It might not be surprising, then, that one New Jersey politician spent 21 percent of his time on the road over an 18-month period – except that this particular elected official was not a member of Congress, but rather the mayor of Newark.

Cory Booker has spent much of his time out of town appearing on television, including appearances on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” “The Daily Show,” and “Meet the Press,” and speaking before auditoriums of non-Newark residents at graduations and other events. Oprah Winfrey dubbed him a “rock star mayor.” In Newark, he’s more often known as the “absentee mayor.”

Booker claims that his nationwide networking is critical to attracting funding for his city and has helped his administration to raise $400 million in philanthropic contributions. Kevin Griffis, a spokesman for Booker, explained to Newark’s Star-Ledger newspaper that the speeches “have helped the mayor connect to philanthropists and developers and attracted talented people to the city.” Booker’s speech-making has also brought in $1.3 million for Booker himself, according to documents he disclosed recently. The mayor’s typical honorarium for delivering a speech runs around $20,000, the documents revealed.

Newark residents who cannot spare $20,000 to get an audience with their mayor must often make do with responses of 140 characters or fewer. Booker, who once tweeted 106 times in a single day, is a Twitter devotee, and frequently uses the site to communicate with his constituents.

Booker has also become known for high-profile activities that do a lot to bolster his personal brand but little to affect policy. In 2010, he personally helped to shovel snow after a blizzard – although he apparently still had his hands free often enough to thoroughly document his efforts on Twitter. Last December, he embarked on a weeklong challenge to live on the $4-a-day meal budget allotted to those who rely on food stamps. The mayor also once pulled a neighbor from a burning building. That was certainly a heroic act – and nobody wants personal publicity that badly – but, as The New York Times recently pointed out, the incident occurred shortly after the city was forced to eliminate three fire companies.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with combining political experience and personal charisma to make a job out of touring the lecture circuit. The problem, in Booker’s case, is that he already has a job. Few high-level jobs can be done effectively while taking off an average of one day a week to pursue a side gig. It turns out running the largest city in New Jersey is no exception.

Other Newark politicians complain that the mayor’s frequent travels make him less able to connect to residents and understand their concerns. “I don’t know the last time the mayor was in my ward,” West Ward Councilman Ron Rice told The Star-Ledger. Booker also faced focused criticism for his failure to attract support for a school overhaul measure in 2011.

Even if Booker thought he could govern just as well part time, the decision is not his to make. The voters of Newark hired him as a full-time mayor, at a salary of $174,496 a year. His time is already bought and paid for. If Booker genuinely believes that the best use of that time, in the service of his city, is to raise money through his personal charm, he ought to put the proceeds of his speaking engagements back into the city’s coffers. It would at least give Booker the distinction of being a public servant who unarguably earns his keep.

Booker does, in fact, donate much of the money he makes from speaking. He estimated he had given away around $620,000 of the $1.3 million he made from speaking between 2008 and 2013. Rather than giving the money directly to the city, however, he donated it to a variety of individual, mostly Newark-based charities, churches and schools.

But charity for which one hopes to get a reward is simply spending, and that appears to be the case with Booker’s donations. Last year, Booker was already openly fueling rumors that he might challenge Gov. Chris Christie. Since then, he has shifted his sights to the U.S. Senate, specifically the seat of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, who is retiring next year. That may help to explain his congressional-style schedule. In the what-goes-around-comes-around economics of politics, Booker’s donations to private charities may return to him in the form of support from those organizations’ leaders and members.

If Booker does make it to the Senate, he will have to cut back on his speaking engagements, or at least on his fees. Members of Congress are not permitted to earn more than 15 percent of their salaries in “outside earned income.” Congressional rules recognize that serving is a full-time job.

In Newark, where 26.1 percent of the population lived below the poverty line from 2007 to 2011, many people need to work multiple jobs just to get by. The mayor is fortunate enough not to be one of them.

Some mistakes are hard to see coming. Others are big enough to view from miles above.

I lived in Montana during college and for the first few years after I graduated, from 1974 to 1981. Since I’d left my family back in New York, I flew to the East Coast fairly regularly in those years. On those flights, I only had to look out the window to know exactly where I was.

Most flights took a northern route, passing over the plains of Montana and North Dakota, heading to Minneapolis and the Eastern states beyond. Below me, I could see evidence of farmers who practiced dryland agriculture. They planted wheat in contoured curves on hilly land, or in strips that created alternating stripes of golden crop and brown fallow soil. “Strip farming” conserved water, allowing moisture to accumulate in the fallow soil for use the following year. Both the contour and strip methods also prevented topsoil from blowing away. These practices came into wide use following the disastrous Dust Bowl years of the 1930s.

The northern Plains were not suited for corn; they were too dry and, more importantly, the growing season there was too short. Farmers there were never tempted to turn to irrigation on a mass scale. Even if they had wanted to, the aquifers were too deep or too scanty in many places to support large-scale crop watering.

