With the Dow topping fifteen thousand and long lines forming down my block to inspect a two-bedroom apartment that is going for the shockingly low price of under a million dollars, it’s hard not to think of the “b” word: bubble. Whatever else, the Fed’s policy of “quantitative easing” may have accomplished, or not accomplished, it’s certainly given a bit more juice to the Brooklyn real-estate boom.

Should we be worried? In a typically feisty column today, Paul Krugman dismisses those who are concerned as “babbling barons of bubbleism.” It’s a nice piece of alliteration, and I’m largely with Krugman on the specifics, but l think he goes a bit far. On the past two occasions we dismissed talk of bubbles, we ended up with the dot-com bubble of 1998-2000, which was epic but didn’t have too many lasting effects, and the housing bubble of 2003-2007, which was simply disastrous.

When was the last time a picture of a soccer coach appeared on the front of the Financial Times and the New York Times on the same day? The answer is never, I would guess. But on Thursday morning, staring out from the front pages of the two newspapers I get delivered, there were the ruddy features of Sir Alex Ferguson, who, until his retirement on Wednesday, had been the manager of Manchester United, one of the most successful sports teams in the world. In a league where most managers last a year or two, Ferguson’s twenty-seven-year tenure was remarkable and unique. In modern American sports, there’s no real comparison, either. Bill Belichick’s thirteen-year run at the New England Patriots probably comes closest.

The National Rifle Association, as I pointed out in my previous post, is on the offensive. Not content with its recent victory in Congress, it is already looking forward to the 2014 midterm elections, when it hopes to sink the prospect of effective gun control for another decade or more. So what, if anything, can be done? How can supporters of sensible measures to prevent the proliferation of deadly firearms—a group that includes the majority of Americans—hope to defeat the gun lobby?

In seeking answers to this question, I’ve been conversing with some folks in the gun-control movement, and the conversations were more encouraging than I had expected. Having spent a few weeks getting over their setback in the Senate, the N.R.A.’s opponents are taking President Obama at his word that it was merely the “first round” in a lengthy fight. Realistically, they can’t hope to knock out Wayne LaPierre and his four-million-plus members (the precise number of N.R.A. members is hotly disputed) anytime soon, but they are looking to defeat them on points. And they see signs of encouragement. Indeed, some of them believe that the N.R.A.’s historic victory could end up being viewed as a historic blunder.

In case you missed the news—and I can’t really blame you for tuning it out—the National Rifle Association has gotten itself a new president. He’s a charming tub of a man by the name of Jim Porter, and Monday was officially his first day in his new job. But even before taking over at the N.R.A.’s headquarters, in Fairfax, Virginia, Porter clearly signalled his intentions.

Addressing the N.R.A.’s annual convention in Houston over the weekend, the sixty-four year-old Porter told the assembled firearms enthusiasts, survivalists, and Republican hangers-on that they were engaged in a “culture war” with the President, media élitists, Mayor Bloomberg, and anyone else who questioned the right of God-fearing Americans to arm themselves like members of an infantry battalion without a proper system of background checks on purchases. “This is not a battle about gun rights,” Porter declared at a breakfast meeting. “[You] here in this room are fighters for freedom. We are the protectors.”

Friday’s employment report for April was generally positive, and, at least for now, it has alleviated fears that the economy is stuttering. On Wall Street, traders cheered the numbers. The Dow flirted with 15,000, and the S. & P. 500 topped 1,600.

Both surveys from the Labor Department—of firms and of households—showed solid job growth. According to the survey of firms, the economy created a 165,000 jobs last month; according to households, it created 293,000 jobs. The unemployment rate edged down another tenth of a per cent, to 7.5 per cent. And the job figures for February and March were revised up substantially, presenting a much more buoyant picture of the labor market. After the revisions, the payroll survey shows job growth averaging almost two hundred thousand per month—196,000 to be precise—since the start of the year.

Memo to a President who said, in November, 2007, “I am in this race to tell the corporate lobbyists in Washington that their days of setting the agenda are over”: If you are going to name a former lobbyist for big cable and wireless companies as head of the federal agency that regulates the cable and wireless industries, you had better find a public-interest-group advocate to say something positive about him (or her) before you make the announcement.

