Mitt the Mutt I think Mitt Romney's an animal for strapping his dog to the roof of a car and driving on the highway for 12 hours...but even I wouldn't go as far as this TIME reporter:

Ingrid Newkirk, president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals...called the incident "a lesson in cruelty that was ... wrong for [his children] to witness...Thinking of the wind, the weather, the speed, the vulnerability, the isolation on the roof, it is commonsense that any dog who's under extreme stress might show that stress by losing control of his bowels: that alone should have been sufficient indication that the dog was, basically, being tortured." Romney, of course, has expressed support for the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques when it comes to terrorists; his campaign refused to comment about the treatment of his dog. (Emphasis added)

From how he treats his dog to condoning torture for terrorists—that's a pretty irresponsible leap, no?

Oh, wait—the reporter is Ana Marie Cox. That explains it.  ¶ 4:27 PM 0 comments   

  The Weirdness of Mitt Romney He strapped the family dog to the roof of his car...for a 12-hour drive. Presidential campaigns have collapsed for less.....

The freaked-out dog lost control of its bowels, at which point Romney stopped the car at a gas station, hosed down dog and car, left dog strapped to the roof, and kept driving.

Nice.  ¶ 4:23 PM 0 comments   

  The Clash of (Sic) CIvilizations

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip, June 29 -- A Mickey Mouse look-alike who preached Islamic domination on a Hamas-affiliated children's television program was beaten to death in the show's final episode Friday.

In the final skit, the character Farfour was killed by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land. At one point, the mouse called the Israeli a "terrorist."

—The Associated Press, June 30

  ¶ 8:31 AM 0 comments   

  Ann Coulter: Bitch Set Me Up* Ann Coulter responds to Elizabeth Edwards' telephone call to Hardball by claiming she was sandbagged by host Chris Matthews—whom she promptly trashes.

I doubled the ratings of the lowest-rated cable news show on Tuesday by agreeing to go on for a full hour to promote my new paperback version of "Godless" — a mistake I won't make again....For the first time in recorded history, the show's host did not interrupt a guest, but let Elizabeth Edwards ramble on and on, allowing her to browbeat me for being mean to her husband. ...Say, did any TV host ever surprise Al Franken, Bill Maher or Arianna Huffington with a call by the wife of someone they've made nasty remarks about?

Apparently it is too painful for Coulter to mention the name Chris Matthews, even though Matthews has been a great boon to Coulter's career.

Her response to Elizabeth Edwards is fascinating; she picks apart the details, while patently avoiding the larger question of whether she's just a mean, terrible person whose contribution to political dialogue is bile and hate. Instead, she mentions (as I've seen her do repeatedly) that she's written five New York Times bestsellers.

Coulter once suggested that the New York Times would have been a good target for Timothy McVeigh. But when it comes to validating the success of her work, it's apparently good that the Times is still around.
____________________________________________________________

*One of my favorite Marion Barry quotes.  ¶ 8:51 AM 1 comments   

  Quote of the Day —Without Harvard, MIT, and other world-class universities, Boston would be Baltimore.

—Boston Globe correspondent Jonathan Unglaub, an associate professor at Brandeis, attacking anti-Harvard protesters in Cambridge.  ¶ 7:50 AM 3 comments   

  It's iDay In case you haven't heard, a little thing called the iPhone goes on sale today....

Meanwhile, MacRumors.com reports signs that the speed of AT&T's much criticized Edge network, on which the iPhone runs when it's not surfing Wi-Fi, has been boosted....  ¶ 7:26 AM 0 comments   

  Shark Slaughter In the next few months, I hope, you're going to be hearing a lot about a documentary called Sharkwater. Made by a Canadian named Rob Stewart, it's not out in the United States yet, but will be this fall. A friend who has seen it says it's amazing, and if you take a look at the preview linked to above, you may agree that it looks powerful.

Sharkwater tells the story of the international trade in shark fins, a commerce so lucrative that only drug smuggling can rival it. Shark fishermen around the world longline and net sharks, cutting off their fins and throwing the living animal back in the water to die. Shark meat, you see, is less lucrative than the fins, and if the fishermen kept the whole fish, they'd have less room for the valuable fins. It's a horrific practice and it's leading to the eradication of shark species around the globe.

In one scene in the film, Stewart came across two fishing boats near the Galapagos Islands which had put out 60 miles of longline hooks. Sixty miles. There were an estimated 16,000 baited hooks on those lines.

Americans don't eat shark fin soup, of course. (The Chinese are the real problem here, just as the Japanese are with tuna and whales.) But we still host pointless and coarsening "monster shark" fishing tournaments, and we still eat shark.

