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If someone hadn’t already spoiled the ending of last night’s episode of ‘Game of Thrones’ for me, I would have had the same reaction, but not as funny.

I agree with the AV Club reviewer who said that this could be one of the gutsiest decisions by a TV show, ever. I know the show’s simply following the plot of the book, but there have been plenty of productions that lose their nerve and find a way to save a charismatic and telegenic character from the death he or she suffers on the pages – especially when that death comes so early in a multi-part and still unfolding story.

It’s something of a sport among movie lovers to debate where the inflection points in the long arc of Woody Allen’s career are to be found, but it’s a hopeless enterprise, in my book. Yes, ‘early’ Allen is better than ‘late’ Allen, but this kind of a distinction doesn’t really mean much; I think it’s a big question whether or not films like “Annie Hall,” “Manhattan,” or even “Hannah and her Sisters” could even be made today. Even if they were, how would they be received and reviewed?

Better to just enjoy a good film when it comes along. Allen’s latest, “Midnight in Paris,” isn’t perfect (I think it’s unforgivable to make Rachel McAdams into such an unlikable character), but there are plenty of good jokes, not least of which is the one Allen makes at the expense of Christopher Nolan’s baroque-epic “Inception”, a movie which I loved but whose utter lack of humor diminishes it in my mind, as time goes on.

1. A person serially incapable of doing her own original work?

2. A calculation that instructors and faculty are saps, or (more charitably) that they don’t talk to one another and compare notes, so that even if detected she can talk her way out, one-by-one, of the ultimate penalty – i.e., being referred for dismissal proceedings?

3. A conviction, despite evidence to the contrary, that she’s immune to detection and discovery?

What’s the theory of action here?

I think some people might be willing to give Mortensen the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he was taking more than a few liberties with the truth. Perhaps his organization was poorly run even to the point of gross mismanagement and malfeasance. Still, it remains that for many the big lesson is that this is another chapter in how outsiders need to know that ‘real’ development is slow, hard, and difficult, and amateurs and populists and celebrities ought to stop deluding the rest of us into thinking that there’s a magic solution or quick fix. For instance, in a recent article for Foreign Policy, Alanna Shaikh, the seasoned development expert and well-known development blogger, writes:

While much of the uproar has been over the lies Mortenson peddled, I can’t help wondering: Why, exactly, did we ever think that Mortenson’s model for education, exemplified in his Central Asia Institute (CAI), was going to work? Its focus was on building schools — and that’s it. Not a thought was spared for education quality, access, or sustainability. But building schools has never been the answer to improving education. If it were, then the millions of dollars poured into international education over the last half-century would have already solved Afghanistan’s — and the rest of the world’s — education deficit by now.

These are reasonable questions. I don’t want to defend Mortensen. I think the evidence against him looks pretty damning, and it’s a fair question whether his reputation – or his institute – will survive this attack. Let the chips fall where they may.

Still, I think the criticisms that have been lodged against him – aside from a certain kind of delight that comes from seeing the popular and mighty fall – suffer from a blindspot. As Shaikh’s observation makes clear, the ‘foreign aid industry’ itself has been guilty of some of the same problems that have been seen with respect to Mortenson’s approach to education. Twenty years ago the international community committed itself to a world declaration on ‘Education for All,’ but it was quickly criticized as all rhetoric, no action. When, in 2000, ‘universal primary school completion’ was reaffirmed as a part of the U.N. Millennium Development Goals, it was criticized for being just about expanding school enrollment, not improving educational quality – ‘butts in benches’ is how one development expert characterized the approach to me. The World Bank recently announced its new ‘Education 2020 Strategy’ that takes up ‘learning’ as its centerpiece, as if this were a major insight – even though experts have been saying all along that expanding education without focusing on quality and learning wouldn’t amount to much. Mortenson’s schools, in other words, aren’t the only ones that are failing due to an unsustainable approach to development. It’s also true of education projects that are designed and implemented by more ‘legitimate,’ mainstream development organizations. For these organizations, projects typically focus on and finance activities with 3- to 5-year outcomes, but they too have been criticized for not doing much to ensure longer-term sustainability, follow-up, or carry through – especially once the funding dries up and attention turns elsewhere.