Other flights took me east via Denver. This route passed over the central Plains of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, and sometimes as far south as the Texas Panhandle. Below me, I could see a Swiss cheese pattern of green circles set against the backdrop of dry, brown prairie grasses. Each green circle was a field irrigated by a center-pivot irrigation system. Farmers raised wheat, sorghum, corn and, in some places, even water-hungry rice, all with water from the region’s vast and easily tapped aquifer.

Even 30 years ago, we knew it couldn’t last. But nobody stopped until the water ran out.

The New York Times ran an article this past weekend that focused on the rapid depletion of the High Plains Aquifer, which stretches from Wyoming and South Dakota down to the Texas Panhandle. The southern portions of the aquifer, especially, are losing the ability to support large-scale irrigation, as years of intensive farming and recent drought take their toll. Farmers in Kansas and other nearby states face the reality that their water may soon run out.

The Times described it as a “slow-motion crisis,” with some farmers already coping with a harsh new reality and others still years or decades away from running out of groundwater. But replenishing an aquifer is a matter of centuries, not seasons. Farmers in the region will have to learn to cope with less water for irrigation, or no irrigation at all. It is now only a matter of when.

The same center-pivot irrigators that allowed farmers to grow more and thirstier crops have done the bulk of the work in hastening that day.

I now fly regularly to California over the same central Plains. But the green circles, once so prominent, have largely vanished. In some places, I can still make out their shape, but they are just ghosts of past bumper crops, brown on brown.

It’s too bad the water from the High Plains Aquifer and others like it looked to be abundant when it actually was not, at least not in a long-term perspective. Had the water been priced efficiently from the beginning, farmers would have used less of it. Improvements in irrigators would have led to decreased water consumption, rather than increased crop output. Plains farmers would have turned to more efficient irrigation methods and to crops that required less water. Farmers in more humid areas, such as the Southeast and eastern Midwest, would have stepped up their planting, without the price competition of commodities from western states that had been indirectly subsidized by unrealistically cheap water.

We aren’t going to run out of the corn, cotton, or other agricultural commodities we need. The depletion of the Plains water supplies is ultimately a local issue, not a national one. Communities in that part of the country will find their future growth and prosperity constrained due to the lack of water – water consumed, often wastefully, years earlier. The water cost farmers and their communities too little for decades, but now that bill is finally coming due.

Even if the issue is local, it serves as a warning about the use of natural resources. We knew better than to use water in semiarid regions as if it were inexhaustible. Yet in the absence of clear market signals, we did not care enough, and we did not respond in time. Now the story of our wasteful past is written on the land in the ghost circles we can see from the sky.

For the second time in less than 15 years, the citizens of Moore, Okla., face the prospect of rebuilding their shattered community after a tragic and devastating tornado.

It is a sad but familiar fact of life in “Tornado Alley,” the stretch of the southern Plains where twisters are more common and, too often, more powerful than anywhere else on Earth. The old saying goes that there nothing stands between the Gulf of Mexico and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence. Tornadoes are fueled by the clash of warm, moist, light air masses from the Gulf and cold, dry, dense air masses from the Arctic. May is the peak of the tornado season in the region, and May – in 1999 and 2013 – is when massive storms struck in Moore, a suburb on the southern outskirts of Okalahoma City.

There is nobody to blame for Monday’s death toll: 51 in early reports that said 20 children were among the dead, though later the total fatality count was lowered, at least temporarily, to 24. Two elementary schools were struck by the storm.

Weather forecasters issued warnings even before the twister hit the ground, and the region’s battle-hardened residents had anywhere from 15 to 60 minutes to take cover, as most surely did. I have absolutely no doubt, in particular, that the teachers and staff at those elementary schools did everything in their power to protect their charges, just as teachers and administrators did in the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., that killed 20 children just five months ago.

We are conditioned to blame Mother Nature and bad luck for tornado deaths. Unlike hurricanes, which form far out at sea and can be forecast days in advance, tornadoes are highly local and both short-lived and capricious. A tornado might level a house and leave the one next door unscathed. Hurricanes don’t do that.

Most tornadoes land in open areas, and thus do little damage, for the simple reason that most of the nation’s midsection and the deep South, where tornadoes are most common, consists of fields, farms and forest. Occasionally and purely by chance, a strong tornado hits a developed area, and mayhem results.

But blaming only nature and bad luck is fast becoming outmoded. As recently as 1999, when the last devastating storm struck Moore, a tornado warning could seldom be issued until a funnel cloud had been sighted. More often, the warnings would not come until the twister had touched the ground. People relied on community sirens and special radios tuned to National Weather Service broadcasts. At best, there was only time to run to a storm cellar or an interior room and hope for the best.

Today, we have longer lead times and more precise warnings about the locations at which a storm is likely to strike. If we build shelters in places where large crowds gather – places like schools, hospitals, shopping malls, office buildings and sports stadiums – there is now time to move people to those secure areas until danger has passed.

Imagine, for example, if an elementary school is built on and into a hillside, with the auditorium (nearly all schools have one) dug into the hill. A storm might level the exposed part of the structure while harmlessly passing over the room in which students and staff take shelter. Hillsides are scarce in some parts of the plains, but they aren’t unknown – and we can certainly build one alongside a school using earth-moving equipment. We do it for highway overpasses.

