Parallels

By Robert J. Samuelson It is now conventional wisdom that the world has avoided a second Great Depression. When the gravity of the financial crisis became apparent in late 2008, the response was swift and aggressive. Panic was halted. The resulting economic slump was awful, but it was not another Depression. The worst has passed. Or has it? Greece's plight challenges this optimistic interpretation. It implies that the economic crisis has moved into a new phase: one dominated by the huge debt burdens of governments in advanced societies.

The ancient Rome of gladiators and senators, conquering armies and slaves, togas and helmets will be the focus of the next exhibition at the National Constitution Center. "Ancient Rome & America," which will run Feb. 19 through Aug. 1, will consist of more than 300 artifacts and artworks from lending institutions in Florence, Rome, Naples, and 40 U.S. institutions, said David Eisner, the center's new president. The center is curating it with Contemporanea Progetti of Florence and the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities in Rome.

Among the rewards of seeing her best-selling 2002 memoir, Riding the Bus With My Sister, turned into a Hallmark Hall of Fame television movie, Rachel Simon found herself with a stash of cash. Not a sizable stash. Certainly not major movie money. But enough to make Simon, 49, and her architect husband, Hal Dean, 57, think about turning their drafty, cramped Wilmington home into an airy, more energy-efficient version of its dear, sweet self. They hesitated - the television money would at best cover down payments for loans - then plunged into an overhaul of home and hearth that would become a study in the fractures and fissures of the heart.

Right now, the 76ers and Sacramento Kings have more in common than the NBA's only head coaching vacancies. The two franchises are also overlapping on candidates for those vacancies, pursuing three of the same ones and making it seem possible - if not quite likely - that the two teams could target the same coach. Last week, the Sixers and Kings both met with Eddie Jordan, 54, the former Washington Wizards head coach. This week, Sixers general manager Ed Stefanski interviewed Los Angeles Lakers assistant Kurt Rambis and Dallas Mavericks assistant Dwane Casey, and confirmed that he would interview Boston Celtics assistant Tom Thibodeau.

It's not that far-fetched to argue that Tiger Woods' popularity helped pave the way for Barack Obama's smashing victory. That legions of golfing white businessmen already idolized Woods may well have made it less of a stretch for them and others to imagine a black man as the country's president. For that matter, Woods, much like Obama, presents himself as something of a "post-racial" figure, crossing old color lines by virtue of his mixed ancestry. But whether or not Woods helped some vote for Obama, the superstar golfer's effect on his sport offers a cautionary lesson about the effect of an Obama presidency: There's no necessary correlation between the feel-good symbolism of a racial breakthrough and actual, on-the-ground progress toward a race-blind America.

In pirate movies - and you may have caught Keira Knightley in a few - the hero or heroine swats away the meddlesome hordes with jaunty strokes of a sword. Knightley, the 23-year-old Brit who's been charming audiences since she big-splashed onto screens as the plucky tomboy of 2002's Bend It Like Beckham, has developed a kind of conversational equivalent to the swashbuckler sweep. Ask her too obvious a question, or one that's been posed too often, and she simply bats it away with a smile.

Carl Leubsdorf writes for the Dallas Morning News The parallels between Barack Obama and John F. Kennedy are compelling and suggest a potential path from here to Nov. 4. Those parallels were on vivid display last night when Obama became the first presidential nominee to accept his nomination in an outdoor setting since Kennedy's historic 1960 "New Frontier" speech at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Like JFK, Obama chose an outdoor venue - the Denver Broncos' Invesco Field - to show that his candidacy extends beyond the politicians and interest-group leaders who have dominated the convention proceedings.

There were times when the Olympic gold medal they hung around Paul Hamm's neck in Athens must have felt like an albatross. A judge's error had tainted the Wisconsin gymnast's historic victory - the first all-around gold for an American male. There were subsequent hearings, investigations, outraged editorials, even calls for Hamm to return the medal. During the controversy, Hamm was not always happy with the U.S. Olympic Committee. Somehow, he had made it to the sport's mountaintop, only to end up in a valley.

When Richard Price finally got around to writing the novel about the Lower East Side that he'd been itching to do for 25 years, he realized that his teenage daughters knew more about the neighborhood than he did. "They knew where the best clubs were, the best hole-in-the-wall clothing shops, and where the Knitting Factory is," says Price, who will read Tuesday from his new novel, Lush Life - a capacious crime story and character study of cultures...

You're playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 for the 1,473d time. How can you keep the music alive and fresh - with that just-composed feeling? One way, pianist Andr? Watts and the Philadelphia Orchestra showed Friday night at the Mann, is for soloist and orchestra to lose contact with each other and end up at an important arrival point at different times. It's a rare thing to hear in a big, professional orchestra, but it happens, and when it happens it's a harrowing moment.