It Has Come to This Yankees versus Red Sox. Three final games. The Yankees up by one. The Red Sox playing at Fenway, where they are tough to beat.

As I've said before, isn't autumn baseball grand?

These are two terrific teams engaged in the best rivalry in sports. And there is nothing like baseball to ratchet up the tension. For the past month, this pennant race has been tightening...and tightening....and tightening. It's getting hard to take. My brother, also a Yankees fan, insists that he would like nothing more than for the regular season to end in a tie, followed by a one-game playoff between the Yanks and Sox. I couldn't take it, and I don't know if most Sox fans could either. If the Yankees lost, we'd be subjected to millions of column inches about how the 1978 Bucky Dent homer has finally been erased. If the Yankees win, we'd lord it over Sox fans so brutally they'd never recover.

No...please. It's bad for the heart. Let the Yanks win two out of three this weekend.

Herewith, a handy viewers' guide to the most pertinent questions of the next three days.

1) How big a factor will Fenway be?
2) Whose middle-inning relief pitchers will hurt their team more?
3) Which Mike Mussina will show up on Sunday—the one who pitched a terrific game in his first start back from a sore elbow, or the one who lasted about an inning in his last start?
4) Will anyone pitch to David Ortiz after the sixth inning? Just walk the friggin' guy, okay?
5) Can Tim Wakefield continue to pitch as brilliantly as he has the past couple of months? (Won't that guy ever retire?)
6) Curt Schilling has been mediocre this year—except when pitching against the Yankees. Can he pull it off again, just as he did about three weeks ago, when he was masterful against the Yanks at the Stadium? Or will he bumble and fall?
7) Who'll rise to the occasion more tonight: Yankee rookie pitcher Chien Ming Wang, who is as cool a customer as I've ever seen in a rookie, or the emotional, fiery David Wells—who famously fades near the end of a long season, particularly as he gets older and fatter. (Sorry, was the framing of that question biased?)
8) Who'll manage better, Joe Torre or Terry Francona? Last year, Francona clearly outmanaged Torre in the championship series, making a series of moves that all paid off while Torre managed like a mime on Prozac.
9) Who wants the MVP more, David Ortiz or Alex Rodriguez? (Who says I never say anything good about the Red Sox? Unless something changes dramatically this weekend, I'd give the award to Ortiz, no matter which team finishes first. Rodriguez has been great for the Yankees...but it seems like every time the Red Sox come from behind and win, Ortiz is the reason. The guy is just great.)
10) Defense, defense, defense. Whose is better? I give a slight nod to the Yankees—particularly at third, where A-Rod has been astonishingly good.
11) As Gene Hackman famously said in the classic football film "The Replacements," in order to win the big games, "you gotta have heart." Which team wants it more?

Go Yankees!  ¶ 9:00 AM 1 comments   

  Make the Money and Run Today marks Jack Meyer's final day as head of the Harvard Management Corporation, the investment group that invests Harvard's billions. Meyer has been wildly successful in the job, so the pressure is on his successor, which may be one reason why, despite an almost year-long search, his successor has not yet been named.

Vice-president for finance Ann Berman—herself heading for the exits—tells the Crimson that there will be "transitional leadership" at HMC until a final replacement for Meyer is named.

There remain those at Harvard who are hoping that phrase "transitional leadership" will apply to other areas of the university.

In any case, this is a hugely important story. More than its students, more than its professors, what drives the modern Harvard is money, and it could be argued that Jack Meyer has been the most important person in the creation of modern Harvard. It could also be argued that this will be the most important personnel decision Larry Summers will make as president.

In universities as in politics, the adage holds true: If you want to know the real story, follow the money.  ¶ 8:53 AM 0 comments   

  I Expect It Would Be an Interesting Conversation The University of Michigan is initiating a series of undergraduate courses on ethics. Here's one description:

"Forums to facilitate discussion about ethics are undefined right now, but their basic function is clear — providing a discussion setting on topics such as military action in Iraq and Harvard President Lawrence Summers’s controversial comments on women in science."

It is an interesting moment in Harvard's history—although not inherently a bad one—when its president has become a topic in other universities' classes for a conversation about ethics.

Funnily enough, the Michigan program is taking shape just as Harvard seems to be phasing out its own undergraduate requirement in "moral reasoning".....  ¶ 10:01 AM 1 comments   

  Well, No One Ever Said He Was Fluent in English Here's a line from the battle-cry of defiance posted on Tom DeLay's website:

"Thank you for visiting and I look forward to keeping you up to date on our fight this out of control DA."

It's a classic story: Whenever you get indicted, the first thing that goes is your ability to write a sentence.


  ¶ 9:56 AM 0 comments   

  And on a Serious Note David Brooks has a solid column in today's Times about the DeLay situation. (I'd link to it, but because of the NYT's foolish, influence-diminishing greed, I can't.)

Here's the critical graf:

"Will we learn from DeLay's fall about the self-destructive nature of the team [partisan] mentality? Of course not. The Democrats have drawn the 10-years-out-of-date conclusion that in order to win, they need to be just like Tom DeLay. They need to rigidly hew to orthodoxy. They need Deaniac hyperpartisanship. They need to organize their hatreds around Bush the way the Republicans did around Clinton."

Seems to me that Brooks is exactly right. While Democrats can revel in the Republicans' current troubles, those troubles actually mask glaring Democratic weaknesses. It's still unclear what the party stands for, other than a nip-at-his-heels opposition to Bush. The party lacks not only a vision, but also strong, charismatic leaders to communicate it. The closest the Dems come to such a figure—at least in terms of the 2008 election—is Hillary Clinton, and even though you can't underestimate her, she does have an awful lot of baggage.

My guess is that by the time 2008 rolls around, most Americans are going to want a fresh face from both parties. (Weirdly enough, 69-year-old John McCain, whose candor is always refreshing, fits the bill more than anyone else other than Barack Obama, who won't be running this time.) Is there any Democratic candidate who fits that description? Because despite the GOP implosion, Democrats still lack a candidate they can proudly call their own.  ¶ 9:16 AM 0 comments   

  Angelina Jolie=Gollum? According to Jennifer Aniston, yes, says the gossip rag Star (via Gawker).

I must say that, as a former magazine editor, I admire the editor who came up with the idea of running a side-by-side comparison of a beautiful but slightly wacko movie bombshell and a hideous fictional movie monster torn apart by the corruption of power.

Yes, you need to do the serious stuff. (Maybe not at Star, though.) But sometimes, you need to have a little fun too....

And just for the record, in my opinion, Jennifer Aniston really ought to be annoyed at her ex-husband, not Angelina Jolie, who has two lovely adopted children.

I would add that there are other figures in our public life who may bear a greater resemblance to Gollum.  ¶ 9:05 AM 0 comments   

  Proof That God Exists? Tom DeLay is indicted, the Red Sox lose, and the Yankees retake first place...on the same day. Coincidence? I think not.

Humor me, if you would, while I make a modest suggestion.

One of the many reasons I dislike the Sox is that, although they play in leftie Massachusetts, they are actually a Red State team. They have the most evangelical Christians of any team in baseball, even as they date college students (she's a freshman?) and marry strippers. They are proudly anti-intellectual, calling themselves "the idiots." They campaign for George W. Bush.

So isn't it just possible that the fate of the Sox and the fate of the Republican Party are linked? And that the heavens have turned against both?

I know the season isn't over. I know anything can happen, and overconfidence is a recipe for disaster. But I can still hope, right? Hope that just maybe this time, for once, God is on our side.  ¶ 8:24 AM 2 comments   

  A Little Dark Humor with Your Giant Squid Here's a funny/sad joke.

Donald Rumsfeld is giving the president his daily briefing. He concludes by saying, "Yesterday, three Brasilians were killed."

"OH NO!" the president says. "That's terrible."

His staff sits stunned at this rare display of emotion, nervously watching as the president sits, head in hands.

Finally, Bush looks up and asks, "How many is a brazillion?"


________________________________________________________________

P.S. Thanks, Kristen...  ¶ 8:31 AM 4 comments   

  Harvard Natives Getting Restless Yesterday's faculty meeting sounds like a hot one. First, Randy Matory led a discussion about Conrad Harper's resignation from the Harvard Corporation, suggesting that "the secretive Corporation, which is Harvard’s highest governing body, is indifferent to faculty concerns and has shied away from confronting difficult questions regarding Summers’ leadership."

Sounds about right to me, from what I hear.

A quick digression: I'm enjoying the fact that the default adjective the Crimson uses to describe the Corporation is "secretive." Not "influential," not "wise," not "respected," not even "powerful." But "secretive." The Crimson is correct: its secrecy is the most salient fact about the Harvard Corporation...and it is also part of the dynamic by which the Corporation's very legitimacy is eroding. It fascinates me that a consequence of the Harvard Corporation secretly choosing Lawrence Summers to be Harvard's president will ultimately mean a choice it doesn't want to make: becoming more transparent, or losing its moral authority over Harvard. Are the alumni paying attention?

Okay, back to the faculty meeting.

Apparently an even hotter discussion revolved around the fact that FAS dean Bill Kirby announced that FAS is going to slow the hiring of new faculty. It's not a freeze, Kirby insisted, just more modest growth to give FAS finances a chance to breathe.

Huh.

Here's a question for some enterprising Crimson reporter: What is the real state of the university's finances and fundraising?

Some relevant facts:
1) Harvard Management Corporation head Jack Meyer is quitting, and Harvard can't seem to find a replacement for him.
2) Vice-president of finance Ann Berman is leaving Harvard to spend more time at her home in Italy.
3) The University reported that its fundraising last year was the highest since Larry Summers became president, which sounded, let's say, counter-intuitive to me, because....
4) Harvard fundraisers simultaneously announced that they are postponing a long-planned capital campaign for another couple of years. The campaign was supposed to have started by now, but President Summers' controversies have delayed its inception, and Harvard fundraisers say now that the delay is intended to help prioritize the Allston development.
5) And...FAS is slowing hiring, despite very public pledges by Bill Kirby to increase the size of the faculty. It would be interesting for someone to go back and look at his statements to this effect over the years and see how they jibe with his current announcement. It would also be interesting to see how many of those new hires are senior faculty, how many are part-time or junior, and how many more faculty are taking leaves of absence under the university's recent, more generous leave policy.
6) Meanwhile, as some at the faculty meeting apparently pointed out, the university is spending $50 million in diversity efforts as a result of Summers' unfortunate remarks about women in science.

Sounds to me like there's a story there...and an important one. I suggest a three-part series.
__________________________________________________________________

P.S. I'm grateful to the Crimson for reporting on the faculty meeting, but it's a little hard to tell from your relatively brief stories what really goes on. Can't you guys post a transcript? Or at least the minutes?   ¶ 7:55 AM 0 comments   

  Some Giant Squid with Your Coffee? Two Japanese scientists filmed a giant squid 900 meters underwater off the Ogasawara Islands in the North Pacific. How cool is that? No one's ever photographed a giant squid before. And to make it even cooler, "Architeuthis"—that's the squid—"appears to be a much more active predator than previously suspected, using its elongate feeding tentacles to strike and tangle prey."

Excellent!

Here's their report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.  ¶ 7:43 AM 0 comments   

  Rumsfeld: What, Me, Worry? The Times reports that the Army whistleblower pursuing the exposure of detainee abuse believes that the Army is more interested in harassing him and his fellow truth-tellers than in rooting out torture.

"I'm convinced this is going in a direction that's not consistent with why we came forward," Captain Fishback said in a telephone interview from Fort Bragg, N.C. "We came forward because of the larger issue that prisoner abuse is systemic in the Army. I'm concerned this will take a new twist, and they'll try to scapegoat some of the younger soldiers. This is a leadership problem."

(Credit to reporter Eric Schmitt for getting Fishback on the record for the first time.)

