A Shark's Slaughter, a Human's Hubris While I was gone, Captain Bucky Dennis, a Florida fisherman, caught what appears to be the largest hammerhead shark ever caught on rod and reel. (Thanks to those who sent me this story, by the way.) The 14.5 foot-long shark weighed 1,280 pounds. Why the hammerhead? "I was just trying to find a record that was feasible to break," Dennis explained.

I gather that Mr. Dennis was all over the media, and is pretty happy with himself. His ambition now is to catch a bigger one as soon as possible.

To which I ask, why? And why do we tolerate such pointless slaughter?

Hammerhead sharks are astonishing creatures, a marvel of evolution. When they are alive, they are hypnotically beautiful. When they're dead, they're pretty ugly. (They don't attack humans, by the way, although even if they did, that wouldn't be a reason to kill them for pleasure.) I spent about four hours underwater in the Galapagos trying to see one. (Unsuccessfully, alas.) Near the northernmost Galapagos islands of Darwin and Wolf, which our boat did not get to, the hammerheads swim in schools of hundreds, for reasons no one entirely understands. (It may have to do with mating.) Just to see this on video is an amazing and humbling sight. Someday I'll get back to those islands and experience it firsthand.

Mr. Dennis ought to be ashamed of himself, and the rest of us ought to do our part do shame him.

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against fishing—unless you have no intention of eating what you've caught. Because that's not fishing, that's just killing, and we're at a period in human history where we can't afford to do that any more. The planet won't sustain it. Humans have to be better than that, or we're in real trouble.

Dennis tried to assuage his conscience by donating the shark to the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, which is kind of like the Japanese saying that they hunt whales for science. John Tyminski, a biologist at the lab, said that the shark was 20-40 years old and pregnant, which makes Dennis's killing of it even sadder. Tyminski struck the right note about Dennis's bloodlust.

"We would give credit to the fisherman for donating, but we are not happy about killing a shark for no reason," he told the Times.

Exactly.




One of these animals hunts to survive,
and one kills for no reason.  ¶ 8:30 AM 4 comments   

  A Million Moments of Zen



I am back from the Galapagos, although, truth to tell, I wish I weren't; a week in such a magical place is hardly enough. But life and work beckon, and sometimes we have no choice but to answer. (But if I were 21 again....)

The trip was remarkable. These islands are a sacred trust: One can see clearly how a scientist could discern in them the denial of God, but one could also see the Galapagos inspiring faith.

I'll write more about the Galapagos shortly, but for now let me just say that my fountain of Zen has been refreshed. The above is a sea lion at sunset on the island of Espanola, by the way. (Click on it to enlarge it.)  ¶ 8:19 AM 0 comments   

  See You June 1 Even bloggers need vacations, and it's been months—literally, months—since my last. So, along with some family members and some friends, I'm headed to the Galapagos Islands. We fly to Quito today, then out to the islands tomorrow, and get on a boat...

...and I must say, I'm delighted. Visiting the Galapagos, the islands that inspired Darwin to write The Origin of Species, has been a lifelong dream of mine, and in recent months I've been boning up on them—reading E.O. Wilson, Darwin, and Jonathan Weiner's excellent The Beak of the Finch, going to the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, watching Deep Sea 3-D at the Imax theater—twice. (Yes, you have to wear the glasses. Click on this link to see the trailer, which is too short but pretty great. )

Most of all, I'm looking forward to the diving, which is considered by some to be the best in the world. If we're lucky, we'll see manta rays, hammerhead sharks, Galapagos sharks, and whale sharks—not to mention an incredible diversity of smaller fish life. (But I'll admit, it's the hammerheads I really want to see; occasionally in the Galapagos, divers find them swimming in schools...of hundreds. How great is that?)

The point is, all this will provide many new Moments of Zen.

The downside is that I will be far, far away from any Internet connection, and so this blog will lie fallow for about a week. I'll be back and writing again June 1, so...mark your calendars. And if there's something you'd like me to know about in the meantime, please either post it below or e-mail it to me. (Just click on Contact to the left.) I promise, I'll read it first thing.

Have a wonderful week, everyone. See you soon.  ¶ 7:49 AM 16 comments   

  In Defense of Human-Eating Alligators Floridians have gone ballistic over the fact that, in recent days, three of them have been eaten by alligators, and yesterday an alligator tried to make a meal of someone's golden retriever. Thank God the woman had a shotgun close at hand!

My sincerest condolences go out to the loved ones of the consumed...but otherwise, cry me a river. Alligators wouldn't be eating anyone if humans hadn't swallowed up so much of the gators' natural habitat that we're now living closer together than we're supposed to.

In the Washington Post, Louisianan Ken Ringle brings some sense to the subject.

You would think from the gator-mania on CNN and Fox this week that alligators are some sort of grotesque mutation of the natural world stalking urban man. The obvious truth is that alligators in Florida are just hungry and confused and doing what comes naturally.

(CNN, that once-credible cable news network...)

Of course, Ringle has some unusual experience with alligators. One of his grandfather's cousins once wrote a treatise on them. How can you not love this quote?

As a boy, he writes in the book's preface, he and his cousins used to swim in the bayou that surrounds Avery Island, and "always took great pleasure and not a little excitement in seeing how many gators we could call around us during our swim. We would attract them by imitating the barks and cries of dogs and by making loud popping noises with our lips. . . . We had no fear of them and would swim around the big fellows, dive under them and sometimes treat them with great disrespect. . . . Sometimes when the tide was low we would surround on three sides a big one that might be lying on a mud flat. . . . He would stand a certain amount of pelting with mud. . . . Then it was, 'Boys, get out of his way, he's going to the water.' On one of these occasions, I was mired past my knees in the soft mud . . . and the old gator who was blinded with mud ran over me as I fell backward, and I still have the marks of his claws on my stomach where . . . he slid over my naked body."

Ringle himself received an alligator as a pet when he was seven. Croxy was an ill-tempered little beast, and returned all my love with repeated attempts at digital amputation...

And Ringle reminds us of something that is true of every animal we fear: We humans kill countless more of them than they do of us.

A lovely piece of writing, whether or not you care about alligators....  ¶ 8:12 AM 6 comments   

  Department of Bad Reviews, Part II I didn't much like Curtis Sittenfeld's novel, "Prep." I found Sittenfeld's protagonist tedious and self-involved and humorless and devoid of growth through three hundred-plus pages. But thousands and thousands of people disagreed with me, connecting, I suppose, with the sense of alienation felt by Lee Fiora, an outsider at a prep school for rich kids. I'm glad for Sittenfeld, whom I know slightly, that her book did so well...but I couldn't quite understand why.

Which is why I kind of enjoyed this Times review of Sittenfeld's new book, "The Man of My Dreams"—because what Janet Maslin writes about this book pretty much what I thought of Prep. (Always nice to have your opinions validated.)

Let me quote:

Ms. Sittenfeld's embrace of the unremarkable is even clingier the second time around. In "The Man of My Dreams" her drab heroine is made special mainly by endless reserves of myopia and self-pity. An amazing number of episodes involve pizza, despite the limited range of pizza as a literary device.

Nothing is too dull to be scrutinized by Hannah, whose passive-aggressive blahs are at the book's mopey heart. Does Hannah think a manicure will lift her gloom? "She does have a fingernail clipper — that's not festive, but it's something. She returns to her desk chair, pulls the trash can in front of her, and sticks the tip of a nail into the jaw of the clipper. This doesn't take long." Oh no? It feels like forever.