Shopping malls might be equipped with emergency lighting and electronic signs to guide patrons to the secure area. Store personnel can be trained to assist. A flight crew can evacuate everyone from a smoke-filled aircraft in 90 seconds with the aid of emergency lighting and those annoying pre-flight safety briefings. We ought to be able to move everyone in every mall and big-box store to safety in no more than five minutes. These days, with warnings “pushed” directly to cell phones via text messages, five minutes is enough time to save many lives.

There were reports of gas leaks in the aftermath of this week’s tornado in Moore. When new neighborhoods are built, officials should consider whether it makes sense to use gas for heating and cooking in this region, or whether to instead rely on electricity (produced at safer locations with gas-fired turbines), which can be more easily turned off. Officials also should consider whether to require new utility lines to be buried, which will reduce future storm damage and facilitate faster recoveries.

Should every new home and apartment building in Tornado Alley be required, as a piece of basic safety equipment, to have an adequate storm shelter for the expected number of residents? Should every office building be required to have protection for the anticipated number of workers and visitors? We require modern buildings to have smoke alarms and fire-suppression systems. As a result, fatalities from fires have plunged over the past several decades.

Hurricanes Hugo (1989) and Andrew (1992) triggered major changes in building codes in parts of the Southeast, and especially in Florida. Similar lessons should be drawn from major tornadoes in populated areas. We can probably never achieve perfect protection, but we surely can do better in the future than we have done in the past.

These issues are best addressed on the state and local levels, rather than nationally. Safety standards that might be essential in Tulsa, Okla., could be irrelevant in Tacoma, Wash. (which has its own natural disasters to think about, including earthquakes and nearby volcanoes). Ideally, states would help one another, sharing and applying lessons learned and harmonizing building codes to achieve economies of scale. Also, while hurricanes and tornadoes are very different storms with different effects, some of the measures used to fight one are applicable to the other. My home state of Florida has a lot of experience with both types. I hope Gov. Rick Scott and other Florida officials extend every possible form of assistance to our Oklahoma friends, including sharing the lessons we have learned in many episodes of rebuilding.

The people who live in Tornado Alley, and everywhere else tornadoes strike (they have been known to occur in every state), are going to keep rebuilding after every storm. That’s as it should be. But we don’t have to keep rebuilding the same way. Every tragedy offers lessons to be learned, and each lesson learned helps lessen the death toll in the future.

For many people, summer unofficially begins on the Memorial Day holiday weekend, but I like to get a head start – especially because I am usually in the Northeast this time of year.

From the Jersey shore (sadly, still struggling to recover from Sandy) to the coast of Maine, the upcoming three-day holiday will bring endless traffic, clogged restaurants and scarce hotel rooms. I make it a point never to have to cross a toll bridge on the Friday or Monday evening of a summer holiday weekend. If you have experienced the George Washington Bridge at such times, you understand why.

So Linda and I try to start our summers a week early, as we did this past weekend in Vermont. This tiny space on the calendar, sandwiched between Mother’s Day and Memorial Day, is like a dress rehearsal. The snow is gone, the mud is (mostly) gone, and seasonal enterprises like Dana’s restaurant at the Quechee Gorge (a favorite haunt for pancakes with maple syrup) are open for business. Newly hired employees are still trying to find their way around, but things tend to run smoothly without the pressure of holiday crowds. Restaurants and innkeepers, coming off a six- or eight-week drought after the end of ski season, are eager for customers.

About 30 minutes’ drive from Quechee, the tiny village of Fairlee, Vt., sits alongside the Connecticut River, just off Interstate 91 some 90 miles north of the Massachusetts line. Fairlee is the home of one of the last-remaining drive-in movie theaters in this part of the world. Though I have not done it myself, I understand that if you book a room at the adjacent motel, you can view the movie out your window. Last weekend’s features were “Iron Man 3” and “Wreck-It Ralph.” You might need that motel bed if you go for one of the double features. In Vermont around the summer solstice, it does not get dark enough to start drive-in pictures until about 9 p.m.

The drive-in is struggling to stay in business. That’s hardly a surprise, considering how few drive-ins remain, but in this case the problem is not a customer shortage. It is that the drive-in’s old 35-millimeter projector is fast becoming a museum piece. A new digital projector, already required for many of the latest Hollywood releases, will soon become a practical necessity. The drive-in is appealing for customers to help it raise the $70,000 or so that a new projector would cost.

We visited Fairlee, as we usually do, on our summer kickoff tour this weekend, but we were not there for the drive-in. We stopped at the tiny Fairlee Diner to fortify ourselves for an afternoon’s hiking. The diner offers one of the better slices of chocolate cream pie in the Upper Valley, which is what residents on either side of the Connecticut River call this region. It also features friendly, warm service, the sort you find in a tiny place where the staff knows half the customers by name and most of the rest, including me, by sight. Each time we go to the diner, I remark how I like the “Fairlee friendly” service to my wife. Each time, she rolls her eyes in response. It’s worth the trip just for that.