As if to confirm his supicions, this is what Donald Rumsfeld said when asked about the torture.
"All I know is that the Army is taking it seriously. To the extent somebody's done something that they shouldn't have done, they'll be punished for it."

Let's deconstruct that response a little bit, beginning with the phrase, "All I know is..."

Mr. Rumself is the secretary of defense. If all he knows is that the Army "is taking it seriously," then he is profoundly ignorant of extremely serious allegations regarding the men under his charge. It is hard to know what's worse: whether Rumsfeld is telling the truth about his ignorance, or whether he's lying in an attempt to cover his own ass and disassociate himself from the horror of Americans torturing their prisoners.

Okay. Let's move on to the "Army is taking it seriously" part. It amuses me, in a dark sort of way, that Rumsfeld says this as if it is meaningful. To take allegations of torture seriously is not an accomplishment. It is a responsibility; it is a minimum. It is not something to be proud of. But in any event, the Army's response—trying to root out the whistleblowers—suggests that it is taking the matter seriously not because torture is wrong, but because it is bad public relations.

Finally: "To the extent that somebody's done something wrong, they will be punished for it." Implicit in Rumsfeld's statement is that any misdeeds are merely the work of wrongheaded individuals, and a little jail time will take care of the problem. (Reinforcing Fishback's concern that younger soldiers will be scapegoated.) There's no acknowledgment of Fishback's charge that this torture was systemic. Until he at least addresses that issue, Rumsfeld isn't dealing with the problem of torture.

But one can see why he's dodging: Because if the torture is systemic, then it has to do with the culture of the military which he leads, and the very nature of this war, which he promoted.

Would it be too much to suggest that Capt. Fishback and Donald Rumsfeld trade places? Fishback could run the Pentagon, and Rumsfeld could go fight in Iraq....  ¶ 7:20 AM 0 comments   

  Some Ice With Your Spirituality? Ashley Smith, the Georgia woman who persuaded her murderous captor to release her by reading him excerpts from "The Purpose-Driven Life," has now admitted she also gave him some of her crystal methamphetamine.

What a fable for our times! Nothing is simple anymore. Rafael Palmeiro takes steroids and Viagra; Kate Moss does blow; Lance Armstrong may or may not have taken hormones; Ashley Smith snorts a little meth. (You do snort it, don't you?) Everyone, apparently, is medicated, and the line between the legal and the illegal never seems to make sense.

Me, I like some good strong coffee in the morning....  ¶ 7:12 AM 0 comments   

  Vote for Your Favorite Brainiac What do Pope Benedict XVI, Camille Paglia, and Lawrence Summers have in common? No, it's not their hair. They're all on a list of Foreign Policy magazine's top 100 "public intellectuals," and you can vote for your top five.

The list is a little bizarre; you can see the biases of Foreign Policy's editors pretty clearly. A quick scan, for example, shows about a dozen Harvard people (Henry Louis Gates, Niall Ferguson, E.O. Wilson, etc.)...and, by my count, a whopping six women.

Is that really an accurate reflection of women's intellectual contributions to our public debate? Or is Foreign Policy just sexist? You make the call....  ¶ 7:00 AM 0 comments   

  Yale vs Harvard The Yale Daily News has an interesting profile of President Richard Levin, contrasting his management style with that of Larry Summers.

The two men really do represent different styles of leadership. Levin is quiet and low-key; Summers, um, isn't. Outside of New Haven, no one knows who Levin is; everyone seems to know who Larry Summers is. You could argue that Levin has been a better president than Summers has, and that one of the reasons is because he's avoided the kind of controversy Summers keeps provoking in favor of the university's substantive needs. On the other hand, proponents of an activist university president, a "public intellectual," might argue that provoking such controversy is part of the job.

It may also be the case that each president is suited to the particular environment in which he's working. Levin needed to focus on Yale's finances, the condition of New Haven (so much improved under Levin, it's really impressive), and labor strife. Summers, meanwhile, leads a university which doesn't have to worry about money but has been, perhaps, intellectually lethargic....  ¶ 8:56 AM 0 comments   

  Is Bill Keller on Crack? Have you been following the brouhaha about Allessandra Stanley* and Geraldo Rivera? I'm a little late to the story, but I'm fascinated by it. Stanley's the TV critic for the Times, and Geraldo is, of course, Geraldo.

In a September 5th column on reporters in New Orleans, Stanley wrote this sentence: ""Fox's Geraldo Rivera did his rivals one better: yesterday, he nudged an Air Force rescue worker out of the way so his camera crew could tape him as he helped lift an older woman in a wheelchair to safety."

Geraldo went ballistic, loudly proclaiming that he'd done no such thing and announcing that if Stanley were a man, he'd challenge him/her to a fight. Rivera demanded a correction; Times managing editor Bill Keller refused to give him one.

The Times' public editor, Byron Calame, subsequently disagreed. After watching the videotape upon which Stanley based her allegation, he said, "My viewings of the videotape - at least a dozen times, including one time frame by frame - simply doesn't show me any 'nudge' of any Air Force rescuer by Mr. Rivera." As if to drive home the point that Stanley won't stand behind her reporting, Calame added that "Ms. Stanley declined my invitation to watch the tape with me."

Calame is obviously right; Keller and Stanley are obviously wrong. How do I know that? Listen to Keller's reasoning, in a widely distributed e-mail, in defense of Stanley.

Keller writes: "It was a semi-close call, in that the video does not literally show how Mr. Rivera insinuated himself between the wheelchair-bound storm victim and the Air Force rescuers who were waiting to carry her from the building. Whether Mr. Rivera gently edged the airman out of the way with an elbow (literally 'nudged'), or told him to step aside, or threw a body block, or just barged into an opening - it's hard to tell, since it happened just off-camera."

Let's use the kind of linguistic precision that a Times editor ought to use and deconstruct that a bit. Start with the first sentence: "...the video does not literally show how Mr. Rivera insininuated himself....."

In fact, the word "literally" is a fudge that any decent college newspaper editor would know better than to rely upon. The video either shows something, or it doesn't. Obviously, it doesn't. The correct way to write that sentence: "The video does not show how Mr. Rivera insuated himself..."

I could go on—"a semi-close call"..."it happened just off-camera..."—but you get the point. Keller's indulging in weasel language.

According to Calame, Keller then added that "'frankly,' that in light of Mr. Rivera's reaction to the review, Ms. Stanley 'would have been justified in assuming' - and therefore writing, apparently - that Mr. Rivera used 'brute force' rather than merely a 'nudge' on Sept. 4. "

In other words, the Times can run an allegation about someone that it has no proof of—and then declare its correctness based on the person's reaction to the smear. In fact, the Times can actually embellish the original charge.

Huh.

I don't think they teach that technique in journalism school.

At the end of the web version of Stanley's story, you will now find this wan disclaimer:

"The editors understood the 'nudge' comment as the television critic's figurative reference to Mr. Rivera's flamboyant intervention. Mr. Rivera complained, but after reviewing a tape of his broadcast, The Times declined to publish a correction.

"Numerous readers, however - now including the newspaper's public editor, who also scrutinized the tape - read the comment as a factual assertion. The Times acknowledges that no nudge was visible on the broadcast."

The editors understood the "nudge" to be figurative? Oh, bullshit. If the "nudge" was figurative, then it simply wasn't a story, and no editor would have allowed it, because if it was figurative, then it had no point.

The Times should just admit that Stanley made up an assertion about Geraldo Rivera because she wanted to juice up her story and Rivera's an easy target....and Bill Keller should lay off that pipe.


* Full disclosure: I've had my own issues with Stanley, who once included me in a trend story about "underlings" who write "revenge" tell-alls about their former bosses, despite the fact that American Son couldn't fit that description less. I've also had issues getting a correction from the Times, such as when Style section writer Bob Morris included me in a trend story about the return of "gall" for writing a book about John Kennedy after criticizing others who spoke out about him after his death (long story, this isn't the time)—without mentioning that he was one of those publicly slammed (not by me) for his on-air milking of his (slender) connection to John. This would seem an important thing to disclose to the reader, no? Try telling that to the Times editor who told me to "write a letter," and then refused to print that part of the letter.....  ¶ 8:02 AM 0 comments   

  What Constitutes a Harvard Education It would appear that Harvard is finally making some progress on its long-delayed curricular review: a committee of five professors is preparing a report of recommendations on general education, the most central aspect of the undergraduate review.

As the Crimson reports, "The report recommends replacing the Core’s 11 fields of study with three broader disciplines—Arts and Humanities, Study of Societies, and Science and Technology. Students would be required to take three courses in each of the two areas most distinct from their concentration."

I am underwhelmed. It took four years to say, well, let's just divide up the world of knowledge into three categories and make students take two courses from each? Truth is, any serious member of the Harvard faculty could have done that in about twenty minutes. It's not exactly rocket science.

What's interesting about this report—and to be fair, the Crimson saw only a draft—is the essential abdication of any educational philosophy. At least the Core, for all its flaws, had a view of the world, a sense of what a Harvard education was supposed to accomplish. A curriculum this broad, and this loosely structured, doesn't seem to have an opinion on anything, except perhaps that the Core is bad, and that Harvard students feel they labor under too many requirements.

Well, it's early yet; there's a long way to go with this curricular review. But is this really the best the finest minds in the nation can come up with?  ¶ 7:40 AM 7 comments   

  Writing about the Kennedys Janet Maslin reviews the new memoir by Christopher Lawford, the son of Peter Lawford and JFK sister Patricia Kennedy, this morning. It's called Symptoms of Withdrawal, and it actually sounds pretty good.

I read the review with particular interest, and perhaps self-interest, because, having written a book about a Kennedy, I follow the genre. Next out is Carole Radziwill's "What Remains: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Loss." Carole is the widow of Anthony Radziwill, who was one of John Kennedy's closest friends and died of cancer just a few weeks after John, his wife Carolyn, and her sister Lauren died in a plane crash in July, 1999. My heart goes out to her; she has had a rough time.

Having gone through a trial by fire to publish my book, and receiving some pretty tough and personal criticism for doing so, I'm slightly bemused by the fact that these books—which are much closer to "tell-alls" than American Son was—aren't raising an ethical eyebrow. Where are the media ethics police now?

But more than bemused, I'm supportive of these books. This idea that writing about the Kennedys is somehow morally wrong is just silly. (Well, not always.) If people have a legitimate story to tell, they should tell it, and in the best, most honest, most serious way they can. I was even supportive of Robert Littell, whose book, The Men We Became: My Friendship with John F. Kennedy, Jr., came out not long after Littell publicly criticized me for writing American Son.

Anyone who's had close contact with the Kennedys knows that it's a wild ride; we need to be understanding that people process that experience in different ways. For some, that means spewing bile; for others, that means trying to make sense of the experience through a book. I happen to think that one way is preferable to the other, but I understand that both are aftershocks of grief.

So good for Christopher Lawford and Carole Radziwill; I wish them luck with their books. I don't know if I'll be able to read Carole's—that's a little close to a still-painful memory for comfort—but I hope that the act of writing gave the authors some much-needed peace of mind. I know it did for me.  ¶ 8:34 AM 0 comments   

  Kate Moss: Hot or Not? It's a fair question, and a very important one. At least to the British, who are, apparently, in the midst of a heated debate on whether or not Kate Moss is particularly attractive.

I mention this because I've never felt that she is, and so I've watched fascinated as she has been constantly described as a beauty icon. To me, she represented the disconnect between the world of fashion, populated by gay men who see women's bodies as objects to manipulate and control, and the world of male heterosexuality, which is much more catholic in its tastes. One simple example: Every time I hear a female friend complain about her weight when she's not even close to being overweight—which happens way too much—I remind her that straight guys like curves. If you asked straight men whether they'd rather spend a night with Anna Nicole Smith or Kate Moss, Anna Nicole would take about 90% of that poll...