I'm sure that somewhere the karma train will come back to run me over on this subject. (Though I've certainly had my share of bad reviews...or so I'm told. I try not to read them.)

But Prep seemed so dour and joyless...prose for the angry, sulky misfit wallowing in self-pity. I'd love to see Sittenfeld apply her considerable talent to something more ambitious.

  ¶ 7:44 AM 1 comments   

  And You Think You Got Bad Reviews Anyone who has ever received a bad book review will be strangely comforted by this evisceration of historian Doug Brinkley and his new book, "The Great Deluge," about Hurricane Katrina.

The link may be subscriber-only, so I will quote:

[Brinkley's] bestknown writings seem to have three things in common.

First and foremost is their relentless mediocrity. I cannot think of a historian or public intellectual who has managed to make himself so prominent in American public life without having put forward a single memorable idea, a single original analysis, or a single lapidary phrase - let alone without publishing a book that has had any discernable impact. Mr. Brinkley is, to use Daniel Boorstin's famous words, a historian famous for being well-known.

Writing in the New York Sun, historian Wilfred McClay has written one of those reviews that is simultaneously delicious reading and leaves those of us who write books with just one thought: Thank God it isn't me.....

Oh, heck, let's enjoy the schadenfreude just a little longer. Here's another quote....

All of this would be forgivable if Mr. Brinkley had written a book that was lively and evocative. But "The Great Deluge" turns out to be a book worthy of its title. It just goes on and on and on, a veritable Mississippi of sludgy, sophomoric, rebarbative prose, with gimmicky human-interest stories, transcriptions of press releases, gratuitous quotations from great writers about hurricanes, and potted history.

For those of us who needed to look it up, "rebarbative" means "tending to irritate; repellent."

It may be time to start subscribing to the New York Sun.....  ¶ 10:41 AM 1 comments   

  Another Voice in the Conversation I continue to think that Richard Brodhead has the potential to emerge from the Duke scandal as one of the truly important figures in American education. His baccalaureate address is eloquent and inspiring...and deals with the rape scandal in an indirect but instructive way.

Here's a quote:

Last and very quickly, if we have been through some hard things here together, that need not prove the negative it might appear. For building a better world, humans need access to that special form of intelligence called wisdom, and the way to wisdom has never been through school exercises or the formal curriculum. Like it or not, this form of knowledge comes the hard way, through trial, through conflict, through failure and error, and through suffering and loss. I would gladly have spared you every hard thing we have been through since I arrived-last year's controversy over issues of free speech, our more recent conflicts over the presumption of innocence and the social values that will govern this community, the death of friends and classmates who did not complete your journey. But I know that, just to the extent that you have lived the emotional complexities of these incidents, you leave here with a deepened understanding of the terms of human life. In the measure that you have not protected yourself from difficulties but opened yourself to their sometimes painful human meanings, you have got an education, one that will make you a more thoughtful contributor to your times.

Nice.  ¶ 9:08 AM 3 comments   

  The Strange Relationship of Larry Summers and Harry Lewis In Harvard Rules, I wrote that "it was inevitable that Harry Lewis and Larry Summers would clash. In some ways, both men were surprisingly similar—opinionated, stubborn, strong leaders. But their similarities only highlighted their points of contention."

I am reminded of that now, reading today's Crimson, with its description of Summers' farewell to the faculty and Lewis' reading of Excellence Without a Soul at the Coop.

As Anton Troianovski reports, Summers said, "There is only one important question on which history will judge us. Did we do all we could to blaze new paths for higher education and change the world through our teaching and research? Or did we continue to do traditional things in traditional ways, enjoying the greater comfort that increased resources provide?"

Harry Lewis, who of course was forced out as dean of the college by Bill Kirby/Larry Summers, has a different take.

According to Yin Wang, Lewis said, "We’re not doing much to help students identify purpose in their lives...and to help them become the mature and responsible people on which society will depend." On the subject of leadership from the top, Lewis added that “changing direction requires...leadership that views the university idealistically, as something more than a business and something more than a slave to the logic of economic competition."

The differences are interesting. Summers spoke of changing the world; Lewis talked of students and their obligation to society. It's a subtle distinction, but I think that Summers tends to focus on the individual and Lewis contextualizes the individual within a community. Summers' remarks are suggestive of individual glory; Lewis is slightly more modest in his goals.

And Lewis is clearly more critical of the rush to merge the university with the worlds of Washington and international business than is Summers.

Nonetheless, the quotes above are mere snapshots of the two men's views, which are more nuanced than those snapshots suggest. And what is interesting is how there is real overlap between these two opponents. Both believe in the importance of Harvard to the world, and both are seriously concerned about the direction in which the university is headed. Both are concerned about how undergraduates are taught, and what they are taught.

I can't help but think that Summers made an enormous mistake in ousting Lewis—one of his largest mistakes. Between the two of them, they could have generated truly provocative conversation about the changes that are coming/need to be made at Harvard.

At the time, though, Larry Summers wasn't particularly interested in starting a conversation; his style was more that of the monologuist. A shame. If they could have lived with each other, Larry Summers and Harry Lewis might have done some interesting things at Harvard.

Nonetheless, the conversation they are starting now—even if they are not in the same room at the time—is one the next president and deans of the College and FAS should continue.  ¶ 8:35 AM 6 comments   

  Presidents on the Hot Seat The Washington Post runs an AP story listing five university presidents who resigned or were fired during the last academic year.

For some reason, the headline identifies them as "college presidents," when in fact they are all university presidents...  ¶ 10:03 AM 8 comments   

  Mike Nifong is Losing It Out-of-control district attorney Mike Nifong has charged a third player with rape in the Duke lacrosse scandal. The player, David Evans, the team captain, promptly held a press conference in which he dubbed the charges "fantastic lies" and said, "I look forward to watching them unravel in the weeks to come."

According to defense attorney Joseph Cheshire, the alleged victim told police that she'd be 100 sure that Evans was the guy...if only he had a mustache.

Evans has never had a mustache.

And, one wonders, has anyone on the Duke lacrosse team ever had a mustache? (Somehow I just don't see a lot of Duke lacrosse players looking like Tom Selleck.)

Moreover, according to Evans, he offered to take a lie detector test, but Nifong declined the offer. Evans then took one himself and passed.

So let's see...the alleged victim has a past history of alleging that she was raped by three men...her fellow dancer claims she saw nothing, but wants to profit from the story...there is no DNA match, despite the fact that the alleged victim claims to have been raped in three orifices...one of the accused has witnesses to his location during the events in question that would make it almost impossible for him to have been present at any alleged rape...the third accused person would look more like the alleged rapist if he had a mustache that he's never had...the alleged victim was never shown any photos of people other members of the lacrosse team, meaning that she had to pick *someone* out....

It's possible that the alleged victim could be telling the truth...but it's also possible that Barry Bonds never took steroids. Almost anything is possible, really.  ¶ 9:41 AM 4 comments   

  You've Got to Be Kidding Me At B.C., an adjunct professor has resigned in protest of Condoleeza Rice's speech there.

I'm no Condi fan, but...resigning?

Steve Almond explains that Rice "has lied to the American people knowingly, repeatedly, often extravagantly over the past five years, in an effort to justify a pathologically misguided foreign policy...."

The letter of resignation suggests that this departure is no great loss.

And if you check out Almond's website, the move looks more like a way to gin up publicity for his book tour.....

