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SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY Coco Chanel's Secret War [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

VIOLETTE NOZIERE A Story of Murder in 1930s Paris [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

President Obama has made scientific innovation the cornerstone of his plans for ''winning the future,'' requesting in his recent budget proposal large financing increases for scientific research and education and, in particular, sustained attention to developing alternative energy sources and technologies. ''This is our generation's Sputnik moment,'' he declared in his State of the Union address last month. It would be easier to believe in this great moment of scientific reawakening, of course, if more than half of the Republicans in the House and three-quarters of Republican senators did not now say that the threat of global warming, as a man-made and highly threatening phenomenon, is at best an exaggeration and at worst an utter ''hoax,'' as James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, once put it. These grim numbers, compiled by the Center for American Progress, describe a troubling new reality: the rise of the Tea Party and its anti-intellectual, anti-establishment, anti-elite worldview has brought both a mainstreaming and a radicalization of antiscientific thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There was bound to be some push back. All the years of nurturance overload simply got to be too much. The breast-feeding through toddlerhood, nonstop baby wearing, co-sleeping, ''Baby Mozart'' co-watching; the peer pressure for never-ending singsong-voiced Mommy niceness, the ever-maddening chant of ''good job!''; compulsory school ''involvement'' (that is, teacher-delegated busywork packaged as a way to Show Your Child You Care), the rapt attendance at each and every school performance, presentation, sporting event -- the whole mishmash of modern, attuned, connected, concerned, self-esteem-building parenting. The reaction came in waves. There were expert warnings, with moralists claiming that all this loosey-goosey lovey-dovey-ness was destroying the hierarchical fiber of the American family, and psychologists writing that all that self-esteem building was leading to epidemic levels of pathological ninnyishness in kids. Then there was a sort of quasi-hedonist revolt, cries of rebellion like Christie Mellor's ''Three Martini Playdate,'' mother-toddler happy hours (postpregnancy liberation from ''What to Expect'' sanctimony!) and take-the-kid-out-all-night hipster parenting. Then came ''free range'' parenting, an appellation with the added advantage of sounding both fresh and fancy, like a Whole Foods chicken; ''simplicity parenting'' (recession-era lack of cash dressed up as principled rejection of expensive lessons); and, eventually, a kind of edgy irritation with it all: a new stance of get-tough no-nonsense, frequently called -- with no small amount of pride -- being a ''bad'' mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Earlier this month,Sarah Palin showed up in Bucks County, Pa., with ''dozens and dozens'' of cookies, suggesting that the state's schoolchildren risked losing the right to the occasional classroom treat because of a high-minded anti-sugar edict from the board of education. Pretty much everything about the setup was wrong. Pennsylvania wasn't, as Palin tweeted, in the midst of a ''school cookie ban'' debate. And the school she turned into a photo op wouldn't have been subject to such a ban had one existed; it wasn't a public school but a private Christian academy. And while Palin might have been seizing an opportunity to ''intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire,'' she wasn't just visiting with schoolchildren but was delivering a paid speech at a fund-raiser. Still, however shaky its factual foundations, Palin's highly mediatized cookie showdown was a big rhetorical win. With her unerring feel for the message that travels straight to the American gut, she had come up with new and vivid imagery to make the case that the Obama ''nanny state'' is, essentially, snatching cookies -- i.e., the pursuit of happiness -- from the mouths of babes. Suddenly, Pennsylvania's suggestion that schools encourage alternatives to high-sugar sweets became an assault on the American way of life. On freedom and simple pleasures. On wholesome childhood delights and, of course, the integrity of the family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

