Woman Is Killed by Garbage Truck in Manhattan

A 58-year-old woman was walking her bicycle along the curb on 23rd Street, near Park Avenue, when a garbage truck pulling into traffic crushed her to death early Friday afternoon, the police said.

Passers-by captured the aftermath in pictures, and on Twitter, with the woman's body still partially visible under the yellow truck. (The images are not graphic.)

A street vendor described the accident for The New York Post:

“He clippe d her, and she just rolled and fell underneath the wheel,” said Greg Lamans, 43, who works as a street vendor near the accident scene. “Her legs ended up where her arms would be. Her legs were above her head.”

Police officials do not suspect criminality and have not yet identified the woman because her family has not been notified, according to a statement released late Friday.

Man on Icelandair Flight Is Said to Have Been Restrained by Fellow Passengers

It landed online Friday: a picture of a middle-aged man crudely bound and taped to his airline seat, apparently against his will. The brief explanation underneath, posted on the blogging service Tumblr, went like this:

Passanger drank all of his duty free liquor on the flight from Iceland to JFK yesterday. When he became unruly, (i.e. trying to choke the woman next to him and screaming the plane was going to crash), fellow passengers subdued him and tie him up for the rest of the flight. He was escorted off the flight by police when it landed.

Andy Ellwood, the man who posted the picture and the description, said in an interview Friday that it was taken by a friend of his on the flight. He declined to identify his friend, and said that the person did not want to speak about it publicly. But Mr. Ellwood said his friend said that, a few hours into the flight, the man ” became belligerent and started to hurt other passengers.”

It remains something of a mystery what happened to the bound man.

A spokesman for Icelandair, Michael Raucheisen, confirmed there was an incident on a flight between Reykjavik and New York on Thursday. It involved, he said in an e-mail, “a disruptive male passenger who was hitting, screaming and spitting at other passengers while yelling profanities.” He continued:

His behavior was considered to be unruly and threatening. To ensure the safety of those on board, he was restrained by passengers and crew and was monitored for his own safety for the duration of the flight. Upon arrival at JFK the flight was met by authorities who arrested the male.

Ron Marsico, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, said that the man had not been charged by federal or local authorities. Mr. Mars ico said that the man was 46, had an Icelandic passport and “was taken into custody and transported to a hospital because he was deemed to be intoxicated.”

It was not immediately clear why he escaped the clutches of law enforcement. A Google search for “airline passenger arrested” yields local news stories on others held in recent months for refusing to turn off cellphones, for wearing a bulletproof vest and painting fingernails, among other infractions. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, which often deta ins unruly passengers, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Friday evening.

The Week in Pictures for Jan. 4

See the slide show

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include New Year's Eve in Times Square; the return of Sandy Hook Elementary students to classes; and a Fire Department promotion ceremony.

This weekend on “The New York Times Close Up,” an inside look at the most compelling articles in Sunday's Times, Sam Roberts will speak with The Times's Joe Nocera, Danny Hakim, Patrick Healy, Mich ael Barbaro, Eleanor Randolph and Clyde Haberman.. Tune in at 10 p.m. Saturday or 10 a.m. Sunday on NY1 News to watch.

A sampling from the City Room blog is featured daily in the main print news section of The Times. You may also browse highlights from the blog and reader comments, read current New York headlines, like New York Metro | The New York Times on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

This Lovely 1920s Fire Alarm Box Door Could Be Yours

Still haven't found that post-holiday gift for the nostalgic fire buff who has everything? Check out this potential bargain: the door to a surplus vintage 1925 fire alarm box. It's being auctioned by New York City, with a minimum opening bid of $50.

Neither gift wrapping nor delivery is included. The faded red door is described as in “fair” condition, but the pull handle and the mechanism attached to it still appear to work, if the video above is accurate.

The alarm box, No. 5743, used to be located at 121st Avenue and 197th Street in St. Albans, Queens.

“The alarm box was used by residents to alert the F.D.N.Y. of a fire,” says the description on the Web site of publicsurplus.com, which is running the sale for the Departm ent of Citywide Administrative Services.

A decade ago, there were still more than 15,000 fire alarm boxes, but given the proliferation of cellphones and the availability of the 911 emergency number, the Fire Department deemed many of the boxes superfluous and prone to false alarms. At last count, there were about 14,000.

The online auction began Wednesday and runs through at least Jan 23. As of Friday evening, no one had placed a bid.

Historians Look Back, and Inward, at Annual Meeting

NEW ORLEANS - Some 4,000 historians descended on New Orleans on Thursday for the American Historical Association's four-day annual meeting, replacing the chants of departing Sugar Bowl revelers with more sober talk of job interviews, departmental politics, and - at least in the official panels - the past itself.