Here's a small thing you can do to save sharks: Don't eat them. And if you're in a restaurant that serves shark, please don't order it, but instead pass a message to the chef that you don't support the presence of shark on the menu.

It's a small part of the solution, but it's something.  ¶ 7:03 AM 4 comments   

  Baby, You're a Star The fourth Indiana Jones movie is being filmed at Yale this summer..... Perhaps not coincidentally, Steven Spielberg's son, Theo, will be a Yale sophomore in the fall.  ¶ 8:37 AM 0 comments   

  The End of History On Larry King last night, the host asked Paris Hilton if she were strip-searched. (In the cheesiest possible way, that is a brilliant question.)

His follow-up: "Is it as gross as we think it is?"

And with that, a line was crossed....

Hilton's response included the assertion that it was "the most humiliating experience of my life," which begs the question: Really? Worse than, say, having a video of yourself performing oral sex distributed over the Internet?

Hilton also denies ever having used drugs, any kind of drug, other than a prescription for attention deficit disorder. But then, she also said that she read the Bible in jail.

All told, though, a typical softball interview from Larry King.  ¶ 7:53 AM 1 comments   

  Good One, New Zealand I recently joined an e-mail campaign to try to get various countries to list spiny dogfish and porbeagle sharks on the CITES Appendix II, which would ensure some protection for the animals. (CITES stands for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species.)

New Zealand, one of the countries on the e-mail list, voted against the proposal. But I did get a very nice e-mail back from the Honorable Chris Carter, that country's minister of conservation.

I represented New Zealand at the CITES meeting in the Hague. I listened to
the arguments and after very careful consideration I decided that New
Zealand could not support the proposal for a listing of the two species on
Appendix II of CITES. My main reasons for this were that only the North
East Atlantic populations of the two species met the biological and trade
criteria set out by CITES and that, in the end, a CITES listing would not
contribute greatly to changing the status of the populations of these
sharks in the affected area. A revision of EU fishing regulations would be
much more effective in protecting these local populations. What is needed
to improve the conservation status of the two shark species is proper
management of them in the North East Atlantic by the states concerned,
which to date has been conspicuously absent. The EU needs to show
leadership in resolving this issue.

Mr. Carter, I appreciate the response. New Zealand is generally outstanding on environmental issues, so I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt.

No response from the US yet.....  ¶ 7:43 AM 2 comments   

  The Case Against Cheney In Slate, Bruce Fein makes the conservatives' case for impeaching Dick Cheney.

It sounds quixotic, I know. But think of it this way: If Dick Cheney has caused this much trouble so far, imagine what he's capable of in the desperate last days of a dying administration, when he feels even less responsibility to be publicly or legally accountable?  ¶ 7:37 AM 0 comments   

  You Can't Keep a Brother Down Guess who's just collaborated with Prince on a hot new song?

You won't, so I'll give you a hint: His previous musical outing was wrongly described by ignorant or racist (or both) critics as "rap."

You guessed it! Cornel West has teamed up with Prince to record a song called "Dear Mr. Man," which is the "song of the day" today on Salon.com.

Here's writer David Marchese's description of "Dear Mr. Man":

Prince was featured in this space just last week, but today's song, his collaboration with Princeton professor and public intellectual Cornel West, is just too unique to pass by. Horn stabs and some wiggly wah-wah guitar groove along to a greasy beat as Prince wonders, "What's wrong with the world today?" and West chimes in with lines like, "Raise your Socratic questions to the system!" If only all protest music were this funky.

Me, I like it when West shouts out, "Break it down, brother Prince!"

It's a pretty good song, in fact.  ¶ 7:13 AM 4 comments   

  Sex, Please, We're Professors Now that we've discussed the sex lives of Harvard students, it only seems fair to consider that of their teachers.

In the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz examines the image of the priapic professor in popular film.

The absentminded professor, that kindly old figure, is long gone....

Deresiewicz, an associate professor of English at Yale, writes that the new stereotype is of a bitter, frustrated, and disappointed professor who compensates for his lack of professional success by sleeping with students.

Why are so many of these failed professors also failed writers? Why is professional futility so often connected with sexual impropriety? (In both Terms of Endearment and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, “going to the library” becomes a euphemism for “going to sleep with a student.”) Why are these professors all men, and why are all the ones who are married such miserable husbands?

So many choices....

The first possibility is that today’s academics are portrayed as pompous, lecherous, alcoholic failures because that’s what they are....

But there's more to it than that, apparently..... Deresiewicz winds up suggesting some quite smart ideas about how a certain erotic tension is in the nature of the student-teacher relationship and, properly channeled, is a socially good thing.