Although I do like that Almond is no fan of the massively overrated Jonathan Safran Foer.....  ¶ 10:28 AM 2 comments   

  Hillary Flip-Flops on Work Hillary Clinton has apologized for her claim that young people today "think work is a four-letter word."

Mrs. Clinton explained that she was chastised by her daughter Chelsea, who called her to say, "Mom, I do work hard and my friends work hard."

(After working hard to get a two-year master's degree from Oxford, Chelsea works hard pulling down a six-figure salary as a "consultant," a job which she surely had to work hard to get. At least the Bush girls are doing something useful.)

Mrs. Clinton told Chelsea, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to convey the impression that you don't work hard."

Which, of course, is exactly the impression that Hillary meant to convey.

Clinton made the original remarks at a speech before the largely-Republican U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She backtracked in a commencement address at Long Island University.

The whole episode reminds one of why it is so hard to like Mrs. Clinton.

The original comment—which is actually kind of interesting, and I think not entirely wrong—was a craven attempt to win over an audience more conservative than she in preparation for a presidential run.

The flip-flop is the inevitable result of saying something that you may or may not mean but which is primarily intended to win the support of an audience which normally wouldn't support you. It's hard to stand behind a remark that you probably didn't believe in the first place.

I still think that the Democrats need a credible alternative to Hillary Clinton... As Newt Gingrich points out, her negatives are awfully high.  ¶ 8:43 AM 8 comments   

  The Times Is Shocked... ...to discover that some early employees of Southwest Airlines are not only millionaires, but are still working as flight attendants. "We've come all the way from hot pants to hot flashes," says Sandra Force, who has been with Southwest since it began in 1971.

The Times always has trouble when writing about people who are not yuppie professionals. And this story has some hilarious (in a bittersweet kind of way) dubious assumptions.

1) It shouldn't come as a shock that after working for 35 years at a very tough job, flight attendants are worth two or three million dollars. More people are millionaires than used to be, and anyway, 35 years is a long time.
The real story is that employees who work that hard and that long at other companies aren't millionaires....and that CEOs who don't work very hard or very long or very successfully or very honestly are paid annually in the tens of millions.

2) Why don't these people retire? the Times asks.
Well, first because some Americans still work hard. But perhaps more importantly, if you retire at age 56, the age of one of the people interviewed, you probably have another 20-25 years of life expectancy...and $2 million isn't really a lot of money to live off for two to three decades.

It's great that Southwest treats its employees well and earns their loyalty as a result. And it's certainly newsworthy. I guess my point is, it shouldn't be.  ¶ 8:25 AM 0 comments   

  "Be Big" That was Larry Summers' advice to Harvard undergrads in an event billed as Summers' "final event" with undergrads (although the baccalaureate and Commencement come to mind).

According to the Crimson, Summers said, “At a time like this, the question should never be what you’re against. It should be what you’re for, and what each of us individually can do that is really important and that can make a difference and change the world...this University, as it strengthens itself, has the potential to do just that.”

Asked about reports that he had once referred to Harvard College as "Camp Harvard," Summers responded that he was "substantially misquoted." He added that he could not remember “precisely in what context, if at all, I used the phrase ‘Camp Harvard."

But he said that if he had used the phrase, it was in reference to high student satisfaction in extracurricular actitivies outside academics—and his view that a similar level of excitement should be maintained in the classroom.

Translation: I was misquoted, although I don't remember what I said, but if I did say it this is what I meant.

Of course, the second of those assertions negates the first, and the third does not follow logically from the second.

And the first assertion isn't true in the first place.

Summers was not substantially misquoted, according to people I interviewed for Harvard Rules. At a first year-meeting with house tutors, he emphasized his desire for students to work harder by saying, "We don't want this place to be Camp Harvard."

It is a little difficult to see how that translates into discussing "high student satisfaction with extracurricular activities outside academics."

Why the Washington-style dissembling? What possible difference could it make now?

How about this for a response: "I was being hyperbolic, but sometimes I do worry that the students' devotion to extracurriculars comes at the expense of their classroom work."

In the end, it's just easier to tell the truth....  ¶ 7:58 AM 6 comments   

  Commencement Crises, Part 2 Two Yale grads, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, spoke at Tulane's commencement yesterday.

Meanwhile, Anderson Cooper will speak at Yale's commencement. And Jim Lehrer will speak at Harvard's.

Of course, Tulane's commencement is a big deal in that it's the university's first after Hurricane Katrina.

But still...Anderson Cooper and Jim Lehrer?  ¶ 10:26 AM 2 comments   

  Yale in China...not Harvard? Rather quietly—which is exactly the style of Yale president Rick Levin—Yale appears to be beating out Harvard for influence in China.

That, at least, is the suggestion of Marcella Bombardieri in today's Globe.....

Given the contrasting styles of Levin and Larry Summers, this is an interesting conclusion. Levin may be the quietest, least-known president of Yale in the last 100 years; the same could not be said of Summers at Harvard.

Of course, the comparison isn't really fair, given that Levin has been president of Yale since 1993 and Summers has been at Harvard only since 2001, and of course no one would say that Summers has not paid enormous attention to globalization.

I just raise it as part of a larger question about the efficacy of various leadership styles—something I'd like to see, oh, the Harvard Business Review do a comparative case study on.  ¶ 10:19 AM 6 comments   

  At ABC, Confusion Over Duke DNA
May 11, 2024 —New DNA Evidence in Duke Lacrosse Case
Prosecutors believe they have DNA evidence to tie a third Duke lacrosse player to the alleged attack of a 27-year-old exotic dancer, sources close to the investigation tell ABC News. Sources say the third player is the same person who was identified with "90 percent" certainty by the alleged victim in a photo lineup.
—Christopher Cuomo, ABCNews.com


May 13, 2024—Duke Lacrosse DNA: Mystery Man Revealed
Accuser's Boyfriend is Single Source of DNA on Vaginal Swab
—Christopher Cuomo, ABCNews.com

Just one question: If the DNA comes from the accuser's boyfriend, why does ABCNews.com headline its story "Duke Lacrosse DNA"? To get even more things wrong?  ¶ 12:00 PM 6 comments   

  At Duke, a Lament for Lost Fun What's the most e-mailed article from the Duke Chronicle? It's a piece by senior Matt Sullivan called "Rain on the Duke Parade" that laments the end of fun at Duke.

On a high school visit to Duke,

I had dinner with seven gorgeous girls on a gorgeous night outside at Parizade until the Delta Sig formal kicked us out, headed to the Edens quad for a Kappa Sig rager full of kegs, tunes and hugs, passed out in section, woke up and wrote my last high school English paper, got on a plane and couldn't help but think of who wouldn't want to grow up at a place like this, where you work hard and you play hard and then you work harder and then you play harder and that's what you're supposed to be doing if you want to. Duke rocked....

But those salad days are over.

In the four years since, I have witnessed nothing short of an administrative ransacking of this school's social life...

I'm slightly sympathetic to this argument, since I partied a lot at college and don't regret it for a minute. Bladderball, Tang, Feb Club...that was just mad fun with no harm done.

(All right, the whole thing with the tequila shots contest/Julie B. episode wasn't my finest hour, but I was under a lot of pressure at the time. Same thing with the incident at the Branford Ball. Same thing with—oh, never mind.)

Like the late Eliot House master Alan Heimert, I also believe that you can't completely control adolescent behavior and that it's actually useful, from an evolutionary point of view, when young people do stupid things—they learn. The touching-a-hot-stove theory....