As usual, the meeting's 300-plus sessions touched on contemporary issues like climate change, the 2012 presidential election, and the Arab Spring, along with more purely scholarly topics big (“Horstory: Equines and Humans in Africa, Asia and North America”) and small (“Trash and Treasure: The Significance of Used Goods in America, 1880-1950″). But for many in attendance, the most urgent question was the state of the historical profession itself in an era of budget cuts and declining humanities enrollments.

At a panel called “The Skyscraper Index, the Hemline Index, Champagne, Nail Polish and the Dow Jones,” scholars analyzed the colorful - and usually suspect - metrics that journalists and other commentators sometimes use to track the state of the economy.

In the official conference hotels clustered on Canal Street, it was tempting to look for similarly offbeat indicators of the perennially troubled job market for history doctorates: The number of special “historian-themed cocktails” quaffed at the conference hotel bars? The profusion of sessions with titles like “The Entrepreneurial Historian” or “Exploring a Range of Careers Outside the Academy”? The rueful Twitter post noting that the meeting was generating only .5 tweets per minute, compared with the 13 per minute for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held simultaneously in Boston?

O r perhaps it was the hearty laughter that followed when the journalist Michael Pollan, at Thursday night's opening plenary panel, asked: “Why do people like me who use your work end up selling more books than you do?”

Tension between popular and scholarly approaches to history can get rancorous, as the recent dust-up over Steven Spielberg's “Lincoln” can attest. But Mr. Pollan's quip wasn't meant as a victory dance. The deep perspective offered by professional historians, he said, is an essential public good in a world where “every politician would have us forget what he said yesterday,” and too few journalists are willing (and perhaps able) to cry foul.

And there was little disagreement from his fellow panelists, four distinguished historians and one publisher who had been summoned to ponder “The Public Practice of History in a Digital Age.”

“If we were as lost in space as we are in time, we would be freaking out,” said Edward Ayers, th e president of the University of Richmond and a host of the popular podcast “BackStory with the American History Guys.”

But there was less agreement over what was to blame for the marginal status of academic history in a world that gobbles heroic biographies of the Founders and turns Twitter feeds like Real Time WWII into viral sensations, but takes a pass on the kind of impersonal, analytic history that academic departments reward.

For William Cronon, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the outgoing president of the history association., the problem is insufficient attention to basic storytelling. Historians, he said, tend to default to a dry omniscient voice that hasn't changed since the 19th-century, despite the fact that historians no longer believe in that kind of omniscience.

“We are a deeply narrative discipline, but we give very little thought t o who the narrator is,” he said.

Niko Pfund, the president of Oxford University Press, seconded the notion, pointing additionally to the history profession's continued reliance on the scholarly monograph for tenure decisions. Historians, more than any other group of scholars, he said, remain “absolutely imprisoned in the format of the printed book,” a situation he called “borderline catastrophic.”

Not that all the panelists were ready to throw footnotes and peer-review standards out with the monograph. The designated power-blogger on the panel, Clare Potter, a professor at the New School and the author of the blog Tenured Radical, questioned the printed book's status as a professional “fetish object,” but defended the value of traditional historical training against those who have called on departments to stop training so many doctoral students who will later find themselves without jobs .

“I think we should be educating as many Ph,D.'s as possible,” she said.

In the end, the panel seemed to agree on a loose and egalitarian notion of who counted as a “historian.” Jon Stewart, several agreed, was a good public historian simply for confronting politicians with inconvenient truths about the past. A historian, Mr. Ayers added, is simply someone who has interesting things to say about the past, and can point to the documentary record to prove them.

That why-can't-we-get-along outlook, coming from scholars who had already run the tenure gauntlet, drew a mixed response from the audience. And it hardly seems likely to defuse intellectual turf wars like the debate over “Lincoln.”

At a packed panel earlier in the day on “The Emancipation Proclamation at 150,” a question about the film's “great man” view of emancipation drew an awkward silence from the panel followed by a laugh.

Kate Masur, a professor at Northwestern University who wrote a much-discussed New York Times Op-Ed blasting the film for ignoring African-Americans' active role in their own emancipation, said that her view of the film softened somewhat after she went to see it again with groups of students.

David Blight, a professor at Yale who was briefly an adviser on the film, defended it, cautiously, as delivering a useful public lesson on the 13th Amendment, even if it ended up reinforcing a simplified heroic narrative of Lincoln.

The movie, Mr. Blight said, shows us Lincoln the great abolitionist, rather than the “much messier” and more conflicted pre-1863 Lincoln who believed, among other things, that African-Americans should ultimately be “repatriated” to Africa.

“But no one is going to make that movie,” he added.

Big Ticket | Sold for $50,000,000

Tina Fineberg for The New York Times 944 Fifth Avenue

Another in the skein of palatial domiciles with Central Park vistas and/or impeccable Fifth or Park Avenue pedigrees that named their price in a resurgent 2012 luxury market and received it without the nuisance of negotiations, a full-floor co-op at 944 Fifth Avenue that sold for $50 million was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records. And it wasn't even a penthouse with wraparound terraces. In fact, it is not a penthouse nor does it possess any outdoor space.

