Sure, we all have a thing or two to say about Bernard Madoff. But Diana Henriques of the New York Times, who knew Madoff for 20 years, reminds us that he was also a "visionary" who understood the financial industry well as anyone in the field.

She believed him as much as his clients. And why not? Madoff recognized how computerization and globalization would affect the trading of stocks in the nascent days of the World Wide Web. He was on the vanguard, and that he could carry out a fraud of this dimension, Henriques says, "stunned" her.

I was relieved when I read this afternoon that Bernard Madoff received the full sentence requested by lawyers prosecuting his case: 150 years. In contrast, Madoff's lawyer's request for 12 was both a joke and an insult to the people whose lives Madoff all but destroyed.

The presiding judge, Denny Chin, said he wanted to make an example of Madoff and believed that levying the full 150 years would be a deterrent to future white-collar criminals. The Madoff sentence is the third-longest for any white collar crime, according to a compilation by Forbes.

The $65 billion Ponzi scheme that Madoff had constructed since the 1980s was a vast, far-reaching deception. It convinced thousands of people that Madoff was a man with eminent financial savvy, an ability to turn modest wealth into a fortune through wise investments. But all he was really doing was taking the money from new, unsuspecting customers and giving it to older clients to create the illusion of successful returns. It was a gigantic jig-saw puzzle with numerous missing pieces, and eventually the 71-year-old Madoff could no longer keep up the charade.

When he ran out of money last December, and told his kids about the Ponzi scheme, it's doubtful that Madoff thought that in just six months he'd be facing life behind bars. But even if he did suspect this fate, his apology to his victims rings as hollow as the investments he pretended to be making.

During his trial, Madoff turned to his victims and apologized, claiming that he lives in a tormented state for what he's done, and while he knows it won't make any difference, he feels he must say how sorry he is.

Bull. He's not tormented for defrauding his clients; he's tormented because he's been living in a holding cell in Lower Manhattan for nearly four months. If he really feels bad about what he did, he wouldn't have spent 20+ years doing it.

Madoff will most likely be sentenced to a medium-security prison in Upstate New York or New Jersey, to ensure that he is close to his family. Authorities do not intend to sentence him to a maximum-security facility because he is not a violent criminal, but his sentence is also too long for him to be a candidate for a minimum-security prison or a "prison camp" -- a facility in which prisoners are granted maximum freedom and the illusion of being outside through open-air yards with fences instead of walls.

Madoff is likely to find his next job in the kitchen or laundry of his new home, earning no more than 40 cents an hour.

[Image: The AM New York blog]

The Friday before last, I stopped into the Virgin Megastore at Union Square for its final day of business. The shelves were mostly bare, but there were still scads of people combing their contents for great deals on music and movies. I was too depressed to stick around, having already witnessed the closures of my two favorite music stores this year: Kim's Video, on St. Mark's, and Etherea, on Avenue A.

Of course, Kim's didn't close completely -- it reopened a few blocks away -- but in a fraction of the space it had on St. Mark's, and with a fraction of the selection. I suspect it won't be long before it shutters its new doors, too.

With the digitization of music, movies and now books, I fear the worst: a Fahrenheit 451-type scenario, in which future generations may not live without those things, per se, but will never develop a sense of context.

In Ray Bradbury's novel, all books have been destroyed, so a group of elders have each memorized a specific book, and they pass that book on to the next generation in the oral tradition. Thus each person is a repository of one text, but nothing more.

The author himself, now 87 years old, is speaking out to save the public library in Ventura, California, which is in a massive deficit and is likely to follow its for-profit counterparts if something isn't done to save it. But what is the likelihood of that happening? The problems faced by the Ventura library are not unique to that city. Will libraries become the sole province of private universities? And if so, how long will that sustain itself, if the entire book publishing industry falls apart?

There can't be anything to shelve if no one's printing the books.

I began thinking about this months ago, when it became obvious that music and movie collections were fast becoming obsolete. With innovations like the Amazon Kindle, will collections of books -- personal, academic, public -- be next?

[Image: The Bookworm, by Carl Spitzweg]

Do you know Capucine? She's an adorable 4-year-old French girl who tells adorable stories about animals and more. Her videos have been watched by hundreds of thousands -- which gave her and her mother, Anne, an idea.

They have made t-shirts, buttons and magnets featuring drawings by Capucine based on her stories, the proceeds of which are being donated to EduRelief to create "Capucine's Library," a project to help raise literacy rates in Mongolia. The effort has raised nearly $1,500 so far -- chip in yourself and help one adorable little girl help a whole lot of other adorable little children.

David Carr is a media columnist for the New York Times, but he's also a recovering drug addict whose journey to the vaunted offices of the country's largest paper nearly killed him. His memoir, Night of the Gun, recounts the author's long, murky descent into crack and alcohol abuse back in the 1980s, his recovery in the 90s, and his miraculously successful efforts to rebuild a life for himself in the 2000s.

Here Carr talks with Rachel Sklar of the Daily Beast about some of the topics nearest and dearest to him: