I refer, of course, to Pottersville.

In Capra's Tale of Two Cities, Pottersville is the Bad Place. It's the demonic foil to Bedford Falls, the sweet, Norman Rockwell-like town in which George grows up. Named after the evil Mr. Potter, Pottersville is the setting for George's brief, nightmarish trip through a world in which he never existed. In that alternative universe, Potter has triumphed, and we are intended to shudder in horror at the sinful city he has spawned -- a kind of combo pack of Sodom, Gomorrah, Times Square in 1972, Tokyo's hostess district, San Francisco's Barbary Coast ca. 1884 and one of those demon-infested burgs dimly visible in the background of a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

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The talks failed because the U.S. and the rest of the P5+1 (Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany) refused to take yes for an answer. The key issue on the table was Iran’s accumulation of uranium enriched to 20 percent – not a high enough level to make a nuclear weapon, but close enough that it would be much easier for Tehran to do so. Iran made it clear that it was prepared to stop enriching to 20 percent and to even ship its stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country, if the U.S. and the other powers agreed to relax the draconian sanctions they have imposed on the country.

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Homophobia is the last refuge of open bigotry in American life. Racism, anti-Semitism and misogyny still exist, but they lurk in the shadows. It is no longer socially acceptable in any segment of society to openly say that blacks are violent or Latinos are lazy or Jews are grasping or women are genetically inferior. But it is still acceptable to say the crudest and most hate-filled things about gay people. In his 1999 book “One Nation, After All,” sociologist Alan Wolfe found that Americans were remarkably tolerant and open-minded about every controversial subject except one: homosexuality. Attitudes toward gays have become far more enlightened during the last 13 years, but Wolfe’s findings touch on a profound social reality: Many Americans still feel gays are somehow unacceptable, or scary, or immoral, or just different in some way that makes it acceptable to discriminate against them and/or openly disparage them.

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There the debate rested. Then Romney hit the campaign trail, and the pendulum swung decisively toward those who held that he was constructed out of high-impact plastic. Even the skeptics admitted that Romney’s “personality” did not appear to be of organic origin. He seemed uncomfortable in his own skin (which of course would make sense if he did not have actual skin), and did not know how to tell jokes (humor is notoriously difficult to program). Even the words he used to describe himself sounded like they were auto-imported from a slightly archaic database, as when he oddly described himself as “severely conservative.”

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There is a very good chance that this slow-motion blood bath could go on for years. And at the end, Assad could still be in power.

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To realize those totalitarian ambitions, China’s authorities, with Bain Capital’s help, are expanding the country’s already vast network of surveillance cameras. The city of Chongqing is spending $4.2 billion for a network of 500,000 cameras, Guangdong Province is installing a million cameras, and Beijing is planning to put cameras in all entertainment venues, the Times reported.

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Breitbart’s death at age 43 led wingnuts on the right to mutter darkly that he was taken out by nameless forces, presumably working for a Satanic Commie Muslim with the initials B.O. Now the video has been released, and it is safe to say that if the Obama administration did dispatch a hit team to silence Breitbart, it was a serious miscalculation. If Breitbart really believed that this feeble artifact would change the election, it would have been much better for the White House if he remained a key member of the right-wing brain trust charged with reclaiming the White House.

The brief video, shot in 1990, shows a young, skinny Barack Obama, at the time a second-year student at Harvard Law School, delivering a speech at a rally on behalf of a tenured law professor at the school named Derrick Bell.

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Obama faced a very delicate task this week. Netanyahu came to town to address the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s big conference. This is Washington’s annual pro-Israel orgy, in which politicians from both parties vie with each other to declare their undying fealty to a tiny foreign country. Sitting out this bizarre ritual is not an option. As the New York Times reported, AIPAC delegates from all 50 states scheduled 530 meetings with members of Congress: Only five congressional offices did not take meetings, and two of those were vacant.

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How did this happen? In retrospect, the war in Afghanistan was the prime culprit. That endless, Sisyphean war was the thin end of the wedge. In that murky, shifting struggle, it was normal for the U.S. to arrogate to itself the right to kill the Taliban wherever they were in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Once that precedent was established, it was an small step to killing bad guys in Iraq, Somalia, Yemen and Libya. And so, by imperceptible steps we arrived at the place we are now, where 77 percent of liberals support President Obama’s vastly expanded killer drone campaign, where an American citizen can be remotely vaporized at the touch of a button and no one cares. The war on Afghanistan set the precedent that shaped the entire “war on terror” paradigm. The chimera of “safety from terrorism” led us by easy stages to begin waging dirty war across the globe -- changing the definition of war, eroding moral and legal standards and greatly increasing the likelihood of ugly future consequences.

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His death is not just a terrible loss to journalism: it is a loss to America. Even though the United States is at war with two Middle Eastern countries, and stands on the brink of war with a third, most Americans, including our politicians and many so-called “experts,” know almost nothing about it – which is one of the reasons we embarked upon the disastrous Iraq war. Like all great reporters, Shadid penetrated the darkness. He took us not just into streets and cafes, but into hearts and minds. He showed the impact of decisions made by politicians and generals in far-away lands on housewives and young girls and street vendors, on small human beings just trying to live decent lives. He was our eyes.