Job done.

By Wednesday, when the White House confirmed that it was nominating Tom Wheeler, a veteran Washington insider who has headed not one powerful industry association but two, as the next chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the nomination had already secured the support of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that promotes open and unlimited access to the Internet. “Certainly we will have disagreements with the new Chairman (assuming Wheeler is confirmed), but we expect that Wheeler will actively work to promote competition and protect consumers,” Harold Feld, a senior vice-president at Public Knowledge, wrote in a blog post.

Tuesday’s press conference marking the hundred-day mark in Barack Obama’s second term was revealing in many ways. If you are still wondering what sort of character resides behind the cool, detached visage that the forty-fourth President presents to the world, the answer was plain to see: a cool, detached attorney, but one who hasn’t wholly forgotten the idealism that propelled him through Harvard Law School and onto the streets of Chicago’s South Side.

Asked about the tricky case of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and his alleged use of sarin gas against his own people, Obama, to the outrage of many armchair interventionists, remarked, “We don’t have chain of custody that establishes what exactly happened”—an answer that could be roughly translated into English as, “Back off, buster. I’m not going to rushed into anything.” But when he was quizzed about the hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay, he dropped the legalese and renewed his calls for the detention center to be closed, saying, “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried—that is contrary to who we are, it is contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop.”

The news that house prices have risen by almost ten per cent during the past twelve months, the fastest rate of increase in almost seven years, confirms a trend seen in other recent reports on the economy: the private sector—excluding the unemployed—is doing pretty well. But retrenchments in the public sector, which accounts for roughly a fifth of G.D.P., are holding back the recovery, and, indeed, jeopardizing its future.

Let’s start with the positive developments. One of the reasons that this recovery, which technically began in July, 2009, has been so weak is that the bombed-out housing sector has acted as a big drag on spending. In most recoveries, residential construction, and other spending associated with housing, is a key engine of growth. But for at least the first couple of years of this recovery, the housing sector was actually detracting from G.D.P. growth. Last year, things picked up a bit, and the trend is continuing. Since last summer, residential investment has been rising at an annual rate of about fifteen per cent, albeit from a low base.

In one of life’s little ironies, last Friday’s disappointing G.D.P. figures, which reflected a sharp fall in government spending, appeared on the same day that the economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published an Op-Ed in the Times defending their famous (now infamous) research that conservative politicians around the world had seized upon to justify penny-pinching policies. Addressing a new paper by three lesser lights of their profession from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, which uncovered data omissions, questionable methods of weighting, and elementary coding errors in Reinhart and Rogoff’s original work, and which went around the world like a viral video, the Harvard duo dismissed the entire brouhaha as “academic kerfuffle” that hadn’t vitiated their main points.

Really? Even somebody living in a bubble stretching over Harvard Yard would have difficulty believing that. For all of the illuminating work Reinhart and Rogoff have done on the history of financial crises and their aftermaths, including their popular 2011 book “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly,” their most influential claim was that rising levels of government debt are associated with much weaker rates of economic growth, indeed negative ones. In undermining this claim, the attack from Amherst has done enormous damage to Reinhart and Rogoff’s credibility, and to the intellectual underpinnings of the austerity policies with which they are associated. In addition, it has created another huge embarrassment for an economics profession that was still suffering from the fallout of the financial crisis and the laissez-faire policies that preceded it. After this new fiasco, how seriously should we take any economist’s policy prescriptions, especially ones that are seized upon by politicians with agendas of their own?

Here’s a little mental experiment. Imagine, for a moment, that the Tsarnaev brothers, instead of packing a couple of pressure cookers loaded with nails and explosives into their backpacks a week ago Monday, had stuffed inside their coats two assault rifles—Bushmaster AR-15s, say, of the type that Adam Lanza used in Newtown. What would have been different?

Well, for one thing, the brothers would probably have killed a lot more than three people at the marathon. AR-15s can fire up to forty-five rounds a minute, and at close range they can tear apart a human body. If the Tsarnaevs had started firing near the finish line, they might easily have killed dozens of spectators and runners before fleeing or being shot by the police.