Happy Easter morning! The Los Angeles Times leads off with an investigation of a late-1990s program meant to provide homes for low income families, which the paper deems a failure after nonexistent oversight allowed the formerly foreclosed-upon houses to change hands repeatedly, enriching speculators rather than investing in communities. The Washington Post also leads local, with a look at how the redeveloped Nationals baseball stadium has so far failed to revitalize the surrounding neighborhood; anticipated shopping and residential development remains conspicuously absent as another season opens. The New York Times leads with a meet-and-greet of banking's bright youngish things who have found careers outside the industry's old titans, starting up their own firms and reshaping Wall Street in the process.

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It's almost an article of faith among Supreme Court watchers that President Obama will fill the bench's next vacancy—and perhaps the one after that, too—with a woman. The current court's sole female member, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, has said she is 'lonely' there, and even if she's not the next to step aside and another women joins her, that's still just two out of nine. Americans seem quite certain that isn't enough. Former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, on learning in 2005 that John Roberts would take her place, declared him 'good in every way, except he's not a woman.' Americans concur. In a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll taken just before Roberts was appointed, 80 percent of respondents said it was a good idea to replace O'Connor with a woman, and 13 percent said it was 'essential.' And with women claiming a large share of responsibility for Obama's victory over John McCain, the demand for a more gender-balanced court is stronger than ever.

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At a conference last week on the panic of 2008, a group of distinguished academics tried to puzzle out the meaning of the tumultuous events of the past year. Sitting in the Moot Court Room at the George Washington University Law School, I listened to people who possess more degrees than me struggle mightily to shoehorn the bewildering facts into the accepted model and theories that are supposed to govern our world. Efficient markets? Rational actors? Regulatory capture?

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I got out a box of tissues and let the finale take me away. The next morning, I woke up to the hollowed-out comfort that comes after a good cry. With the distance of a few more days, I grant that this season didn't have the impact, heft, or grittiness of the first one. And I've started picking apart the logic of this last episode. But in the moment, it all rolled over me in a wave of satisfying television. The ending worked (and endings are the hardest part to get right), because it held in tension resolution and open-ended possibility. No one working on the show knew whether FNL would be renewed or canceled; maybe behind-the-scenes uncertainty is a recipe for good TV.

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The Los Angeles Times leads news of the suicide bomber who killed eight (including five U.S. soldiers) and injured 60 in Mosul yesterday in a grim reminder of the continuing tensions in Iraq. The New York Times leads an article forecasting a potential 'showdown' between the banking industry and the government as they tussle over the next stage of the financial bailout. The Washington Post leads a piece on the administration's struggle to assess the extent of the threat posed to the U.S. by Somali extremists with purported ties to al Qaeda. Al-Shabab, the nationalist group in question, is unaffiliated with the Somali pirates recently in the news for assaulting an American merchant ship. The Wall Street Journal tops its world-wide newsbox with word that the American sea captain behing held hostage by those pirates failed in a swim-away escape attempt. (In another, separate Somali pirate incident, a hostage was killed when the French navy attempted to recapture a hijacked yacht.)

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To help you keep up with the debates in and about Washington, Slate offers this guide to the news of the week. Here are a few arguments on some key issues.

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After Somali pirates hijacked a U.S. cargo ship Wednesday and took its captain hostage, the U.S. Navy called in an FBI negotiator. The Navy recaptured the ship, but the standoff continues. What, exactly, does a hostage negotiator do?

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Please take a minute out of whatever you're doing to look at this bar graph:

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PITTSBURGH—On Saturday, hours after Richard Poplawski is alleged to have gunned down three police officers called to evict him from his mother's house, experts on extremism began trying to unravel his mind. Getting into his head was surprisingly easy, thanks to the Web. Understanding what they found there was not.

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Obama remains coy about recent signs of economic recovery and sends Detroit a major order for more government vehicles.

