Shots In The Dark

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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...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?

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.

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.>>

Posted by: richard / 1:42 PM   

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....

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....

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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...

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....

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....

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....

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....

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).

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.

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.....

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.....