Those are two extremes, of course. But if you look at the magazines that cater to heterosexual guys with babealicious photos—FHM or Stuff or Maxim, all those rags—you won't ever find the heroin chic look on the cover. And those magazines know their market.

The fact is that if fashion designers were straight, Kate Moss would never have become a supermodel in the first place...and she probably wouldn't be a cokehead now. And more important, millions of women wouldn't feel that they have to weigh under a hundred pounds to look beautiful.  ¶ 8:21 AM 2 comments   

  New York Politics The Times has a think piece on how African-American voters lack a consensus on this year's NYC mayoral race, suggesting, the Times says, that the black vote is becoming harder to predict.

Well, kinda. Does this mean that African-American voters are less affiliated with the Democratic Party than they used to be? On a national level, I doubt it. Especially not after Hurricane Katrina.

Does it mean that Freddy Ferrer is such a weak candidate that he can't even hold on to the Democrats' core voters?

Why, yes, it does....  ¶ 8:05 AM 0 comments   

  Women in Science, cont'd.... A new paper published in Science holds that the reason there are fewer women than men in the sciences is because of discrimination, not because of innate differences in aptitude between the sexes, as Larry Summers proposed last winter.

The Associated Press runs this quote: "We're not too stupid to do science, but there are real structural and attitudinal impediments to the advancement of women that create an unfair playing field," says Jo Handelsman, a University of Wisconsin microbiologist who is lead author of the paper.

But not everyone thinks the paper is good scholarship.

"It's simply a political statement. I don't see any evidence of original research," said Stephen Balch of the National Association of Scholars.

But then, the NAS itself seems like a political group, judging by this "Open Letter to Lawrence Summers" posted on its website, which begins:

"As badly as Nancy Hopkins and her ilk behaved in berating Lawrence Summers for his provocative remarks about male-female aptitudes...."

Nancy Hopkins and her "ilk"? What exactly are you trying to imply there, NAS? Doesn't sound very scholarly to me....  ¶ 7:54 AM 0 comments   

  Bare-Ack? Some of those readers who didn't like Harvard Rules, or thought that it was too tough on President Larry Summers, faulted my emphasis on his social graces, or lack thereof. They missed my point. My opinion about Summers' manners wasn't the issue; Harvard's opinion was, and Summers' boorish manners had repeatedly handicapped his ability to lead the university. That's why I wrote about them at length.

In today's Globe, Marcella Bombardieri reports on a classic example: At this weekend's reunion of Harvard's African-American alumni, Summers repeatedly mispronounced the name of law school alumn and U.S. senator Barack Obama (Bare-Ack instead of Buh-rock).

As I wrote in the book, that fact that Summers' mispronunciations occur primarily with ethnic-sounding names doesn't help him when he's trying to reach out to minority constituencies.

Obviously, enough people remarked on this for it to make the Boston Globe, and for Obama himself to make a joke about it at another speech when Summers wasn't present.....  ¶ 4:42 PM 2 comments   

  Not the Good War The heart sinks when reading the headline from today's New York Times: " 3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine. The soldiers told a human rights group that prisoners had been beaten and abused to help gather intelligence and for amusement."

For amusement.

Americans aren't supposed to commit such heinous acts; we're supposed to be better than that. It's the terrorists who torture for amusement. Right?

I can't help but think that this kind of moral corruption stems from the fundamental dishonesty of this war; that it was predicated on a premise its most informed proponents knew to be very probably untrue, the existence of weapons of mass destruction. A war predicated on lies is immoral, and that immorality seeps down to every level. How can soldiers act honorably when they're acting at the orders of a dishonest president? (It's to their great credit that most of them, probably the vast majority, do.)

I suspect that history is going to be very tough on this war, and that it will be seen as the time when, even more than Vietnam, America really lost all its illusions about its own place in history, its self-proclaimed moral standing. I am having a hard time being proud of my country these days, and the reality of that fills me with a sadness greater than I can describe. One gets the feeling that more and more of the country would like a new leader who fills us with an honest pride, not a chest-beating, macho, "mission accomplished" false pride. That's a start. But what happens for the next three years?


  ¶ 7:56 AM 0 comments   

  The Human Being and Fish Can Coexist Is it a sign of President Bush's sagging political fortunes that people are starting to make fun of his appalling speech habits again?

Take a look at this short film, a little bit of political genius.....You'll laugh. But you'll cry more. Oh, trust me. You'll cry.  ¶ 12:17 PM 2 comments   

  Dan Shaughnessy Recants The Boston Globe columnist who wrote that the Red Sox would win like Secretariat going away at the Belmont in 1973 has recanted.

Too late, Dan Shaughnessy!

The Curse, it would appear, is back.

Whatever happens, it's nice to see some gnashing and wailing in Red Sox nation. Those... those...people have gotten far too cocky for a team that won one (which is to say, one fewer than the Florida Marlins) World Series in the past 87 years.  ¶ 10:23 AM 0 comments   

  Narcissus, Meet Narcissus What is it about the media that it can't help but ask the profoundly unimportant question—over and over again—who is the real "media star" of Hurricane Katrina?  ¶ 7:02 AM 1 comments   

  The Differences Between Boys and Girls Over at DailyKos, there's a heated debate going on about a new study downplaying genetic differences between boys and girls and its applicability to the socio-scientific theorizing of Larry Summers. Check it out.  ¶ 6:59 AM 0 comments   

  Go Yankees! Very quietly now, so as not to disturb the baseball gods while elevating yourself into a higher state.....

goyankeesgoyankeesgoyankeesgoyankeesgoyankees
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goyankeesgoyankeesgoyankeesgoyankeesgoyankees!  ¶ 6:49 AM 3 comments   

  What's Wrong With This Picture? ...in today's Times story about Texans fleeing Houston?

Well, two things, really.

One, every single visible car in the photo is an SUV...which would help explain why lots of people are running out of gas.

And two, is there such a thing as public transportation in Texas?

I don't mean to sound like Campbell Scott in Singles, but maybe it's time to start thinking of public transportation not just as an energy-saving measure, but as a public security issue. (Come to think of it, these days, that's the same thing.)

Could there be a less efficient way to evacuate people from a city than by having everyone pile into their SUV and head onto the highway? Didn't any of these people see War of the Worlds?  ¶ 6:42 AM 0 comments   

  Another Good Book, Another Plug Since it's the beginning of fall and school's back in session, I feel compelled to report on my summer reading; it's one of those back-to-school rituals that never seem to leave the bloodstream. (If only I could take to the soccer field at 3 PM, five days a week, like I used to....)

One of the most fun and clever reads I enjoyed this summer is a book called Man Camp. The author is Adrienne Brodeur, the founding editor of Zoetrope literary magazine and a friend. (That's why I read it, but not why I'm plugging it.)

Man Camp revolves around this terrifically clever premise: two New York women get so fed up with the ineptness of the men in their lives that they start a camp where said inept men can go to learn manly skills, such as how to change a tire, fix a fence, milk a cow, and so on.

As a guy who enjoys doing all those things (all right, maybe not milking a cow) but never feels wholly confident that they'll come out right, I connected to the underlying theme: an anxiety that we citydwellers have lost the ability to perform rudimentary survival skills. (I have a hunch that the TV show "Survivor" operates on the same anxiety.)

But Adrienne never hits you over the head with her message. Instead, she's written a beach read (for all seasons!) with surprisingly deep and likeable characters, snappy dialogue, great comic situations, and happy endings. She has a particular gift, I think, for conveying human interactions that go wrong when one person hits an off-note, sends the wrong signal, and two people who were in sync fall out of rhythm.

Anyway, take a look at Man Camp. You'll probably see it on the big screen in a couple of years, so now's your chance to get in ahead of the curve.  ¶ 1:55 PM 1 comments   

  Stolen Entirely from AndrewSullivan.com I have to admit, this is entirely lifted from Andrew's site...it's just exactly the right point to make. Thanks, Andrew—we're on the same side on this one.

<



This is a picture of Father Mychal Judge, the pastor for New York City's fire-fighters, an openly gay priest who died with those he served in the ashes of the World Trade Center. According to the new Pope, he should never have been ordained.>>

  ¶ 1:42 PM 0 comments   

  Oh, What a Night (At the Stadium) Thanks to my friend Dan—congrats on the new job, buddy!—I went to the Stadium last night to see the Yankees and Randy Johnson take on the Orioles. It was a gorgeous night for baseball—warm, clear skies, a light breeze. All was indeed right under the heavens, as Johnson pitched beautifully for eight innings, with only a flash of the temper that got him thrown out of the last game he started. The Yankees led 2-1 in the top of the ninth when Mariano Rivera came in to relieve Johnson. He promptly hit a batter, and one out later gave up a single, putting the winning run on first. Yikes. But the next Oriole whiffed, and the next after that lined out to first, and just like that the Yanks had won their ninth out of their last ten games.

And to top off the evening...as we 50,000-plus fans (Yankee attendance will be over 4 million this year) filed out of the Stadium, the scoreboard flashed that the pesky Devil Rays were beating the Red Sox, 6-4. A huge roar went up from the crowd, and the Yankees who were leaving the field turned to look—if the Sox lost, the Yanks would be in first!

By the time I got out of the Stadium, it was 7-4; by the time I got home on the D train, it was a final.

The Yankees are in first. The Yankees are in first. The Yankees are in first.

This is a crazy season, and anything could yet happen. There are still those three games up at Fenway. And the Sox are too good to count out.

But still...if only for a day...I'm just going to enjoy this moment. New York needs this....  ¶ 8:55 AM 0 comments   

  The Catholic Inquisition The Vatican is launching a ban on gays in the priesthood, whether or not they are celibate, as part of the new pope's desire to "purify" the church.

Well, as Mike Dukakis used to say, the fish rots from the head.

Naturally, the pope, who appears to be a bigot, is using the child abuse scandal as an excuse for anti-gay discrimation. That's a mistake. It was never clear how many of those priests were gay, or simply straight men whose normal sexual desires were perverted by the priesthood.

The child abuse scandal could have been such an opportunity for real, enlightened reform in the Catholic Church—permitting women to become priests, getting rid of the celibacy requirement, opening the way to honest discussions of human sexuality.

What a shame that it has instead become a venue for launching a whole new wave of abuse.

And perhaps I am paranoid, but it makes me nervous when a former soldier in Hitler's army starts purging an entire swath of people from the ranks of the holy....

P.S. And speaking of gay stuff...apparently ever since Renee Zellwegger listed "fraud" on her divorce petition after her quickie marriage to country singer Kenny Chesney, the rumors have been flying that Chesney is gay. (In my opinion, one would have to be gay to marry Renee Zellwegger, but that's not really the point.) Of course, everyone in Chesney's camp is denying like mad, because the red states feel about gay country music singers the way the Vatican feels about gay priests. Me, I think it has some commercial possibilities—talk about cross-over! Especially with New York magazine reporting that local gays are getting into frat-style hazing....  ¶ 8:43 AM 0 comments   

  The Beat Goes On The Harvard faculty will be discussing the circumstances of Conrad Harper's resignation from the Harvard Corporation at its meeting next week, the Crimson reports.

J. Lorand Matory, the anthropologist who initiated the vote of no confidence in Larry Summers last spring, is also responsible for putting this conversation on the faculty meeting agenda.

