The Week in Pictures for March 1

See the slide show

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include a gun rally in Albany; a demolished home in Roxbury, Queens; and a flash mob in Times Square.

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 Wendell Jamieson and Eleanor Randolph. Also, Joseph Lhota, a mayoral candidate, and Phillip Lopate, an essayis.. 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.

The Week in Pictures for March 1

See the slide show

Here is a slide show of photographs from the past week in New York City and the region. Subjects include a gun rally in Albany; a demolished home in Roxbury, Queens; and a flash mob in Times Square.

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 Wendell Jamieson and Eleanor Randolph. Also, Joseph Lhota, a mayoral candidate, and Phillip Lopate, an essayis.. 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.

Using Walls to Talk Back to Unwelcome ‘Compliments’

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times Posters on a wall on Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, try to make the point that some comments to women aren’t welcome. “These things make you feel like your body isn’t yours,” the artist says.

Shorty. Sweetie. Sweetheart. Baby. Boo. If you’re a woman, you’ve probably heard it.

If you were to respond, what would you say

Last fall, Tatyana Fazlalizadehbegan replying â€" through her art â€" to the dozens of men who approached her in public each week. As night fell, she slipped out of her Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment armed with a bottle of wheat paste, a couple of posters and a paintbrush, and began to pepper Brooklyn with messages:

“My name is not baby.” “Women are not seeking your validation.” “Stop telling women to smile.”

Since September, Ms. Fazlalizadeh has plastered walls in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Bushwick, Clinton Hill and Williamsburg. As winter came and night temperatures dropped, though, she retired her paintbrush. “The wheat paste starts to freeze before it actually dries,” she said. “So the paper wasn’t holding.”

But as slightly warmer weather has returned, so have the messages. She recently tossed up two posters on the corner of Tompkins Avenue and Halsey Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant. And Ms. Fazlalizadeh, 27, an Oklahoma-born oil painter, illustrator and after-school ! art teacher, was headed back out Friday night. “I’d like them to be out in Manhattan somewhere,” she said.

The project grew out of a desire to explain that for many women, “hey sweetums” or “let’s see that smile” isn’t a compliment. “These things make you feel like your body isn’t yours,” she said.

Of course, her target audience may still need convincing. On Friday afternoon, Andrés Carlos, 50, stood by the freshly pasted posters on Tompkins Avenue. “A woman likes nothing more than being told she is beautiful,” he said. “For me, this is ridiculous.”

A friend of his, Richard Johnson, 29, passed by. Mr. Johnson is married, and no longer calls at women on the street. But he did his share of aggressive flirtation. Did women respond negatively “Sometimes,” he said. Did he stop “No,” he said. “I’m persistent.”

Let Your Body Sing

As video concepts go, it was pretty simple: hit the streets and parks of New York with a boombox playing a dance remix of your band’s song and ask passers-by of all ages, races, shapes and sizes to move to it. Film the results.

Here, then, is the newly released video for “It’s Illicit” by the rock-ish band Motive, as remixed by an Italian group called Late Guest at the Party. It was shot late last summer at nine varyingly iconic New York City locations, including St. Marks Place, Flushing Meadows Park, Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, and Coney Island in front of a wall that was later damaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Ari Goldstein, the band’s manager and the conceptualizer of the video (it was directed by Mark Carrenceja), promised that apart from theband members, everyone who appears in it was an actual random person passing by.

“New York is often looked at like this edgy, high-paced place,” Mr. Goldstein said on Friday, “but I wanted to show that the reason New York is amazing is stuff like this - these people are willing to stop and be free.”

Have a good weekend.

Insurgent St. Patrick’s Day Parade Comes Into Its Own

Yana Paskova for The New York Times Brendan Fay said he helped establish an inclusive St. Patrick’s Day parade in 2000, a year after he was arrested at three St. Patrick’s Day parades when he tried to march under a banner for a gay alliance.

Brendan Fay pointed to an e-mail on his computer screen from the New York Fire Department’s Emerald Society Pipes and Drums corps confirming that it would be marching in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in Queens, on Sunday.

“Now that’s how you know the tide has turned for us,” said Mr. Fay, 54, adding tat this would be quite a change from the lone bagpiper that the fledgling parade had to settle for most years.

Mr. Fay helped found the parade in 2000, and since then he had had trouble finding pipe bands willing to play in this parade whose name, St. Pat’s for All, and theme of inclusion are a swipe at the much larger and older St. Patrick’s Day parade held on Fifth Avenue. In the Fifth Avenue parade, people seeking to march under gay banners have been turned away. (The organization that runs the parade says its policy is meant to discourage political displays, including banners and slogans on T-shirts.)

“I’d try to get pipe bands to participate, and they’d say something like, ‘Oh, you’re that parade - no, we’re not available,” said Mr. Fay, who helped start the Queens event after being arrested at three St. Patrick’s Day parades in 1999 after he tried to march under a banner for a gay alliance.