The Socratic relationship...has become a kind of suppressed cultural memory, a haunting imaginative possibility. In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name.

Lots to think about in this essay....  ¶ 9:31 AM 0 comments   

  Ann Coulter's Ghastliness Elizabeth Edwards calls Hardball to challenge Ann Coulter to start acting like a human being. Coulter twists her words, says no.   ¶ 6:43 AM 1 comments   

  More on Cheney Here's the WashPo blurb for today's Dick Cheney investigation into his role in the White House's environmentalism:   ¶ 6:34 AM 0 comments   

  It's a Hit Walt Mossberg in the Journal and David Pogue in the Times love the iPhone.  ¶ 6:32 AM 8 comments   

  Good News for Zen In Florida, leatherback turtles are making a "mild resurgence" this year, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. (Thanks, Florida reader.)

With a few weeks to go in the nesting season, "Anecdotal reports show this could be a record year statewide for leatherback turtle nests," said Meghan Koperski, environmental specialist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Conservation efforts are actually working!

In other animal news, scientists have found that giant penguins used to roam Peru about 42 million years ago.

And whale-watchers in Australia have spotted Migaloo, a legendary albino humpback feared eaten by killer whales. Nice one, Migaloo. Way to stay alive.  ¶ 7:02 AM 20 comments   

  The Cheney Story Continues Today the Washington Post examines his influence on domestic policy—less well-known than his impact on foreign policy, but also huge.

These articles really do raise the question: Who is the president of the United States? Or, perhaps more accurately put, who has more power, President Bush or Vice-President Cheney?

The answer should be obvious. It isn't.  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments   

  No Argument There Meet Elwood, the world's ugliest dog....





And the runners-up are no beauties either.  ¶ 6:33 AM 5 comments   

  No Sex Please, We're Harvard Students In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Justin Murray and Sarah Kinsella talk about the Harvard-based, pro-abstinence group, True Love Revolution. (I know—sounds like a '70s disco orchestra, doesn't it?)

On a campus they describe as saturated with casual sex, Justin and Sarah have helped put abstinence on the map. As they prepare to take their commitment to chastity — and each other — off campus, they leave behind a handful of devotees of a countercultural movement that says abstinence is sexy.

Harvard? Saturated with casual sex?

Well, they seem like nice young people, so I wish them luck. But one day, will they grow up and join the next Bush-like administration and start telling the rest of us what we can and can't do?

That's always the concern, of course.  ¶ 7:44 AM 17 comments   

  Apple vs. Microsoft In Slate, Jack Shafer follows the webzine's model—figure out conventional wisdom, write opposite in 350 words, cash check, go back to bed—by trashing journalists for sucking up to Apple and, specifically, getting excited about the iPhone.

Well, maybe there's some truth to that. But then, the iPhone does seem to be a product that a lot of people are excited about. (Let's face it, except for the Blackberry, all cell phones suck.) And it's clearly having an impact on the tech world, as competitors race to catch up.

A more interesting story, IMHO, is the fact that Microsoft has begun paying bloggers to use its ghastly catch-phrase, "people-ready."

Does anyone praise Microsoft if they're not paid to?  ¶ 7:27 AM 0 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen   ¶ 7:16 AM 4 comments   

  Cheney Run Amok The Washington Post continues its exploration of Dick Cheney's astonishing power within the White House—and how he used it to spearhead the use of torture (even if it was given another name).

In a radio interview last fall, Cheney said, "We don't torture." What he did not acknowledge, according to Alberto J. Mora, who served then as the Bush-appointed Navy general counsel, was that the new legal framework was designed specifically to leave room for cruelty. In international law, Mora said, cruelty is defined as "the imposition of severe physical or mental pain or suffering." He added: "Torture is an extreme version of cruelty."

...The vice president's lawyer advocated what was considered the memo's most radical claim: that the president may authorize any interrogation method, even if it crosses the line of torture. U.S. and treaty laws forbidding any person to "commit torture," that passage stated, "do not apply" to the commander in chief, because Congress "may no more regulate the President's ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield..."

It's a fascinating, horrific story. Cheney's emasculation of the president is complete—and dangerous.  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments   

  Journalism at the Globe Want to know how (some) journalism works?

The Boston Globe today has an item on me taking a job at 02138. For no apparent reason—I stress "apparent"—it's kinda bitchy.