But the apartment, No. 11, spans 5,000 square feet and commands an impressive 70 feet of frontage on Fifth Avenue above the treetops of Central Park - shown to full advantage by s even oversize picture windows that transform western views into seasonal portraits - so it does possess ample trophy attributes.

With four bedrooms, and renovated to impress a dozen years ago by Thad Hayes, the go-to designer for deep-pocketed avatars of “timeless” good taste like the Lauder family, the apartment rambles from front to back for a grand total of 12 rooms, not counting a separate but equally elegant two-bedroom, two-bath guest suite on the ground floor.

The main apartment, with wide-plank oak floors, has a private elevator landing and 30 windows to capture all four exposures; each bedroom has its own private windowed bathroom, and the master bedroom, with a fireplace and park views, also has a walk-in closet with a south-facing window. The library, which faces the park, is flanked by the master on one corner and a 27-foot living room on the other; pocket doors connect, or dis creetly segregate, the three rooms with prime Fifth Avenue frontage. The monthly fees are $20,804.

The sellers, the investor David T. Hamamoto and his wife, Martha, bought the co-op and its downstairs adjunct 14 years ago, and with their two children they moved in after a two-year tweaking by Mr. Hayes. Mr. Hamamoto, who resigned last fall as the executive chairman of the Morgans Hotel Group, is the longtime chairman of the NorthStar Realty Finance Corporation, which with Deutsche Bank acquired the landmark John Hancock Center in Chicago last year. When the Hamamotos listed the apartment in June, their broker, John Burger of Brown Harris Stevens, said the couple had opted to downsize because their children were grown and they no longer needed such an opulent space.

Citing a confidentiality agreement, Mr. Burger declined to comment on the sale or verify the identity of the buyer. But the buyer was named in public records as Frank McCourt, provoking not-so-idle speculation that the Frank McCourt who was sufficiently flush to pay the full listing price in December is very likely the former owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball franchise, which was sold to an investment group headed by Magic Johnson for a record $2.15 billion last spring after filing for bankruptcy.

Mr. McCourt, who made his fortune in parking lots, bought the club for $430 million in 2004 but had since been maligned as an imprudent team owner whose bitter public detractors include his ex-wife, Jamie. Also a former chief executive of the Dodgers, she filed suit last fall requesting that the terms of their divorce be set aside because Mr. McCourt had undervalued his assets.

I n Los Angeles, his venture into sports ownership was decried as an ego trip, but Mr. McCourt apparently received a warm welcome at 944 Fifth, a 14-story white-glove limestone establishment designed by Nathan Korn and built in 1925, and lately a favorite of financiers and investors who prize their privacy. All of the upper units occupy full floors. It seems Mr. McCourt has switched coasts and traded one sort of trophy for another. All it took was $50 million.

Big Ticket includes closed sales from the previous week, ending Wednesday.

Less Bronx-Whitestone Bridge Yielded More Stability During Hurricane Sandy

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times The Bronx-Whitestone Bridge, seen from Malba, Queens.

One very windy day in 1968, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge began to oscillate crazily, leading drivers to abandon their cars in panic.

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Siobhan Roberts at the former Citicorp Center, which the subject of her biography , Alan G. Davenport, helped engineer.

But on an even windier night in 2012, as Hurricane Sandy howled across Long Island Sound and buffeted the span, the bridge stood all but unmoving. The difference? Six thousand fewer tons of steel trusses, which were removed in 2004.

The trusses had been installed in 1946 to stiffen the bridge deck and lessen the chances that the 2,300-foot-long span would break apart in the wind, as the Tacoma Narrows Bridge (“Galloping Gertie“) did in 1940.

But it turned out the trusses were doing more harm than good. Their weight was shortening the bridge's life span by further stressing the structure. From an aesthetic point of view, they spoiled the slender lines of one of the most beautiful bridges in New York. And when those 70-mile-an-hour winds hit the bridge in November 1968, the deck oscillated all the same, as much as 10 inches.

Instead of trusses, the bridge is now equipped with aerodynamic fiberglass fairings along the deck, which streamline the airflow around the suspended span. During Hurricane Sandy, the bridge was closed to traffic as it sustained winds of 50 to 55 miles an hour, and gusts up to 80 miles an hour. It reopened at noon the next day.

“Our engineers were very pleased with the performance of the bridge,” said Aaron Donovan, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which owns and operates the Bronx-Whitestone through its bridges and tunnels division. “There were no instabilities recorded.”

David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Detailed view of the aerodynamic fiberglass fairings that deflect wind load around the suspended deck of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge.

Much credit for solving the problems of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge goes to Alan G. Davenport (1932-2009) and his colleagues at the Boundary Layer Wind Tunnel Laboratory at Western University in London, Ontario. A new biography by Siobhan Roberts, “Wind Wizard: Alan G. Davenport and the Art of Wind Engineering” (Princeton University Press), details the work that has gone into preparing skyscrapers and bridges for an event like Hurricane Sandy.

