Oops. 40,000 Federal Workers Miss a Payday.

WASHINGTON â€" Everyone looks forward to payday. But for about 40,000 federal employees, Friday’s regular payroll deposits never materialized.

A mistake by the payroll center that serves 23 federal agencies meant that paychecks were not deposited into bank accounts on Friday as they usually are. Officials at the Interior Business Center, a part of the Interior Department, apologized in a statement and assured employees that their paychecks would appear in their accounts on Tuesday.

“I.B.C. knows that this is a serious matter for those affected and sincerely regrets any inconveniences the error may have caused,” Michael Fernandez, a spokesman for the Interior Business Center, said in the statement.

The biggest problems for the employees are likely to be bounced checks or other overdrafts from automatic withdrawals. The payroll center’s statement acknowledged those issues but said federal rules limited what officials could do to help.

“The federal government may not compensate employees for overdraft or other financial institution fees,” Mr. Fernandez wrote, “but I.B.C. can provide written confirmation that the errors occurred outside of the employee’s control and make requests on behalf of the employee that the financial institutions waive any resulting fees.”

Obama Aide Hospitalized Twice Last Week

Dan Pfeiffer, President Obama’s 37-year-old chief strategist and one of his longest-serving advisers, was hospitalized twice last week after suffering “stroke-like symptoms,” White House officials confirmed on Friday.

“We are happy and relieved to have Dan back at work full-time,” said Amy Brundage, a White House spokeswoman. “He’s feeling better, listening to his doctors and focused on helping implement the president’s very full domestic and foreign policy agenda.”

While the health scare raised the question of whether Mr. Pfeiffer would finish the term with Mr. Obama â€" he is one of the few remaining White House aides who were with the president in January 2007, when he began his first, underdog presidential campaign â€" neither Mr. Pfeiffer nor his colleagues would address it.

According to Ms. Brundage, Mr. Pfeiffer first felt ill during dinner at a downtown restaurant on Sept. 4, and went to nearby George Washington University Hospital, where he remained overnight for tests and monitoring. He went to work the next day but had a similar occurrence and was re-admitted to the hospital, where he spent nearly two days.

Doctors decided the symptoms reflected hypertension. Mr. Pfeiffer had not previously been diagnosed with high blood pressure, though it runs in his family. Even from the hospital, he communicated with White House colleagues dealing with the Syria crisis. Mr. Obama, who was on a diplomatic trip to Russia, checked in a couple times.

After being released last Saturday morning, Mr. Pfeiffer went to the White House and helped prepare the chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, for appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. He has been at work full-time this week, his blood pressure monitored by White House doctors.

New Magazine Celebrates Rust-Belt Chic, With a Wink

The decaying cities of the post-industrial Midwest can sometimes seem like a museum of things America used to make: cars, refrigerators, steel, television.

But if a start-up in Cleveland gets its way, the region may help rebuild the market for another endangered product â€" long-form magazine journalism.

Belt Magazine, an weekly online magazine of essays and reportage that officially began publishing this week, is dedicated to exploring the reawakened regional identity symbolized by corner taverns, abandoned industrial landscapes, and unfancy beer, while also giving its writers enough space to push past the Shinola-like clichés.

“I cringe at words like ‘authentic,’ ” Anne Trubek, the magazine’s editor in chief, said by telephone. “But the rust belt aesthetic isn’t about the ephemeral global economy, it’s about boots on the ground and things hidden in grandma’s attic. We want to explore that.”

Belt is an outgrowth of “Rust Belt Chic,” a self-published anthology of essays about Cleveland that Ms. Trubek, a writer-in-residence at Oberlin College, and Richey Piiparinen, a local urbanist, put together “on a whim” last summer. (The title was taken from an acerbic comment by Joyce Brabner, the widow of the unofficial Cleveland cartoon-laureate Harvey Pekar, who wasn’t very happy about all the “vampiric” out-of-towners singing the praises of the city’s down-and-out charms.)

Assembled in about three weeks, “Rust Belt Chic,” sold about 3,500 copies, and drew enough response to convince the pair that there was a market for a magazine. They raised nearly $10,000 in seed money, mostly via Kickstarter. (Most writers are paid.) Ms. Trubek said she was about to sign a partnership deal with two investors, and is also in talks about a paid mobile app, as well as a brand expansion in Detroit.

In addition to shorter commentary and personal essays, Belt’s inaugural issue includes a long reported story on the 70-year history of a Cleveland-based literary prize dedicated to books about racism (still the only such prize in the country, the author claims), as well as an essay by Alissa Nutting, the author of the well-reviewed new novel “Tampa,” on her love-hate relationship with the city’s weather. (Yes, she used to live in Florida.)

If Belt, like the anthology, has few nationally known contributors, Ms. Trubek said, it’s because the city historically hasn’t had a literary scene to match the rich arts community fostered by institutions like the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Orchestra.

A few famous writers, like Langston Hughes, spent time there. (The proposed demolition of the derelict house where he once lived became a cause celebre a few years ago.) But Hart Crane, born in Cleveland but famous for writing about Brooklyn, may epitomize the local literary spirit, Ms. Trubek said wryly. (She grew up in Madison, Wis.)