On the other hand, that behavior sometimes hurts other people, as it allegedly has with the Duke rape, and that should never be tolerated.

Meanwhile, our litigious culture makes it increasingly difficult for college administrators to turn a blind eye to young kids doing dumb things, even if they'd like to.

And while American kids might like to think of college as a place to "study hard and play hard," international students might come to college to study harder, and wind up kicking our economic butt.

So, while I'm sure that Mr. Sullivan has a point, his piece is really an elegy to a culture of partying that's getting harder and harder to validate.  ¶ 10:32 AM 5 comments   

  Why Does Everybody Want to go to Harvard? The class of 2010's yield—the percentage of accepted applicants who choose Harvard—has come in at 80%, a record, according to the Crimson.

This is rather remarkable, coming after a year in which the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was ousted, the president resigned, and a celebrity student imploded amidst a plagiarism scandal.

The news, as they say, was not good.

So why are the numbers going up?

Dean of Admissions William Fitzsimmons argues that it's because the Harvard Financial Aid Initiative is so appealing, but since no numbers of how many students are coming under the terms of that initiative are provided, it's impossible to know whether that's true. I'm sure it's a factor, but does it explain everything?

I wonder if these numbers don't suggest the truth of that adage that "all publicity is good publicity."

Is it possible that modern students just don't care about how a university makes news...as long as it's in the news? Is this just another manifestation of the American obsession with celebrity?

It'll be interesting to see Duke's yield this year....  ¶ 9:35 AM 8 comments   

  Saving Shoelaces In the Crimson, Anton Troianovski has reported an important story today: the fact of rising deficits at FAS and their impact on college life.

University President Lawrence H. Summers and Dean of the Faculty William C. Kirby have been unusually aggressive in pushing for new buildings, letting construction begin before a major donor was secured. Administrators say that Harvard had no choice but to build in order to keep its status as a leading research university, and insist that the Faculty can handle the cost.

But some professors worry, and some financial planners concede, that crucial uncertainties remain in the financial plan...

Among the uncertainties:

—whether the departures of Kirby and Summers will cause fundraising to fall short of targets
—to what extent government money can alleviate the deficit spending (in the case of the stem cell institute, not at all)
—the lack of major donors supporting new building projects

I would add two more uncertainties:
—was fundraising falling short of targets even with Kirby and Summers in place?
—to what extent will financial pressures warp the search for a new FAS dean and president, forcing Derek Bok and the presidential search committee to place greater-than-usual emphasis on candidates' fundraising abilities?

(Note that a poster below suggests that this would be one reason for eliminating Theda Skocpol from being named FAS dean. The poster claims that she wouldn't be a good fundraiser, and this at a time when fundraising is urgent.)

To his credit, Troianovski also finds several instances where this deficit spending is forcing budget cutbacks that have a direct impact on student life: departments with unfilled professorships, cutbacks in grant money, budget cuts in the operations of the student houses. "We're saving shoelaces," says Peter Hall, director of the Gunzburg Center for European Studies.

It's a problem those students who lined up to cheer President Summers on his resignation day might want to consider. The impact of Larry Summers on student life is more subtle, and more mixed, than simply his attendance at pizza feeds and his support of a student center, fine as those things may be....  ¶ 9:17 AM 4 comments   

  Harry Lewis Reviewed The New York Sun is, so far as I can tell, first out of the box with its review of Harry Lewis' Excellence Without A Soul, calling it a "scathing critique."

But as is usually the case with book reviews, the reviewer faults Lewis for paying insufficient attention to the things that he (the reviewer) considers important. And rather oddly, he implies that Lewis flashes a hint of anti-Semitism, writing....

Mr. Lewis dwells a bit creepily on the news that a Harvard economics professor, Andrei Shleifer, "was reported to have broken the fast with Summers on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, three months after Shleifer had been found to have defrauded the government in his Harvard role."

Despite these significant flaws...

Hmmm. Seems to me that Lewis' point is that Summers and Shleifer were hobnobbing at a time when Summers was supposedly keeping his distance from Shleifer. But these days, the charge of anti-Semitism is being thrown around frequently (hello, Mr. Dershowitz) and irresponsibly (that would be you, Ed "Protocols of Zion" Glaeser). And anti-Semitism is something of an obsession for the Sun. I suspect all this will not help when there is genuine anti-Semitism to confront....

Incidentally, the reviewer, Ira Stoll, is a former Crimson editor. (Or, in the Crimson's parlance, "a Crimson editor.") Not that you'd know that from reading the review..... I wish that newspapers and magazines would do a better job of disclosing relevant information about their writers, especially when it comes to book reviewers. What's the downside?  ¶ 9:40 AM 13 comments   

  Commencement Crises At New York's New School, students are up in arms about the choice of John McCain as a commencement speaker. At Boston College, students and professors are unhappy about the decision to invite Condoleeza Rice to speak and the awarding of an honorary degree to her.

Meanwhile, Harvard has Jim Lehrer speaking at its commencement, and Yale has Anderson Cooper.

What's wrong with this picture?

As misguided as some of these controversies are—how could you get upset about John McCain?—at least the students are doing what students ought to do: getting involved, making noise, discussing issues of the day. And the reason that's happening is because their schools have invited topical, major public figures to come and talk.

Meanwhile, Harvard has Jim Lehrer speaking at its commencement, and Yale has Anderson Cooper.

Shouldn't our country's greatest universities be challenging their students a bit more on such an important day, at such an important time?  ¶ 9:09 AM 13 comments   

  The T Goes to Allston? The Crimson reports that Harvard wants Boston to build a T-stop in Allston. That sounds like a fine idea. More public transportation, fewer cars.

Just one problem: the proposed name is "West Station."

Could it be possible to think of a more generic and less helpful name for a subway stop? (No.) I know there's obvious precedent for this—South Station, etc.—but in fact, those are singularly unhelpful names for T-stops. Wouldn't it just be easier to give it a name that actually tells you where the darn thing is?

Like, maybe, "Allston"?  ¶ 9:02 AM 0 comments   

  The Naked Professor According to InsideHigherEd.com, Diane Blaine, a lecturer at the University of Southern California, is posing topless on her blog because her students "wanted more of me after class ended."

Ms. Blaine is a professor of feminist studies who has spoken out against rape at USC, writing in an op-ed that she "hold[s] every single male on this campus responsible." Her posing has apparently kicked up a campus controversy.

Writing about the reaction, Ms. Blaine says...

We can see the obvious puritanical dynamic that the United States has had since, well, the Puritans came over from England where their particular brand of fanatical Christianity proved too much even for the fanatical Protestants breaking away from the Catholic Church in the Reformation. The Puritans loathed the body and tried to exert strict controls on sexuality, particularly female--read The Scarlet Letter for all you'll ever need to know about this. We continue to have their reactionary discomfort with the body, and so we too find it an object of obsessive fascination. Basically, by making nudity taboo, we've guaranteed its centrality. As Feminist Scholar Susan Griffin notes, the priest and the pornographer operate on the same value system--both mark human sexuality as disgusting, and then one says "turn your eyes away," while the other says, "look here, look here!"

Don't you like the way she capitalizes "Feminist Scholar"?

In truth, Blaine sounds like an interesting, intelligent woman, although perhaps a bit over the top.