Ms. Roberts, 41, a freelance science writer, was in town during the storm. “I was definitely thinking of th e Bronx-Whitestone, knowing that it was all rigged up to record every quiver.” she said. “I was doubtful that it had any instability, given what it's gone through in the last 10 years.”

The same was true for 601 Lexington Avenue, the 59-story skyscraper-on-stilts formerly known as Citicorp Center. In her book, Ms. Roberts revisits the harrowing summer of 1978 when Mr. Davenport and his colleagues helped determine that the tower was in danger of imminent collapse in certain winds. An emergency welding program, undertaken as hurricane season approached, left the tower “fit to withstand a 700-year storm,” Ms. Roberts wrote. (She suggested the base of the building as the rendezvous for our interview, to underscore her confidence.)

Courtesy of Western University In the “Three Little Pigs” experiment, researchers at Western University blew this full-scale house apart with hurricane-strength pressure, to measure what structural systems failed and why.

Mr. Davenport's concern was not limited to long bridges and skyscrapers, Ms Roberts wrote. He worried about low-rise buildings, she said, in part because “the ability of a community to cope and recover turns on the survival of these Everyman structures.” In 2001, engineers at Western began the “Three Little Pigs” project. The goal was to subject a two-story, 1,900-square-foot, code-compliant brick house to hurricane-force pressures.

Since then, two houses have been torn asunder to provide a better understanding of what structural systems fail under hurricane conditions, and why. One house had a gable roof: the classic, inverted V-shape in which two sloping planes rise from two parallel walls and meet along a center line. The other had a hip roof, in which four planes rise from all four walls, converging either at a point or along a center line. Many other tests have been conducted on roof sheathing, window openings, soffits and sidings, as well as on the form of the structures.

“We don't tend to think about the shape of the roof when we buy a house, except aesthetically,” said Prof. Gregory A. Kopp of Western University. “But hip roofs are definitely better than gable roofs.” Their structural and aerodynamic superiority, he said, is borne out in testing and in field observations after big tornadoes, when hip-roof houses remain intact while roofless houses nearby turn out to have been gabled. “Roof shape makes a big difference,” Professor Kopp said.

The Week in Culture Pictures, Jan. 4

Chad Batka for The New York Times Chris Martin, the lead singer of Coldplay, during the band's concert on Sunday at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

More photographs.

A slide show of photographs of cultural highlights from this week.

Thomas Pynchon to Publish New Book

He is suspicious of e-books, does not like to have his picture taken, and is often rumored to be on the short-list of American novelists who might win the Nobel prize for literature.

The secretive novelist Thomas Pynchon is back. He will publish a new book called “The Bleeding Edge” his long-time publisher, Penguin Press, said Friday. No publication date has been set.

Mr. Pynchon has won loyal fans for his intricate narratives that use the 1960s and 70s as touchstones and frequently combine popular cultural references with obscure history. He is the author of “V.,” “The Crying of Lot 49,” “Mason & Dixon” and the critically acclaimed “Gravity's Rainbow,” which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1974. However, his last title, “Inherent Vice” in 2009, got mixed reviews.

Jamie Kennedy Discusses His Memorable New Year\'s Eve Special

Alexandra Wyman/Getty Images Jamie Kennedy

As New Year's Eve telecasts go, this one was not exactly a tightly planned, rigidly precise, Ryan Seacrest-style affair.

On Monday night, Jamie Kennedy, the comedian and star of films like “Scream” and “Malibu's Most Wanted,” hosted “First Night,” a special broadcast live from Hollywood by KDOC, an independent Southern California television station. Advertisements for the show promised a mix of celebrity cameos, musical guests and other surprises, and viewers who tuned in sur ely got their share of unexpected laughs.

Presiding over the sometimes shaky-looking and decidedly seat-of-the-pants special, Mr. Kennedy and his co-host, Stu Stone, mixed it up with exuberant revelers (some of whom read directly from the teleprompters of the M.C.s), occasionally getting caught by surprise by their own live cameras and open microphones. Innuendos were made; obscene words were broadcast unbleeped; and Macy Gray gave a performance that had some viewers wondering if she'd started celebrating the arrival of 2013 well before midnight. The show concluded with Mr. Kennedy announcing from a crowded stage, “There's a fight. It's ending with a fight. It's ending with a fight. Guys, please. God bless you, get out. Go to a cartoon.”

That might have been the last viewers saw of “First Night,” had it not been for the help of the Internet, where portions of the show were posted by Shaun Broyls, an actor and comedian, and circulated with the help of enthusiasts like Patton Oswalt. (For the time being, a version of Mr. Broyls's unbleeped video can be found here.)

This viral video has since been widely covered on blogs, some of which appreciate it for its rough charm and inadvertent comedy, and others, like The A.V. Club, which simply declared it “the world's worst New Year's broadcast.”