“He’s a real Cleveland poet, because he was conflicted about it,” she said.

As models for Belt, Ms. Trubek cited the Oxford American, the award-winning magazine of Southern culture, and This Land Press, a Tulsa-based Web and print publication that offers fiction and poetry alongside hard-hitting investigations on topics like the city founder’s involvement with the Ku Klux Klan or the early life of the former Pfc. Bradley Manning, who grew up in Oklahoma.

If nothing in Belt’s first batch of articles sticks a sharp needle in the eye of local pride, Ms. Trubek said the magazine aimed to color well outside the lines of both of civic boosterism and voyeuristic “ruin porn.”

She cited a long forthcoming article on the roiling local debate over whether to demolish the city’s many abandoned buildings.

“It’s a depressing piece,” she said. “Cleveland doesn’t come off well at all.”

Cleveland Plain Dealer article on anthology:

http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/10/rust_belt_chic_warms_to_scruff.html

Itzkoff on Pekar:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/arts/design/05pekar.html?pagewanted=all

NYT review of “Tampa”:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/books/alissa-nuttings-tampa-and-more.html?pagewanted=a

Langston Hughes house in Cleveland:

http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/opinion/perspectives/the-next-page-where-langston-hughes-fueled-his-muse-cleveland-215479/

Oxford American:

http://www.oxfordamerican.org

This Land:

https://thislandpress.com

This Land’s KKK story:

http://thislandpress.com/04/18/2012/tate-brady-battle-greenwood/

This Land’s Manning story:

http://thislandpress.com/02/08/2011/private-manning-and-the-making-of-wikileaks-2/

article about “Ruin Porn”:

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/

Obama Names Zients as Chief Economic Adviser

President Obama on Friday officially named Jeffrey D. Zients, an entrepreneur who twice was the president’s acting budget director and a candidate in the past for two cabinet positions, to succeed Gene B. Sperling as the chief White House economic adviser.

As The Times’s Jackie Calmes reported earlier, the shift does not portend change in the president’s economic agenda. But when Mr. Sperling leaves on Jan. 1 after nearly three years in the White House and two at the Treasury Department, Mr. Obama will lose an adviser who has been known as a perpetual motion machine for progressive domestic policy ideas since the Clinton administration, and “a close friend,” the president said in a statement.

Mr. Zients, who joined the administration in June 2009 as the deputy director for management at the Office of Management and Budget, quickly impressed Mr. Obama and was long rumored for promotion. “He earned the admiration and respect of everyone he worked with,” the president said in the announcement statement.

His advancement had been complicated by Senator Max Baucus’s opposition. Mr. Baucus, the Montana Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, was against Mr. Zients’s recommendations that would have removed government functions from the committee’s jurisdiction.

Q&A: Adding the Right Amount of RAM

Adding the Right Amount of RAM

Q. I want to add more memory to my MacBook Pro laptop before I upgrade from OS X 10.8 to OS X 10.9. How can I tell if it’s possible to add more without opening up the computer?

A. In OS X 10.8, click on the Apple menu in the top left corner of the screen and select About This Mac at the top of the list. The small window that appears shows information about the computer, including the version of the operating system, the type of processor and the amount of memory (RAM) installed.

Click the More Info button in the box. A bigger window pops up with even more information about the Mac. Click the Memory tab in the box to see additional information, including the number of memory slots on the computer’s motherboard and if both are in use with certain sizes of RAM modules.

To see Apple’s instructions for installing more memory, and the maximum amount you can install in your model, click the Memory Upgrade Instructions link in the bottom corner of the box to visit the support area of the company’s Web site. Companies that sell memory modules, like Crucial and Kingston, have guides on their sites that walk you through buying the right type of RAM for your particular computer model.

Resizing Tiles on the Windows 8 Start Screen

Q. Some apps I never use have really big squares on the Windows 8 Start screen. Can I make these smaller and increase the size of the squares for the apps I do use?

A. The Window 8 Start screen is made up of “tiles” (those colored squares) in larger rectangular and smaller square sizes, and you can switch sizes for many of them. You can also rearrange the order of the tiles into more useful positions on the screen and group apps into customized combinations.

To change a large tile to a smaller one, right-click to select it. A menu bar pops along the bottom of the screen. Click the Smaller icon to reduce the size of the selected tile. To make a small tile bigger, right-click to select it and then choose Larger from the menu. This same menu also has options for pinning and unpinning apps to the Start screen.

If you have a touch-screen computer, you can select a tile by putting your fingertip on it and dragging down on the screen slightly before tapping your size option from the menu. Some tiles are “live,” meaning they update themselves automatically with new headlines or images. If you find this behavior distracting, select “Turn live tile off” from the bottom menu bar; you can always turn it back on the same way.

To rearrange the apps on the Start screen, select and drag the tiles with your mouse or fingertip into new locations. If you are moving a tile from one end of the Start screen to the other, drag the tile down to the bottom of the screen first to zoom out for a better view so you can move the tile more easily to its new location.