One of her student critics, writing under the blog name Cardinal Martini, is actually sort of funny about all this.....  ¶ 8:39 AM 2 comments   

  Things Are a Little Slow This Morning... ...because last night, my friend Lesley Dalton took me to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers play at Irving Plaza. You popular music fans out there will understand that this is a bit like seeing U2 play in your high school gym—it's very rare to see a band that good and that popular play a place so small.

I imagine the show will be written up in the Times on Wednesday, but here are my thoughts. I am still recovering, so they may not be coherent.

1) These guys rock. Part of the power of their performance, as is the case with so many great bands, is knowing that they lived the life of rock stars—drugs, debauchery, etc.—and that they're still alive is something of a miracle. One has the sense that they are playing on borrowed time, which does add depth to the performance. The band is clean now, and that's a good thing. But they could tell some stories...and in their songs, they do.

2) Flea is out of control. That man scares me.

3) John Frusciante is really one of the great guitar players in rock. V. glad he didn't die. Let's hope he's off heroin forever.

4) That lovely Ralph Lauren model was in the crowd...you know the one....




5) Thanks to the man behind me who offered to share his joint. I haven't done that in a long time—a long, long time—but it was thoughtful of you to offer.

6) The new stuff from Stadium Arcadium? Really good. But you just can't get any better than a rocking performance of "Give It Away." (Hum it once—you won't be able to stop.)

7) I know it's uncool...but it is pretty great to be able to take a picture with your cellphone.




8) One quibble: Guys, that was a little loud. It's ten hours later, and my ears are still ringing.

9) Has anyone else noticed that the drummer looks like Will Ferrell?

10) I met Lesley back when she worked for a Republican congressman who wanted to abolish the Federal Reserve and take the country back to the gold standard. Now she works at Warner Music, lives on the lower East Side, and goes to Red Hot Chili Pepper concerts. Does that say something about the direction our culture is going? Or is it just inevitable Washington burnout?

11) No, they did not play "Under the Bridge," and yes, Lesley, I do owe you a beer for that. On the other hand, if you could get a copy of that picture with me and the Space Needle guy, I'd appreciate it.

12) For someone who's never connected with American Idol, and always wonders how you can see a concert where the musicians don't play and the singer isn't really singing, it's enormously affirming to see a live band play so well—and to see a crowd of fans who really appreciate it. I saw Madonna a few years back, and distinctly remember a moment where she was writhing on the ground, mouth closed, and the vocals continued unabated. Depressing. But the Chili Peppers—intensely physical, spontaneous, energetic, exhausting, intense, and powerful.

13) In short, pretty great.  ¶ 9:16 AM 23 comments   

  President Summers and Your Posts My item on Neil Rudenstine below sparked some very interesting posts, and I want to highlight a couple to bring them to wider attention and because I'd like to hear other people's thoughts on what the posters have to say.

Here's the first:

Anonymous said...

Larry Summers spoke to the HAA directors last Thursday and repeatedly criticized the FAS - I would say he bashed the faculty. In fact, he also criticized the Corporation, for not agreeing to a uniform academic calendar. At one point, Summers bemoaned his inability to fire or reduce the salary of those who would not do what he wanted them to. His talk and responses to questions and comments demonstrated just how ill suited he is to the Harvard presidency. I fear what he is going to say at Commencement.

And here's the second:

Larry Summers has been actively encouraging at least one faculty member with an outside offer to leave Harvard. He should never have been left in a position where he could do further damage to the institution he was incapable of running. He cares about himself and wants Harvard to look bad after he leaves.

Strong stuff. Can anyone vouch for it? Anyone know who the faculty member referred to above is?  ¶ 8:45 AM 3 comments   

  Does Anderson Cooper Exist? I've never quite understood the media obsession with Anderson Cooper. He's the only person Gawker seems to like, he writes a column for Details, he got a kajillion-dollar book deal from HarperCollins, and he's on the cover of Vanity Fair this month. Why?

Sure, he's an intelligent, nice-looking man with an interesting family history. (Famous mom, brother committed suicide, etc.) He's gay, so a lot of media folks like him for that. And his white hair is distinctive. But the future of the anchorperson, as CNN head honcho Jonathan Klein once called him? I don't think so. I preferred the man who was ousted for Cooper, Aaron Brown, who was curmudgeonly and arrogant (apparently) but contrarian and serious too.

Now comes news that, a year after Cooper took Brown's place, to much hullabaloo and media adoration, Cooper's ratings are in freefall...not that they ever equaled Brown's in the first place.

From Variety....

CNN sacked Brown believing Cooper could draw a bigger, younger aud at 10 p.m. But that hasn't happened. And the VF cover hit just as April ratings showed Coop down 36% in the 25-54 demo, the younger aud he was supposed to attract.

Brown averaged 307,000 young viewers a night last year. This April, Cooper averaged 198,000. In total viewers, Cooper averaged 710,000 compared to 907,000 for Brown last year.

Ouch.

The moral of the story? The New York media really is out of touch with the rest of the country. And likes Anderson Cooper for reasons that have nothing to do with whether he's good on TV.

It's also possible that younger viewers just aren't going to watch CNN, unless maybe you put Lindsay Lohan behind the anchor's desk.

I'll bet that Vanity Fair cover is a bomb.....

  ¶ 8:28 AM 2 comments   

  More on Plagiarism At CounterPunch.Org, Lawrence R. Velvel, dean of the Massachusetts School of Law, explores past incidents of plagiarism at Harvard and their various unsatisfying resolutions.

In his conclusion, he brings up Harry Lewis and his forthcoming Excellence Without a Soul, writing that...

Harry Lewis is surely right in saying that, in searching for Summers' successor, the Harvard Corporation, the university's highest governing board, should not be "distracted by superficialities -- candidates' gender, celebrity, and manners, for example." He surely is equally right in saying that Harvard "must find a way to honor good character in our faculty members and to penalize acts that call a professor's character into question."

Meanwhile, I thought this letter in today's Harvard Crimson, on the subject of KV's plagiarism, was a provocative contribution to a delicate area: whether there is a relationship between KV's ethnic/cultural background and her plagiarism.

According to Sampathkumar Iyangar—who seems to be a "writer and activist based in Ahmedabad"—

It is not at all rare in India for parents to do school work of their children. When the project is found to be beyond their caliber, they resort to engaging professionals for the purpose.... The practice is particularly rampant among offspring of “chosen ones”—politicians and employees of giant state-owned corporations, high-profile government officials, and figures at prestigious public sector institutions.

Gradually, there has been a drastic decline in moral values in India to the point where no value is attached for originality or creativity. Naturally, every other movie produced in India is an unabashed rehash of a Hollywood chart buster. Complete sequences are lifted with no semblance of any acknowledgment to the original. The government routinely confers national honor on directors, actors, and editors of such “clever” creations of art. Until, hopefully soon, globalization corrects the situation, claims of “literary prodigies” of Indian origin will have to be verified and re-verified a thousand times.

Interesting. I wonder what Harold and Kumar would have to say on the subject?  ¶ 9:34 AM 1 comments   

  Alloy Media: Is It the Devil? The more you read about Alloy Media, the ghostwriting agency that holds co-copyright to How Opal Mehta.... , the more it sounds like a very, very bad thing.

As this Boston Globe story shows, the firm considers books valuable only insofar as they lead to movie deals and product tie-ins.

More than books for reading, Alloy titles are content packages, with potential for advertising and cross-marketing. The Alloy website says, ''Advertisers have the opportunity to get their products or services cast in these best-selling books. The value of these mentions far exceeds the hundreds of thousands of readers, creating a viral product buzz." It is not known publicly whether Manolo Blahnik, Habitual jeans, or La Perla bras paid for their mentions in ''Opal Mehta."