“I know what it’s like to be tol! d you’re not welcome,” Mr. Fay said as he rushed around his Astoria, Queens, home making last-minute preparations for this Sunday’s parade, which starts at 2 p.m. in Woodside and runs for two hours. It begins at Skillman Avenue and 47th Street and proceeds east on Skillman, ending at Woodside Avenue and 58th Street.

With the phone ringing constantly, Mr. Fay finalized details for portable toilets, pipers and puppets to be held aloft by children. The parade has grown in size every year, and this year he expects more than 2,000 participants.

Bars that once wanted nothing to do with the parade are now opening early for breakfast on parade day, he said.

As for the parade, he said, “We err on the side of hospitality and inclusiveness.” And with the doors wide open, he has certainly amassed a wide array of regular attendees, including from many ethnic groups in this extremely diverse area of Queens.

At the moment, Mr. Fay was making arrangements with Pakistani and Bengali contingnts. There will be Bolivian, Ecuadorean, Korean and Chinese groups, as well as a troupe of young black and Latino step-dancers from the Bronx. Mr. Fay called a Turkish contingent seeking to march for the first time, to honor the food shipments that Turkey sent Ireland during the potato famine. Then there was the Mexican group marching in tribute to that country’s San Patricio battalion in the Mexican-American War.

“We try to reflect the spirit of New York - we’re all neighbors, we marry each other,” Mr. Fay said in his living room, which is presided over by a green statue of St. Patrick, rescued from a trash heap, with its arms broken off.

It was easier a decade ago when barely any politicians marched. That has changed, especially after Hillary Rodham Clinton showed up several times. Now elected officials are practically trampling over children to engage with spectators, joked Tom Moulter, Mr. Fay’s husband, who for the past week has been baking cakes and cookies for preparade ! events.

Now Mr. Fay’s in-box is full of e-mails from the offices of elected officials and politicians jostling for favored positions, including Joseph J. Lhota, a Republican candidate in the hotly contested race to succeed Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who will also be marching. Mr. Fay said he would probably not put the mayor next to the Occupy Wall Street contingent.

On a refrigerator was a sheaf of personal checks sent as donations, including one for $100 from Arriba Arriba, a Mexican restaurant on Queens Boulevard that heard about the parade from a nearby Irish bar.

As usual, the parade will honor the Rev. Father Michael Judge, the gay Fire Department chaplain who marched in the parade in 2000 and died on Sept. 11, 2001, at the World Trade Center. And as usual there will be a moment of silence for Robert Rygor, an early critic of the Fifth Avenue parade who died of complications from H.I.V. in 2004.

Mr. Fay went out to the garage and climbed up a stepladder to pull down the parade’s mai banner, with help from Kathleen Walsh-D’Arcy, another leader of the event, which seems to have outgrown its early rebel days.

“We’re now part of the St. Patrick’s Day tradition in New York,” Mr. Fay said.

Big Ticket: Heat, Light and Height, Sold at $8.15 Million

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times No. 279 Central Park West, on the corner of 88th Street, has 36 condo units

A sun-glazed floor-through penthouse with a modernist mind-set in a Costas Kondylis-designed condominium tower at 279 Central Park West sold for $8.15 million and was the most expensive sale of the week, according to city records.

The apartment, PH21A, is on the top layer of five floors of terraced apartments designated as penthouses at the 1988 luxury building, at 88th Street, one of the rare condominiums on the avenue. Housing 36 units, it is distinguished by a limestone base and bold picture windows, and is described in the orginal listing as “a fortress of security and style.”

The prevailing aesthetic of the penthouse, which has three bedrooms plus a maid’s room (or home office) and three and a half baths, is sun-worshipers’ and plant-lovers’ nirvana. Light pours in so powerfully from all four sides that the amenities include an automated irrigation system on the wraparound terrace and a sun-shield system to protect furniture and artwork.

The residence is reached from a private elevator landing that opens onto a gallery leading to the corner living room, which has direct views of the reservoir and Central Park South. There is a formal dining room, as well as a butler’s pantry and a powder room. The kitchen has Poggenpohl cabinetry and Madura Gold granite countertops; most of the floors are herringbone teak.

The sequestered master suite has park views, a dressing room and a marble bath with two walls of windows. Each of the two bedrooms on the west wing has its o! wn bath and city vistas.

The seller, identified as Lynx Properties Limited of Port Louis, Mauritius, had owned the unit since 2004 and was represented by Karen Kelley (then of the Corcoran Group, now with Brown Harris Stevens) in an exclusive listing with Michel Madie Real Estate. The buyers, New Yorkers who shielded their identity through a limited-liability company, EP 279CPW, were represented by Richard Pretsfelder of Leslie J. Garfield Real Estate.

The penthouse had been on the market for nearly two years at its previous asking price of $9.9 million. After two downward shifts in price, it sold for its most recent asking price; the buyer was also required to pay a 2 percent flip tax. The uptown location was simultaneously a drawback and a charm, according to Ms. Kelley, who described as “astounding” the in-your-face views of the Central Park reservoir, which looms outside like the unit’s own private swimming pool, and more distant ones of Central Park South. “It should have sold faste,” she said, “but the fact that it was above 86th Street kept some potential buyers away. But once you walk inside, it’s all about the views.”