But a trip to the diner also gives me a chance to catch up with a couple of old friends I have never met: Tom and Atticus.

Tom Ryan is a former newspaper editor from Newburyport, Mass., who now lives in the nearby White Mountains of New Hampshire. Atticus is his eight-pound miniature schnauzer. Together they have become regional celebrities, widely known across New England, thanks largely to a column Ryan writes for the Northcountry News.

I always pick up a free copy of the Northcountry News at the diner, and I always read Ryan’s latest installment of “The Adventures of Tom and Atticus.” He has recounted how he, a middle-aged, not-terribly-athletic man, and his tiny dog (getting on in years and going blind) have hiked all four dozen of the White Mountain peaks that exceed 4,000 feet, as well as many other places. His columns are not so much about mountaineering exploits as about the interesting two- and four-legged characters they encounter on the trail, and about the bond between man, domestic beast and nature that infuses outdoor life.

Two years ago, Ryan collected many of his columns into a book, “Following Atticus,” which brought the pair more fame. The book’s publication led to a review in Boston Magazine and appearances on public television. But I prefer to observe Tom and Atticus in their natural habitat, on the pages of the Northcountry News.

The News is what my old journalism bosses disparagingly called a “shopper.” It is free, and it pays for itself the old-fashioned newspaper way, by selling ads. In most places, this revenue has mostly dried up, as competition from the Internet takes most of the classified business and an increasing share of display ads. But the Northcountry News is, I suspect, different – a must-read bulletin board for area residents and visitors, and a place advertisers can turn with the knowledge that there is an audience that genuinely pays attention to the paper’s content.

Tom and Atticus are part of the paper’s family and a big part of its appeal, just like this week’s cover photo of a bear “family” newly emerged from hibernation. The caption reminded the region’s residents to secure their trash cans and bird feeders (besides which, there really is no need to feed birds in the summer) and, above all, not to feed the bears. “A fed bear, usually ends up a dead bear,” the paper warned. “So if you respect our wildlife, and wish it to live, please do not feed them.”

If you make it to the Fairlee Diner, and it is not a Sunday, drive a few miles farther north to Bradford, Vt., and visit Farm-Way to see what a New England general store has become in the 21st century. Family-run, and proud to be 43 percent solar-powered (this is Vermont, after all), Farm-Way has everything from clothes and shoes to kayaks and La-Z-Boys. They will deliver to most of the region and ship anywhere. Coffee and donuts are free on Saturdays.

I can’t say the first weekend of summer is like coming home. Much as I like northern New England, my home is elsewhere; I only know most of my Vermont neighbors and vendors by sight, rather than by name. But just like Tom and Atticus, Linda and I always find new hills to explore and new personalities to meet. The diner never seems to run out of pie, and the reception is always Fairlee-nice. If it sounds hokey, feel free to roll your eyes.

However, assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) can cause financial complications that are important to discuss with an adviser.

Don’t assume that if your adviser has not asked about these issues, he or she does not need to know. Some lawyers, financial planners and other professionals may believe these issues arise so infrequently that the topic need not be raised. However, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 60,000 live births in the U.S. were the result of ART in 2011. The CDC estimates that more than 1 percent of all births in the U.S. today are the result of conception via ART. As the technology becomes more commonplace, it will become standard to consider its financial and legal implications.

Even individuals without a child conceived using assisted reproduction, or who have no immediate plans to try to have a baby, can face legal complications due to ART. An increasing number of people are choosing to preserve sperm, eggs or embryos to guard against future fertility problems, which can arise due to age, surgery, vaccinations and cancer treatment. An individual may also decide to donate his or her genetic material to others, either out of altruism or for compensation. In all of these cases, it is important that a plan is in place for dealing with the genetic material and any potential children that could result from it.

Legislative Attempts to Deal with ART

Technological advances have created situations that transcend traditional concepts of parenthood. Many of the existing laws regarding intestacy and inheritance were drafted before it was possible to have posthumous children.

There have been attempts to modernize some of these laws. The Uniform Parentage Act (UPA) outlines specific provisions regarding how authorities should deal with issues regarding the parentage and legal rights of children born via ART. The UPA provides rules and procedures for determining who is legally responsible for children after their birth. At this writing, the act has been enacted in Alabama, Delaware, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.

Determining legal parentage is important because it often determines whether a child is eligible to receive benefits such as Social Security or financial support, or to inherit assets. Traditional concepts of parenthood, where genetic relationships were central, are no longer the only basis for a legally recognized parent-child relationship. Modern reproductive technology means a child can have genetic parents (the suppliers of egg and sperm), a gestational mother (such as a surrogate), and intended parents, all of whom may be different. The UPA seeks to cope with this reality.

The Uniform Probate Code (UPC), which applies if a decedent’s assets were not disposed of via a will or trust, has also adopted rules to address issues that arise with children conceived using ART. An important distinction between the parentage act and the UPC is that the probate code designates specific timetables for a child to be born after a parent’s death in order to inherit assets from an estate. (The child must be in utero within 36 months or born within 45 months of a parent’s death). The child’s heirship is automatic under the UPC as long as the timetables are met. Before the UPC was amended in 2008, the code required that children be conceived before a parent’s death in order to inherit assets.

