The current front-page sub-contractor controversies surrounding BP's liability for the gulf explosion and Boeing's grounding of its 787 Dreamliner should not obscure an ultimate take-away for corporate leaders: companies must take operational responsibility for ensuring that products and services provided to them by third party suppliers are safe, effective and of high quality.

Downtown Abbey is entertainment. Its illustrious predecessor in television mega-success about the English upper class, Brideshead Revisited, is art. This distinction between entertainment and art helps explain the decline in Downton this year—it is simply not as entertaining. For those, who have a chance to see the Brideshead DVD (of the 30-year-old series) its power as art is undiminished.

The apparition of 2008 returns once more. Two recently released JP Morgan Chase (JPM) reports on the causes of the "London Whale" trading losses raise important questions about whether financial service firms can exorcise the spectral issues which were so central to the financial crisis. They read as if JPM and a key headquarters unit — the Chief Investment Office — had not learned a single lesson from the meltdown four years ago. And unfortunately, they suggest that, in our huge, complex financial institutions, major failures of organizational discipline and major losses are likely to recur, despite greater attention to risk management.

In his inaugural speech, the president mentioned the obligations of "We the People" as individual citizens. But what's the role of businesses as corporate citizens?

President Obama will soon make what could be the most important appointment of his second term: his chief of staff.

In the past 25 years, the size of settlements, fines and penalties for individual corporations found guilty of wrongdoing has escalated from millions of dollars, to tens of millions, to hundreds of millions, to billions. Think Siemens and widespread bribery — about $2 billion. Or, bigger yet, think BP and the gulf disaster — almost $20 billion to date, with another $20 billion-plus likely in the future.

For the holidays, buy someone you care about deeply Tolstoy's novel, Anna Karenina. Don't settle for silver or bronze or modern dross when you can give the purest gold. But do not go to AnnaKarenina, the current movie, thinking you will get a two hour essence of the novel. Joe Wright's film, while perhaps interesting in its own terms, is a perversion of one of the world's great books. Once you have started the novel, you will be completely transported into a complex world that will enthrall, inspire, and awe you and ultimately break your heart. At the center is one of the great heroines of literature. You will fall in love with Anna as she leaves a cold marriage with a welltodo Russian bureaucrat (Alexei Karenin) for a passionate affair with a young military officer (Count Vronsky), which evolves into pregnancy, societal recrimination, separation from the son she had with Karenin, moments of ecstasy with Vronsky, and then a slow spiral into guilt, insecurity, jealousy, and, ultimately, death. Surrounding the love triangle are the two contrasting marriages of Anna's brother, Stiva, and his wife, Dolly, and Dolly's sister Kitty and the landowner Levin. They are mirrors within mirrors, creating a sequential and dynamic series of vivid comparisons and reflections.

The international media have made a huge story out of Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's power-consolidating decrees and the balloting on his proposed constitution. How the fundamental political disputes -- between factions of the religious and secular, Islamic and Christian, and civilian and military, and between rich and poor and urban and rural -- will be resolved in the Middle East's most populous nation is seen as a harbinger for the political impact of the Arab Spring.

Just after the New Year, President Obama will have to decide whether to take a dramatic, high-stakes gamble on a very unsexy topic: a U.S.-EU free trade agreement. It will be one of the key high-risk, high-reward choices of his second term, writes Ben Heineman.

At the center of the corporate wreckage of the past fifteen years — the accounting scandals, the outright fraud, the environmental disasters, the financial meltdown — sits the boards of directors. Their failure to choose the right CEO and to provide appropriate oversight on core risks and opportunities has, in my view, reflected a broad failure of the corporate governance movement and its reliance on directors to effectively to oversee the corporation and its business leaders.