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

The Week in Culture Pictures, March 1

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times Yuekun Wu as a Chinese opera performer turned worker on the transcontinental railroad in the Signature Theater Company’s revival of “The Dance and the Railroad,” by David Henry Hwang.

More photographs.

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

For 3 Weeks, Eating Like Jews of Baghdad

Katherine Needles Kubbeh in a pumpkin puree with dried apricot and roasted pumpkin seeds.

Katherine Needles Naama Shefi, right, creator of the Kubbeh Project, and its chef, Itamar Lewensohn.

Naama Shefi says Bubbeh’s brisket is only a sliver of the spectrum of Jewish cuisine.

“When you talk about Jewish food, it’s much more cmplicated and diverse than matzo balls and deli food,” she said.

So starting tonight, as a three-week pop-up project at a bakery in the East Village, Ms. Shefi, a Kibbutz-born Israeli expatriate, will offer New Yorkers a taste of the little-known and fading cuisine of Iraqi Jews.

Iraqi Jews - most of the ones living in Iraq emigrated to the newborn state of Israel after 1947 - have a sprawling menu of rice dishes. But Ms. Shefi is focused on kubbeh, a seasoned beef meatball enveloped in a semolina-based dough. It serves as a vehicle for a long list of savory soups and sauces. The chewy exterior of the kubbeh absorbs the flavors of its stew.

Ms. Shefi, in partnership with a chef from Tel Aviv, Itamar Lewensohn, will offer three versions of the Baghdadian staple at the Kubbeh Project at Zucker Bakery on East Ninth Street: a deep red ! beet soup, a vegetarian pumpkin purée with dried apricot and roasted pumpkin seeds, and a palate-challenging tart option called hamusta that uses lemons, Swiss chard and zucchini as its base.

The kubbehs arrive in their respective sauces with a side of rice and turshi, a lightly spicy, curry-infused pickle.

There are no Iraqi Jewish restaurants in New York City, though there is a caterer on Long Island that specializes in Iraqi Jewish cuisine.

Ms. Shefi is of Polish, not Iraqi, descent, but she said, “Israel is a not just a melting pot, it’s a pressure cooker, so a Polish girl like me considered kubbeh as my own.”

The experiment is part of what Ms. Shefi, a former employee of the Israeli Consulate in New York, hopes will be a larger project to save dying Jewish recipes.

“These recipes are about to leave the world if no one will document them,” Ms. Shefi said. “It’s hard to find really well-written recipes. So manyhome cooks will add a pinch of this, a pinch of that, but not really put down their recipes.”

To begin the rescue mission, she dispatched Mr. Lewensohn to the kitchens of grandmothers around Israel to fine-tune his kubbeh craft.

Each night of the Kubbeh Project, Ms. Shefi will unfurl lengths of denim to decorate the bakery after hours, hoping to evoke the workaday food stalls of Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda Market, where kubbeh and other comfort food simmer in vats.

“We wanted to evoke something from Israel â€" the idea of sharing a meal around the table,” Ms. Shefi said. “To somehow translate these blue-collar restaurants, these hole-in-the walls, to New York.”

The Kubbeh Project runs each night through March 21, from 6 p.m. until food runs out, at Zucker Bakery, 433 East Ninth Street. Reservations required on Fridays but not other days.

Cleveland TV Station Celebrates Andy Griffith After Oscars Snub

Sam Falk/The New York Times Andy Griffith in 1965.

Andy Griffith received little love from the Oscars last Sunday, as the producers decided to leave him off the list of actors honored in the yearly obituary reel.

But he is still loved in Cleveland. The NBC affiliate in that city canceled its prime-time lineup on Thursday night â€" “The Office,” “1600 Penn” and “Law and Order: SVU” â€" and instead put on a two-hour episode of Mr. Griffith’s show “Matlock,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote.

“he Academy did snub Andy Griffith,” said Brooke Spectorsky, the president and general manager of the station, WKYC. “We thought it would be a nice tribute.”

Mr. Griffith was in a tough competition among the dead for a piece of the yearly three-minute scroll departed movie actors and other film industry greats. Indeed, since March 1994, when the first “In Memoriam” segment was included in an Academy Awards show, a spot on the list has been one of the Oscar’s most hotly contested honors. Mr. Griffith lost out to Ernest Borgnine, Charles Durning, Nora Ephron, Tony Scott and Marvin Hamlisch, among others.

‘Smash’ Getting Only a Little Help From DVR Numbers

Sure, the ratings for the second season of NBC’s “Smash” have been low. The most recent episode fell to 3.3 million total viewers and it barely cleared the 1 million threshold in viewers between the ages of 18 and 49, the demographic most important to advertisers. But DVR viewing was crucial to buoying “Smash” in its first season. Will that be a help this time around
Probably not.