The UPC further distinguishes between children born to a genetic parent who is the gestational carrier and children who are carried by a surrogate. The code also includes various requirements for establishing intent to be a parent. The model UPC has been adopted wholly or in part by 18 states. However, many states have made substantial amendments, making it “uniform” only in name. For example, only two states have so far adopted the new provision regarding automatic inheritance rights based on specific timetables for conception and birth.

Inheritance and Posthumous Children

The concept of posthumous children is not solely a product of ART. There have been laws on the books for years regarding children that were conceived before a parent’s death but born after. However, ART addresses situations in which conception might occur years after the death of a parent. As discussed in the prior section, laws regarding inheritance in these cases are often unclear and can be inconsistent from state to state.

In May 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court decided the case of Asture v. Capato, one such inheritance dispute. The case centered on whether twins who were conceived after their father’s death were eligible for his Social Security benefits. Robert Capato had deposited his semen in a sperm bank before receiving treatment for esophageal cancer. Following her husband’s death in 2002, Karen Capato conceived twins via in-vitro fertilization. Robert Capato’s will named the couple’s two older children and his children from a previous marriage as beneficiaries of his estate, but did not specifically mention posthumous children. The Court ruled that the twins were ineligible for benefits because Florida, where the Capatos resided, only provides for inheritance in cases where children are specifically named in the decedent’s will.

The Court acknowledged that the results might have been different if the family resided in another state, one that allowed for inheritance. The importance of this ruling is that the Supreme Court affirmed that the determination of posthumous Social Security benefits is based on state law. This underscores the importance of properly drafting documents and understanding the laws in the prospective parent’s state of residence.

When allowing for the possibility of posthumous children in estate planning, it is important to consider the language of the drafted document. Wills or trusts commonly refer to beneficiaries as “issue” or “children.” If a document does not specifically define whether the term only applies to children who were alive before the parent’s death or born within a certain period after, it could lead to complications for the beneficiaries. Children born after the parent’s death who are not included among his or her beneficiaries specifically may be excluded, as in the Capato case, whether this is the parent’s intention or not.

Estate administration is another factor in planning for posthumous children. Uncertainty regarding who is eligible to make claims against the estate or when a class of future beneficiaries may be established could delay the estate’s administration and increase costs and litigation risks.

Donating and Controlling Genetic Material

When donating or preserving genetic material, it is important to understand the potential rights of any resultant children for parental support. Generally, the intended parent is legally responsible for supporting the child, and the donor has no parental rights or obligations. A child in this scenario is unable to make a claim for support or inheritance on the biological parent.

However, a donor who does not want parental responsibilities must also follow certain rules to avoid unintended consequences. For instance, the courts will not generally consider a sperm donor a child’s legal parent, as long as the donor actively waived his parental rights and a doctor handled the mother’s insemination. Without both of these provisions, a sperm donor could inadvertently create legal paternity.

For example, a man in Kansas donated his sperm to a lesbian couple to help them conceive. The insemination was not supervised by a doctor. The couple later separated, and one woman filed for state assistance to support the child. The state of Kansas eventually filed a suit against the sperm donor to collect for assistance paid for the child, even though he had signed away his parental rights. In this case, Kansas ignored the parties’ expressed intent due to the absence of medical supervision. (The courts have generally shown that intent weighs heavier in cases of egg donation.)

If a heterosexual couple divorces and the woman uses her ex-husband’s sperm for in-vitro fertilization, he will not be considered the resulting child’s legal father unless he gave prior written consent for the use of his sperm. Even in cases where there was a signed agreement between the biological parents, the law often sides with the father if there is a subsequent dispute regarding a child’s conception. American courts are generally reluctant to force legal paternity when given another option.

Donors should make sure they document how they wish their preserved or donated genetic material to be handled. Clear evidence of intent can help avoid many legal tangles. If donors signed agreements in the past that no longer reflect their wishes, they should take steps, in writing, to revoke them.

Advances in reproductive technologies have brought the joy of parenthood to many for whom it once was out of reach. Knowing and planning for the issues that can arise when children are conceived using these technologies will help ease worries regarding the financial well-being of the future parents and their children.

If you know anything at all about baseball, you can name the last major league hitter to have a batting average above .400 for a full season – and you also know his exact average and when he did it, even though you probably were not yet born when it happened. (Ted Williams, .406, 1941.) Serious runners, and a lot of other people, know that Roger Bannister was the first person to run the mile in less than four minutes, in 1954. A four-minute mile, which was once a huge psychological barrier, has become routine these days. There might be all sorts of reasons for this rapid evolution in human speed. I figure today’s runners have better shoes, but the knowledge that it can be done probably plays a big part too.

Round numbers command our attention and affect our behavior in ways far out of proportion to their significance. This is true for all of us. Understanding this tendency can help us make better decisions.

You might have heard that the Internal Revenue Service recently acknowledged that it singled out conservative organizations for special scrutiny when they applied for non-profit status. It is a major national story that broke, as such news often does, on a Friday – in this case, May 10.

