a 43-minute phone call, Clinton tells Netanyahu of Obama’s anger.

AIPAC condemns Obama’s ire and Clinton’s 43 minutes, urging the White House to resume being disappointed in private.

Op: No lobby’s more persuasaive than the U.S. military, a message Israel/AIPAC should heed.

Sullivan: Once again, the Catholic Church sees itself as the real victim.

The current Dalai Lama is a professed tickler, often using it as a handshake substitute.

British couple face jail time in Dubai after a child sees them kissing in public.

How Dubai broke down the Bustan Rotana hotel assassination.

Slideshow: Hadrian’s Wall illuminated.

Secret items served by chain restaurants.

Complete analysis of hidden meaning in Lady Gaga’s “Telephone.”

R.I.P. Peter Graves; “request vector, over.”

Op: I will never forgive the senile Soviet power for not allowing a single Western mega-rock-group into Moscow in the ’70s.

New law allows Berlusconi to evade corruption charges again.

Must-read: José Saramago’s incredible, vicious “The Berlusconi Thing.”

Victim of financial crisis lives off hotel points.

Desirée Rogers’s side of the story comes out—victim of one lapse, and perhaps too much love of the limelight.

Instapaper for Saturday: Bruni profiles how Katie Lee came about.

Fat: The sixth sense.

Anatomy of two penpals’ mathematical friendship (or try the audio version).

Hate mail from third graders about Pluto’s planetary demotion.

Samples of the Dead’s vast archive—“largely the product of happenstance, not design,” sniffs the Times—turn up at the N.Y. Historical Society.

Homemade 12x CD-R compilation of punk bands fronted by female vocalists from 1977 to 1989.

Lucky for Bobby I earned a first aid merit badge in the Boy Scouts. Confessions of a Las Vegas call bear.

New underwear made from banana fibers; also incredible: Germany’s hanging railway.

Citizen jetpack will soon be for sale, only $86,000.

I really do think the presence of Sarah Palin made it nearly impossible for him to be elected. For as many times as McCain tried to scare voters by quoting Biden’s “make no mistake, Obama will be tested…” line, any sober voter from either party had to, in a quiet moment, imagine the world on the day Sarah Palin was forced into service as president. What would it be like if Russia invaded its neighbors with Sarah Palin as president? How many points would the Dow Jones lose on the day Sarah Palin was being sworn in?

Someone like Mitt Romney, who is perceived as having economic experience based on the fact that he has accumulated a lot of money, probably would have helped McCain’s standing in the current crisis. Would it have been enough to win? I have no idea.

This election (and this economy) has opened up some pretty serious fissures in the Republican party. There are the intellectual elites, and the fiscal conservatives, the libertarians, and the neo-cons, the good old boys, and the Plumber Joes. For a variety of reasons, none of them could really get behind this ticket. I suspect now they are going to finger point and grumble and then pull out the Newt Gingrich playbook for inspiration.

Obama is going to have a honeymoon, of course. He’s lucky to have been elected this year, as the economy is scraping bottom, instead of last year when the Dow was just coming off its all-time high. I’ve said it before, the more people see of Obama, the more they like him. That’s going to feed his numbers for the next year or two, I suspect.

This is all to say that if your name is Nancy Pelosi and you are a congresswoman from California, dress for battle. Under siege, the rag-tag, fractured Republicans need a common enemy and Nancy Pelosi is looking like the most likely cylon. We are about to see an escalation of the culture wars and the Republican’s newest axis of evil is going to run from her office to Harry Reid’s.

Three states had initiatives on the ballot to ban gay marriage, and a fourth, Arkansas, had a remarkable (and I suspect ultimately unconstitutional) initiative barring gay couples from adopting children. Unless they find some uncounted votes in California, all four of those initiatives will pass, even in states where Obama won. Look for 20 states to have similar initiatives in 2010.

Interestingly, the three state initiatives seeking to limit or ban abortion all look like they will fail. I suspect abortion will actually take a back seat as an issue in the next couple years. Despite Kathryn Jean’s hysterics, Obama is hardly a radical. He’s a center-left pragmatist and that’s especially true on abortion. Catholics, who were a reliable Democratic voting bloc before Roe v. Wade, voted more than 53% for Obama. Part of it might have been this from Obama in the last debate:

There surely is some common ground when both those who believe in choice and those who are opposed to abortion can come together and say we should try to prevent unintended pregnancies by providing appropriate education to our youth, communicating that sexuality is sacred and that they should not be engaged in cavalier activity, and providing options for adoption, and helping single mothers if they want to choose to keep the baby.