Here it is:

Yale grad takes reins at 02138
Wait, a magazine devoted to all things Harvard has hired a Yalie as editor? Apparently. The fledgling glossy 02138, which likes to describe itself as a "lifestyle magazine for educated, affluent, and influential readers" -- i.e. Harvard alums -- has put Richard Bradley in charge. Bradley, whose birth name is actually Richard Blow, is the author of "American Son: A Portrait of John F. Kennedy, Jr.," a book that sold remarkably well considering how badly trashed it was by many critics. He also wrote "Harvard Rules: Lawrence Summers and the Battle for the World's Most Powerful University." Bradley didn't respond to an e - mail yesterday.

Hmmm. Let's look at that last line, shall we? "Bradley didn't respond to an e-mail yesterday."

Actually, that's not true. The writer, Mark Shanahan, e-mailed my website e-mail, which goes to my home computer. He e-mailed me at 2:25—not a lot of time for me to get back to him. I didn't receive his e-mail until I got home from work, at which point—7:19, to be exact—I wrote back and called the phone number his e-mail included. (For some strange reason, I haven't heard back from him.)

Shanahan could, in fact, have picked up the phone and called the 02138 office. That's something reporters frequently do.

But even considering that I didn't get back to him before his deadline, Shanahan's item is snarky. The magazine "likes to describe itself as...." I'm a Yale grad! (Harvard too, but never mind.) I changed my name! (Zzzzzz....) American Son "sold remarkably well considering how badly trashed it was by many critics." ("Badly trashed?" Copy editor, please.)

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln.....

What did I do to deserve that litany of faint praise? Shanahan's e-mail to me, printed below in its entirety, may provide a clue:

hey there, since the flacks for 02138 do such a lousy job, thought i'd
email you directly. want to drop a line into the paper about your new gig.
got a minute?

I've never spoken with Mark Shanahan before in my life. There's no greeting other than "hey there"—what are we, 12?—no sign-off, and, as you can see, punctuation is casual. Well, what the heck, it's not that important in a newspaper anyway.

But the real message of that e-mail is, the PR folks for 02138 first told the New York Post about my new job, not the Globe, which doesn't have a media column. Therefore, payback.

Mark, for what it's worth, 02138 has contacted the Globe a number of times in the past, but the paper has never been clear about to whom to send items of possible interest, which is one reason why we went to the Post. Another is that the Globe doesn't cover the media very much or very well. And a third is that Keith Kelly, the Post's media columnist, is probably the most influential media writer in New York, and so it just makes sense to go to him first.

If you guys beefed up your coverage of the media business, well, that would be different, wouldn't it? But don't get mad at me for a decision that is entirely professional.
  ¶ 8:45 AM 12 comments   

  ROTC on the Outs? The Crimson has an interesting piece about the fact that Derek Bok and Drew Faust both dissed ROTC by not showing up at its graduation ceremony this year.

The absence of Bok and Faust from the commissioning ceremony has been criticized by some who fear that it could indicate a shift away from the support for the military shown by Summers.

Bok was chairing his final Corporation meeting; Faust was speaking to Radcliffe alumnae.

Is't it fascinating how each of those other commitments captures something about the priorities of those two people?

While Summers declined to comment on whether he believed Bok or Faust should have attended the ceremony, he wrote in an e-mailed statement that he made an effort to attend the ROTC commissioning ceremonies because he considered it "very important to show institutional support for the students who were entering the armed forces.”

Well. That obviously is offering a comment on whether he believed Bok or Faust should have been there. Summers went because he thinks it's important; by implication, Bok and Faust didn't because they don't.....  ¶ 8:25 AM 45 comments   

  A Reason Not to Vote for Hillary In the Washington Post, Lois Romano has written a fascinating story about Hillary Clinton's female inner circle, known to itself as "Hillaryland."

Once seen as a tight little sorority, today the group -- happily self-described as "Hillaryland"-- is at the center of a front-running presidential campaign. Never have so many women operated at such a high level in one campaign, working with a discipline and a loyalty and a legendary secrecy rarely seen at this level of American politics.

Older and tougher, they have formed a closely knit Praetorian Guard around Clinton that plots strategy, develops message and clamps down on leaks. But their extraordinary protectiveness also contributes to an ongoing perception of insularity around the candidate and the campaign.

I read this with dismay. Most of these women—Ann Lewis, Minyon Moore, Evelyn Lieberman, Mandy Grunwald, Melanne Verveer, and others—served with Hillary in the Clinton White House, and even then they were notorious for a number of things:
their insularity, their fanatical devotion to Hillary Clinton, and their us-against-the-world mentality.

Some of the group, such as Minyon Moore and Cheryl Mills, were highly competent. Others were not.