Yet the lead story in the next day’s New York Times was a report that scientists atop a mountain in Hawaii had measured the atmosphere’s carbon dioxide level at 400 parts per million. The paper described this as a “milestone” in the course of global climate change. Leaving aside the question of how much credence to give climate predictions, I think the milestone description is accurate. A round number is a marker that, like a roadside sign, can tell you how far you have come, even if it says nothing about where you are going.

But was it the most important news story that day, worthy of leading the front page of The Times? It was not the first time the 400-ppm level had been recorded at the Hawaiian site; it was just the first time it had been measured at that average level over a 24-hour period. Such levels have also been recorded at other sites previously (mostly in the Arctic); those sites just don’t have the historical continuity of the Hawaiian research facility, which offers data that dates back to the 1950s.

And as it turned out, the measurement that was the basis of the Times story was wrong. The average CO2 concentration on that day did not, in fact, reach the 400-ppm level. (The Los Angeles Times, having invested far less in hyping the original figure, simply reported the downward revision below the benchmark; The New York Times fudged by saying that while federal scientists now believe the 400-ppm level was not reached, another group’s measurements still crossed the goal line.)

Journalists have a concept they call “news judgment.” It refers to the ability to discern what information is genuinely new and what isn’t, and the relative importance of each. The IRS admitting it targeted conservatives was new information. The fact that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising was not, and the 400-ppm “milestone,” even if it had been crossed, was of no particular climate significance. At 399 or 401 parts per million, carbon dioxide’s effect on our weather (whatever it may be) is the same. Seen most charitably and, I think, most realistically, The New York Times’ editorial staff was seduced by the power of the round number.

Of course, not everyone sees the decision so charitably, and the paper’s credibility took a hit. Washington Post opinion writer George Will took note: “Episodes like this separate the meritorious liberals from the meretricious. The day after the IRS story broke, The Post led the paper with it, and, with an institutional memory of Watergate, published a blistering editorial demanding an Obama apology. The New York Times consigned the story to page 10 (its front-page lead was the umpteenth story about the end of the world being nigh because of global warming). Through Monday [May 13], the Times had expressed no editorial thoughts about the IRS. The Times’s Monday headline on the matter was: ‘IRS Focus on Conservatives Gives GOP Something to Seize On.’ So that is the danger.”

A few weeks ago I counseled a client who was debating whether to exercise a final batch of stock options he held from his former employer. To respect that client’s privacy, I will change the numbers here, but the gist was that he had been hoping to exercise the options when the employer’s stock reached $24 a share. After a recent rally, the stock was trading slightly below that level on the day of my visit. But now the client was wondering whether to hold out for $25 a share, a level the stock had reached only once, quite a few years ago. It would have needed to reach the target by the fall, at which point the options were going to expire.

I told my client that I would exercise immediately if I were in his shoes. A sudden downturn in the overall stock market or in the particular company’s stock could render the options permanently worthless. Holding out for a few extra dollars by waiting to hit the arbitrary $24 target seemed pointless.

My client gave the order to exercise his options on the spot. He is now happily redeploying his cash. And though the stock’s subsequent price is irrelevant – there is no reason to care what a stock does after you have sold it – it happens that after only briefly touching $24 a couple of times, it has also had some significant dips since my client sold. As of Friday, it was trading right where it was on the day of my visit.

Round numbers exert a strong power in our calculations. It pays to remember that they really have no special power at all.

It took more than two decades, but Sen. Mary Kathryn “Heidi” Heitkamp got a long-awaited chance to have the last word against the Supreme Court. That’s no small accomplishment for a freshman Democrat from North Dakota.

Heitkamp co-sponsored and helped pass the Marketplace Fairness Act of 2013, otherwise known as the Internet sales tax bill. If the legislation makes it through the House of Representatives – a doubtful but not inconceivable prospect – it will effectively reverse the outcome of the pivotal 1992 Supreme Court tax case known in short as Quill Corp. v. North Dakota, and in full as Quill Corporation, Petitioner v. North Dakota by and through its Tax Commissioner, Heidi Heitkamp.

It was only a quirk of political fate that Heitkamp arrived in the Senate just in time to push through the legislation that would undo a legal setback that has frustrated state tax collectors for the past two decades. But the bill’s progress was no accident; it is the result of a massive, years-long effort by cash-hungry states, local stores struggling against mounting online competition, and – most recently – giant web-based retailers that see a chance to gain a competitive edge against smaller upstarts.

Quill established that only retailers with a physical presence in a given state must collect sales tax for that state. When residents of states with sales taxes make purchases from out-of-state retailers, they are required to send in their tax payments directly to their home states, in the form of “use tax.” But hardly anyone does that. As a result, states lose an estimated $12 billion a year.

Brick-and-mortar stores complain that they are at an unfair disadvantage. Since they must include sales tax in their prices, they can be easily undercut by online competitors. As smartphones make online purchasing even easier, local stores have considerable cause to fear that they will be reduced to acting as showrooms for their competitors.