Good for Matory. Though I sometimes differ with his politics, I admire him for having the guts to continue to initiate important discussions at Harvard. With the Board of Overseers irrelevant (by its own lack of initiative) and the Corporation in the president's pocket, the faculty has to step up. A member of the Harvard Corporation resigned over the summer, calling on the university president to resign. What happens? Nothing. That is a failure on the part of Harvard's constitutional system. Whatever the outcome of this discussion, it needs to be held, and publicly.  ¶ 8:32 AM 2 comments   

  And Speaking of Sex Congratulations to my friend Elizabeth Hayt, whose new book, "I'm No Saint," is just out and attracting loads of attention. I went to her book party last night at The Modern, and (aside from me, at least) everyone who is anyone was there. I'm No Saint is a brutally honest memoir of Elizabeth's life, and particularly her sex life. It's definitely a book that people will be talking about. But it's not just the graphic recounting of sexual adventures—and misadventures—that makes this book conversation-worthy. (She really had sex with a bridesmaid an hour before the wedding?) It's the honesty that Elizabeth brings to the inner workings of families—both the one she was born into, and the one she married into. I haven't finished the book yet, but there is such raw honesty on its pages that I kept thinking, Jesus, how could she write this? To be honest, I don't think I could do it. But I admire Elizabeth that she has; it's not easy, putting yourself out there like this. (Read that first review on Amazon, linked to in the book title above, if you don't believe me.) How many people have secrets like Elizabeth...had?

  ¶ 11:21 AM 0 comments   

  Poor Kate Don't you just love the story about H & M firing Kate Moss because she got caught on film doing coke?


Imagine...a model who snorts coke. And then is fired for setting a bad example for young women.

I think this sets an important precedent. Next, clothing makers and sellers ought to fire every model who is anorexic. (After all, images of Kate Moss being super-thin have probably made more women become anorexic than images of Kate Moss doing blow will make women start tooting up.) Or drinks before the age of 21. Or is just incredibly superficial and sends the message that the most important thing in life is to be beautiful, thin, rich, under-fed and under-read, and just generally dumb as a bag of rocks (although weighing considerably less).

Honestly, the hypocrisy here is incredible. It's not like everyone hasn't known that Kate Moss has done coke for years. Not to mention that her boyfriend is a heroin addict. And frankly, virtually everything about your typical supermodel sets a bad example, not just for young women, but for pretty much everyone. Isn't that kind of the point of supermodels? To suggest that they are counterculture, and you want to be like them? I mean, the message is kind of lost on me, though I like to look at supermodels as much as the next guy...but apparently it's an effective pitch.

I love the irony that a supermodel has fallen from grace after being photographed for doing something wrong, when virtually every time a model is photographed, they're sending out equally unhelpful imagery?  ¶ 9:16 AM 0 comments   

  But First... One reason to love the blogosphere is that it's so good at making fun of the idiocies of big media. For example: Check out this montage of CBS' Julie Chen repeating the same catchphrase over and over, with the exact same inflection every time, and throwing in some cute gestures to go along with it....

Too funny.  ¶ 9:09 AM 0 comments   

  To Cook, or Not to Cook Slate's Jack Shafer blasts yesterday's Times story on college women's changing ambitions. He faults reporter Louise Story for not having any hard data on the alleged trend among Ivy League women to downplay careers in favor of motherhood, and relying upon the word "many" instead.

So how did this story make it onto the front page of the Times?

According to Shafer, "I suspect a Times editor glommed onto the idea while overhearing some cocktail party chatter—"Say, did you hear that Sam blew hundreds of thousands of dollars sending his daughter to Yale and now she and her friends say all they want in the future is to get married and stay at home?"—and passed the concept to the writer or her editors and asked them to develop it."

Shafer may be right about this, but I still suspect that Story was onto something. After spending a year and a half at Harvard as a reporter, I found the attitudes she reported on pretty commonplace among women.

My question remains, so what? Is it really such a bad thing to want to balance work and family? Certainly the story has public policy questions, and educational policy ones as well. But the young women interviewed in the piece came across as perfectly healthy and normal to me...certainly more so than women who think they "can have it all." No one can have it all.

And again, to me the more interesting question is why men don't seek out that balance.  ¶ 8:55 AM 2 comments   

  Yesterday, Poetry...Today, Poetry
In my continuing effort to promote the beauty of marine life, I present these breathtaking photos taken by Henry Kaiser, a friend of a friend and an accomplished diver, photographer, and guitar player. Henry took these shots of dolphins and sperm whales on a dive trip off Pico Island in the Azores, and they are just miraculous. How could anyone even think about killing an animal so beautiful? And yet, they do...





  ¶ 11:54 AM 0 comments   

  Must-Cry TV Here's that piece on Anderson Cooper I mention below.

Sample sentence: "Anderson Cooper isn’t the anchors of not-so-long ago. He’s more like Oprah, with richer parents and no weight problem."

As tropical storm Rita "charges toward the U.S.," as CNN put it yesterday, you might find this interesting....  ¶ 10:22 AM 3 comments   

  A New Gender Dilemma In his controversial women-in-science remarks last spring, Larry Summers said that one reason—he ranked it first—why women don't rise to the top levels of science in the same numbers that men do is because they are less willing to devote the enormous amount of hours it takes to succeed. The reason he gave was their greater commitment to family, and in particular, child-rearing.

President Summers may find confirmation of that thesis in this article from today's Times about the goals of women today at elite colleges: Many of them are already planning to have their careers take a back seat to their maternal duties.

Here's one interesting quote: "It really does raise this question for all of us and for the country: when we work so hard to open academics and other opportunities for women, what kind of return do we expect to get for that?" said Marlyn McGrath Lewis, director of undergraduate admissions at Harvard, who served as dean for coeducation in the late 1970's and early 1980's.

A fair question. Because surely if far more men than women plan to make work their primary activity, that raises questions regarding the allocation of resources, and indeed, the very point of an education. When men and women seem to have such different ideas regarding what they intend to do with their education, should the education colleges provide really be gender-neutral?

I'm not sure...but I think it'd be an interesting conversation.

Myself, I think the truly interesting question is not why so many women want to have a real balance between work and family, but why so many men do not. I'm not married, but if one day I have kids, I certainly want to spend more time with them than my father was able to spend with me. The real problem here lies not with women's outlook, but with men's work obsession....  ¶ 9:22 AM 0 comments   

  Go Yankees! The blogger wrote nervously, hoping not to anger the gods of baseball with his over-the-top enthusiasm...but this fall pennant race is shaping up to be a classic. Last night the Yanks beat the O's, 3-2, in the bottom of the 9th, when rookie Bubba Crosby hit only his third home run in the major leagues. (You have to root for any baseball player named Bubba.) Meanwhile, the Red Sox were losing to the actually pretty talented Devil Rays, 8-7, despite the heroics of David Ortiz, who drove in four runs. That guy is singlehandedly keeping the Red Sox in the division race.

And over in the AL Central, the surging Indians—they've won 13 out of their last 14, yikes—beat the division-leading White Sox, 8-7, to pull within two and a half games.

As Phil Rizzuto would say, Holy Cow!

(By the way, is Phil Rizzuto still alive? Anyone?)

Regarding the Red Sox...I will not cheer too loudly at their decline, as they're still in first and the Yanks have to play them three times at Fenway, which is going to be tensetensetense. But I will remind everyone that Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote back in June that the race was going to be a laugher for the Sox. "Don't worry about the Yankees..." he opined. "It's not even going to be close."

Thus ensuring the return of The Curse to Fenway Park....  ¶ 7:49 AM 3 comments   

  CNN's Hurricane Addiction I wrote a little piece for TomPaine.com on Anderson Cooper's tear-filled hurricane reportage for CNN. (Hint: I'm not a fan.) I'll link to the piece when it's up. Meantime, I wanted to take another shot at CNN.

In the past few days, the news network has been splitting its screen to provide more hurricane drama. On the right side, reporters talk about New Orleans, etc. On the left, CNN provides a steady stream of names, ages, and photographs of children reported missing in Hurricane Katrina. Watching this, I was bothered by it, though I couldn't quite put my thumb on why. It only occurred to me when I realized that the network doesn't have pictures of many of the children, so it just runs a generic black profile of a child.

What possible good could it do to run the name and age of a missing child without running a picture? Try to think of a scenario where knowing that seven-year-old Rhonda Owens (to make up a name) is missing is actually going to help you find her.

In fact, what really is the chance that, even when the network has a photo of the missing child, any good will come from the network's milk carton-like strategy?

Let's say you're wandering through an abandoned house in New Orleans and you happen to come across a child who's somehow been living there for the past two weeks. You probably don't need CNN to tell you that something's wrong. So what's the point?

And I realized that the missing child slide show bothered me because, under the guise of helping kids, CNN is just trying to milk this story for all the melodrama it's worth, exploiting the fact that there are numerous missing children, some of whom are probably dead.

It's a little gross, when you think about it....  ¶ 7:30 AM 0 comments   

  The Crimson Defends Its Reporting Yesterday I noted that departing Harvard professor Mark Rosenzweig had challenged the Crimson's reporting of the explanations for his escape to New Haven. The Crimson originally reported that Rosenzweig was leaving the Harvard Center for International Development because he was frustrated over President Summers' lack of support for the center. Rosenzweig promptly penned a letter to the Crimson saying that this was not the case, and suggesting that the Crimson had unfairly edited his e-mailed responses to their questions.

In his letter, Rosenzweig said this: "This is part of the statement I sent to The Crimson reporter when he was writing the article: 'I believe in CID, and I did not go to Yale because of unhappiness with Harvard, but because of the more assured and superior resources and somewhat more agreeable intellectual directions at Yale, where I was once a faculty member.'"

So what's the real story? I contacted the Crimson to find out, and got the following response from reporters Zachary M. Seward and Daniel J. Hemel. The first part is their statement in response to Rosenzweig's letter; the second is the full transcript of their on-the-record e-mailed questions and Rosenzweig's un-edited responses. So you can decide for yourself if the Crimson was unfair, or if Rosenzweig is just backtracking:


Professor Rosenzweig's letter is a helpful addendum to our story on CID that ran last Wednesday. Were we to write the story again, we would have included the sentence he highlights ("...I did not go to Yale because of unhappiness with Harvard...") to give a more complete view of the situation. So we're glad he pointed it out in his letter.

That said, it does not change any of the substance of our story, from the
lede on down. Professor Rosenzweig submitted several lengthy answers to
our questions via e-mail, of which that sentence is a small part. Asked,
"Why did you decide to leave Harvard/CID?" he responded, "Both Harvard and
Yale have extraordinary faculty and graduate students. The Yale Economic
Growth Center, however, has a permanent endowment; CID does not." In
answer to a later question about the possible disbanding or reorganization
of CID, Professor Rosenzweig pinned the blame for the center's scarce
resources directly on President Summers, criticizing him in passages we
quoted extensively in Wednesday's story.

Our story was based on the totality of Professor Rosenzweig's two e-mails
to us on Monday, Sept. 12. The following are all of our questions and all
of his answers. Everything was on-the-record.

[CRIMSON] Why did you decide to leave Harvard/CID?

[ROSENZWEIG] Both Harvard and Yale have extraordinary faculty and graduate
students. The Yale Economic Growth Center, however, has a permanent
endowment; CID does not. Its funds run out in two years. The Yale Economic
Growth Center has enormous resources and relatively more independence from
administration bureacracy, and has a more than 30-year history of
distinguished scholarship. Nevertheless, I had tremendous colleagues and
great staff support at Harvard; I am giving up a lot.

[CRIMSON] In your statement upon being named director of the CID, you
said: "Harvard has a unique opportunity to pull together the multiple
disciplines needed to address development issues that are faced both
within the U.S. and internationally." What opportunities does Yale/EGC
offer that Harvard/CID did not?

[ROSENZWEIG] Yale has resources; CID does not. The center at Yale is more
narrowly focused on the economics of development, and on advancing the
scientific foundations for understanding the development process. CID is
interdisciplinary and more focused on policy. These are great attibutes.
And in a short time (one year) at CID we had begun to realize some of the
potential. We had the opportunity to begin a program on indoor air
pollution (a major source of ill-health in low-income countries that
requires knowledge of health, economics, energy polciy, and environmental
science to understand) and researchers from multiple schools and
disciplines associated with CID won two awards this past year, from NIH
and NSF, totalling more than 2 million dollars. My own interest and
participation in this initiative, and a large component (but not all) of
this money, would not have arisen without CID. Thus, the faculty resources
were getting together. The faculty talent and willingness to collaborate
across disciplines are there, but there is little support provided by the
Harvard administration.