On Friday, Mr. Kennedy, the emcee and mastermind of the “First Night” special, spoke to ArtsBeat about its creation. In these edited excerpts from that conversation, he discusses why he believes it has been so widely embraced by the Web and whether he'd do it again for 20 14.

Q.

So, did the special turn out the way you wanted?

A.

It was totally supposed to be like that. We wanted to make almost an anti-New Year's Eve show, and the recipe calls for unexpected. We had an open bar for our guests, we were unrehearsed. It was not glamorous. We shot at the apex of craziness on Hollywood Boulevard on New Year's Eve, in front of one of the most highly visible places, the Chinese Theater, and it was more like a block party type of feel.

Q.

How did the idea for this originally come up?

A.

I'm friends with the guys in charge at KDOC, and the day of Thanksgiving, we're watching the parade. They were like, “Didn't you correspond for that one year?” I'm like, “Yeah, I did it for Macy's. It was kind of hard but fun.” They were like, “Let's do our own version, but for New Year's.” We were going to do a very local New Year's show. With about five weeks we went out and we got brands aboard and started building a show. It was supposed to look fun and spontaneous. Back in the day, Jerry Lewis used to do it with his telethons for 24 hours straight, and things would happen and that's what made it interesting. We wanted people to go, “What's going to happen next?”

Q.

And the celebrities you recruited, those were mostly through personal contacts and calling up people you knew?

A.

Yeah. I couldn't get Drake, but I got Drake Bell. [laughs] Mena Suvari was supposed to be on the show, but we didn't get to her in time, so she left. I'm sorry about that, Mena. I owe her an apology.

Q.

In those moments you were caught doing things you didn't know  were on camera, or saying things you didn't realize were picked up by microphones, did that freak you out?

A.

It didn't freak me out, because I didn't know I was on camera. [laughs] We had a walkie-talkie issue from the beginning of the show. It was like, “3 … 2 … the walkies are out â€" you're on!” We didn't have a lot of communication for about three-quarters of the show. So we were in Vietnam. But other stuff was supposed to be the way it was.

Q.

Does that include Macy Gray's performance?

A.

Look, that's Macy. She's cool. She's a soulful, raspy chick. People say she's drunk â€" I never saw her drink. She's just chill and laid back. But she didn't do a sound check, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony didn't do a sound check. They were winging it. I thought she did great. There's some funniness there where she thought it was 11:15 and it was 11:50. When we did the countdown I was 10 seconds late. [laughs]

Q.

You were doing the countdown behind schedule?

A.

Yes, it was already New Year's and I was still counting. I wanted to make stew, you know? I wanted to put in many ingredients, from celebs to brands. Like Shannon Elizabeth's talking and there's the Carl's Jr. star dancing behind her, or you've got the California Green initiative lady on screen â€" she was a little stiff, but it was funny. And then you would cut to a Bone-Thugs performance. Hollywood Boulevard â€" people think it's glamorous, it's glitz. It's nuts. That's what I wanted to show. And then technical difficulties added to that nuttiness.

Q.

It looked like things were getting a little hectic at the end of the show.

A.

Yes. At the end, we were trying to give our goodbyes, and this girl said, “I just want to stop all my haters.” And she got pushed to the front, and there was a wr estler and she, I guess, scratched his neck and he pushed her back and it got a little crazy. I was like, “Whoa â€" let me get out of here.” It ended in a fight, which was the perfect way to end it.

Q.

The online reaction to the special has been very polarized and in many cases extremely negative. Does that bother you?

A.

The more stuff I do, the more polarizing I become. Sometimes I'm like the Kardashian of comedy. People seem to hate me but they can't stop watching. I'm fine. We wanted to make a stink. Did we know it was going to make this much of a stink? No. But if I had done this correctly, would I be talking to you right now? No. How many people are talking about a New Year's special on the 4th? Carson Daly, Ryan Seacrest â€" no. They're talking about me. Some people really go after you, and I don't know where the hate comes from. Here's what I say: I didn't stab nobody, I didn't shoot nobody. I just mad e a  New Year's Eve special. Is that so bad?

With the Internet, you can't fail anymore. Everything has to be perfect. How come you can't fail anymore, or trying something? O.K., so maybe it didn't work. But I tried, and you're talking about it.

Q.

Were your sponsors happy with the special?

A.

Commerce Casino is already signed up for next year, they loved it. And I got a text from Marilyn Manson that says he wants to do next year. And I want to get Wu-Tang Clan. I want to put people in that I like.

Q.

So you'd like to make this a tradition?

A.

I would like to do this again. If you can believe it, I want do an Oscars special. I don't know if we have the time to do it. We have to wait and see how this blows over.