There is obviously a case to made for earning and rewarding loyalty. But there's also a case for bringing in fresh voices and differing perspectives. The groupthink prevalent in Hillaryland was astonishing; talking to one of its members, you'd think you were talking to a member of a cult, and you kept wanting to urge the person to wake up. They never did, and it sounds like they still haven't.

It was members of Hillaryland, for example, who largely wrote Mrs. Clinton's memoir, a book equally disingenuous and boring. (The best thing about it was its cover, taken from a photo shoot we did for George. Mrs. Clinton had promised to do an exclusive cover; she then reneged on her promise when asked to be on the cover of Talk, whose owner, Harvey Weinstein, subsequently raised money for Mrs. Clinton's 2000 Senate race.)

I can't speak authoritatively on the subject, I hope, but my guess is that being disingenuous and boring at the same time is something not easily achieved.

And yet, this is Hillary Clinton's largest problem: When she opens her mouth, no one believes a word she says.

Except, perhaps, the women of Hillaryland.  ¶ 7:56 AM 21 comments   

  Shout-out to a Fellow Promoter of Zen One of my college roommates, Timothy Tompkins, is the head of the Times Square Business Improvement District here in Manhattan. Back in 2003, Tim came up with the slightly bizarre idea of holding a yoga class in the middle of Times Square. The first time he staged it, there were all of two people present—Tim an an instructor.

Well, they did it again yesterday, to mark the summer solstice. And guess what? 800 people signed up.....

Nice work, Tim.


Willie Davis for The New York Times  ¶ 7:44 AM 1 comments   

  No Triskets, Please I've posted before on how Internet advertising is corroding the separation between editorial and advertising that print journalists have long valued—ads that slightly impinge on a line of text, for example, so that in order to finish the sentence you were reading, you have no choice but to see the ad.

I hope that this is a passing phase, a sign of publishers' desperation to make money on the Web. But I doubt it.

Meanwhile, the problem worsens. On Salon.com, I was just trying to read a story about how Rudy Giuliani has a priest accused of child molestation on his payroll, when an ad for Triskets suddenly appeared in the middle of the text, as if it were dropped from the top of the browser page. A trisket spun around, appeared with olive oil, then with cheese. And then it retreated back to the top of the screen. There was no "close" button you could hit; you just had to sit there and wait for the damn cracker to stop twirling around.

I now have no appetite for Triskets, nor for finishing the article I was reading. Instead, I feel like punching someone at Salon in the nose.

Pretty soon, these ads are going to become so commonplace and irritating that they actually discourage Web traffic....  ¶ 7:24 AM 3 comments   

  Unsex Me Here? Who says Washington is a conservative town? Well, I do. But maybe the city's changing: The Washington Shakespeare Company is staging Macbeth in the nude...

Surely this Washington Post suggestion regarding Macbeth's anatomy is unintentional:

In the current offering from Washington Shakespeare Company, a cast of intrepid actors essays a wholly uncut "Macbeth" in the nude....



Get your tickets here.  ¶ 7:05 AM 2 comments   

  "Entirely My Decision" That's how Dick Gross explains his resignation as Dean of Harvard College in an e-mail to the Crimson.

Throughout the spring, however, Gross, 56, gave no indication of planning to resign. He said, for instance, that he was considering launching a review of the College's Administrative Board in the fall.

So the discussion about this resignation seems to be centering on a few questions:

1) Did Gross jump or was he pushed, and if the latter, who was the pusher?
2) Who will be the next dean of the college?
3) Should the job again be split into two positions, dean of Harvard College and dean of undergraduate education, as Judith Ryan suggests in a post below?  ¶ 8:01 AM 38 comments   

  Scientific Fact of the Day
As if its looks weren't enough of a turnoff, hagfish, when agitated, vomit and secrete a protein that reacts with seawater to create a thick mucus.

A single animal can turn a five-gallon bucket of seawater into a pool of goo in a matter of moments, said Eddie Kisfaludy of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. While the slime distracts predators, it also occasionally suffocates the hagfish.

—The Associated Press, reporting on the truly bizarre hagfish, which has become a delicacy among Koreans who consider it an aphrodisiac

.  ¶ 7:58 AM 2 comments   

  Gross Loss That was fast: Dick Gross is out of a job.

Here's part of a press release by FAS spokesperson Richard Mitchell:

Harvard College Dean Benedict H. Gross announced today that he will conclude his service as dean on Aug. 31, 2007. In making the announcement, Gross said that, with the conclusion of the legislative process of the curricular review, the time seems appropriate to move on to other projects.