[CRIMSON] I've heard that you'll still be teaching a course with Professor
Rodrik at the Kennedy School. Is that correct?

[ROSENZWEIG] Yes. The MPAID program is a great program and is unique to
Harvard. The course taught by Dani and I is a keystone in the program. It
is also fun to teach.

[CRIMSON] Before your appointment, President Summers said that he would
consider reorganizing the infrastructure for development studies at
Harvard -- and possibly eliminating the CID altogether. Do you think it's
necessary for the CID to remain in existence, or would an alternate
arrangement work better?

[ROSENZWEIG] I still believe in the sentiments I expressed when I took
this job and that the CID structure is the corrrect way to go about
accomplishing the mission. President Summers considers himself an expert
in this area. Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps
sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and
that is why little or no resources are provided to CID. Having Larry
Summers as a collaborator within the framework of CID, instead, would be a
great plus, but he has not indicated while I was around any interest in
CID's vision or accomplishments. CID's unique policy-oriented,
interdisciplinary mission grounded in science and led by Harvard faculty
(rather than the short-term outsiders doing piece work that is the norm in
other centers) is well worth preserving. I believe in CID, and I did not
go to Yale because of unhappiness with Harvard, but because of the more
assured and superior resources and somewhat more agreeable intellectual
directions at Yale, where I was once a faculty member.

[FROM A FOLLOW-UP E-MAIL LATER THAT DAY]

[CRIMSON] We have heard that President Summers never met with you before
or after appointing you to be CID director. Is that correct?

[ROSENZWEIG] Yes (nor talked with me). So no one can say that he
interfered with the Center!

[CRIMSON] You wrote: "Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps
sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and
that is why little or no resources are provided to CID." Does that mean
that President Summers is pushing his particular perspective on
globalization/development? Or that he simply wants personal control over
grants? Or both? (Or neither?)

[ROSENZWEIG] I don't know - I doubt he wants control over grants.

[CRIMSON] Additionally, when you say "some think," does that include
yourself?

[ROSENZWEIG] I do not understand the reasons for failure to commit, one
way or another. Larry Summers did help bring to Harvard some very large
and important projects in recent years. Perhaps he had not yet had time to
turn his attention to CID, although CID focuses on issues which he does
care about.

[CRIMSON] Do you believe that Dani Rodrik should be named as your
successor? We have heard that political differences between him and
President Summers have kept Professor Rodrik from the directorship. First,
do you believe that is true? Second, can you help us understand what those
political differences are? I do not know if it is true.

[ROSENZWEIG] Dani should be the one to define those differences, but there
are real, and well-known, differences in perspective on determining the
appropriate policies that will succeed in increasing economic growth. One
other difference I see is that Dani is a currently active scholar who
continues to study and add significantly to the understanding of the
development process and to evaluating development policy. Larry Summers
has not been an active researcher in the field in many years, but does
have strong views on economic development. Dani would be a great director
of CID. Larry Summers can be a great President of Harvard.

[CRIMSON] Finally, you say that the CID's money runs out in two years.
Where does that money come from? Has President Summers made any effort to
raise additional funds for the center? (And do you know -- exactly or
approximately -- what the CID's annual budget is?)

[ROSENZWEIG] The money is the endowment that was shifted from HIID to CID
at the dissolution of HIID. Since that time, almost all of the expenditure
by CID has been from that endowment. The process is decapitalization - one
of the rare instances in which endowment is spent down rather than just
the income from the endowment. Given the current expenditure of CID the
endowment will be spent down completely in two years. As far as I know
(and I think I know), no effort has been made to raise money for CID.
Aimee Fox can tell you what the annual budget is - remember that a large
portion of the budget is spent just renting space (none of the Yale EGC
budget goes to renting space, or paying "overhead" to any school - at
Harvard, 20% of the income is taxed by KSG. So for every dollar spent on
rent or on providing resources to students or faculty to pursue projects
or engage interesting speakers, $1.20 is taken out of the endowment. This
is standard practice at Harvard, not a special tax on CID).  ¶ 7:15 AM 0 comments   

  Some Poetry with Your Coffee One of my closest friends from my time at Harvard is a woman named Adrie Kusserow, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School with a Harvard doctorate in anthropology. We met in Widener Library, bonded over the usual grad student aggravations, and have remained friends ever since. In addition to being the mother of two wonderful children, Adrie has gone on to become a remarkable teacher at St. Michael's College in Vermont who's known for her work with modern-day slavery and refugees. (Her husband, Robert Lair, is working to start a micro-finance bank and an orphanage in Sudan.) Adrie is also a poet, and one of her recent works came out in the HDS alumni magazine. It's lovely, and with her permission, I'm reprinting it here. (If you like it, check out her book, Hunting Down the Monk.)


LADYSLIPPER, RED EFT


As a child I awoke
to the furiousness of bees.

All morning my mother and I combed the woods
for red efts, trout lily, trillium.

I learned young
the smell of God and soil.

The first time I saw a ladyslipper
I felt embarrassed, the pink-veined pouches,

simultaneously ephemeral and genital,
floating toad-balloons,

half scrotum, half fairy,
half birth, half death.

Without the formalities of church and school
lust and spirit first came to me

as one --
through the potent hips of spring.

But flowers, like fear, once inside me
never lay still --

amidst my restless
stalking of the woods,

I wanted something bulky to thank,
to name, to explain all the impossible grace.

So I dragged my thirsty body
over the hills, into the trees.

I let the plump red efts, orange fingers tiny as rain,
crawl across my neck, onto my cheek,

half reptile, half elf,
half earth, half magic.

Years passed,
spring after spring cycled through me,

again and again I arrived in heaven
through touch,

lust, even, for the wrinkled pouches of ladyslipper,
the soft lemon bellied efts

that waddled pigeon-toed across my palm.
Now I walk my daughter through April’s black mud.

It’s been a long winter,
she hasn’t quite unfurled.

Still, she sticks her ear into the cacophony of crows
above us, the way a dog sniffs

at a tight current of scent.
Across the meadow the peepers

gossip in their giant cities,
salamanders toddle

over the black soil,
back into the cold ponds they think of as mother.

awake, awake

what if, what if

What if God is walking through us,
picking seasons, histories, humans off himself

like milkweed from a sweater,
wading through us,

a slow giant through warm ponds,
feeling the odd tickle of religions

like tangled weeds at his feet.
I watch Ana now in full bloom,

despite the rain, running outside barefoot,
setting up dolls’ nests in the fields,

collecting moles, covering them in leaves,
naming them even though they’re dead.

She skitters across the garden, singing,
she too is learning young

the restlessness of rapture,
the way beauty is hard to sit with,
the way it bends the body into prayer,
the way ripeness must be touched.


Soft black earth of the garden,
she and her brother all fists and toes.

I watch her digging into heaven --
soil, toads, bulbs, buds,

the craning neck of spring --
and all summer

the sweet long green meadows.  ¶ 9:40 AM 1 comments   

  Mark Rosenzweig Speaks Out Just days after the Crimson reported that he left Harvard's Center for International Development in part out of dissatisfaction with President Summers, Mark Rosenzweig has written a letter to the Crimson saying that it ain't so.

Apparently the Crimson printed a part of an e-mail that Rosenzweig had not intended the paper to see (it's very hard to tell exactly what happened), because in his letter Rosenzweig says this:

"This is part of the statement I sent to The Crimson reporter when he was writing the article: 'I believe in CID, and I did not go to Yale because of unhappiness with Harvard, but because of the more assured and superior resources and somewhat more agreeable intellectual directions at Yale, where I was once a faculty member.'"

The first story said this:

"Rosenzweig—who left to join a better-funded program on economic growth at Yale—wrote in an e-mail that Summers 'has not indicated while I was around any interest in CID’s vision or accomplishments.' Though Summers has declared research on international development a top priority of his administration, Rosenzweig said the president never spoke with him before or after naming him director of the center in August 2004.

“''Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and that is why little or no resources are provided to CID,' Rosenzweig wrote."

So it looks as if the Crimson printed material from an e-mail that Rosenzweig did not intend for public consumption (the paper should probably have been clearer about that).

Rosenzweig's statement in that e-mail feels (to me, anyway) like a man speaking what he considers the truth—it's pretty blunt language—while his letter to the Crimson seems carefully worded and political. One can only wonder what telephone conversations or e-mail exchanges Professor Rosenzweig must have had after the original Crimson article appeared. If anyone knows what the real backstory is, I'd be curious to hear.....  ¶ 9:06 AM 0 comments   

  No to the Makah The Makah Indians of Washington state are trying once more to conduct a whale hunt. It's a bad idea, and I hope their lawsuit is unsuccessful.

A little background. The Makah live on a reservation at Neah Bay, Washington, the northwesternmost point of the continental United States, and a forbidding place. (I visited there in 1998 for an article I wrote about the Makah for Mother Jones magazine.) They used to live on more land, but in 1855 they ceded most of it to the U.S. government. One of that treaty's stipulations was that the Makah would have a right to whale, as they did at the time and continued to do until the 1920s, when the tribe abandoned whale hunts because there were so few of the animals left.

But a few years back, a few members of the tribe began pushing for a return to whaling. The original incentive was probably economic, a hope that the whale products could be sold to Japan. But since that's illegal, and the government would never approve a commercial whale hunt, the drive to restore the whale hunt morphed into a kind of cultural pride thing. It is not a subsistence hunt, which is the only kind traditionally allowed for indigenous peoples; the Makah aren't rich, but they don't need the whale meat for food.

The Times piece linked to above doesn't quite capture all the subtleties of the situation in Neah Bay; it is complicated, and internal tribal politics have shaped the debate. (At least when I visited, many people who opposed the hunt were reluctant to speak against it, because several of the tribe's more senior authority figures supported it.)

It's a shame that some members of the Makah tribe feel that the best way to reinvigorate their tribal culture is to slaughter beautiful animals. (Take a look at the horrifying picture.) Wouldn't the tribe benefit by coming up with new traditions, like peacefully interacting with the whales that migrate past their part of the world? Particularly upsetting to me is the fact that the gray whales being hunted have become so accustomed to interacting with humans, they're essentially tame; the Makah's idea of a whale "hunt" is paddling up to a stationary animal, harpooning it, and then shooting it to death.

Visiting the reservation, with its lonely beach and craggy coastline, I couldn't help but wonder if the real reason some of the Makah wanted to start whale hunting wasn't boredom. There just wasn't a lot else to do there at Neah Bay.....  ¶ 8:00 AM 0 comments   

  (Yet Yet) Another Resignation at Harvard Finance chief Ann Berman has stepped down, according to the Crimson, "to pursue her deep-rooted interest in foreign languages."

Huh.

Let's just say I'm skeptical. After all, Berman hasn't had that job very long; she only took it in February 2003. Crimson reporters, how about a follow-up?

Honestly, I wonder when the alumni, or the board of Overseers, will notice how many people can't seem to wait to leave Harvard these days...because you certainly can't expect the Corporation to do anything.
  ¶ 8:47 AM 4 comments   

  Pop Against War One of my favorite organizations, War Child, which is devoted to helping young victims of war, has put out a fundraiser cd that's heating up the British charts. It contains new music from Coldplay, Radiohead, Gorillaz, Keane, Razorlight, The Coral, Bloc Party, and a bunch more. (As you will guess, War Child is an English charity.) But Americans will want to support War Child too, since, well, we've probably created a few orphans in the past couple of years. Any devoted fan of Brit pop will want to download it...and raise money for a good cause at the same time.