Record Ratings for \'New Year\'s Rockin\' Eve\'

Television viewers and party hosts have been given more programming options on New Year's Eve in recent times, but on Monday night, most of them still chose to ring in the new year with an old, reliable standby: “Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve With Ryan Seacrest” on ABC. According to Nielsen, that countdown special attracted its largest prime time audience ever â€" with 13.3 million total viewers tuning in during the 10 p.m. hour â€" and its highest rating in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic in 12 years.

It was Mr. Seacrest's first time as host without Mr. Clark, who died in April at the age of 82. That program was preceded by “New Year's Rockin' Eve Celebrates Dick Clark,” a two-hour special that drew 9.4 million total viewers.

The closest competition for “Rockin' Eve” was NBC'S “New Year's Eve With Carson Daly,” which drew 3.8 million viewers, up slightly from the 3.1 million who watched last year. On CNN, “New Year's Eve Live With Anderson Cooper and Kathy Griffin” was also up from last year and scored 2.3 million viewers.

Hurricane Sandy Cost the City $154 Million in Overtime

Independent Budget Office Chart of Hurricane Sandy overtime costs in New York City. Click to view full-size version.

New York City anticipated that Hurricane Sandy would be an expensive disaster for the government, and now, some of the bills are adding up.

In less than two months, the city spent more than $154 million in overtime costs for city workers, with 81 percent going to the Police and Sanitation Departments alone, according to a report released Friday by the Independent Budget Office.

Over all, 42 city agencies repor ted overtime costs related to the hurricane, between Oct. 29 and Dec. 24, according to the budget office, which relied on payroll data. After the Police ($70.9 million) and Sanitation ($53.6 million) Departments, the biggest expenses were reported by the fire ($8.6 million), parks ($4.7 million) and transportation ($3.1 million) agencies.

And these costs do not include those incurred by the New York City Housing Authority, because payroll data was not available, or by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority or Health and Hospitals Corporation, because they are not city agencies.

The cost of Hurricane Sandy has been a dominant news topic this week, with Congress delaying a vote on a $60 billion relief package, prompting howls of protest from local Republicans, among others, that resulted in th e House's approval Friday morning of $9.7 billion in relief funding.

When asked about the Independent Budget Office's overtime calculations, Marc La Vorgna, the press secretary to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said: “From even before the storm hit, we said we were not going to wait for Washington to write us a check â€" we were going to go out and deliver the services immediately needed and worry about paying for it later. And the colossal O.T. costs demonstrate a portion of that effort.”

It's unclear how much more those overtime costs will climb. But the $154 million figure is already a daunting figure - it's about the same, for a little context, as the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

By comparison, the overall cost to the city related to Tropical Storm Irene, in 2011, was $55 million, inc luding overtime, supplies, damage to city buildings, and damage to sidewalks and trees. And while there is no specific data related to the blizzard at the end of 2010, Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the Independent Budget Office, notes that in the 2011 fiscal year, sanitation workers earned $62.4 million in overtime pay to clean up 61 inches of snow for the entire year.

Graphic Books Best Sellers: A Curious Vampire

It's a sleepy start to the New Year, with only one newcomer among graphic books best-sellers this week. That honor goes to volume one of “Blood Lad,” by Yuuki Kodama (Yen Press), which is at No. 2 on the manga list. The series is about Staz, a vampire whose tough exterior hides a love for and curiosity about human culture, especially all things Japanese. When he meets a Japanese girl, he thinks he's finally found someone he can ask questions, but her life is tragically cut short. His new mission becomes restoring her ghostly form to human life. The first volume was released in December. Volume two follows in March and volume three in May.

Over at The Beat, the news blog of comics cult ure, Torsten Adair published an impressive year-end analysis of the 2012 books that appeared on our hardcover, paperback and manga lists. DC Comics was the pacesetter in the hardcover category, Image was the leader in paperbacks and VIZ was at the front of the pack in manga.

As always, the complete best-seller lists can be found here, along with an explanation of how they were assembled.

The Sweet Spot: Jan. 4

In advance of the Academy Awards nominations, A. O. Scott and David Carr talk about their favorite movies and performances of 2012.

La Guardia-Bound Pilot Arrested on Alcohol Charge

An American Airlines pilot about to take off for La Guardia Airport was arrested in Minneapolis Friday morning after failing a breath test, Minnesota authorities said.

The pilot, whose name was not immediately released, was in the cockpit of American Eagle flight 4590 at Minneapolis â€" St. Paul International Airport doing a preflight check when “a witness smelled what appeared to be alcohol,” said Patrick Hogan, a spokesman for the airport.

The pilot was arrested at 6:19 a.m. local time, a minute before the flight's scheduled departure time, Mr. Hogan said. The pilot, whose blood alcohol exceeded the legal limit of 0.04 percent, was taken to a hospital for a blood test, Mr. Hogan said.
American Airlines said that the pilot is based at La Guardia but declined to offer more details other than to say:

American Eagle has a well-established substance abuse policy that is designed to put the safety of our cu stomers and employees first. We are cooperating with authorities and conducting a full internal investigation. The pilot will be withheld from service pending the outcome of the investigation.