Supporters of the Senate bill claim it would help states collect their existing taxes and level the playing field for brick-and-mortar and online businesses. Under the bill, any retailer that does not qualify for a narrow “small seller” exemption could be forced to collect tax for any state that meets a basic set of requirements.

The bill attempts to resolve a conflict that has been simmering since the Supreme Court’s 1992 ruling in Quill. In that case, North Dakota sought to force Quill Corporation, an office supply company, to collect tax on sales to North Dakota residents. Quill had no offices or warehouses in North Dakota, though it did solicit sales through catalogs and accepted orders via toll-free phone lines.

The Court ruled that it does not violate the due process rights of out-of-state retailers to force them to collect sales taxes for states in which they solicit business yet do not have a physical presence. This was a victory for the states, reversing a holding from a 1967 case known as National Bellas Hess.

But it was a hollow victory, because the high court went on to hold that only Congress could regulate interstate commerce by forcing interstate sales tax collection. Congress, however, could delegate that power to the states, the court further held. Thus began the 20-year battle to get Congress to do just that.

In the meantime, states have been creative about trying to conjure a physical presence through the barest wisps of local connection. I wrote about one of the biggest battles in this fight in 2009, when New York, followed by other states, attempted to claim that affiliate programs like the one popularized by Amazon were enough to constitute a physical presence.

The Senate bill would make the debate over physical presence irrelevant. However, far from simplifying matters, it would introduce a new, even more convoluted structure, forcing retailers to navigate the tax codes of states where they have no real business interests. To get permission under the bill to collect tax from out-of-state companies, states must either join the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement or implement a set of “minimum simplification requirements” outlined in the bill itself. However, even the Streamlined Sales and Use Tax Agreement has had only minimal success in harmonizing the various states’ myriad rules about what goods and services are to be taxed and how taxes are to be remitted.

Internet behemoths like Amazon have abruptly become supporters of the Senate legislation, after fighting similar efforts for years. Amazon has warehouses and other facilities in a growing number of states, requiring it to collect taxes in those locales where smaller rivals are exempt. It also has the internal resources to comply with the demands of dozens of taxing jurisdictions; smaller sellers do not. The Senate bill’s small seller exception applies only to companies with less than $1 million in annual out-of-state sales, meaning that many small businesses would still be subject to the law.

While the Senate bill would stop debates over the “physical presence” of sellers, it would introduce a whole new set of questions about the physical locations of buyers. According to the bill, the state of the buyer will be determined by “the location where the product or service sold is received by the purchaser.” That’s fine if the product is a box of pens or a packaged DVD. It’s less useful if the “product” is a subscription to Netflix’s Instant View program or the services of a tax professional who electronically files the seller’s returns in many states around the country.

Forget tax fairness. You could call this legislation the Law of Unintended Consequences. Local stores only have to worry about the tax rules in their own locale; the Senate legislation will saddle sellers in places like Muskogee, Okla., with the burden of knowing tax rules and responding to tax audits in places like Bismarck, N.D., and Augusta, Maine.

When things get messy enough, someone will start looking for new solutions. One possible avenue would be for the federal government to take over the task of collecting sales taxes across state lines, with uniform rules and procedures established by the Internal Revenue Service. Of course, once the IRS is in the business of collecting sales taxes, expect it to rake off a share for Uncle Sam, too. That’s not a prospect that will make too many consumers happy.

The Supreme Court might also step back into the fray. The Senate’s legislation was made possible because the Quill court found that turning out-of-state businesses into unwilling tax collectors is allowed under the Due Process clause. That holding predates the Internet, which made it possible to solicit multi-state sales simply by putting up a website. The Court might revisit this concept in a future case that seeks to restore the National Bellas Hess rule. I don’t think the current justices are highly inclined to do this, but a future set – one more attuned to the complexities and opportunities of online life – just might.

Of course, all of that is a long way off. It may still be years before we know where Quill Corp. v. North Dakota will take us. But in the more personal battle between out-of-state retailers, the Supreme Court and the one-time North Dakota Tax Commissioner who is now a senator, Heidi Heitkamp has finally won a round.

Yet the norms of civilized behavior are sometimes discarded when the emotions of a mob take hold. A mob’s reactions are sometimes understandable, but they are never laudable.

Irrational, mob-like emotions continue to run high in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing. Last week, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was buried in a small Islamic cemetery in rural Caroline County, Virginia. Now many Virginians have joined New Englanders in trying to reject all connection to Tsarnaev and his earthly remains.

Tony Lippa, the sheriff of Caroline County, told The Associated Press he was unhappy with what he characterized as a covert burial, saying, “I know of no Virginia law enforcement agency that was notified.” Lippa also expressed concern that vandals might seek out Tsarnaev’s grave. He did, however, say that the interment appeared to be legal.

Floyd Thomas, the chairman of Caroline County’s board of supervisors, was blunter: “We don’t want the county to be remembered as the resting place of the remains for someone who committed a terrible crime.”

We can understand why many people do not want to accept the body of the man who is believed to have masterminded the Boston bombing. There is an urge to strike back in some form, however meaningless (after all, Tsarnaev can no longer care what becomes of his body) or spiteful (we can’t punish him, but we’ll punish any family member who might want to visit his grave).