Ugh.

And as this New York Observer story shows, Alloy has a reputation for screwing the anonymous scribes who work for them.

All of which raises the question: Given that Alloy is a strong indicator that our culture is going to hell, does that make the firm a front for...Satan?  ¶ 9:09 AM 0 comments   

  What's Going on With Neil Rudenstine? First, the former president gives a talk at the unveiling of his portrait that raises eyebrows and may or may not have caused Larry Summers to leave the room.

Then, at the funeral of former Corporation fellow Bob Stone, Rudenstine delivers what many (including me) thought was a pointed and political elegy, at least in part.

While remembering Stone, Rudenstine talked about two things that could have been interpreted as a criticism of Rudenstine's successor, Larry Summers. He talked about how Stone was never a numbers man, never believing that numbers really said anything about a person, but instead suggesting looking to "the character." And he said that while Stone was a great believer in debate at a university, that it was always tempered debate, never contentious. (I'm paraphrasing and condensing.)

Given that Larry Summers is renowned for his emphasis on data, and that he has been associated with contentious debate—and especially on the heels of the portrait incident—the remarks were heard by some as an implicit rebuke of Summers.

A number of people with whom I spoke after the funeral were struck by Rudenstine's words, and thought that they were pointed and deliberate.

If Rudenstine did intend either or both of his sets of remarks as a commentary on Summers, all agreed, such public criticism was very much out of character for him.

So what would explain it?

Perhaps years of being unfavorably compared to Larry Summers, years of having the accomplishments of his own presidency slighted. (In fact, I've argued that Rudenstine's presidency was successful if one defines success as fulfilling stated goals.)

I still think of Corporation fellow D. Ron Daniel telling the New York Times Magazine, "We agreed that we needed somebody more aggressive, more pushy, bolder," than Neil Rudenstine.

So if Neil Rudenstine is venting some pent-up frustration—well, it would be admirable if he could transcend his anger, or bitterness, or whatever it may be. (For surely, these moments do feel like kicking Summers when he's down.)

But can you really blame him if he can't?  ¶ 8:42 AM 13 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen   ¶ 8:37 AM 0 comments   

  Student Evaluations: An Assault on Professors' Freedom? InsideHigherEd.com has a piece today about the fight at Harvard over student evaluations. German professor Peter Burgard says they can become "popularity contests," and Harvey Mansfield called them "an intrusion on the sovereignty of the classroom."

Well, yes and yes, I suppose. But both arguments suggest a lack of confidence in Harvard students, and perhaps a little over-sensitivity to being publicly rated by them. Of course teaching is a popularity contest; students have always chosen to take courses with professors they like. But what makes them like a professor? In general, college students seem smart enough to like professors who are smart and bring material to life vividly and teach well. So I'm not sure that the idea of teaching being a popularity contest is really a bad thing...

When I was a TF at Harvard, I taught in a Core course that clearly contained a lot of students who didn't want to be there. One of the reasons was that the professor was horrible—she was a somnolent lecturer who hadn't changed her lectures in years. It was tough for even the TFs to stay awake. The students pummeled her in the CUE evaluations, and they should have.

I'm not sure that such an intrusion on the sovereignty of the classroom is a bad thing...but perhaps the real argument is over the best way to conduct these evaluations, and whether in the end they actually lead to improved teaching.  ¶ 6:54 AM 7 comments   

  Yet More Colbert In Salon, Sidney Blumenthal (sigh) weighs in with his deadly serious commentary on the Stephen Colbert brouhaha—apparently the blogosphere is on fire with debate about his performance at the White House Correspondents Dinner—and how the press has let us all down and President Bush is the greatest threat to freedom ever.

His piece is gently titled "The Fool and the Knave."

Blumenthal writes: Some in the press understand the peril posed to the First Amendment by an imperial president trying to smother the constitutional system of checks and balances. For those of the Washington press corps who reproved a court jester for his irreverence, the game of status is apparently more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it's no laughing matter.

lumenthal's argument is essentially, "Funny? Who cares whether he was funny? This country's going to hell in a handbasket."

Or, as Jesse Jackson once said in a hilarious Saturday Night Live skit, back when that wasn't an oxymoron, "The point is moot!"  ¶ 6:46 AM 3 comments   

  Plagiarism Punished The board of Raytheon Company is essentially fining its chief executive, William Swanson, $1 million for plagiarizing a book for a list of management maxims he published.

Granted, Swanson will still be taking home a pay package worth around $7 million. But still—a million dollar fine is pretty remarkable.

It also ramps up the pressure on Harvard to take a tough line in the KV case. After all, if a defense contractor can punish plagiarism......  ¶ 6:36 AM 2 comments   

  On the Road Again I'm heading up to Boston today (Thursday), so posts will be erratic. Sorry about that...business calls.  ¶ 11:44 PM 0 comments   

  Suzy Welch Explains KV In today's Wall Street Journal, Suzy Welch, wife of former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, does her best to explain Kaavya Viswanathan. "What went wrong with KV?" Welch asks.

She got kissed -- wooed, seduced, whatever -- by a publishing industry machine that craves content, moves fast, and depends on big hits. The days are gone when new writers could wrestle through draft after draft of a first manuscript, guided by a thoughtful (even challenging) editor. The business model of the publishing industry is about a small number of books selling lots and lots of copies. Kaavya got swept into that process, and, my guess is, was too young to fight its heady pull. Can you blame her? How many 18-year-olds do you know with the stuff to say, "No, please don't tell me I'm marvelous. Please don't make me rich and famous. I'd rather write carefully and suffer in obscurity."

Fair enough. But Welch loses me when she goes on to argue, Am I saying then that Kaavya didn't intentionally plagiarize, as she claims? I am indeed. Every writer hungrily reads other books in his or her genre, as Kaavya did with Megan McCafferty. And every writer is, by nature, something of a mimic.

Oh, nonsense. While every writer may be influenced by the things that he or she has read, not every writer incorporates them verbatim into her work.

And here's another quibble: Would it be too much to ask Welch to acknowledge, however mildly, that she too has suffered the pains of literary scandal?

(Back in 2001, Welch, then known as Suzanne Wetlaufer, was bedding Jack Welch, a married man, even as, in her position as editor of the Harvard Business Review, she was editing an interview with him.)

It's certainly relevant to know that Suzy Welch might have quite personal feelings about such traumatic events. (Living through scandal, not sleeping with Jack Welch. Though, maybe....)  ¶ 4:29 PM 0 comments   

  Rudenstine v. Summers? A reader posted this comment yesterday evening, and it's so interesting I wanted to make sure it was highly visible.

The Crimson missed a story you would have cherished, Richard. The unveiling of the Rudenstein portrait on Monday evening. The story buried inside only hinted at the tension in the room. Rudenstein gave a passionate defense of the faculty as an agent of creative change, and was uncharacteristically direct in his criticism of "authoritarian" leadership by presidents. The faculty needs to be led, but by taking their ideas and shaping them and the group to ends that all share. Even Pres. Eliot, one of the most authoritarian presidents knew well that he could not order the faculty around. At that point, Summers, who had been standing in the front of the audience, turned and left (either the room, according to some accounts or back to the refreshement table, according to others). There were some gasps. Rudenstine even pointededly noted that the faculty supported him when he took the unpopular move of creating a tax to start Allston development. Many faculty were surprised at Rudenstein's uncharacteristically direct comments. Most thought this was great (the audience was clearly on his side given the occasion). But some thought it was not right to humiliate Summers in this way. In any case a dramatic moment that was not to be missed, though the Crimson did. Too bad you weren't there....