I'm off to New Haven—long story—today, so posting will be scarce. But as my mother said to me, didn't the president sound like Santa Claus last night? And why does Curt Schilling get so fired up to pitch against the Yankees and suck against everyone else?

1.5 games, my friends...are the Sox re-cursed? After a tough year in the rest of the world, we can only hope.  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments   

  The Catholic Inquisition? The Vatican has ordered its hatchet men to investigate every Catholic seminary for "evidence of homosexuality."

I'd be outraged about this, if I weren't so sure that they'd never, ever find any gay men in the priesthood....  ¶ 2:11 PM 0 comments   

  Change at the Top? In an editorial, The Crimson discusses the resignation of Corporation member Conrad Harper and warns of the Corporation's blatant homogeneity under Larry Summers. "It is always worrying when a secretive, self-perpetuating body converges on a single viewpoint," the paper points out.

Rather mildly, I would say. As is often the problem with The Crimson, it's hampered by its somewhat overblown sense of being the paper of record at Harvard. Its arguments always seem tempered by a fear of rocking the boat.

Ergo the editorial's very next sentence: "This is not to challenge the Corporation’s secrecy or self-perpetuation; rather, it is to note that such insular conditions of operation, which impede external critique, make vigorous internal critique imperative."

Why not challenge the Coroporation's secrecy or self-perpetuation? It's the only university governing body in the country which is that small, that secret, and self-selecting. And at the moment, it's clearly not working. Not only did the Corporation prove itself oblivious to the campus' complaints about Summers (remember Bob Rubin's embarrassing remarks about being unaware of any discontent?). But word is that the Corporation is meeting less frequently than ever, and that Rubin, in particular, would just as soon not be on it.

And the argument could be made that the Corporation—albeit a largely different group than today's—erred in choosing President Summers, and that its secrecy and self-perpetuation were major factors in its wrong choice.

At the very least, it's time for the Corporation to start justifying itself. Why is it secret? Why is it self-selected? What are the benefits of those undemocratic characteristics, and how do they stack up against the downsides mentioned above?

The Crimson should follow its logic to its inevitable conclusion, rather than inching up to a real threat to the powers-that-be, only to retreat in an excess of caution and timidity....
  ¶ 9:01 AM 0 comments   

  Go Yankees The Yanks are on the verge of sweeping their dreaded foe, the Devil Rays. They took two out of three from the suddenly nervous Red Sox. Jason Giambi is having another monster month. The pitching is finally shaping up. (It was great watching Randy Johnson shut out the Sox, and it has to be said, Boston's Tim Wakefield—and Curt Schilling the day before—weren't so bad, either.) A-Rod is having an MVP season. So, come to think of it, is Mariano Rivera.

So the Sox are still 2.5 games up, and Cleveland, which has been playing fantastic, is a game up in the wild card race.... Isn't September baseball grand?  ¶ 8:30 AM 0 comments   

  A Note On New York Politics New York congressman Anthony Weiner has declined to participate in a run-off against Democratic primary leader Freddy Ferrer, though obscure city rules might force him to. It's a bizarre situation, not least because there isn't a soul in Manhattan who actually thinks Ferrer could win. Ferrer, the Bronx borough president, might be the least inspiring candidate in the history of politics. Not New York politics. Not even American politics. Just politics, period. In the Democratic primary four years ago, he got his clock cleaned by Mark Green, who couldn't win an election if you spotted him 48%. Ferrer won this time only because of name recognition (turnout was low, low, low), money, and party machinery. Bloomberg will crush him like a tiny bug.

Weiner, a protege of Senator Chuck Schumer, is aggressive, smart, and has a future. I don't know why he thinks it's a bad move for him to participate in the run-off; he swears he hasn't cut any kind of deal. But long-shot though he may be, he's the only Democrat who might actually catch fire and beat Bloomberg.

So it looks like Mayor Mike will get four more years...and the truth is, he deserves 'em. Bloomberg's done a good job. Especially when you consider what was going on just as he became mayor....  ¶ 8:19 AM 5 comments   

  (Yet) Another Resignation at Harvard Mark R. Rosenzwieg, the director of Harvard's Center for International Development, has resigned because of a lack of support from Larry Summers, according to Zachary M. Seward and Daniel J. Hemel in The Crimson.

What's intriguing about this story is that Summers has often spoken of his desire to promote a greater international focus at Harvard. It's a constant theme of his speeches and the always entertaining curricular review. So why refuse to fund CID?

“Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and that is why little or no resources are provided to CID,” Rosenzweig wrote in an e-mail to the Crimson.

Another reason for Summers' distaste for CID: It was founded by his old rival, Jeffrey Sachs, now at Columbia and making headlines with his plans to lift the world's poor out of poverty. Sachs left Harvard...let's see...at about exactly the moment Summers arrived. Coincidence? I think not.

Rosenzweig is headed to Yale, which is probably why he's so candid about Summers' relationship with CID. But there's another possibility that could make for interesting Harvard-viewing: the events of last spring, as well as the mid-summer resignation of Corporation member Conrad Harper, have emboldened the Harvard faculty to start calling 'em like they see 'em.

In any event...it's (yet) another resignation at Harvard.  ¶ 8:07 AM 0 comments   

  More Incompetence from the Department of Homeland Security Does anyone believe this agency is actually making us safer? Or is it just a massive tangle of bureaucracy, inertia and incompetence?

Among the most vulnerable of New Orleans displaced are foreign students who planned to attend college in New Orleans (foreign students being not just a great source of income for the United States, but also a valuable cultural and intellectual presence, especially when they choose to stay here after finishing their education).

But they risk losing their visas if they're not actually enrolled somewhere, and, as the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, DHS has been alarmingly slow about responding to their requests for help.....  ¶ 8:03 AM 0 comments   

  What Now for Larry Summers? That's the question Zachary M. Seward poses in today's Crimson, and it's the right one. The events of last winter and spring almost destroyed Summers' presidency. The question is, Did they permanently cripple it? Because five years in, Summers is, in a sense, starting from scratch or worse.

As Seward points out, Summers is taking some steps to broaden his outreach to women; five of the seven vice-presidents in his administration are female. (Why a university president needs seven "vice-presidents" is another question, but that's a different post.) You can be sure that when it comes to women, Summers won't make the same mistake twice.

Still, the Harvard president has had a difficult summer. Thanks to his old protege, economist Andre Shleiffer, Harvard has to pay the federal government a $27 million fine; Summers must also decide whether to allow Shleiffer, found guilty in a civil trial of defrauding the federal government, whether to remain on the faculty. Corporation member Conrad Harper resigned, calling upon Summers to do the same—both unprecedented public acts by a member of the Harvard Corporation. And Summers still can't find a replacement for investment manager Jack Meyer.

Meanwhile, the once much-vaunted curricular review stumbles toward the finish line like a horse with a broken leg.

And what's going on with that capital campaign, which was supposed to have begun by now?

To be sure, Summers did have some good news during the summer. The Broad Institute, which he helped found to study the human genome, made news with its analysis of the genetic composition of apes. And Summers announced the creation of an institute to study evolution, a project which will help counter the bizarre spread of creationist thought in American classrooms. That's the kind of thing the Harvard president should be spearheading.

As I said before, I don't think Summers will make the same mistake twice. But there's very much the question of whether he'll make some entirely new mistake. That's part of what makes Summers-watching so compelling: the tension between the truths of his personality and his need to play nice to promote his agenda and keep his job.

No one will work harder than Summers to reaffirm his power and get his presidency back on track; he is admirably dogged in this way. It will be fascinating to see how this year progresses.  ¶ 8:26 AM 4 comments   

  Where Have You Gone, Gatemouth Brown? But New Orleans' losses are still ongoing, and another one, a particularly hard one, came yesterday—the death of guitarist Clarence Gatemouth Brown at age 81, just about a week after he fled the city.

Brown was one of the city's legends—a musician, a character, a storyteller, a piece of history. The things he could do with a guitar! I saw him play once, at a long-ago Jazzfest, at a New Orleans bar whose name I can't remember. His show began around two in the morning. I was a little tired and a little tipsy when it started, but I woke up fast. Brown walked out on stage wearing a white suit and a cowboy hat, and he sat down on a stool to play, and I just remember thinking, They don't make 'em like this any more. Certainly I'd never seen a 70-year-old man rock like that before. He might have needed a stool, but his fingers and his spirit were still young. "American music, Texas style," Brown called it, but really it was just American music, played by a master.

Brown died of natural causes, but given that he was uprooted from his home, and his age, it's hard not to think of him as another victim of that terrible hurricane.  ¶ 8:06 AM 0 comments   

  Remembering...and Living Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of 9/11, of course. It is a sad irony that such a hard day comes at a time when New York is at its most beautiful. The weather yesterday was almost as clear and crisp as it was on that horrific morning four years ago. The air was warm, but if you felt carefully, you could sense the cool of October and November implicit in the breeze of the early September morning. The sky was cloudless. Some of the leaves on the trees are starting to turn. Around the city, Andres Agassi was playing his heart out against Roger Federer, the Giants were smashing the Cardinals, and the Yankees were beating the Red Sox, 1-0, in that wonderful and rare thing, a pitchers' duel, won by a home run from my underdog hero of the year, Jason Giambi.

It is a day to remember, but if you can help it, not a day for sadness. I tried to honor the lost of 9/11 by celebrating this city. And so I traveled across the park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I walked the show of fabulous cabinetry by 18th-century Rhode Islander John Townsend, as well as an exhibit detailing how Matisse drew upon 19th-century textiles for the colorful backgrounds of his paintings. Walking along Fifth Avenue, I spotted an older couple dressed for a wedding, carrying one of the table planters from the reception. Sweet. I walked back across the park, and saw thousands of New Yorkers enjoying life—lovers and families rowing boats in the pond, friends having a beer at the boathouse, strollers walking their dogs by the 72nd Street fountain.

9/11 hasn't ruined or devastated this city, as some once feared it might. It provides a day for New Yorkers to appreciate all that we enjoy here, and to show how life can carry on, will carry on, despite the most permanent of losses.

I hope it is not too long before the people of New Orleans come to know this truth as well.  ¶ 7:47 AM 0 comments   

  Tempting, but no Thanks An Italian couple is trying to set a world record by "living" for a week underwater. My hat's off to them if they can pull it off...I'm usually happy enough after 70 minutes down to come to the surface and feel the sun. Being underwater for a week would be immensely difficult, especially mentally. I think you'd run a real risk of going nuts. But maybe these folks are a little nuts already, just to try it....  ¶ 9:22 AM 0 comments   

  More Thoughts on the Times ...In his column today, Nicholas Kristoff writes about the study on hurricanes and global warming by MIT physicist Kerry Emmanuel mentioned below. I agree with the thrust of Kristoff's column, which is that the White House has to accept the reality of global warming, now. But he should have mentioned that there's widespread debate about Kerry's thesis, and he doesn't.

...This is the second article the Times has run about how hard this hurricane has been for people named Katrina. (The first was four or five days ago, in Arts & Leisure.) It was a bad idea the first time....

One of the things I like about the NYT Book Review under new editor Sam Tanenhaus is that is has a newfound sense of timeliness, such as today's essay by Benjamin Kunkel about fiction dealing with terrorism. And Tanenhaus isn't afraid to run contrarian letters, like this one from Donald Trump, who disapproved of Mark Singer's profile of him.

Trump writes: "Most writers want to be successful. Some writers even want to be good writers. I've read John Updike, I've read Orhan Pamuk, I've read Philip Roth. When Mark Singer enters their league, maybe I'll read one of his books. But it will be a long time — he was not born with great writing ability. Until then, maybe he should concentrate on finding his own 'lonely component' and then try to develop himself into a worldclass writer, as futile as that may be, instead of having to write about remarkable people who are clearly outside of his realm."