In contrast, someone whose ethics and compassion inspire her to stand against the mob deserves our deep respect. Martha Mullen, a Virginia resident, organized the interfaith effort that facilitated Tsarnaev’s burial. Mullen said that she was moved by a news report about the refusal of cemeteries in Massachusetts and elsewhere to accept Tsarnaev’s remains.

“Certainly this was a horrific act,” Mullen said, “but [Tsarnaev is] dead and what happened is between him and God. We just need to bury his body and move forward.”

Mullen and the cemetery administrators she contacted, who finally put an end to this demeaning spectacle, continue to face hostility from people nationwide whose anger overrides their judgment.

Tsarnaev’s body couldn’t remain in a Massachusetts funeral home forever. Moreover, we bury executed murderers all the time. Last rites and a final resting place are not privileges reserved to those who live exemplary lives, or even ordinary ones. We don’t desecrate the bodies of those we despise in our society. To do so would not diminish them; it would diminish us.

Distance is sometimes necessary to understand this distinction, however. Someone far from Boston stepped up this time to do the decent thing. The correct response is to thank her, not vilify her. Then again, mob thinking does not often yield a correct response.

A couple of recent news items illustrate the contrast. In the first, the Justice Department recently informed The Associated Press that it had covertly seized records of outgoing calls on more than 20 telephone lines used by The AP and its reporters. According to The AP’s coverage of the story, the Justice Department would not say why it sought the records, though the prevailing theory is that the seizure was linked to a May 2012 story about a CIA operation in Yemen that foiled a terrorist plot, which included leaked information about the CIA’s activities.

Gary Pruitt, the news agency’s president and CEO, wrote a strongly worded letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday. “There can be no possible justification for such an overbroad collection of the telephone communications of The Associated Press and its reporters,” the wire service chief said. Other news organizations, as well as The Newspaper Association of America, expressed shock and concern over the incident. In a news conference on Tuesday, Holder defended the Justice Department’s action, though he said he had recused himself and was not personally involved.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg recently admitted that some of its journalists had habitually accessed information on their terminals about subscribers’ contact information and terminal use. The Bloomberg staff could not see trades, portfolios, or clients’ messages to one another, but they could use the information they obtained to advance stories. For example, noticing an employee had not logged on for some time might prompt a reporter to seek information on that employee’s status with the company.

Bloomberg apologized, and CEO Matthew Winkler wrote that “the error is inexcusable” in an op-ed published on Monday. Yet many of Bloomberg’s clients – who pay, on average, about $20,000 per year for use of this database – remain angry that their information was available to reporters feeding stories back to the mother ship. Bloomberg said it has deactivated the system that allowed reporters access to this data, but rebuilding client trust will be a long process.

Though the stories above are unconnected, they mirror one another. The outraged journalists in the first are the ones causing outrage in the second.

Reporters at The AP and elsewhere are incensed that the Justice Department went fishing in the news agency’s phone records without notifying the organization or exhausting other avenues first. (Holder maintained that the Justice Department was thorough and that the subpoenas were properly limited in time and scope.) Federal officials have regularly extended such niceties to journalists since Watergate. The New York Times noted that Justice Department regulations call for “notice and negotiation” under normal circumstances, though a serious leak in the intelligence community could surely be said to fall outside that heading.

The Justice Department extends consideration to journalists as a courtesy, but those who bring us the news ought to remember that they are not specially protected individuals under the law. They have the same rights and responsibilities as anyone else. Assuming the Justice Department’s subpoena to The AP’s phone providers was valid, the real questions on the table are whether the government treats too much information as secret and whether investigators can turn too easily to subpoenas without going through a judge, who could protect the public’s privacy and due process rights. Those questions are both fair.

But they aren’t the questions The AP and its fellow news organizations are raising. Instead, the organizations focus on their own feelings of violation in this particular case, and the potential for the government to identify confidential sources through the seized records.

Journalists and their sources ought to know by now that if they leave a trail for investigators to follow, investigators will follow it if the stakes are high enough. Terrorist activity is one instance where the stakes that high. Unlike the reporters who concern themselves, at their most noble, only with keeping the public informed, the government has multiple public interests to consider: keeping everyone safe, protecting intelligence sources and methods, respecting privacy, and disclosing information the public ought to know.

Nowadays, we all understand that our physical and digital movements are easily observed by those with sufficient interest. If journalists want clandestine meetings with sources, they should do it the way Woodward and Bernstein did with Deep Throat: Meet at night, face to face, in a dark garage.

Journalists risk coming across as crybabies or hypocrites when they demand the government give them space to pry into its secrets without repercussion while they themselves gleefully trample on the privacy expectations of others, as Bloomberg’s reporters did – and as did Eric Lipton of The New York Times, about whom I recently wrote in this space.

Like it or not, the government has a public interest to protect, particularly when it comes to thwarting terrorist attacks. Anyone who thought the Feds wouldn’t be interested in where The AP got its information about the CIA’s Yemen exploit was naive in the extreme.