It does sound like a remarkable scene. Anyone else who was there?  ¶ 10:30 AM 14 comments   

  Quote for the Day

''Crazy, crazy, it's always crazy. It's good for baseball. Good for the fans, depending on who gets their ass kicked. We saw a couple fights [Monday] night outside the stadium, got to watch them from upstairs. That's what you're going to get, a lot of drunk people. Let them go at it. It's fun to watch. Better them than us, right?"

—Red Sox pitcher David Wells, talking about the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry, in the Boston Globe  ¶ 9:03 AM 0 comments   

  Stephen Colbert: The Debate Continues If anyone out there still cares, Troy Patterson in Slate thinks that Colbert was funny.

He's wrong.

Meanwhile, just two days after I pleaded with the Times not to run any more stories about how the blogosphere is all fired up about one thing or another—the blogosphere is always fired up about one thing or another—the newspaper has ignored my plea with this earth-shaker: "After Press Dinner, the Blogosphere is Alive with Colbert Chatter.

Sigh.

I will say that I agree with one line in the Times' story: Others chided the so-called mainstream media, including The New York Times, which ignored Mr. Colbert's remarks while writing about the opening act, a self-deprecating bit Mr. Bush did with a Bush impersonator.

In fact, I noticed that lacuna in the Times' piece about the correspondents dinner, and it did strike me as odd—the Colbert thing was much more interesting than the fact that Bush did a little routine with a Bush impersonator.

So maybe today's piece is just about compensating for an earlier mistake.....

Oh, and here's what Al Franken told the Times about Colbert's performance: "It's very, very tricky," Mr. Franken, a Democrat who played the dinner twice during the Clinton years but was not there on Saturday, said in an interview. "I thought that what Stephen did was very admirable."

Note that Franken doesn't actually say that Colbert was funny.....  ¶ 8:48 AM 2 comments   

  Stick a Fork in Kaavya ...she's done. Little, Brown has announced that it will not publish a revised edition of How Opal Mehta... after all—as predicted on this website seconds after Little, Brown said that it would—and it also will not be publishing KV's second novel.

Here are reports in the Crimson, the Times, and the Boston CBS affiliate website. (Thanks to the reader who posted this last.)

And thus the cycle of scandal is almost complete; you can feel in the stories linked to above a sense of, yup, justice is done, the bad girl is exiled, and the publishing insiders whom everyone in the media knows have escaped pretty much unscathed. At the very least, with no long term damage.

I hope things don't work out that way—because frankly (and here I shock even myself), Kaavya Viswanathan is getting screwed.

Yes, she's guilty of complicity in a literary fraud. She either committed plagiarism, or put her name on a book written (and plagiarized) by ghostwriters. She has paid a price for this complicity, and will do so for a long time.

In her defense, KV's morality may not have risen above that of her publisher, but it never sank below that of her publisher.

For Little, Brown's move to suggest that all the misbehavior in this unfortunate episode is KV's is disingenuous at best. The publishing company knew that KV had turned to Alloy Entertainment for help—if memory serves, they recommended Alloy.

And Little, Brown knows what Alloy does for a living; the company hires ghostwriters to ghostwrite books. What did it think Alloy would do for KV? Give her a lollipop and send her on her way?

Even if there was no plagiarism involved, Little, Brown would still have been foisting a fraud on the public: its massive promotion of a teenage author as a literary prodigy, when it knew full well that she was no such thing.

Let's look at this from Viswanathan's potential perspective: Based on skimpy writing samples and a highly marketable persona, an esteemed publisher throws quite a lot of money at her. The company then sends her to a ghostwriting company. Somewhere along the line—and perhaps not from KV—plagiarism occurs. When it is revealed, she is so embarrassed that she didn't really write the book, or the entire book, that she takes responsibility for it. Then it turns out that there was more plagiarism....

But all along, she's just been doing what she thinks is standard operating procedure in the publishing world. And, perhaps, it is—until they get caught, and then they blame it on the author and cut her loose.

At Little, Brown, today, I'm sure there's a sense of exhaustion, but probably too there's some feeling that they've turned the corner on this fiasco. Pretty successfully, they've managed to pin all the bad news on a 19-year-old college student. They'll move on fast, with few consequences.

Not so for KV, who doesn't have a corporate machine to protect her, or press flacks to take reporters' calls, or an easy way to redefine her identity. She's just out there, tarred and feathered, on her own.

Why do I feel so strongly that KV has been made a scapegoat? And why do I think that the people at Little, Brown, are lying?

Because a few years back, they did the exact same thing to me.....and they lied about it then, too. (If you're interested, click the link and search for the phrase "agent's behavior.")  ¶ 8:18 AM 3 comments   

  Stephen Colbert: More Bad Reviews The New Republic agrees with me that Stephen Colbert was lame.

Since that link is probably subscriber-only, I'll just quote:

Colbert's problem, blogosphere conspiracy theories notwithstanding, is that he just wasn't very entertaining. Most of the funny lines had been recycled from his show; the new material was all pretty tired--including a way-too-long video presentation whose big joke was that ... Helen Thomas is old and batty. (Stop me if you've heard that one.) Various aggrieved bloggers have suggested the audience wasn't laughing because Colbert was too tough on the president and the press corps. I dunno. I didn't find Colbert appreciably harder on either of them than, say, Jay Leno was two years ago--though Leno did take shots at John Kerry, too, which maybe took some of his edge off. In any case, it wasn't just journalists who didn't find Colbert amusing. I was sitting about ten feet from Ed Helms, Colbert's former "Daily Show" colleague, and kept glancing over to check his reaction. He cracked some smiles here and there. But I never saw him doubled over with laughter, not even close. My sense is that the blogosphere response is more evidence of a new Stalinist aesthetic on the left--until recently more common on the right--wherein the political content of a performance or work of art is actually more important than its entertainment value.

I think that last point is exactly right: People who hate Bush wanted Colbert to be funny, or "courageous," as one poster below insisted. Sadly, he was neither.

I think this event may have go down as the moment where Colbert's meta-humor jumped the shark.... The man is a one-trick pony, an extended Saturday Night Live skit, and while that trick is pretty funny, it just didn't translate to stand-up.  ¶ 11:31 AM 1 comments   

  KV: It's Getting Ugly How many books did Kaavya Viswanathan and/or her ghostwriters plagiarize from?

The Crimson reports that she/they may have ripped off Salman Rushdie and Meg Cabot, author of "The Princess Diaries."

And the Times reports that passages in How Opal Mehta "bear striking similarities to writing in "Can You Keep a Secret?," a chick-lit novel by Sophie Kinsella."

"The plots of the two books are different...but the phrasing and structure of some passages is nearly identical."

It's time to 'fess up, people. What the hell happened here? Remember that old Washington law of scandal: It's not the crime that gets you, it's the cover-up.

Instead, Viswanathan declined to comment, and a spokeswoman for Alloy Entertainment offers this piece of blather: "We are continuing to refrain from offering comment on any matter relating to Kaavya at this time."

In my opinion, the phrase "at this time" should be banished from the English language—from all language—except in those cases where it is being used to make fun of people who say "at this time."

Somehow, you knew that this story wasn't over....  ¶ 8:40 AM 2 comments   

  The Myth of the Lacrosse Culture Let's take a test. (Don't worry, there's only one question.)

