Post-Bubble Portraits The great housing-fueled market bubble couldn’t burst, could it? The best Wall Street minds and their best risk-management tools failed to see the crash coming.

Andrew Bird

Sadie talks Jim Eggers down when he’s on the verge of a psychotic episode.

Delving into the head and heart of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman so brilliantly, as Lynn Hirschberg has done, has left us with the sense that we know this man, this actor, personally as well as anyone could (Dec. 21). We not only like him. We want to be there as he immerses himself in the character so completely that we no longer realize that Hoffman is playing a role. He becomes the character from the inside out. We are pulled into Capote for he is Capote as we knew him in the flesh. He is the priest in “Doubt” and could step permanently into this priestly role in real life, and we would not know the difference.

I was fascinated by Tina Rosenberg’s article (“A Payoff Out of Poverty?” Dec. 21) about Mexico’s Oportunidades program. Seeking to ameliorate rural poverty through cash subsidies to support health care and education seems like an attractive approach that could be embraced by both ends of the political spectrum. But as Rosenberg notes, without the creation of large numbers of well-paying jobs, the cycle of poverty will continue. In Mexico, 6,500 students graduate from medical school annually, but tens of thousands will end up as taxi drivers, book vendors and laboratory technicians, or in other jobs that have nothing to do with their training. Tiny cash supplements can never be a meaningful substitute for real jobs.

Bonfire of the profanities.