The latest DVR numbers released by Nielsen, which include the live ratings plus the next seven days of viewership, revealed that the Season 2 premiere of “Smash,” on Feb. 5, gained only about 900,000 viewers in the 18-to-49 category. That total signifies an increase of 58 percent for the category, a respectable number, but the show still finished outside the Top 25 broadcast programs in both total viewers and adults 18 to 49.

NBC has already paid for most of the second seaon of “Smash,” save for one episode, so the network will probably give the show every opportunity to reverse its slide. But fans looking to the DVR numbers for reassurance will need to look elsewhere.

Graphic Books Best Sellers: Batman Battles the Owls

New on the graphic books hardcover best-seller list this week, at No. 1, is “Batman: Night of Owls,” written by Scott Snyder and illustrated by Greg Capullo.

This adventure pits Batman and his allies (Batgirl, Nightwing and current and former Robins) against the Court of Owls, an evil that has shaped Gotham City for decades. Mr. Snyder and Mr. Capullo have been doing an outstanding job with the main “Batman” series, and they continue that work here. The problem with “Night of Owls,” however, is the crossover aspect. Readers who are only reading “Batman” can follow the story fairly well, but supplemental parts of the saga were told in other titles, including “Nightwing,” “Batgirl,” “Batwing” and “All-Star Western.” (Many of these pics are designed to encourage readers to try different series.)

When you’re dealing with characters that live in the same world, it makes sense for big events in one title to affect others. And it is easy, as the issues are published, to follow the story religiously across all titles, or stick to the ones you normally buy. Part of it is personal taste, but I found the flow of the collected edition jarring. Westerns leave me cold, and the opening chapter of “Night of Owls” is from “All-Star Western” issue No. 9, which takes place back when Gotham City was a one-horse town. But whether good (“Batgirl” continues to be excellent, as does “Nightwing”) or bad (“Red Hood and the Outlaws”), many of the supplemental stories feel like treading water. At a certain point, I found myself skipping some of the ancillary stories to get back to “Batman.”

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

Now Hear This: Works by Chinese Sound Artists

Colgate University is mounting an exhibition of sound-art installations by Chinese artists whose work has never been displayed in the United States.

Sound artists use noise, live performances by musicians, recorded ambient sounds, spoken words, audio-visual tapes and other aural elements to create art installations that either have no visual elements or forge a connection between images and sounds. It has become a popular genre in China in recent years, where a new generation of avant-garde artists are pushing its boundaries.

The Colgate exhibition, “Revolution Per Minute,” will feature works by more than 30 Chinese artists who work with sound, including Wang Changcun, Yan Jun, Samson Young and members of the Shanghai noise band Torturing Nurse. “This really reflects the landscape and soundscape of China, and it’s much more diverse, much more progressive, than we imagine it could be,” said Wenhua Shi, an assistant professor of art who is curating the show along with the American-trained sound artist Dajuin Yao. The exhibition will run from March 26 through April 26 and feature 35 installations scattered throughout the Colgate campus and nearly village of Hamilton, N.Y.

Among the works will be two pieces by Mr. Young: “I am thinking in a room, different from the one you are hearing in now,” a performance piece that uses the performers’ brain waves to control a sound-making device (an homage to the sound art pioneer Alvin Lucier and his brain-wave pieces), and “Liquid Border,” which uses ambient noises from fences along the border between Hong Kong and mainland China.

Some of the other pieces touch on sensitive political and social issues, though none have been banned in China, Mr. Shi said. For instance, Ed! win Lo’s “Mourn” from 2011 is a spooky audio-visual work about candlelight vigils to commemorate the killings at Tiananmen Square in 1989. Another piece, by Xu Cheng, makes use recordings of people engaging in telephone sex and arranging casual trysts on a chat line, a subject considered edgy by Chinese standards, Mr. Shi said.

Before a Tourist’s Body Was Found, Rebuffed Efforts to Report Her Missing

Li Junyun

Li Junyun, 46, arrived in New York last month with a tourist visa and a single suitcase, “hoping to see what America was like,” a friend said.

Within three weeks, she was dead.

Last Friday night, after eating dinner and having several drinks, Ms. Li and four friends went to Monster Karaoke on Main Street in Flushing, Queens. Twenty minutes into an hourlong singing session, Ms. Li, a Korean citizen born in China, walked out into the cold without her coat, said her friend Lin Dongmei, 51.

“There was no really reason for her to just leave â€" she was just a little drunk,” Ms. Lin said.

She also left her belongings behind â€" wallet, iPhone, passport. “She has nothing. Knows no one. And she doesn’t speak nglish,” said Song Liyan, 45, another friend.

Efforts to enlist official help finding Ms. Li proved agonizingly difficult, her friends said.

An hour after Ms. Li left the karaoke bar, her friends went to the 109th Precinct station house in Flushing to report her missing but were told they had to wait 24 hours, Ms. Lin said. They tried again Saturday night and were told by officers to call 911 and report her missing by phone, Ms. Lin added.