What group of individuals at one of the country's best universities...

...is extremely close-knit
...does well academically and has a 100 percent graduation rate
...is not generally known for racist or sexist behavior
...and has alumni known for their public service?

If you guessed the Duke lacrosse team, you would, apparently, be correct. That's according to a report released by a Duke faculty panel commissioned by President Richard Brodhead.

Those results aren't quite what you'd expect if your opinion of the Duke lacrosse team was shaped by newspaper writers such as Allan Gurganus* and David Brooks, who were quick to decry the team's jock culture—not that they actually knew whereof they wrote.

The report does come to two predictable conclusions: alcohol is a big problem for these athletes, and on the Duke campus generally; and the Duke administration has an ambivalent relationship with alcohol, often letting its own policies on alcohol consumption go unenforced.
As a result, according to the Raleigh-Durham News & Observer, the team has a "pack" culture and an alarming record of alcohol-related misbehavior.

Meanwhile, two of the defense lawyers in the rape case have asked that D.A. Mike Nifong be removed from the case, claiming that he is more interested in politics than justice.

Mike Nifong responded by saying that he had not read the lawyers' court filing. "I just don't have as much time for reading fiction right now," Nifong said.

Given Nifong's apparently astounding incompetence, these lawyers should be careful what they're asking for, lest they get it.....

_____________________________________________________

* "When the children of privilege feel vividly alive only while victimizing, even torturing, we must all ask why."
—Allan Gurganus, New York Times, April 9, 2024  ¶ 8:18 AM 0 comments   

  Stephen Colbert Bombs The web was atwitter yesterday with the notion that President Bush was so offended by Stephen Colbert's monologue at the White House Correspondents Dinner that he refused to laugh.

Not so.

I happened to not be able to sleep on Saturday night, and so I watched C-Span's replay of the dinner at around 12:30 AM, and here's the God's-honest truth: The reason Bush didn't laugh is because Colbert wasn't funny. No one laughed.

Yes, Colbert had a couple close-to-home shots, and I enjoyed it when he mocked the press for its slavish sycophancy to the president. But the truth is, Colbert died up there...  ¶ 9:45 AM 7 comments   

  Republicans in Bed with...Hookers? The Washington Post, following up on a Wall Street Journal story, reports that federal authorities are investigating allegations that a California defense contractor arranged for a Washington area limousine company to provide prostitutes to convicted former congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham (R-Calif.) and possibly other lawmakers.

Let's be honest here: There are some potential scandals you read about and can only say, please, please—let it be true.

Yes, it'd be good for the Democrats, which, at this point, means that it'd be good for the country. But just as important, imagine the hours of mirth one could enjoy watching the GOP try to retain its status as the party of moralizers and explain away its members who happen to be in bed with call girls.  ¶ 8:56 AM 1 comments   

  The Times: So Bleh The Times has discovered that bloggers wrote a lot about Kaavya Viswanathan.

In the age of the Internet, literary exegesis (whether driven by scandal or not) is no longer undertaken solely by pale critics or plodding lawyers speaking only to each other, but by a global hive, humming everywhere at once, and linked to the wiki. And if you are big enough to matter (as any writer would hope to be), one misstep, one mistake, can incite a horde of analysts, each with a global publishing medium in the living room and, it sometimes seems, limitless amounts of time.

Frontier justice? Mob rule? Perhaps.

To which I say, "linked to the wiki"? I have no idea what that means—be honest, do you?—but it sounds kind of kinky.

(Wiki, related to wikipedia, of course, means "a collaborative Web site set up to allow user editing and adding of content," but have you ever, ever heard anyone use the term? "Linked to the wiki"—that is too funny.)

Can we please stop with all these stories about how amazing it is that current events get discussed on blogs? This is not news anymore, and the articles have a gee-whiz quality that just makes the Times look silly and out-of-touch. "Frontier justice"? Please. Just consider how the reporting in these pieces is done: Google "Kaavya Viswanathan" and sample some of the results.

If a blog breaks news—as The Smoking Gun did with James Frey—that's one thing. But I think we've passed the cultural moment in which the Times must remark upon the fact that blogs exist and that people talk about stuff on them.  ¶ 8:42 AM 6 comments   

  Harvard: Follow the Money The Crimson reports today on Harvard's oft-delayed capital campaign, noting that it won't start until 2008 at least, according to outgoing finance chief Donella Rapier. The argument, of course, is that a major campaign can't start until a new president is in place.

Rapier isn't specific about when in 2008, but it would have to be the fall at the earliest. Assuming a new president takes office in September '07, that person would need at least a year before beginning a huge fund drive that would consume vast quantities of his or her time—if not longer. Neil Rudenstine, remember, took two years before he commenced his hugely successful drive, and Rudenstine wasn't inheriting a wounded and divided university.

So perhaps 2009, then?

In any case, the consequences of this timetable are interesting, because candidates for the president's job are a) going to have to be good at raising money, and b) willing to start a huge campaign very soon after taking office—something Larry Summers was promised he would not have to do. That might well discourage some qualified candidates from considering the Harvard job.

Plus, there's the whole unreported story of what a mess the college's finances are said to be in—the gifts counted as booked but not, the massive financial commitments to the sciences in Alston, the soaring costs of the central administration, the cooking of the fundraising numbers for the past couple of years.....
_______________________________________________________________

Correction. As I've mentioned before, I'm always appreciative when readers point out mistakes—I dish it out, etc.—and there are a couple big ones in the post above. Donnella Rapier is, of course, not Harvard's "outgoing fnance chief"—that was Ann Berman—who has already departed—she is the Vice-President for Alumni Affairs and Development. My apologies to Ms. Rapier, Ms. Berman, and Mr. Berman, the valiant husband/poster who has weighed in more than once to correct me when I have erred. Mr. Berman (if your surname is indeed that of your wife's), may I suggest a blog? I have a feeling you might be very good at this....  ¶ 8:20 AM 4 comments   

  More News in the Strange Case of KV The New York Post had an interesting scooplet in the matter of defrocked writer Kaavya Viswanathan yesterday. (I'd link to it, but the Post website is virtually unusable.)

The Post found that a few months ago 17th Street Productions, the book "packager" which co-created (i.e., wrote) the now-defunct How Opal Mehta..., "forked over an undisclosed sum to a Brooklyn author after she sued for copyright infringement."

Hunter College English professor Susan Daitch received the settlement earlier this year from Random House and 17th Street Productions....

Daitch...said 17th Street rejected her novel "Blackwell's Island," about turn-of-the-century orphans sent to a notorious hospital on what's now Roosevelt Island, three years ago, then published a similar book with the same title by a different author.

In other words, people at 17th Street plagiarized from an unpublished novel, which adds more circumstantial evidence to my theory that the plagiarism in How Opal Mehta... was committed by the ghostwriters, and not Viswanathan herself.

(I wish Viswanathan would stop obfuscating about this and tell the truth.)

The Post also reports that "in 2004, shareholders sued 17th Street's parent company, Alloy Inc., and three top officers for $7 million, claiming the firm inflated Alloy's stock by misrepresenting its finances. The defendants settled but denied the charges."

Viswanathan has paid a price for using these ghostwriters—financial loss and permanent damage to her reputation. Will any heads roll at Little, Brown? Or are they content with letting a 19-year-old take full responsibility?  ¶ 8:07 AM 2 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen   ¶ 8:04 AM 3 comments