Maybe those tweet-happy, trivia-obsessed McMuffins really are letting down the profession and the country, turning Presidential politics into a game show. And since I’m sitting here waiting to find out how the horse race in New Hampshire turns out, rather than doing some research into the historical demonization of African-American political leaders, or whether Mitt Romney’s get-tough approach to China is credible from a game-theoretical perspective, maybe I’m guilty of the same thing. But wait a minute. Over breakfast this morning, I read the front section of the Times, which contains almost four full pages of political coverage, much of it tied to today’s New Hampshire primary. There were reports on how Romney has spent years cultivating local political leaders, on how the campaigns are already blanketing the airwaves in South Carolina, and a particularly interesting story on the relationship between Newt Gingrich and Sheldon Adelson, the Las Vegas casino billionaire and fervent Zionist, who has just donated five million dollars to a Super PAC tied to the Georgian. Sitting down at my desk, I picked up an investigative report from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal that I had printed out. It examined the history of seventy-seven businesses that Bain Capital, Mitt Romney’s old firm, invested in between 1984 and 1999, and revealed that more than one in five of them (twenty-two per cent) had filed for bankruptcy. To my eyes, anyway, these were all examples of serious political journalism: well reported, clearly edited, and soberly presented. And today is nothing special.

This.

Reporting and policing can be high-adrenaline jobs. . But the decade-long trajectory in New York is toward expanded police power. Officers routinely infiltrate groups engaged in lawful dissent, spy on churches and mosques, and often toss demonstrators and reporters around with impunity. When this is challenged, the police commissioner and the mayor often shrug it off and fight court orders. The mayor even argued that to let the press watch the police retake Zuccotti Park would be to violate the privacy of protesters. “It wouldn’t be fair,” he said. As arguments go, this is perversely counterintuitive. But the mayor’s words reflect, as State Senator Eric Adams, the civil liberties lawyer Norman Siegel and two others wrote in a recent letter to the commissioner, a misunderstanding of long-established patrol guide procedures.

In effect, the space between the two lenses is a kind of spatio-temporal cloak that deletes changes that occur in short periods of time. The device has some limitations. The Cornell time cloak lasts only for 110 nanoseconds—that’s not long. And Fridman and co say the best it can achieve will be 120 microseconds.

Go read this. David Sasaki asks: Okay, networked activists, what’s next?

Brian Till, on Moscow:

The street needs leaders, or cohesive coalitions of leaders, who can tell the movement when to lie low, like Mandela, and when to rise up, and who can demand more in the face of the regime’s tepid offerings. Starting with the Green revolution, in Iran, moving to Wall Street and what we’ve seen in Moscow today, these uprisings have sometimes seen individuals decline to lead (like Mir Hossein Moussavi in Iran), or suffer fractured leadership (like in Libya), or structure themselves in a way that they will never elevate a leader (Occupy), or simply too infant to have decided who, in the end, will lead (Moscow). But, it should be clear that revolutions need leaders, and those that succeed without will continue to be the exception rather than the rule — perhaps even more so today, because of both the advantages and dangers conferred by the digital era.

The old business model for entertainment, it’s a-changin’. The Times on Cee Lo Green:

Cee Lo — a cannonball-shaped man devoted to the Liberace and Elton John school of showmanship — will earn about $20 million this year. Record sales represent the smallest slice of the revenue pie, according to Larry Mestel, the chief executive of Cee Lo’s management company, Primary Wave Music. The collapse in record sales over the last decade has decimated the bottom line, and a hit song alone is no longer enough to bring in superstar wealth. So even musicians with multiplatinum success have started looking elsewhere for income, especially to increased touring and the kind of commercial deals that result in Miracle Whip product placement in Lady Gaga videos and Taylor Swift’s performing at a JetBlue airport terminal.