Anyone else surprised by the speed with which Drew Faust made this move? Or did Derek Bok do it, just as he effected calendar reform on his own? Anyone think it's a bad move? And finally...who's the next dean of Harvard College?  ¶ 2:12 PM 26 comments   

  Quote for the Day "Many Iraqis, beleaguered at every turn, said they saw the bomb as an attempt to aggravate sectarian strife and as one more piece of evidence that the Americans could not protect them from extremists. Many of those who live near the site of the destruction said they had concluded that the Americans must be helping the suicide bombers."

—Alissa Rubin in the Times, writing about yesterday's mosque-bombing in Iraq

What does it say when citizens of the country we were supposedly/allegedly/ostensibly trying to save now believe that we are the ones trying to destroy it?

I don't know at what point we can truly conclude that we have lost Iraq, but surely one indicator would be when ordinary Iraqis believe that Americans are helping suicide bombers blow up mosques.  ¶ 2:06 PM 0 comments   

  Rudy Giuliani's Snow Jobs The state chairman of Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign, Thomas Ravenel, has been indicted on federal charges of cocaine possession.

According to the Times,

The treasurer, Thomas. Ravenel, a former real estate developer who became a rising political star after his election last year, is accused of buying less than 500 grams of the drug to share with other people in late 2005, said United States Attorney Reggie Lloyd.

Let us hope that it is a lot less than 500 grams, because, well, let's just say that, if it were, say, 450 grams, Mr. Ravenel would either be awfully rich, awfully generous, or have an awful lot of friends. 500 grams is a lot.

In other Giuliani news, it turns out the self-proclaimed hero of 9/11 was more interested in giving lucrative speeches than attending meetings of the Iraq Study Group—which is why they kicked him out.....  ¶ 1:48 PM 2 comments   

  Vroom, Doom A friend of mine from college went to work for Ford Motor Company in Detroit after she attended business school, and at times the culture there drove her crazy. It wasn't just that she was about the only female executive in the entire country. It was also that she found the top management at Ford incredibly isolated, both geographically and culturally. "You can't believe these people," she said. "It's like they're living in a different era."

I thought of that reading today's Times story about how American automakers are finally succumbing to political pressure to raise fuel standards. Well, kind of:

Even as recently as last weekend, a lobbying group financed by auto companies was still running radio ads in 11 states, raising the prospect that soccer moms might lose the opportunity to buy big sport utility vehicles if they did not urge Congress to reject legislation calling for higher mileage.

“Why can’t they let me make the choice?” one of the ads said. “I’m all for better fuel economy, but for me safety is my top concern.”

These people really are complete idiots, aren't they?

(And not just because we know that SUVs are actually less safe than smaller cars.)

Why do American auto executives need political pressure to tell them that they need to make cars with better gas mileage? You'd think that the marketplace would have made this fact obvious to them by now. Ford, GM, Chrysler—whatever Chrysler is called now—they've all been making the same clunky, ugly gas-guzzlers for years now. No one wants 'em. And yet, they still say, Don't make our cars get good gas mileage, it'll kill our business.

Which would, of course, make it a race to the bottom, because Detroit seems to be pretty good at committing suicide.

Carmakers say the plan will probably cost the industry tens of billions of dollars in development costs for new vehicles and technology over the next decade.

It's called research and development, Detroit. Perhaps you should have been investing it over, say, the past 20 years?

Imagine if the American computer industry had the same mentality as the auto industry. We'd have computers that got slower and had less memory with every passing year, and were plagued an unfortunate tendency to roll over....  ¶ 1:21 PM 4 comments   

  A Babe in Bad Boyland In Slate, Ron Rosenbaum writes a vicious and hilarious deconstruction of Esquire magazine's celebrity profile of Angelina Jolie.

I particularly enjoy Rosenbaum's short essay because Esquire drives me nuts. (Deep, I know.) It's a magazine that wants to appeal to the prurient interest that every men's magazine tries to appeal to, and so it puts Angelina Jolie and various other gorgeous women on its cover. Nothing particularly wrong with that. But then it suggests that, well, unlike those other magazines, it's actually very highbrow about the whole thing. This inevitably leads to pretension; Esquire's website, for example, proffers a list of articles "for your perusal." For your perusal. Pretty funny.

The result of Esquire's pretensions to seriousness, Rosenbaum suggests, is the worst celebrity profile ever written.... Give Esquire some credit, though: It is a beautifully designed cover.

  ¶ 11:20 AM 3 comments   

  The Jobs Report In a desperate attempt to be counter-intuitive, New York magazine asks, "Has Steve Jobs peaked?"

Translation: We want to do a story on the iPhone, but we are scrambling to figure out something to say other than how cool it is going to be/will businesspeople survive without a keyboard.

