A curse has befallen Los Angeles. Two of its leading civic institutions -- and for Angelinos of my generation, perhaps its two greatest institutions -- were sold to men so venal, cynical, incompetent, and egomaniacal that they gutted them in just a couple of years. Now, higher authorities have stepped in to stop their further destruction, at least temporarily.

I refer, of course, to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Los Angeles Times. The Dodgers were already a storied franchise when Walter O'Malley moved them from Brooklyn in 1958. The Times had been the city's dominant paper since the early years of the 20th century, but only in 1960, when Otis Chandler became publisher, did it begin its rise to become one of the nation's greatest newspapers.

Last week, the gay-rights group Truth Wins Out celebrated Apple's decision to pull from its store an app by Exodus International, perhaps the best-known "ex-gay" organization in the world. The app, a near mirror of Exodus' website -- including its podcasts, FAQs, blog posts, and news updates -- was removed after a petition circulated on Change.org collected more than 150,000 signatures. "The message Apple is sending here is clear: there is no place for 'ex-gay therapy' on the Apple platform," said a Change.org editor.

But there was another message that also came across: It's Apple's job to police who can see what online.

I find it difficult to get worked up about debates over whom the president should pick to succeed Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff or Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council (NEC). These are important jobs, but they're fundamentally staff jobs whose occupants work for the president and have little to no autonomous decision-making authority. Under the circumstances, Barack Obama should pick people he likes, and the only real mystery is what's taking so long.

"The apportionment of taxes," wrote James Madison in Federalist No. 10, "is an act which seems to require the most exact impartiality; yet there is, perhaps, no legislative act in which greater opportunity and temptation are given to a predominant party to trample on the rules of justice. Every shilling with which they overburden the inferior number, is a shilling saved to their own pockets."

The financial crisis has led to an accountability moment for our economic system. But the most disappointing -- if unsurprising -- realization in what ought to be an era of reform is that so few experts from the world of Wall Street and commerce have stepped forward to offer a transformative vision of the new economy. On the left, brilliant economists and advocates abound, but it is harder to find practitioners whose reforms are inspired by hard-won experience.

"Any idiot can nationalize a company," the great American socialist Michael Harrington used to say, disparagingly. For socialists of Harrington's generation and thereafter -- the socialists and social democrats who have governed most of Western Europe off and on for the past 30 years -- nationalizing companies hasn't really been part of their playbook. To be sure, they long since nationalized a range of services -- most prominently, health insurance -- that remain in private hands in the United States. But taking over major companies? Ever since Francois Mitterrand pulled back from nationalizing major French concerns in the early 1980s, it simply hasn't been done.

As I read coverage of the unpublished 513-page account of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq, a wave of sad recognition washed over me. The narrative thread of how a $100 billion effort to "save" Iraq became a giant save-your-own-ass bureaucracy was one that I had seen repeatedly in the news recently. A depressingly familiar story.