Orhan Pamuk? Who knew that Donald Trump was into [relatively] obscure Turkish writers....  ¶ 8:33 AM 0 comments   

  Where was W.? Buried in the "Storm and Crisis" section of today's Times is a fascinating tick-tock by David E. Sanger detailing the process by which Michael Brown was relieved of his hurricane-related duties (though he remains, inexplicably, the head of FEMA).

Sanger's reporting suggests that the decision was a joint one between Dick Cheney and Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff.

What's remarkable about the article, though, is that it barely mentions the president, except to say that the decision to oust Brown was, after it was made, brought to Bush.

There's been talk before that Bush lives and works in a cocoon, in which he's isolated and "protected" from bad news. The fact that he wasn't involved in the decision to get rid of the disastrous Michael Brown is more evidence of that alarming withdrawal from reality.  ¶ 8:27 AM 0 comments   

  Argh A miserable day at the Stadium—the Yankees didn't look like a team that deserved to make the playoffs. Poor pitching, sloppy fielding, un-clutch hitting. Argh. And on top of that, they showed a replay of Varitek's collision with Jorge Posada, and I have to eat my words: It was a clean play, and Varitek actually looked like he might have pulled up a bit at the end of it. So...mea culpa.

The Red Sox are still bad guys, though.  ¶ 4:38 PM 4 comments   

  Jason Varitek, Scum of the Turf Jason Varitek of the Red Sox seems to have a passion for throwing dirty punches at players on the Yankees; just take a look at this photo. (Scroll down a bit to see it.) Last year he did it to Alex Rodriguez, only he hedged his bets by keeping his catcher's gear on and using his glove as a weapon. Now he's charging into home plate, with no slide, both fists extended.

Huh.

In 30 years of watching baseball, I don't think I've ever before seen a baseball player come into home double-punching. Not even Pete Rose would do that, and he was a dirty player. Jason Varitek, you are human scum.

In any event, Yankee catcher Jorge Posada held on to the ball, Varitek was out, and the Yankees won, 8-4. Let's hope the good guys can do it again today, when Shawn Chacon pitches against Curt Schilling, who is also a singularly unpleasant human being. I'll be at the Stadium, cheering for the men in pinstripes. It's like rooting for the U.S. against Osama bin Laden.

Who, come to think of it, several members of the Red Sox kind of look like....  ¶ 8:09 AM 3 comments   

  Ask and Ye Shall Receive A week ago, George Bush told the head of FEMA, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

Today, Brown is history.

I'm glad he's gone. But I still wish the president had called a spade a spade and said that Brown was being relieved of his duties because he was not performing them to an acceptable standard. There's something to be said for the public insistence on accountability.  ¶ 3:40 PM 0 comments   

  Anyone Need a Job? There's one open at Harvard (and no, it's not the one you're thinking of).

The Boston Globe reports that Harvard continues to have a difficult time hiring a replacement for money manager extraordinaire Jack Meyer.

As I've mentioned here before, the difficulty in finding someone to replace Meyer ought to force Harvardians to discuss the real reason for Meyer's departure, and not all this silliness about a little bad publicity on the salary question. Will some enterprising reporter please track down all those rumors that Meyer is leaving because he got sick and tired of Larry Summers encroaching on his turf?  ¶ 9:59 AM 0 comments   

  Fire Michael Brown Condoleeza Rice gets a promotion after years of incompetence. George Tenet gets the Medal of Freedom after leaving the country vulnerable to terrorist attack, and then telling the president that the presence of WMDs in Iraq was a "slam dunk." What does it take to get George Bush to fire someone?

The question is all the more urgent after the inept performance of FEMA head Michael Brown. And as if the situation in New Orleans weren't bad enough, now Time reports that Brown's been padding his (already thin) resume.

According to Time, before joining FEMA, Brown's "only previous stint in emergency management, according to his bio posted on FEMA's website, was 'serving as an assistant city manager with emergency services oversight.'"

Apparently he worked for the emergency services division of the Edmond, Oklahoma, city government from 1975 to 1978.

Even if this were true, it's unclear to me how working for the "emergency services division" of a city of 60-something thousand people qualifies you to run FEMA.

But it isn't even true. Brown was, apparently, an intern at the agency. Explained former city manager Bill Dashner, "Mike used to handle a lot of details. Every now and again I'd ask him to write me a speech. He was very loyal. He was always on time. He always had on a suit and a starched white shirt."

He was very loyal...and we all know how the president prizes loyalty (Rice, Tenet) even more than he prizes competence (Paul O'Neill, Colin Powell).

The padding doesn't end there...go to the Time link to see how Brown was fired from a law firm he worked at, one of two jobs he was fired from before President Bush made him the head of the federal disaster relief agency.

In two days, we mark the fourth anniversary of 9/11. How can we possibly be having this conversation now?

Because we have a president who is not a serious man.  ¶ 9:29 AM 0 comments   

  Is Global Warming Making Hurricanes Worse? One MIT scientist thinks so. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that atmospheric physicist Kerry A. Emmanuel has removed his name from a paper downplaying the impact of global warming on hurricanes because he has come to believe just the opposite. Emmanuel argues that the total power unleashed by storms in the Atlantic has more than doubled in the last 30 years.

Emmanuel's theory is far from universally accepted by scientists who study this stuff, of course, and it's sure to prompt a healthy debate. What's unfortunate is that the Bush Administration, which has decided that global warming simply doesn't exist, will be entirely absent from this debate. (Of course, that might be a blessing in disguise.)

I recently wrote a piece for Plenty magazine about GE's new environmental campaign, known as "ecomagination," which aspires to profit from cleaning up the planet and addressing issues such as global warming. (It's not online yet; I'll link to it when it's up.) What struck me as particularly interesting about this push by GE was that the Bush White House has denied the existence of global warming and, literally, has no policy directed towards it. Taking steps to combat global warming, the Bush folks say, would devastate the American economy.

And yet, here's one of the pillars of the American economy saying, in essence, of course global warming exists, and we're going to actually make money by trying to deal with it.....

The ideology of this White House has made it simply irrelevant on a number of issues, even as the rest of the world pushes ahead.....  ¶ 9:43 AM 0 comments   

  P.S. I forgot to mention that, even though the Times took two days to run its Coldplay review, it still misidentifies Coldplay's guitarist in a photograph. It's not Will Champion, who's the drummer. It's Johnny Buckland. Kind of important....

(The photo and incorrect caption are below.)

  ¶ 9:38 AM 0 comments   

  Sharapova v. Martin I took in a couple of classic New York events over the past couple of nights, both revealing in their own ways. On Tuesday, I journeyed out to to Queens to watch Maria Sharapova and Nadia Petrova duke it out at the U.S. Open tennis tournament. And last night, I subwayed to the Garden to see Coldplay in the second of their two shows at MSG. After all, just because the summer's over doesn't mean you can't have fun any more.

Some thoughts...

I love watching Open tennis—it's a great tournament, and playing in New York seems to get the athletes fired up. But the classist nature of the Open makes me queasy; it's surely New York's most elitist sporting event. Ticket prices are exorbitant—in my case, $67 for seats not too far from the top row—and concessions are brutal. The sponsors are obnoxiously high-end; you could get your photo taken in front of a new Lexis hybrid, if that floats your boat. The Chase Manhattan symbol was emblazoned on both sides of the net.

Rich people go to the Open, and as is so often the case with rich people who get corporate tickets to entertainment events, they're not necessarily fans. (A prime center box, clearly belonging to some corporate sponsor or perhaps a law firm, remained completely empty throughout the match. Argh.) Nor are they necessarily well-behaved. Would anyone care if the young turks of Wall Street were suddenly sucked into another dimension? Gentlemen, no matter how great your seats are, or how hot you think Maria Sharapova is, you don't have to call up your work buddies to say so. Nor do you need to check your Blackberries between every point. Nor do you have to try to impress your friends by shouting a marriage proposal to Sharapova as she's preparing to serve. (Although I did enjoy it when someone from the opposite side of the stadium, in an effort to counter the vast amount of attention paid to Sharapova's looks, promptly responded by asking the same question of Petrova.)

Last night's Coldplay show was of a different character—far less individual and far more communal. That's largely due to the efforts of lead singer Chris Martin to make the Garden feel smaller than it is—getting people to sing along on "Everything's Not Lost," wading into the crowd during "In My Place," making self-deprecatory jokes about the band. ("We look better from far away," he said to the folks in the cheap seats.)

The band also pulled off a neat trick, turning cell phones from a divisive, individualizing tool into a bonding moment. On one song—I can't remember which—the video screen behind the band flashed the words, "Get Your Cameras Ready," in huge lights, then counted down from three. As brilliant white lights illuminated the band from behind, thousands of cell phones lit them up from in front. A nice touch.

As for the music—well, Coldplay has always been a terrific live band, though they're not really known as such. I saw them about five years ago at Irving Plaza, a small club here in Manhattan, and at the time I thought they were amazing and would go far. This show was proof of that. They opened with "Square One" from the new record, then went into "Politik," which is fantastic live, and then "Yellow," their first big hit. A pretty great way to start a show.

It must be said that the concert lost momentum in a couple of places. The songs from X & Y are not consistently as strong as those from A Rush of Blood to the Head, and "Speed of Sound," the first single from the latter, just isn't very successful in concert. Also, an acoustic interlude in which all four band members played from the front of the stage didn't work. I went and got a beer for half of it, and didn't feel like I missed anything.

But those are small gripes. This band is for real; they all play really well, and they have fantastic songs to play. My favorites from last night: "Politik," "God Put a Smile Upon My Face," "Talk," "Clocks"—what a great fast, loud version they did, could you put that out on iTunes already?—and the lovely closer, "Fix You."

A little note on journalism: the New York Daily News and the New York Post both had their glowing reviews of the Tuesday show in Wednesday's papers. The Times review, by Keleefa Saneh, wasn't in till today, which reflects the Times' rather casual attitude towards cultural coverage. (Oh, it can wait a day or so....)

It also meant the review was outdated by the time it appeared. Saneh criticized Martin for making a joke about Mariah Carey that didn't quite work...but last night at the show, Martin apologized for telling a "shit story" about Carey. "I shouldn't have said it, and I'm sorry," he said—I'm paraphrasing slightly—which is kind of a remarkable thing to hear from a rock star. If only politicians would follow that lead....  ¶ 8:13 AM 0 comments   

  And Then There's the Supreme Court The Times has a nice write-up on the politics of John Roberts' nomination as chief justice of the Supreme Court.

Here's a prediction: The president, in an attempt to restore his credibility with African-Americans after the Katrina fiasco, will nominate a conservative African-American to the court.

If he can find one....  ¶ 12:16 PM 0 comments   

  Whoops "It took almost no time for President Bush to put his stamp on the national response to the tragedy that has befallen New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.... We cannot yet calculate the political fallout from Hurricane Katrina and its devastating human and economic consequences, but one thing seems certain: It makes the previous signs of political weakness for Bush, measured in record-low job approval ratings, instantly irrelevant...."

—David Broder in the Washington Post, 9/4/05  ¶ 12:10 PM 0 comments   

  A New Orleans Story My cousin George, who lives in New Orleans but got out in time, passed along this story of a friend who was stuck in Charity Hospital:

"She was finally airlifted by a Black Hawk helicopter across the lake to another hospital.
Unfortunately, the pilot didn't have any idea where it was. They actually had to land in front of a Walmart and ask directions."

Sad but true.  ¶ 10:49 AM 17 comments   

  Cannibalism? Part 2 After searching the web, reading lots of newspapers, and watching too much TV news, I can't find any indication that Randall Robinson's claim of cannibalism is true. It has sparked some pretty angry rebuttals, though.

I'm disappointed in Robinson, though. While one can certainly understand his anger and frustration over what's happened in New Orleans, things are bad enough without passing on appalling rumors...and such exaggeration can wind up discrediting the terrible things that really are happening there.

