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.