On Sunday, after Ms. Lin called 911, police officers came to her home, where Ms. Li had been staying, and told her that because she was a healthy adult and had not gotten into an argument, there was nothing they could do, Ms. Lin said.

On Monday, after Ms. Lin went to the Korean consulate in Manhattan to seek help, she returned to the 109th Precinct station house, where officers told her that they could not file a missing-person report without explicit permission from Ms. Li’s family, she said. She said off! icers told her and a friend that they were lying and shooed them away. Language problems compounded the difficulty, she said.

On Tuesday, an anonymous caller to 911 reported an unconscious person behind a U-Haul franchise on an industrial stretch of College Point Boulevard along the Flushing River, half a dozen blocks from the karaoke bar, the police said.

Ms. Li’s body was found along a rocky embankment of the river, said the police. There were no visible signs of trauma, the police said, and the medical examiner’s office said it was investigating the cause of her death. The low temperature the night she disappeared was about 35 degrees.

According to the city’s Web site, there are no hard rules about waiting periods for filing a missing-person report.

“No set amoun of time must elapse before you may report someone missing,” the site says. “Use common sense and specific circumstances. In certain cases - if the missing individual is a child, a senior citizen, senile, mentally or physically impaired - an immediate search will be conducted.”

The Police Department issued a one-sentence statement about Ms. Li’s case Thursday night: “The incident is under investigation by our Internal Affairs Bureau.”

Representative Grace Meng of Queens is helping Ms. Li’s family in China get visas to travel to New York and claim her body, Ms. Meng’s office said.

Ms. Li, who worked as a waitress in Korea, was active on the Chinese social-media site Qzone. On Jan. 4, she wrote: “Life. Walking step by step. Tossing out a little, bit by bit. What we walk on, is the road. What we toss out, are our burdens. The road will get longer and longer. The heart stays evermore the same.”

The Sweet Spot: Streaming Along

In this week’s episode, A. O. Scott and David Carr talk about Netflix’s “House of Cards” and other shows for “binge-viewing.” How do you watch TV

Branagh To Play Macbeth at Manchester Festival

Sir Kenneth Branagh will return to the stage to do Shakespeare for the first time in more than a decade at this year’s Manchester International Festival, playing the title role in “Macbeth” at a deconsecrated church.

That production, to be co-directed by Mr. Branagh and Rob Ashford, is one of several highlights of the July festival, which specializes in staging new work and one-off events across the disciplines of theater, music and the visual arts.

This year, Romeo Castellucci, a provocative Italian director, is staging Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” with a 100-piece orchestra in a derelict train depot; Willem Dafoe and Mikhail Baryshnikov will appear in Robert Wilson’s production of “The Old Woman,” based on a novel by he Russian author Daniil Kharms; and Josie Rourke will direct “The Machine,” a new play by Matt Charman about the chess champion Garry Kasparov’s battle against a supercomputer.

Mr. Branagh has never played Macbeth before. “The one play by Shakespeare that follows me everywhere is the Scottish play,” he told the BBC. “Of all the plays, it’s the one that sits in the loo and has traveled with me all over the place and that I’ve talked and thought about, and I’ve always circled around it.”

“Over all of those years, there was something happening to me as an artist that wanted to come and meet that play and that role at some point, if I was lucky enough to have the opportunity,” he added.

This Week’s Movies: ‘Stoker,’ ‘Leviathan’ and ‘Jack the Giant Slayer’

In this week’s video, Times critics offer their thoughts on the thriller “Stoker,” the documentary “Leviathan” and the adventure film “Jack the Giant Slayer.” See all of this week’s reviews here.

Book Review Podcast: The Bully Problem

Gabriella Giandelli

This week in The New York Times Book Revie, Andrew Solomon reviews “Sticks and Stones,” Emily Bazelon’s new book about bullied children and how to contain or prevent such harm. Mr. Solomon writes:

If charity begins at home, then so, too, does brutality: at home and early, and Bazelon looks for the seeds of troubling behavior in the home lives of bullies. She is taken with the work of Dan Olweus, the grand old man of anti-bullying theory and practice, whose programs target the school, the classroom and the individual. She describes a headmaster who was able to transform the climate at his school largely through charisma, will and the methodology proposed by George Sugai, who believes that positive rewards given to students for positive social skills may be just as effective as punishment for those who are out of line.

On this week’s podcast, Ms. Bazelon talks about “Sticks and Stone! s”; Phillip Lopate discusses the craft of essay writing; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.

Robert A. Caro, Ben Fountain Among National Book Critics Circle Winners

The National Book Critics Circle handed out its annual awards on Thursday night at the New School’s Tishman Auditorium, with an old hand among the winners.

Martine Fougeron/Getty, for The New York Times Robert A. Caro

Robert A. Caro won in the biography category for the fourth volume in his epic life of Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Passage of Power.” The first two books in Mr. Caro’s series also won the Book Critics Circle award, and the third volume was a finalist. Michiko Kakutani wrote that in his latest book, Mr. Caro ses “the intimate knowledge of Johnson he’s acquired over 36 years to tell [the] story with consummate artistry and ardor.”