P.S. To his credit, Robinson has retracted his claim.  ¶ 9:46 AM 0 comments   

  Wise Words from Cornell Cornell graduate student Shaffique Adam writes sagely in the Cornell Daily Sun about the corporatization of universities. His piece, entitled "Dollars and Nonsense," considers how "the new model of viewing universities as education service providers is gaining prevalence globally." He warns of the "corporate perspective" in which "students become the consumers of education, but since we are addicted to the product (boycotting classes or transferring away hurts us more than it does the corporation), we will be sure to come along quietly," no matter what the university leadership—its president and an external governing board—does.

Faculty, Adam writes, will become "nothing more than employees who belong to a special union that self-selects and who cannot be fired (tenure), but the corporation still determines how many get employed (you can’t imagine how difficult it is for a department chair to get a new tenure line) and which subject areas get funding and which ones don't."

I think Adam's critique is right on the money, and it's fascinating to apply it to Harvard, where everything he writes about has been occurring since Larry Summers became president in 2001. (After all, what was the Cornell West fiasco about other than a clumsy manager's attempt to rein in an employee he didn't approve of?)

I have my opinions on this trend towards the corporatization of the university, which readers of this blog can probably guess. And I'll certainly concede that there are legitimate arguments on its behalf. What concerns me, though, is how much this is occurring without any real debate about whether it's a good idea, and what we might be losing in the process. Are universities really nothing more than businesses? Are students nothing more than consumers? What do we lose if we adopt this perspective, as Americans are increasingly doing?  ¶ 9:26 AM 0 comments   

  Why is This Man in Charge of FEMA? Michael Brown was hired as a deputy director at FEMA after being fired from a job supervising horse shows, according to this horrifying article from the Boston Herald.

For eleven years, Brown was the commissioner of judges and stewards for the International Arabian Horse Association. Then, the Herald reports, "Brown was forced out of the position after a spate of lawsuits over alleged supervision failures." He was hired at FEMA by an old college friend.

Andrew Sullivan has repeatedly argued that the greatest failing of the Bush administration is its competence, and this farce certainly backs up that argument. How can a guy who got fired from a job running horse shows possibly become the head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, especially in a post-9/11 world?

Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, argued in his book, The Price of Loyalty, that the Bush White House cared absolutely nothing about policy, because politics was all. Well, now we know the consequences of such disregard of the work of government.

And as I've mentioned before, if we can't control New Orleans, a relatively small city, in a time of crisis, how can we possibly maintain order in Iraq?


  ¶ 3:57 PM 0 comments   

  Harvard and the Hurricane Larry Summers has announced that Harvard is setting up a fund for contributions to victims of Hurricane Katrina. Harvard will match contributions of up to $100, even if members of the Harvard community gave the money before the fund was established. Meanwhile, Harvard College and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences will each be accepting up to 25 students—tuition-free—who can't go to the school they were supposed to go to because of the hurricane.

While it's hard to fault Summers' intentions, these moves reflect an interesting and noteworthy shift in the traditional conception of the purpose of a university: teaching, learning, and scholarship. By committing Harvard as an institution to acts of charity and social outreach, Summers is clearly stating that he wants the university to be firmly engaged with society—as opposed to just the university's students and graduates. That will surely have some benefits, but it will also lead, inevitably, to the further politicization of the university, which has already happened quite substantially during the Summers' years.

An example: Harvard is a 501-c/3, tax-exempt, non-profit organization. Its alumni and others give money to it because they want to support Harvard's educational mission. Yet now Harvard is saying that it will redirect money contributed to it to victims of Hurricane Katrina—which, however altruistic that may be, is not why the original donors gave the money. Imagine if, for example, the American Cancer Society suddenly announced that it was matching gifts to the Red Cross for hurricane relief...

After 9/11, Summers set up a program of scholarships for children of victims who were accepted to Harvard. And after the Asian tsunami, Summers established a similar fund to match contributions. Which is generous, but then, it's not his money, it's the institution's—and one wonders if, in a sense, he isn't using it to promote his own public rehabilitation.

It also raises the question of what disasters reach the level at which Harvard should start sending money. Why not the children of Iraqi war veterans? (Hell, why not the veterans themselves?) Why not African AIDS orphans? Why not the children of slain Iraqi civilians? It does get hard to draw the line, once you start injecting the university into world events in such a fashion. I'd be very curious to hear Summers' response if someone asked him what his guiding principle was about the circumstances under which the university should match contributions for victims of a natural disaster. Perhaps Harvard should simply match all contributions to all charities?

The idea of accepting students from hurricane-closed universities makes more sense to me...although it'll be interesting to see if they get kicked out once the term is up.  ¶ 3:29 PM 0 comments   

  Well, Maybe Not Turned on CNN to hear them say that things are actually getting worse in New Orleans....followed by an ad for a GMC Yukon, which is about as big as the whale sharks I was snorkeling with and a lot less fuel efficient. Talk about throwing good money after bad. Perhaps General Motors—which may well be pushed into bankruptcy by these oil prices—should wait till gas drops below $3.50 a gallon to advertise the Yukon.  ¶ 10:10 AM 0 comments   

  A Smidgen of Good News The New Orleans Times-Picayune suggests that the balance has tipped back towards order in New Orleans; finally, there's enough law enforcement there to start to reign in the chaos. Let's hope they're right.  ¶ 9:39 AM 0 comments   

  Cannibalism? Over at HuffPo, Randall Robinson claims that desperate survivors in New Orleans have been forced to eat corpses in order to survive. He doesn't cite a source, though. Could this possibly be true? I pray it isn't.

But if so, these truly are hard days in the United States. Recovering from Katrina is going to take a lot longer than however long it takes to rebuild New Orleans.  ¶ 9:25 AM 0 comments   

  Labor Daze This holiday weekend isn't supposed to be so grim. It's supposed to be about family, friends, the end of summer. There's a pennant race on in the AL East, which is exciting and tense. The weather—in New England, anyway—is glorious. Labor Day is, at is best, a wonderful and relaxing time before the pace of life quickens with the beginning of school and the onset of autumn.

Of course, this year's going to be different; this Labor Day feels like a watershed. There's no good news from Iraq, and the story of the 950 people killed there in a panicky stampede is almost too sad to bear. The situation in New Orleans and Mississippi is horrific. This kind of thing—looting, graverobbing, banditry, corpses floating through the streets—is supposed to happen in the Philippines, or Bali, or some third world nation we don't pay much attention to normally. Meanwhile, on the highways, a different kind of looting is going on: gas stations charging anywhere from $3 to $6 a gallon for fuel they've already bought. (As one Rhode Island gas station attendant put it to me today, shaking his head in frustration, "That gas from the Gulf probably wouldn't have shown up here till January.")

And so far, our president has been disappointing—more the guy who looked dazed and confused in that classroom (tick-tick-tick, went Michael Moore's clock in "Fahrenheit 9-11," as the minutes dragged by and the World Trade Center burned) than the president who stood on top of a heap of rubble and called out inspirationally to the people working to clear the wreckage of the World Trade Center. It didn't help that the president was on vacation until he belatedly realized that this was one crisis he couldn't pedal through.

So this Labor Day weekend feels like a turning point. Towards what, I'm not sure. But I'd say that it caps a summer in which the Bush presidency has effectively come to an end. As soon as someone takes a poll, it will show that Bush's ratings have dropped to new lows...and he's already at record lows.

Of course, presidents can come back from dips in polls. And Bush may yet rebound to save face with the hurricane situation. But the president's real problems are twofold, and they won't go away: Iraq, and oil. We can't get out of Iraq any time soon, and we certainly don't appear to have any plan to win the war. And the huge jump in oil prices—wherever they wind up—is going to gut the economy.

Driving on the highway today, I couldn't help but look at the trucks rolling along and wonder how much more people would be paying to transport goods—costs which will invariably be passed on to consumers. I also couldn't help but smile a little bit as I watched people pull their SUVs up to the pumps. What does it cost now to fill up the tank of a Ford Explorer? $75? $100? I've never liked SUVs, so part of me is happy to see them suddenly become the bane of their owners' existence. The problem is that fatcat yuppies driving BMW and Lexus SUVs can take the hit. For working people driving trucks and vans they need for their jobs, this is going to be rough.


And the more people spend on gas, the less they'll spend on other goods. That's because Americans don't have a big cushion of disposable income; the poverty rate is at 12 percent, our savings rates are the lowest on record, and we're maxed out on credit cards and mortgage payments. It's not as if we can dip into our pockets for gas money until things get back to normal. In any case, "normal" may never be the same again. The era of cheap gas is almost surely over. And while in the long run that may not be such a bad thing, as a nation, we haven't prepared for that transition...which is kind of like building levees that can only withstand a Class III hurricane.

I don't mean to be gloomy, but we could be seeing the toughest times in this country in seventy years. Too bad our president's initials are GWB and not FDR.  ¶ 7:37 PM 2 comments   

  NYT vs. Bush The New York Times appears to be losing whatever patience it once had for President Bush. Today's editorial, harshly titled "Waiting for a Leader," blasts the president for his weirdly casual demeanor yesterday when addressing the hurricane victims. "One of the worst speeches of his life," the Times calls it. That's the second passionately anti-Bush editorial in the last three days.

I don't know if these editorials have any impact, but they are fun to read; it's nice to see the Old Grey Lady unleash her bark. More than that, they may reflect the nation's growing disillusionment with the president; it's just possible that the Times could be an outlier of widespread discontent.

From a political perspective, this hurricane is fascinating. Generally, hurricanes and other natural disasters are a godsend for a president. He can direct federal funds and relief supplies to the area, and easily look sympathetic and authoritative simultaneously. So far, Bush has come across as weak and slow. Stories of looting and carnage—rape in the Superdome? Jesus—create the legitimate impression that the government is overwhelmed. And I'm sure that, at some point, more and more people are going to make the connection between the number of National Guards-people overseas and the number of National Guards-people who are not in the hurricane-affected areas.

President Bush never told Americans that they were going to have to sacrifice for the war in Iraq...but now the sacrifice has come anyway. And that will make Americans wonder all the more just why we went into Iraq in the first place.  ¶ 7:23 PM 0 comments   

  A Note on New Orleans I'm immensely relieved to hear that my four cousins who live in New Orleans are safe and sound, and out of the city....though three of them are homeowners, one just a few blocks from Lake Pontchartrain. That part doesn't sound good. But that's nothing compared to their health and safety. Allen, Jen, George, and Mary—so glad you guys are okay.

The situation there is a little hard to comprehend, and I'm sure that we're not getting a complete picture from TV news. I was convinced of this when I received this forwarded e-mail from someone in New Orleans as of yesterday. I think I'll just let it speak for itself.

"I don't believe in Hell, per se, but the situation in the city of
New Orleans right now has got to be as close to hell on earth as it
gets. It's Biblical. Fucking apocalyptic.

"First there's the "water." It's black. It is sludged up with
everything washed up out of the sewer system from trash to feces to
urine, all the decomposing bodies that have floated up from every
single grave and crypt in the city, gasoline, rotten food, newly
dead animals, newly dead people, and God knows what else. It is, at
least in some places, flammable. I cannot even begin to imagine the
smell.

" In and under that water, which you can't see through, are snakes,
alligators, and swamp leeches. And live electrical wires. And
twisted glass and sheet metal. Oh, and there are balls of fire ants
floating around. The ants cling to each other in a ball to keep
from drowning, but when they make landfall on a structure, or a
person, they disperse. And dine.

"Now there are roving bands of thugs who have armed themselves to the
teeth by looting gun shops, and they are just walking around
shooting people. At night, there is no light, except for the light
from the fires that are burning in many places.

"And the water is rising."

It does raise the question: If we can't maintain order in a crisis in the United States, how could we possibly hope to do so in Iraq?  ¶ 10:40 AM 0 comments