The flight took off with a different pilot, Mr. Hogan said, and landed at La Guardia at 12:11 p.m., about three hours behind schedule.

Book Review Podcast: Inside the Canine Brain

Olaf Hajek

This week in The New York Times Book Review, Walter Vatter reviews “What's a Dog For?” by John Homans, an “engaging and informative book that is both a survey of the latest research on canine cognition and a memoir of his years with his Lab mix, Stella.” Mr. Vatter writes:

Curious about how Stella's brain works and how she adapted to her new famil y, Homans seeks out experts who can explain “the strangeness of having this predator in my home, lying on her back, waiting to get her stomach scratched.” He meets with scientists, trainers and breeders to understand why so many of us bond with dogs, and why dog ownership is on the rise. There were 77 million dogs in America in 2010, up from 53 million in 1996. “We've seen a linear explosion in pet populations in Western countries over the past 40 years,” one researcher says. “People are living more isolated lives, are having fewer children, their marriages aren't lasting. All these things sort of break down a social network and happen to exactly coincide with the growth in pet populations. What's happening is simply that we're allowing animals to fill the gap in our lives.”

This week, Mr. Homans talks about “What's a Dog For?”; Leslie Kaufman has notes from the field; Allan Kozinn discusses Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya; and Gregory Cowles ha s best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Popcast: The Year in Jazz

Robert Caplin for The New York Times Vijay Iyer performing in September at Harlem Stage.

On this week's podcast, New York Times jazz critics Nate Chinen and Ben Ratliff talk about the 2012 year in jazz.

Under discussion: the mysteries of David Virelles, Ravi Coltrane, Vijay Iyer and Tim Berne, and why they're on our top-ten album lists; the latest crew of astounding musicians in their 20s, and the new crew of mentors to guide them; jazz musicia ns making pop records and how to change the ritual of the jazz performance.

Listen here, download the MP3 here, or subscribe in iTunes.

RELATED

Nate Chinen's top ten albums of 2012

Ben Ratliff's top ten albums of 2012

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Tracks by artists discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)

Popcast: The Year in Jazz

Robert Caplin for The New York Times Vijay Iyer performing in September at Harlem Stage.

On this week's podcast, New York Times jazz critics Nate Chinen and Ben Ratliff talk about the 2012 year in jazz.

Under discussion: the mysteries of David Virelles, Ravi Coltrane, Vijay Iyer and Tim Berne, and why they're on our top-ten album lists; the latest crew of astounding musicians in their 20s, and the new crew of mentors to guide them; jazz musicia ns making pop records and how to change the ritual of the jazz performance.

Listen here, download the MP3 here, or subscribe in iTunes.

RELATED

Nate Chinen's top ten albums of 2012

Ben Ratliff's top ten albums of 2012

SPOTIFY PLAYLIST
Tracks by artists discussed this week. (Spotify users can also find it here.)

Lehane Continues Search for Missing Dog

Steven Senne/Associated Press Dennis Lehane with a poster of his missing dog, Tessa.

More than a week after appealing to the public for help finding his lost dog, Tessa - and offering a role in his next novel as a reward to the person who finds her - the author Dennis Lehane has not yet located his missing pet, but he has not given up hope that she will be found.

“No dog since Lassie ever got this attention,” Mr. Lehane told The As sociated Press. Noting that efforts to find Tessa have spawned an online campaign and even attracted the volunteered participation of a dog psychic in San Francisco, he added, “The flip side of the comedy is, who wouldn't do this for their dog?”

Tessa, a beagle, went missing on Dec. 24 after she escaped from the yard of Mr. Lehane's home in Brookline, Mass. The author, whose novels include “Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island,” quickly took to his Facebook page, where he asked for the help of his followers in finding the dog, who was not wearing identification tags but does have a microchip. As an added incentive, Mr. Lehane wrote on Facebook: “Naming of character in the next book for anyone who gets her back to us! (No, really!)”

Since then Mr. Lehane has received many online tips on Tessa's whereabouts, though the dog is still missing. (The search comes as he is finishi ng up a screenplay adaptation of his short story “Animal Rescue,” which he observed was a “sadistic irony.”)

But Mr. Lehane sounded an optimistic note when he spoke to The A.P. on Thursday. “Every dog expert we talk to is strongly suggesting that she's in somebody's house,” he said. “That's why we keep saturating the area with pictures. Because somebody could have her and just not know.”

He added that finding Tessa was “a no-questions-asked issue.”

“Bring the dog to a shelter or call me and I will pick up the dog,” Mr. Lehane said.

Lehane Continues Search for Missing Dog

Steven Senne/Associated Press Dennis Lehane with a poster of his missing dog, Tessa.