Only two of the winners were present to accept their awards. The general nonfiction award went to Andrew Solomon for “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity,” which Dwight Garner called a “knotty, gargantuan and lionhearted” book. And Ben Fountain was in town from Dallas to pick up the fiction award for “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.” Janet Maslin wrote that the Dallas Cowboys game at the novel’s center is “an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war. Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation.”

D. A. Powell won the poetry award for “Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.” Marina Warner’s “Stranger Magic: Charmed States and the Arabian Nights” took home the prize for criticism, and the author and illustrator Leanne Shapton’s memoir “Swimming Studies” won in the autobiography category.

The circle’s annual Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing was given to William Deresiewicz. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the authors of “The Madwoman in the Attic,” among other influential books of feinist literary criticism, accepted the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award with speeches via video.

Release of Third ‘Hobbit’ Film Delayed

Peter Jackson has pushed back the release date for the third installment of his Hobbit trilogy, “The Hobbit: There and Back Again,” for five months to December 2014, Warner Brothers announced. The news of the delay came as the first film in the series, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” neared the $1 billion mark in worldwide box-office sales, thanks in part to strong demand in China.

The second installment, “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” remains on schedule to open this December. No reason was given for the delay, but Warner Brothers, the distributor, portrayed it as good news. “We’re excited to complete the trilogy the same way we started it, as a holiday treat for moviegoers everywhere,” Dan Fellman, president of domestic distribution for Warner Brothers, said.

Popcast: Deconstructing Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace

Joshua Bright for The New York Times Thom Yorke performing with Atoms for Peace, which released a new album on Tuesday.

This week: Jon Pareles, The Times’s chief pop music critic, talks to host Ben Ratliff about “Amok,” the new album by Atoms for Peace. The quintet is, at heart, a collaboration between Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his longtime producer Nigel Godrich.

Atoms for Peace rests somewhere uneasily between progressive rock and electronic dance-music; it’s as dependent on aggressive and transformative post-production as it is on the creation of tracks by people playing instruments â€" but where does that process come from, and what does it signify

Listen above, download the MP3 here, or listen on iTunes here.

RELATED

Jon Pareles’s review of “Amok”

Ben Sisario’s review of a 2009 Atoms for Peace performance.

A Reddit interview with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich

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

Popcast: Deconstructing Thom Yorke’s Atoms for Peace

Joshua Bright for The New York Times Thom Yorke performing with Atoms for Peace, which released a new album on Tuesday.

This week: Jon Pareles, The Times’s chief pop music critic, talks to host Ben Ratliff about “Amok,” the new album by Atoms for Peace. The quintet is, at heart, a collaboration between Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and his longtime producer Nigel Godrich.

Atoms for Peace rests somewhere uneasily between progressive rock and electronic dance-music; it’s as dependent on aggressive and transformative post-production as it is on the creation of tracks by people playing instruments â€" but where does that process come from, and what does it signify

Listen above, download the MP3 here, or listen on iTunes here.

RELATED

Jon Pareles’s review of “Amok”

Ben Sisario’s review of a 2009 Atoms for Peace performance.

A Reddit interview with Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich

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

Susan Boyle Gets a Movie Role

Susan Boyle, the Scottish singer with the big voice who enjoyed a period of international fame in 2009 after appearing on a British talent show, has landed a part in a Christmas movie, Reuters reported.

Ms. Boyle, 51, will appear in “The Christmas Candle,” a film based on the novella by Max Lucado about a magic candle that changes life for people at the turn of the 20th century in a dull village with a skeptical minister. The producers did not say what part Ms. Boyle would play, or whether she would sing. Samantha Barks, Hans Matheson and Lesley Manville also appear in the film, which began production this week on the Isle of Man.

“Everyone on set is a delight to work with and it’s a fantastic experience to be part of the team,” Ms. Boyle said in a statement. She added, “I’m really enjoying getting dressed in the period costumes and stepping back in time and although itâ€s very cold filming on location, I’m wearing long johns under my bustle.”

Ms. Boyle, whose unassuming looks belie a powerful mezzo-soprano voice, gained international attention after appearing on the variety show “Britain’s Got Talent” and performing a soaring rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical “Les Misérables.” Her first album, of the same name, was one of the best-selling records ever recorded in Britain and reached the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic. Since then she has released two more studio albums and a live compilation.

More Red Fire Hydrants Are Popping Up on the Sidewalks

Ruth Fremson/The New York Times Expect to see more of these as the city installs more red fire hydrants as a signal to firefighters that they are fed by a wider water main.

Just about everyone knows the old joke about why firemen wear red suspenders (to keep their pants up, of course. But red fire hydrants

If the sleek, bright red sidewalk standpipes seem to be proliferating in certain parts of Manhattan, including the Upper East Side, there are more to come. They stand out vividly compared to the standard black and silver variety.