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And, of course, Asian-Americans are going wild.

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It was a taut game, this 21-17 affair, airless and strange and beautiful to watch for purists, a game that lacked surface melodrama but in which the outcome hung on every snap. A baseball-type football game. A novelistic game, inexorable and fatalistic, the football equivalent of Edith Wharton’s "The House of Mirth," in which any change in the late narrative would have meant a different ending – Lily Bart not dying in despair, Tom Brady riding off into the sunset with four rings. But the fates – it felt like that, anyway, but it was just players making plays – decreed otherwise. Manningham’s gorgeous snag of Manning’s perfectly thrown 38-yard pass on the left sideline, with only a nanosecond to get his feet down and secure possession of the ball as he was slammed out of bounds, will go down as one of the most memorable catches in Super Bowl history, up there with Steeler Lynn Swann’s balletic leap in 1979 and John Taylor’s winning grab in the 49ers’ last-second victory over the Bengals. For Giants’ fans, it will forever be Catch 2.

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It will be a sad and lonely night for Baltimore Ravens’ kicker Billy Cundiff, whose shanked chip-shot 32-yarder gave the AFC championship to the New England Patriots. Kickers must have strong mental constitutions: in a sport where bonds between teammates are cemented in blood and pain, they are not always regarded as full-fledged comrades to begin with, and so when they screw up, it’s even harder for them to deal with. The mantra “short memory,” which defensive backs are constantly shouting at each other, applies in spades to kickers.  Cundiff could use a tall glass of Milk of Amnesia.

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Occupy’s first act, the Tent Phase, ended in early December, when city authorities raided its urban camp at Justin Herman Plaza near the Ferry Building. But even before the tents were removed, it had become clear that the movement needed both to develop new tactics and deepen its strategic vision.

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My team, the San Francisco 49ers, are channeling the ghosts of Joe Montana and Dwight Clark after coming back not once but twice in the last four minutes to beat the unstoppable New Orleans Saints in one of the most thrilling playoff games ever played. (Gloating and hubristic reminder: in my previous piece I called the 49ers to win 30-28. The final score: 49ers 36, Saints 32.)

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In an attempt to answer that question, the tortured French philosopher Blaise Pascal came up with something called “Pascal’s wager,” also known as “Bet on God.” Pascal’s argument went something like this: Man cannot know for sure whether or not God exists, but he has nothing to lose and everything to gain if God does exist, so he should “bet on God.”

It wasn’t exactly the most overpowering argument for the existence of a supreme being ever made, but it is one that millions of atheists, agnostics and other non-believers have been forced to take seriously since Tim Tebow pulled on a Denver Broncos’ uniform.

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I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Was it really possible that such wooden slogans were still being used by the leaders of the country with the most dynamic economy on earth? “We should deeply understand”? “Always sound the alarms”? Those antique phrases sounded like they’d been torn from a poster that had been pasted up during the Cultural Revolution and somehow never taken down. It seemed that not that much had changed since soon-to-be-Chairman Mao was writing tomes rejoicing in titles like “To Be Attacked by the Enemy Is Not a Bad Thing but a Good Thing” and urging the members of the party to cut off the head of imperialist snakes. A belief system as nutty as Maoism took a long time to get out of a nation’s system. I pitied the poor 1.3 billion Chinese, living in a country so insecure, so adolescent, so in thrall to authoritarian nationalism, that its politicians felt impelled to keep the cult alive. Thank God I’m an American, I told myself. We have plenty of cults, but at least they don’t get involved with our national politics.

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Any time someone who was the best at something dies, the world shrinks a little bit. It feels smaller today. One part of it especially feels smaller -- the world of words. For Christopher Hitchens was a virtuoso of language. As a baby, Mozart supposedly could tell if a violin was microscopically out of tune. I imagine Hitchens lying in his crib, wailing because his mother did not use a subordinate clause in exactly the right way to modulate to her conclusion. He was a rhetorical freak.

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One of the memorable slogans of the Vietnam era was “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” Today, the question should be: What if they ended a war and nobody cared?

With the possible exception of the Korean War, never in U.S. history has a major war concluded with so little fanfare. Every schoolchild knows that the Revolutionary War ended at Yorktown, when Gen. Cornwallis’ troops surrendered to George Washington’s Continental Army as a British band famously played “The World Turned Upside Down.” The encounter at Appomattox Court House between an immaculate Robert E. Lee and a mud-spattered Ulysses S. Grant has entered American legend.

V-E and V-J Days, commemorating the end of World War II, set off the most joyous, raucous and heartfelt celebrations in U.S. history. Even our defeats are marked in memory: The end of the Vietnam War will forever be associated with the image of desperate South Vietnamese clinging to the last helicopter as it lifted off from the American Embassy in Saigon.

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