What if [the] consensus is wrong? What if Jobs and Apple have peaked? What if, in terms of power and influence it's all downhill from here? These suggestions might seem incredible, but half a century of high-tech hnistory indicates otherwise.....

Zzzzzzzzzz.......
  ¶ 7:44 AM 1 comments   

  To Eat or Not to Eat In the Globe, the M-Bomb looks at the explosive new fad among college students: the hunger strike.

In most of the protests, the hunger strikers claimed to have won concessions. But they have also alarmed university leaders and, on some campuses, triggered a backlash from fellow students.

Bombardieri points out that the technique developed at Harvard in response to crackdowns on other forms of protest.....  ¶ 7:34 AM 3 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen


Cozumel toadfish by Phil Harris.  ¶ 8:01 AM 3 comments   

  Fade to Black The debate about the end of The Sopranos rages on--another sign of the brilliance of David Chase's ending--and there seems to be a growing faith that the eleven-second blackout at the end of the show does indeed represent Tony's death.  ¶ 8:11 AM 2 comments   

  Harvard Hires a Coach After the Boston Globe reported that Harvard didn't have a single African-American head coach, the university has now hired its second (basketball coach Tommy Amaker was the first): former University of Florida star Traci Green.  ¶ 7:41 AM 5 comments   

  Caroline Hoxby in the Wall Street Journal The Wall Street Journal reports on the departure of Blair and Caroline Hoxby for Stanford.

Aside from a sunnier clime, Stanford offered Ms. Hoxby the attractive lure of a tenured position for her husband, Blair Hoxby – something that Harvard, where Mr. Hoxby taught history and literature, had failed to do.

....In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Hoxby, 41, said the tenure offer had helped clinch the deal. She said she and the Harvard economics department had made various attempts to give the university a chance to keep her, but that “there is a sense in which no one is in charge” at the venerable institution.

Here's the most relevant part of that interview:

Ms. Hoxby, who is 41, joined Harvard's economics department in 1994. Her chairman tried hard to keep her, she said, but she never heard from anyone in the administration. She even telephoned Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard's incoming president, to let her know the couple was about to leave, but nothing happened, Ms. Hoxby said.

Hoxby's is a profound criticism: There is no one in charge at Harvard. Is it true? Is Harvard a little, well, adrift?  ¶ 7:34 AM 78 comments   

  In Which I Take a Job After seven years of book-writing, I'm going back to office life; starting now, I'm going to be the new executive editor of 02138 magazine.

In the New York Post, Keith Kelly reports on me and my controversial past.  ¶ 6:41 AM 9 comments   

  And in Shark News The Human Society is pressuring the organizers of shark-fishing tournaments to cancel them. I hope it works. These tournaments don't kill a huge number of sharks, certainly nothing compared to the hideous practice of finning, in which millions of sharks are slaughtered because Chinese people erroneously believe that their fins are an aphrodisiac. Because the shark meat isn't nearly as valuable—it's not considered an aphrodisiac—the rest of the animal is then generally dumped overboard. An eco-catastrophe.

But back to these tournaments....

Though they don't kill many sharks relative to finning, they still send the message to Americans that sharks are evil, awful animals which should be hunted for sport, merely so that some macho fisherman can get a good picture next to a corpse. (Most shark tournaments in the US commenced after the publication of Jaws, and author Peter Benchley came to decry that impact of his book.)

So the symbolism of these tournaments outweighs their statistical impact, and indeed, has relevance beyond the slaughter of sharks. They send a message regarding our relationship to all animal life: It's okay to kill for fun. It's the 21st century; we know better.









A once-beautiful tiger shark
caught, killed, then thrown away
in a Martha's Vineyard
"Monster Shark Tournament."  ¶ 8:04 AM 10 comments   

  Free the Whale Sharks! I'm a big fan of aquariums and zoos, and I believe that their mission of research and promoting awareness of animal life justifies holding some animals in captivity. Just not this one:




That was a whale shark held in captivity at the Georgia Aquarium. Named "Norton"—an improbable attempt to turn something magical into something cute—it died yesterday, the second whale shark to die there this year.

Whale sharks can grow to be about 45 feet long, and no other aquarium has ever tried to hold them on display. They are also migratory animals, and though their patterns of migration are not well understood, some think that their migrations can last for years.

So even if the aquarium could keep these animals alive, it still shouldn't keep them. There's no tank big enough for an animal that migrates hundreds of miles.....  ¶ 7:43 AM 0 comments   

  Yale's Allston? Yale University has just purchased 137 acres of property and 1.5 square feet of buildings in nearby West Haven and Orange, Connecticut, the Yale Daily News reports today. The buildings include 550, 000 square feet of laboratory space.