Don’t expect a great hue and cry by traditionalists, though.

The city says that while there may be more of them (and they are more noticeable), some New York hydrants have always been painted red. The Fire and Environmental Protection Departments explain that the red hydrants are fed by wider trunk water mains. The color also signals to firefighters that the higher-pressure hydrants should be opened more carefully.

Dozens more are due to be installed by the end of the year when the next segment of the city’s Water Tunnel No. 3 goes online. Construction began in 1970 on the tunnel, which will give the city a third link to its upstate water supply.

Running on Empty

Dear Diary:

After moving to the Upper West Side this year and fulfilling a lifelong dream of moving to Manhattan, I decided to participate in this summer’s New York City Triathlon. I thought the training had been going well and was feeling quite good about myself until the other day.

Running up the rolling hills on the north end of Central Park, I was passed by a speedster who asked if I was injured.

“No, that’s just the way I run,” I replied.

As he took off up the hill I heard him say, “I used to run like that when I had a stress fracture.”

Read all recent entries and our updated submissions guidelines. Reach us via e-mail diary@nytimes.com and follow @NYTMetro on Twitter using the hashtag #MetDiary.

Taking American Dance to China, and Bringing Back a Film

To promote cultural awareness between the United States and China, the Asia Society recently began a series of artistic exchanges in which performers from each country visited the other to put on a show. If it sounds like old-school diplomacy, that’s because it is. The first such delegation arrived in Beijing in November 2011, under the guidance of Orville Schell, a veteran journalist and observer of China who is now director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society. That delegation had names familiar to anyone steeped in American high culture and popular culture of recent decades: Yo-Yo Ma, Meryl Streep, Joel Coen, Damien Woetzel, Alice Waters and Amy Tan all seized the chance to engage with Chinese counterparts and foreigners in the city.

Rob Bennett for The New York Times Ole Schell in 2008.

There was a younger face in that crowd. Charles Riley, better known as Lil Buck, then age 23, brought his remarkable style of dancing, called jookin’, from the streets of Memphis to Beijing. Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma did an impromptu performance for Liu Yandong, China’s highest-ranking female politician. At the end of the four-day affair, Lil Buck took part in a more ambitious event at the National Center for! the Performing Arts, the glittering egg-shaped space west of Tiananmen Square.

Following Lil Buck every step of the way in China was Ole Schell, the son of Orville Schell and a video producer. He made a short film on Lil Buck’s time in Beijing that has recently been posted to ChinaFile, an online publication of the Asia Society. The film got the attention of Stephen Colbert, who interviewed Lil Buck on Feb. 21. Lil Buck will perform in two shows at Le Poisson Rouge on April 2, along with Yo-Yo Ma,Brooklyn Rider and others.

I asked Ole Schell about the making of the film. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.

Q.

How did you first hear about Lil Buck, and what gave you the idea to make a short film that higlights his performance

A.

I live in New York and was in Central Park watching Yo-Yo Ma perform with a group of kids from Harlem for a summer concert series. Towards the end of the show, this young guy named Lil Buck came out and stole the show. He did a dance routine unlike anything I had ever seen. He looked like a computer-animated plastic Gumby doll as he moved. One second he was slow and fluid like water, and the next he was precise and lightening-fast like a prizefighter.

To me, his style looked like something totally new and served as a stark contrast to both the classical cello and the renowned cellist behind him. I later learned Lil Buck is from Memphis and his style is called “jookin’.” Trying to describe Lil Buck’s jookin’ is nearly impossible. It really needs to be witnessed first-hand or at least on film.

As a child, my dad would return from trips to China with Mao hats, cricket cages and other little-boy ! treasures! like swords and scrolls for me. I then traveled to China for the first time as a boy in 1987. Beijing was teeming with bikes then instead of cars, and many people were still wearing official Mao suits. I have traveled there often over the years and seen first-hand how fast China and its youth culture have been Westernizing.

So when the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York was organizing an event in Beijing bringing Western filmmakers, artists, writers, journalists, actors and musicians together for four days to interact with their Chinese counterparts, I saw a great opportunity. People like Joel Coen, Amy Tan, Alice Waters, Michael Pollan and Meryl Streep were to have discussions and hold events with the likes of Chinese actors Liu Ye, Ge You and a host of others. It was to be called the U.S.-China Forum on the Arts and Culture. There were to be screenings, panel discussions, a dinner at the embassy prepared by Alice Waters and then finally a concert put on at the National Prforming Arts Center to include Yo-Yo Ma and Meryl Streep. The forum had so many accomplished guests, but to me they didn’t have anyone as young and cool as Lil Buck, so why not bring this hip-hop wunderkind, film it and turn the whole thing upside-down

We urged that Lil Buck be included to add a little spice to the whole affair. From there, I went to Los Angeles where Lil Buck was then living and decided to document his journey to China for this short doc.

Q.

What were the challenges of making a film about this kind of performance

A.

