'Godfather' Mansion On The Market

The Corleone family home from The Godfather went on the market this week for $2.89 million.

In the Oscar-winning film, the grand Staten Island home belongs to Mafia boss Vito Corleone, played by Marlon Brando. Director Francis Ford Coppola only filmed its English Tudor-inspired exterior for the movie.

The mansion was the setting of the infamous wedding of Connie Corleone, the daughter of the godfather himself, Don Corleone.  The backyard of the home was also the setting for the scene in which Don Corleone dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandson. 

Built in 1930, the mansion was the home of the Norton family, who lived there for nearly six decades. They sold the house  in 2012 for $1.69 million dollars. In 2013, the new owners remodeled the interior to make some rooms look like replicas of the decor in several of the movie's scenes. That includes an office where Don Corleone pulled the strings of his criminal empire sat behind a wooden desk on a leather chair. This facelift added  $1 million to the price tag.

The 580-square-meter house sits on a half-acre and includes:

• five bedrooms and seven natural stone bathrooms.
• gym
• playroom
• dream kitchen with a breakfast area, big open space, a huge island, and a very large eating area that opens up to the yard and pool.
• basement with English pub and stone fireplace and game room.
• four-car garage.
• granite saltwater pool.

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Parents and spanking

George Stewart's teacher in Jamaica used to wait by the school door with a switch to punish tardy pupils. His parents whipped him, too. Now he lives in the Bronx and refuses to hit his own children. “I don’t think beating works,” he says. “It instils in them a cruelty that they pass down, generation to generation.”

Ample evidence backs his view, say Richard Reeves and Emily Cuddy of the Brookings Institution, a think-tank. Nearly 30 studies from various countries show that children who are regularly spanked become more aggressive themselves, as both children and adults. They are also more likely to be depressed or take drugs, even after correcting for other factors.

Smacking is effective in the short run: it stops children pulling their sisters’ hair. But in the long run it has all sorts of bad effects. A study in 20 American cities, published in the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2013, found that young children in homes with little or no spanking showed swifter cognitive development than their peers. Other studies find that children in physically punitive schools perform worse.

Still, 81% of American parents believe that spanking is sometimes necessary (see table). That is more than in many other rich countries, 20 of which have banned spanking even by parents. In America Republicans spank more than Democrats; southerners more than north-easterners; and blacks more than white.

American teachers are still allowed to spank children with a paddle (a wooden bat only a little shorter and thinner than a cricket bat) in 19 states, mostly in the South—a practice that is banned in over 100 other countries. More than 216,000 pupils were beaten at school during the 2008-09 school year, according to the Department of Education. Children who were poor, black, disabled and male disproportionately received the most blows.

edtited from The Economist

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