More than a week after appealing to the public for help finding his lost dog, Tessa - and offering a role in his next novel as a reward to the person who finds her - the author Dennis Lehane has not yet located his missing pet, but he has not given up hope that she will be found.

“No dog since Lassie ever got this attention,” Mr. Lehane told The As sociated Press. Noting that efforts to find Tessa have spawned an online campaign and even attracted the volunteered participation of a dog psychic in San Francisco, he added, “The flip side of the comedy is, who wouldn't do this for their dog?”

Tessa, a beagle, went missing on Dec. 24 after she escaped from the yard of Mr. Lehane's home in Brookline, Mass. The author, whose novels include “Gone Baby Gone,” “Mystic River” and “Shutter Island,” quickly took to his Facebook page, where he asked for the help of his followers in finding the dog, who was not wearing identification tags but does have a microchip. As an added incentive, Mr. Lehane wrote on Facebook: “Naming of character in the next book for anyone who gets her back to us! (No, really!)”

Since then Mr. Lehane has received many online tips on Tessa's whereabouts, though the dog is still missing. (The search comes as he is finishi ng up a screenplay adaptation of his short story “Animal Rescue,” which he observed was a “sadistic irony.”)

But Mr. Lehane sounded an optimistic note when he spoke to The A.P. on Thursday. “Every dog expert we talk to is strongly suggesting that she's in somebody's house,” he said. “That's why we keep saturating the area with pictures. Because somebody could have her and just not know.”

He added that finding Tessa was “a no-questions-asked issue.”

“Bring the dog to a shelter or call me and I will pick up the dog,” Mr. Lehane said.

This Week\'s Movies: Jan. 4

This week, Times critics look at the Michael Apted documentary “56 Up” and also take a look back at earlier releases, “This Is 40″ and “On the Road.” See all of this week's reviews here.

No Wrath, but Some Discontent, When Nobel Prize Was Awarded to Steinbeck

nobelprize.org John Steinbeck

When their best-laid schemes of mice and men, and authors and writing, went awry, the members of the Swedish Academy made the best of what they thought was a bad situation in 1962: they awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to John Steinbeck. The decision came amid their general dissatisfaction with the candidates for the prize that year, according to documents recently released by the academy.

As has become its custom, after a 50-year waiting period the Swedish Academy released documents on the internal deliberation of its committee members as well as a privately kept shortl ist for the literary prize, The Guardian said, citing a report in the Svenska Dagbladet of Stockholm.

According to The Guardian, 66 authors were put forward for the literature Nobel in 1962, and the list was narrowed down to Steinbeck, Robert Graves, Lawrence Durrell, Karen Blixen and Jean Anouilh. But after looking at the field of contenders a committee member, Henry Olsson, wrote, “There aren't any obvious candidates for the Nobel prize and the prize committee is in an unenviable situation.”

Blixen, the Danish author who wrote “Out of Africa” under the pen name Isak Dinesen, became ineligible when she died in September 1962. Graves, whose novels included “I, Claudius,” was nonetheless regarded primarily as a poet and Olsson, The Guardian said, was reluctant to give the prize to an Anglo-Saxon poet until Ezra Pound, whose work he greatly admired, died. (Although Olsson objected to Pound's politics.) Durrell's series of novels “The Alexandria Quartet” was not yet considered a significantly substantial body of work (the author had also been passed over in 1961), while Anouilh, the French dramatist, had the bad fortune to come between the 1960 Nobel victory of his countryman Saint-John Perse and the ascent of Jean-Paul Sartre, who would win in 1964.

So the prize was given to Steinbeck, whose body of work consisted merely of such enduring novels as “Of Mice and Men,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Cannery Row” and “East of Eden.” In awarding the Nobel to Steinbeck, the Swedish Academy offered no public hint of its internal weariness, citing him for being among “ the masters of modern American literature” and “for his realistic as well as imaginative writings, distinguished by a sympathetic humor and a keen social perception.”

A Life Raft for Seaport Museum: $500,000 Gift

Having called out for help after Hurricane Sandy, the South Street Seaport Museum has received $500,000 from an anonymous donor and $100,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

   An additional $150,000 has been contributed by about 500 other donors, the museum announced, including corporations, foundations, and individuals - even the piggy bank of a young Seaport District resident.

“Their generosity affirms that New Yorkers want the Seaport Museum to survive,” said Susan Henshaw Jones, president of the museum, who is also the director of the Museum of the City of New York.

The museum was forced to close after the storm destroyed its telecommunications, electrical, heating and air conditioning systems. It reopened in mid-December and estimates that repairs will cost $22 million. As a result, it is still seeking contributions.

A Passionate Embrace at the Bus Stop

Dear Diary:

I was inspired to write this poem as I gazed out the bus window at the 86th Street and York Avenue stop:

Two elderly people
Passionately
Kiss each other
Goodbye
He nearly drops his cane
She giggles
Like a schoolgirl
Then they
Hesitantly part
It seems to me
They are
The richest people
Alive

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