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Rolling Stone, April 16Ethan Hawke profiles Kris Kristofferson. The Grammy-winning singer/songwriter, actor, political activist, Rhodes scholar, and former U.S. Army captain is, at his core, 'a poet who sometimes sings and acts extremely well.' Kristofferson's acting career turned after he starred in the enormous failure Heaven's Gate in 1980. But he has faced drastic highs and lows throughout his adult life, including two failed marriages and alcohol abuse. 'One of the remarkable things about Kris is that he lived so fast, burned so bright, crashed so hard, and survived.' … An article details the challenges ahead for Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in combating 'the pervasive scandals and cronyism at the federal agency charged with managing one-fifth of America's land.' Among other things, 'he pledges a thorough review of Interior's royalty policies—for both onshore and offshore drilling,' after billions of dollars went uncollected under President Bush.

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The irresistibly titled Anvil!: The Story of Anvil (Abramorama) is living proof that This Is Spinal Tap is the Andy Warhol of rock documentaries, a movie so hugely influential that no subsequent nonfiction film about rock 'n' roll can avoid quoting it and even reality itself sometimes seems to be in its debt. Anvil!, the story of a Canadian heavy-metal band that had a brief flash of fame in the early '80s, touring with Whitesnake and Bon Jovi before disappearing into obscurity, is full of nods to Rob Reiner's 1984 mockumentary, from a comeback tour of Japan to a visit to Stonehenge to a shot of an audio engineer's volume dial that goes to 11. And, in a bit of Spinal Tap synchronicity that couldn't have been planned by anyone but God, the given name of Anvil's drummer is Robb (two b's) Reiner.

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Education pays. That's the lesson of study after study on the income effects of going to college and graduate school. In general, you make more money if you get a higher degree. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have written that since 1980, '[t]he increase in the relative earnings of college graduates and those with advanced degrees has been particularly large.'

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Twitter is growing so fast it's sometimes easy to forget that to a lot of people, the concept is completely bizarre. According to comScore, the microblogging site received about 10 million visitors in February—a 700 percent increase over last year. To the initiated, the surge seems justified. Committed Twitterers argue that the 140-character-or-less tweet represents the next great mode of human communication. To vast swaths of the population, though, Twitter is inscrutable: Wait a minute—you want me to keep a perpetual log of my boring life for all the world to see? What if I just spend my free time watching Golden Girls?

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Mid-April each year brings with it blooming azaleas and Jim Nantz's soothing intonations at the Masters golf tournament, which began Thursday morning. In a 2002 article reprinted below, Alex Heard extolled the virtues of watching golf from the splendor of your living room. 'Physically, going to a tournament is a pain. You'll swelter, get sore feet, spend $200 on Cokes, and wait in line forever to enter skanky port-a-wees.' Watching at home, by contrast, is a restorative pleasure. 'On television, you are wherever the action is, and when the action isn't—which can be often—you get to snooze.'

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The food police are closing in on their next target: a soda tax.

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Signs for storefront churches in poor neighborhoods are usually handmade, using recycled materials. The larger, more established churches nearby use expensive, free-standing, factory-made signs with tracks for movable letters, allowing for updated messages about next Sunday's sermon, allusions to important issues of the day, or announcements of weddings and celebrations.

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In the April 8 'Faith-Based,' Michael Lukas misidentified the Egyptian sun god Aton as Akhenaton.

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A summary of what's in the major publications.

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The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times lead with a look at a number of indicators that could signal the economy may be starting to turn around. No one is trying to suggest that the pain is anywhere near over, but there's at least some hope that some markets may have reached bottom. Good news from the financial sector, and not-as-bad-as-expected news from retailers, sent stock markets soaring once again and the Dow Jones industrial average increased 3.14 percent. The New York Times leads with explosive allegations that some of President Robert Mugabe's cronies are abducting and torturing opposition leaders to push them to grant amnesty for past crimes. Impressively, these claims don't come from the opposition but rather from senior members of Zimbabwe's ruling party who talked to a local journalist working for the NYT.

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