The main goal was to create a cultural contrast and see what happened. Lil Buck couldn’t have been more different than the people we would see on the street.

Having grown up in the United States, I could more or less get Lil Buck, but the real question was how would your average Chinese person react

Nobody in Lil Buck’s family had ever left the United States, so I was curious to expe! rience Ch! ina through his unadulterated eyes.

We took him to one of the last giant images of Mao Zedong, on the rostrum at the entrance of the Forbidden City. We were surrounded by the image of Mao, the Forbidden City in front of us, and Tiananmen Square behind us - the heart of the dragon, if you will. Lil Buck started to dance below Mao, and we were very quickly shut down by a grim-faced security detail. From there we migrated inside Tiananmen Square, where Lil Buck did something I can only describe as a frontwards moon-walk on ice through a crowd of elderly Chinese tourists all wearing the same hats and T-shirts so they wouldn’t get lost. They looked confounded and perplexed and stared at Lil Buck like he was an alien.

We generally would find a cool location like the Great Wall or Rem Koolhaas’s CCTV building and shoot Buck dancing until we got shut down. We woul often draw a crowd and sometimes the ire of the authorities. Overall, the people and even police were intrigued and good-natured about it.

Andrea Mohin/The New York Times Lil Buck onstage in New York in 2011.

Q.

What did you want to say about China and Lil Buck’s relationship with China through this film

A.

On the one hand, you go into these situations blind, but on the other you try to set things up in a such a way that hopefully creates compelling moments. I am not sure I had a message I wanted to convey. I really saw this as an exercise in juxtaposition, and the worlds coming together couldn’t have been more disparate.

There is a real generational di! vide in C! hina. The younger people got Lil Buck more easily. Many of that generation are very savvy and even listen to the same music Lil Buck might dance to. The nightclub industry is booming in China, and any of them will play the latest rap songs from the United States. Kids who grew up in the ‘90’s or 2000’s got Lil Buck and often wanted to have their picture taken with him. The older people had a whole different perspective. For those who lived through the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution or even the devastation of the Great Leap Forward, Lil Buck must have appeared to have landed from another planet. For people born much after Deng Xiaoping’s reform, however, all that tumult is ancient history.

In trying to bridge the East-West divide, we included a soundtrack from both sides of the world. The track in the beginning and end of the film is called “Blowin Up My Phone” by Young Jai, a Memphis rapper getting radio play in the south. (He is lso Lil Buck’s brother). We included the tracks “Aisha” and “Made in China” from Beijing rapper Young Kin in the Great Wall scene, among others, and then included the haunting music of famed Chinese musician Wu Tong, who performed on an ancient instrument made from a gourd called a sheng. Contrast that with several live performances by Yo-Yo Ma and Brooklyn Rider, a New York-based string quartet, and we hope the film has a well-rounded soundtrack.

Q.

What were the most surprising aspects of Lil Buck’s encounters with China or with Chinese whom he met

A.

The final culmination of the China trip was a concert put on in the National Performing Arts Center, the most prestigious concert hall in China. It was curated by! Yo-Yo Ma! and the former principal dancer in the New York City Ballet, Damien Woetzel.

There was a moment towards the end of the concert when Lil Buck got up and did an improvised number that just about set the place on fire. The concert included so many internationally recognized musicians and dancers in a relatively formal setting, and along came Lil Buck with his street swag and Air Jordans and blew people’s minds. The theater was filled with an array of Chinese officials (including a member of the Politburo), Western sponsors of the forum and classical music enthusiasts. I doubt many in the crowd had caught even the faintest sniff of hip-hop culture.

Lil Buck was at his best and closed the show to a rousing standing ovation. It was there that I fully appreciated his physical genius and immense talent. In front of a packed house of Beijing glitterati including the American ambassador, and flanked by the greatest living cellist and Meryl Streep, he got up and tore out a totally impromptu performance uring the grand finale of Yo-Yo Ma and Brooklyn Rider’s performance of “Ascending Bird.” He without question stole the show.

I even heard second-hand that Meryl Streep had called it the best night of her life.

Q.

What did you hope to capture in the film about Lil Buck’s relationship with the other performers who were on the cultural trip

A.

Lil Buck was certainly cut from a different cloth than the rest of the performers, and that was part of the appeal of filming him there. Most of the other performers were much older and certainly not of the hip-hop generation. Lil Buck has a certain street cred to him but can also roll with the punches in almost any setting. To me, he was the final ingredient in a successful forum. Lil Buck had already had a relationship with Yo-Yo Ma, so I obviously wanted to capture that. But I also was curious to see what would happen when he interacted or performed with Brooklyn Rider or Meryl Streep! . I deci! ded to structure the film in a way that would show his journey from living in his grandmother’s Memphis basement to traveling to Beijing to perform with a duo as accomplished as Meryl Streep and Yo-Yo Ma.

I suppose I saw Lil Buck’s journey as the ultimate American dream, albeit realized in China.

I’m now happy to call Lil Buck a friend.