They make for strange bedfellows, Sarah Palin, leading her pack of ''mama grizzlies,'' and Michelle Obama, now touring the country on behalf of beleaguered, largely female Democratic candidates as the self-described ''mom in chief.'' The former beauty-pageant flutist dead set on undoing health care reform and the working-class Harvard law grad intent on consolidating her husband's legislative triumphs couldn't be further apart in their political goals or in their personal histories. But each is doing the mom thing -- big time -- tapping a vein of sentiment and belief, practicing a special form of political sympathetic magic, hoping clearly that by invoking the image, inveighing the glorious beloved power of all that's maternal, they will warm and rally the hearts of voters enough to get them to the polls and determine the outcome of the midterm elections. There was a time when words like ''mom'' or ''mama'' weren't necessarily associated with the traits needed for good political judgment or the trappings of power. But it has been quite a while now -- perhaps since the grass-roots activist Patty Murray got herself elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992 as ''just a mom in tennis shoes'' -- that the mom image has been expanded from angel of the hearth to political maverick. In an age when ''the mommy brain'' is now considered a greatly superior organ -- uniquely suited for multitasking, specialty-schooled in the challenges of diplomacy and budgeting, grounded in the can-do here and now rather than in the hopelessly abstract or esoteric -- being a mom (the ''just'' has been dropped) is now frequently spun as a prime career asset, particularly in the world of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Economists may assert that we're in the early stages of a recovery, but surveys continue to show that the impact of the Great Recession on American families is deep, widespread and grim. A Pew Research poll published last month indicated that more than half of all adults in the U.S. labor force had experienced some ''work-related hardship'' -- a period of unemployment, a pay cut, a reduction in work hours or an involuntary move to part-time employment -- since the recession began in December 2007. A report in March from the Population Reference Bureau showed that more than 70 percent of Americans age 40 and over felt they had been affected by the economic crisis. Government data indicate that the net worth of the average American household has shrunk by about 20 percent -- the greatest such decline since the end of World War II. Long-term unemployment -- joblessness lasting six months or more -- is also at its highest level since the mid-1940s. According to recent data from the Rockefeller Institute, 20 percent of Americans have seen their available household income decline by 25 percent or more. And yet, despite this bleak reality, some talk persists of silver linings: less cash to spend means less materialism, a real change to ''the definition of living well,'' as Jim Taylor, a vice president of Harrison Group, a market research firm in Waterbury, Conn., told The Times as the big banks melted down in the fall of 2008. At that time, unemployed Wall Street dads were said to be discovering the unexpected joys of domesticity. Minivan moms in the summertime learned that days at the public beach were just as rewarding as playing tennis while the kids improved themselves at foreign-language camp. The glue of all this new happiness was meant to be togetherness -- a belief that still sustains reports that people are volunteering more, pulling together and even replacing their propensity to compete with their neighbors with a new spirit of cooperation and solidarity. ''There's a new level of social coordination,'' says Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University, relating to me how parents of his acquaintance recently agreed to a multilateral halt in the escalation of kid-birthday-party madness in favor of back-to-basics cake and balloons. ''In some areas of our life we're resetting. Over time, we may get de-escalation.'' [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you had the impression during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that Elena Kagan was speaking slowly, e-nun-ciat-ing clearly, choosing words of few syllables and punctuating each simple phrase with a sweetly, self-consciously ingratiating smile, you probably were on to something. According to Nina Totenberg of NPR, teaching Kagan to soften her law-professorial tone and to correct for ''a streak of what even her friends admit can sound like arrogance'' was a key part of the intensive coaching that went into preparing her for the hearings. Supreme Court nominees generally have a tendency to act like ''the smartest kids in the room,'' she noted; Justice Stephen Breyer, she said, claimed that the best advice he was given while preparing for his confirmation was from the political consultant Michael Berman: don't risk intellectually outshining the senators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The gulf oil fiasco is just the latest instance in which a lack of regulation -- or dysfunctional system of regulation -- has led to a major American disaster. After the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina, the Wall Street meltdown of 2008, the collapse of the housing market and now the BP spill,we have come to what feels like a moment of reckoning, with some tentative signs that our country's decades-long love affair with deregulation is starting to chill. The Obama administration has issued hundreds of new rules and standards over the past year, the most prominent initiative, of course, being the financial-oversight bill now making its way through Congress. What remains to be seen, as we move forward into what The Times's Eric Lipton recently called ''a new age of regulation,'' is whether this new spirit of control and reform will carry over into the American psyche. For in the anything-goes atmosphere of our recent past, it wasn't just external controls that went awry; inwardly, people lost constraint and common sense, too. Now there is a case to be made that problems of self-regulation -- of appetite, emotion, impulse and cupidity -- may well be the defining social pathology of our time. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For the past few years, it's been open season on Generation Y -- also known as the millennials, echo boomers or, less flatteringly, Generation Me. Once described by the trend-watchers Neil Howe and William Strauss as ''the next great generation'' -- optimistic, idealistic and destined to do good -- millennials, born between 1982 and 2002, have been depicted more recently by employers, professors and earnestly concerned mental-health experts as entitled whiners who have been spoiled by parents who overstoked their self-esteem, teachers who granted undeserved A's and sports coaches who bestowed trophies on any player who showed up. As they've entered adulthood, they have inspired a number of books on how unmanageable they are in the workplace, with their ubiquitous iPods, flip-flops and inability to take criticism. Stories abound about them as college students, requiring 24/7 e-mail access to professors and running to Mom and Dad for help with papers or to contest a bad grade. A consensus has emerged that, psychologically, they're a generation of basket cases: profoundly narcissistic and deprived of a sense of agency by their anxiously overinvolved parents -- in short, a ''nation of wimps,'' as Hara Estroff Marano, the Psychology Today editor at large, has put it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

If you're the parent of a child who's having trouble learning or behaving in school, you quickly find yourself confronted with a series of difficult choices. You can do nothing -- and watch your child flounder while teachers register their disapproval. Or you can get help, which generally means, first, an expensive and time-consuming evaluation, then more visits with more specialists, intensive tutoring, therapies, perhaps, or, as is often the case with attention issues, drugs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]