There’s no disagreement that development is slow and hard, but mainstream development organizations – much less lone entrepreneurs and celebrities like Mortenson – haven’t been immune to a desire for showy successes and quick fixes, some vastly more costly and wasteful than anything coming out of Mortenson’s organization. The defense that some of Mortenson’s supporters have offered – his intentions were good, even if the management needs to be tightened – isn’t acceptable, but how different is it from the kind of self-justification that development organizations put forward to legitimize their own activities. ‘We’re emphasizing the right things,’ they maintain, ‘even if we need more transparency, coordination, and accountability.’ There’s no doubt that mainstream organizations are much more accountable than Mortenson’s Central Asian Institute, which seems to have been remarkably lacking in reasonable supervision even for a stand-alone charity. But this kind of ‘procedural’ defense or argument that professionals sometimes offer against outsiders and amateurs seem to me rather unsatisfactory.

What seems to be the major difference is that when it comes to individual entrepreneurs we’re able to make direct attributions of praise and blame, whereas with the professional organizations it’s much more difficult to assign responsibility for specific failures, which instead recede behind the “complexity’ of development and the systemic, organizational ‘deficiencies’ or ‘inefficiencies’ of the field itself. Another way of thinking about this whole kerfuffle, I think, is that in certain fields like development the gatekeeping for amateurs and outsiders tends to be retrospective rather than prospective. You don’t have to jump formidable professional, educational, or training hurdles to ‘enter’ the field – as long as you have drive, motivation, and a certain talent for fundraising and self-promotion, you too can ‘make a difference’ in the lives of others. But the complexities of doing development are likely to drive you out before very long, and consequential missteps such as the ones committed by Mortenson may not be survivable. It’s rarely an issue that mainstream organizations have to worry about, although the recent catastrophe suffered by the Academy for Educational Development may give one pause for thought.

The first episode of Twin Peaks is still as mesmerizing and memorable as any, thanks to Grace Zabriskie and that haunting Angelo Badalementi score. But then all of that zaniness – cherry pie and the dancing dwarf and the woman with the log and so on and so forth – followed, and after a season of that ended with no real answers (if I’m remembering correctly) to “Who Killed Laura Palmer,” it wore out its welcome.

Comparisons to Twin Peaks have surrounded AMC’s new series, ‘The Killing,’ and while the show bears some cultivated similarities – it starts off with a murder of a teenage girl, the AMC ads ask, “Who Killed Rosie Larsen?” – my guess is that the resemblance isn’t likely to stick around for very long. All the better. It feels like it’s going to be a much more straightforward procedural, done in a slow methodical style; with an amazingly compelling Mireille Enos at its center, that makes one hopeful.

Though I’ve been using it for a only few days, Mozilla Firefox 4 seems to me to be a clear advance over earlier versions, and has easily become my favorite browser. Because I use Zotero I’ve always relied on Firefox for my scholarly reading and note-taking, though for other things – Gmail, Facebook, etc. – I’d more or less gravitated to Chrome or Safari. But one of the nifty features of Firefox 4 is the inclusion of App Tabs (see video above) – a strikingly simple innovation, perhaps, but one that’s made the browsing experience more organized and, oddly enough, more pleasurable.

Sparked by the confluence of accelerating domestic transformation and increasingly explicit impacts from ‘globalization’, the Japanese education system has undergone tremendous changes during the turbulence of the past decade. This volume, which brings together some of the foremost scholars in the field of Japanese education, analyzes these recent changes in ways that help us ‘reimagine’ Japan and Japanese educational change at this critical juncture. Rather than simply updating well-worn Western images of Japan and its educational system, the aim of the book is a much deeper critical rethinking of the outmoded paradigms and perspectives that have rendered the massive shifts that have taken place in Japan largely invisible to or forgotten by the outside world. This ‘reimagining’ thus restores Japan to its place as a key comparative link in the global conversation on education and lays out new pathways for comparative research and reflection.

Nary a word about the last week’s events, and that’s not surprising, I guess (even if receiving the email was a bit jarring). With that said, without reading the book my two-word stab at a review would probably be: “Instantly obsolete.”

But I suppose that’s unfair. It’s still an open question about whether this calamity will be weathered, with things returning to some hazy and ambiguously-defined state of ‘normality,’ or if there will be fundamental structural change – for better or worse – in Japan’s domestic arrangements and international position. A half-million displaced residents and a vast stretch of ruined coastline – plus who knows what else, depending on what happens at Fukushima – isn’t easily absorbed without the potential for some measure of social conflict, the famed ‘calm’ and ‘discipline’ of the Japanese notwithstanding.*

(*I’m not minimizing how impressively calm the reaction of especially those in the disaster zone has largely been. But I think it’s partly a function of shellshock, partly a lack of alternatives, and above all it’s also slightly patronizing to assume that everyone there takes this sort of thing in stride. There’s building discontent and anxiety and legitimate unrest that needs to be addressed, and will eventually demand addressing if real, decisive steps aren’t taken very soon.)