Those are all things that we put in the Democratic platform for the first time this year, and I think that’s where we can find some common ground, because nobody’s pro-abortion. I think it’s always a tragic situation.

That’s where the country is on abortion—keep it legal, but keep it rare—and that’s where Obama is. He understands that abortions peaked during the Reagan and Bush administrations and decreased under Bill Clinton’s tenure, when social services were more widely available. Couple that with the fact that Obama will likely appoint at least two justices, making the battle at the high court moot, and I think the ranters like Kathryn Jean Lopez, who seem less interested in actually reducing the number of abortions than they are in getting a license to prosecute someone for “infanticide,” are going to be marginalized.

Obama understands the pathological dysfunction that can overcome those with unchecked power. Here in Illinois, Democrats control both houses of the legislature as well as the governor’s mansion and yet the state is mired in gridlock. The house speaker won’t even talk to the unpopular governor while he schemes to have his own daughter replace him in the next election. The next election isn’t soon enough for the lieutenant governor, who tried to organize a constitutional convention largely for the purpose of getting his own boss recalled.

Republicans are going to wait and hope for President Obama and giddy Democrats in Congress to overplay their hand. Clinton did it with health care and the Dems paid dearly in 1994. Obama set the tone well in his speech last night. If the Democrats can remain somber and gracious, Republicans might have to keep fighting themselves for awhile.

Nothing lasts forever, though. That’s the only thing I know for sure.

I know this is supposed to be a time for magnanimity and extending hands across the aisle. John McCain’s speech was classy (though his supporters were classless) and Obama’s speech was sober and serious, rather than joyful, with not a hint of “I told you so,” in the text or the delivery.

Shit, even Karl Rove and Bill Kristol were gracious over Obama’s victory last night, but fuck it, I’ve been spending the morning cruising the conservative blogosphere and enjoying the wailing and gnashing of teeth. My favorite dummy of the right, Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review’s The Corner did not disappoint:

What Freaks Me Out About This Election is how oblivious to facts people have been. Everything about Obama’s judgment and radicalism — whether Sean Hannity or Stanley Kurtz or Andy McCarthy etc. is telling you about it — was essentially deemed irrelevant (including largely by the McCain campaign, save for Palin eventually talking about Ayers). Abortion? Near no one outside a handful of conservatives were talking about his record on infanticide — beyond abortion.

People are in for a rude awakening. And a mature conservative movement, with both an ear and a solid voice, will be needed.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Dummy! If this is the core of a mature conservative movement, I think we’re looking at an easy Obama re-election in 2012.

The margin is both comfortable and close at the same time. Most of the states Obama flipped that padded his EV total - Virginia, Florida, North Carolina - were very tight margins, and in the case of Virginia and North Carolina, Obama ran well behind the democratic senate candidates. If those states had gone the other way, we’d be talking about how Obama won in a relative squeaker.

Which brings to mind the big question I want to ask you and what I’ve been thinking about is whether or not McCain (or another republican) could have won? The concession speech McCain didn’t make me want to throw a brick through me TV. If that guy had shown up with Mike Huckabee or Mitt Romney on his arm would K-Lo be crowing about a future end to infanticide this morning?

All of the sudden, I’m exhausted.

I’m sure tomorrow we’ll talk more about what happened, why, and how we can get our hands on that hologram technology, but for now, I’m signing off so I can enjoy this.

Go Franken.

Virginia goes for Obama, which means two of the four states I’ve lived in (Illinois, Virginia) go blue.

Here comes the final call from Wolff.

And that’s it, the Grant Park crowd goes wild.

President Obama!

They’ll be dining on bull in Kogelo.

Anderson Cooper watching his journalistic credibility go the way of the Apple Newton.

Bennett just took exception to the implication that the Republican Party is now made up exclusively of “old, white, confederate men,” but thus far, the results pretty much show it to be a truism.

Breaking: Will.I.Am hologram from grant park. He has a purple aura around his entire body.

Do you think they’ll get Obama for a holographic in-studio interview?

Second most useless expensive television graphic ever.

Plus, Al Franken’s floating point head!

Forget about Sean Hannity, Edward Tufte just busted a nut.

UPDATE: Speaking of Tufte, here’s an electoral map from two years ago speculating about a possible McCain-Obama matchup in this election.