Meaningful

Joe Paterno shifts uncomfortably on the couch of his office at Penn State University and makes a confession about his holier-than-thou image. "It scares the heck out of me," booms the hallowed football coach. "Because I know I'm not that clean. Nobody is that clean." "I don't want to appear to be any more than I am," says Paterno, now speaking in a near whisper. "And that's a good, hard-working coach who is a decent guy, a family guy, who doesn't want to cheat." "I lose my temper sometimes.

Jada Pinkett Smith, wife of Will Smith, is addressing those open-marriage rumors again - less than two weeks after chatting about it on HuffPost Live. Now, the Ministry heard a "no" the first time around when Pinkett Smith was asked flat-out, "Is it true?" but we appear to have been in the minority. So much so that Jada took to Facebook over the weekend to try to explain herself, framing her comments as a discussion of trust and love. Or, as she put it, TRUST and LOVE. Can you hear her now?

Morning light revealed pitched tents and scattered sleeping bags in front of the sales offices of luxury builder Woodbridge Pacific Group. Attracted by a dozen new Huntington Beach homes touted as "starting in the low 1,200,000s," about 15 hopefuls had camped out for days. They were waiting for a chance to get their names on a list to buy into the first phase of a new subdivision. One would-be buyer had flown in a friend from Las Vegas to hold his place in line. Another shopper had hired a pair of men to wait in 12-hour shifts.

While education reformers in Sacramento continue to obsess about how easy it should be to fire teachers and how important tests should be in evaluating their performance, almost no one is talking about the central issue of what students are supposed to be learning in the near future. A sea change is coming to schools in California, one of the 45 states that have adopted what are known as the Common Core State Standards. The idea of the new standards is to bring some consistency to education from state to state, and to better prepare students for the work they'll be expected to do in college and their jobs.

NBC's "Double Standard," airing tonight at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39, tippy-toes into the illusory world of bigamy. Robert Foxworth ("Falcon Crest") plays Leonard Harik--loving father and husband, respected lawyer, soon to be a circuit judge--who weds his secretary/mistress in a bogus ceremony after the birth of their illegitimate daughter. He does this because "anything else would be morally wrong."

No woman was ever ruined by a book, New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker famously said, but filmmakers are always being seduced by them, with unlucky audiences left to pay the price. The latest case in point is "Cloud Atlas," which has been turned into a film with muddled, frustrating results. It's not difficult to see why the filmmaking Wachowski siblings joined forces with Tom Tykwer to jointly write and direct a version of David Mitchell's hugely ambitious novel. It's a book that deals with, as Andy Wachowski has said, "the sum of human experience," that unabashedly investigates what is important in life.

Three have been fired and 10 have quit. Nine have been promoted. Two have killed suspects while on duty. And one stands accused of falsifying evidence in a murder case. For most of the 44 Los Angeles Police Department officers labeled "problem officers" in the landmark 1991 Christopher Commission report, the past four years have been tumultuous. The commission said its intention was to illustrate, not define, what it called "the problem of excessive force in the LAPD."

John Wooden was a young high school teacher and coach in the 1930s when he first wrote his personal definition of success, searching for a way to assure his students — and their parents — they could be successful without earning all A's. "I wanted to give them something to aspire to beyond higher marks in English classes or more statistics in sports," he told The Times in 2004. Wooden tied success not to achievement, wealth or fame, but to how close a person came to their potential.

The author Anne Rice, best known for her vampire novels, made waves last week when she declared on her Facebook page that she had "quit being a Christian." Twelve years after her return to Catholicism, Rice said she still believed in God, but that, "In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life."

It has been more than two years since the financial and economic crash of 2008. Since then, many things have improved, and the U.S. economy is officially out of recession. But many Americans are still hurting. Unemployment remains high, and the housing market is far from settled. We invited economists and other astute financial observers from across the political spectrum to suggest what, if anything, the government should do to stimulate the economy. Stimulus: neither needed nor free By John H. Cochrane Should the government do more to "stimulate" the economy?