According to Yale president Rick Levin, "To build new would be much more expensive than what we had to pay to buy the entire site.... This is a once in a century opportunity."

This is clearly not a project on the scope of Allston, but it seems like a quiet coup for Yale.....  ¶ 7:37 AM 1 comments   

  Another Harvard Refugee In the Globe, Steve Bailey tells the story of Stephen Wong, a former Harvard medical scientist who recently decamped to Houston because he got a "an offer he couldn't refuse."

In a star economy, it is stars like Wong we are counting on to again reinvent New England's future. And now Wong is telling us that the old rules no longer apply, that Boston no longer has some inherent intellectual lock over places like Houston. Or two-score cities around the globe for that matter.

...Houston is very hot, Wong says. But it has its advantages. It is newer, he says, with more collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston. "It seems they need me much more than Harvard did," he says.

More collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston....

Drew Faust has spoken about the need for collaboration across boundaries at Harvard, and she's clearly right. This is a significant problem. What many folks at Harvard seem not to want to admit, though, is that the problem is not just structural, fixable with calendar reform and so on. It's cultural. Competition exists much more comfortably at Harvard than does cooperation.

If Faust manages to diminish the culture of cutthroat competition and the death grip of secrecy that pervade Harvard, she will really have accomplished something.....  ¶ 7:14 AM 13 comments   

  Halberstam Remembered David Halberstam was remembered yesterday at a service at Manhattan's Riverside Church, the spiritual home of all fighting liberals.

The Times piece does a fine job...of mentioning how many people from the Times knew Halberstam.  ¶ 6:58 AM 0 comments   

  The Leviathan, Redux Here's another piece, from the Boston Globe, on that slaughtered whale, including a photo of the "exploding lance," manufactured in Bedford in the late 1800s, found inside its corpse after humans finally killed it.

  ¶ 6:52 AM 0 comments   

  The Death of History The following AP story is so sad, I just want to reprint the whole thing.

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it had survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3.5-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated at 115 to 130 years. “No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade, was probably made in New Bedford, Mr. Bockstoce said. It was probably shot from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month; the older device was found as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

We haven't made much progress in 115 years, have we?  ¶ 10:49 PM 1 comments   

  The Genius of the Sopranos The Washington Post reports that Sopranos fans are furious about the way the show ended.

So many angry "Sopranos" fans tried to register their complaints on HBO's Web site, the channel shut it down temporarily Sunday night.

...A bunch, who were way mad at the way Chase had messed with them in the finale, started messing with his Wikipedia entry, adding lines such as: "[Chase] gained mainstream recognition for creating and then destroying the HBO series 'The Sopranos' which is currently being debated as the worst ending to an American Television series in history."

Finally, the brain trust at Wikipedia locked the page from further "editing" until June 18, citing "vandalism."

Are they nuts? I'm surprised at this reaction to the brilliantly ambiguous ending. What did they expect, that creator David Chase was going to take all the plots and subplots of the most ambitious show on television and wrap them up all in a little bundle to take home on DVD? It just isn't possible.

Here's my take on the ending, which featured Tony and his family sitting in a diner as various suspicious characters move about. From the camera work and the intercutting of perspectives—it reminded me of the editing of the toy store scene in which Bobby got killed the week before— it appears that Tony is on the verge of being whacked. But then, the screen abruptly goes dark for eleven seconds, after which the credits roll.

A friend of mine is convinced that this means Tony did, in fact, get killed—that the sudden darkness was a representation of unexpected and sudden death. Maybe. But I have a different theory: I think it's the projection of a blank slate. (A blackboard, if you will.) It's David Chase saying, You folks have been predicting endings for months now, go ahead—project your own onto the screen.

And of course Americans are furious because we are pathetic, passive creatures who want to be spoon-fed our entertainment.

For what it's worth, here's my take on the last scene: It represented Tony's future, a future in which everyone and everything is a potential threat. (And given the last episode's commentary on Bush, terror and Iraq, mightn't Chase be saying that this is, in fact, the United States' future?)

Tony is with his family in a diner booth—a cordoned-off area, but still vulnerable—trying to enjoy the simple pleasure of family. But, as always, the imperatives of his other family constantly intrude. The threat of law enforcement; the threat of murder; the possibility of betrayal. The space in which Tony can enjoy his family has shrunk, become so small that the four Sopranos are literally squeezed together. Really for the first time, there's the sense that Tony's wife and children might also be in danger.

Tony may be shot by the man emerging from the bathroom. It's possible. More likely, I think, Chase is suggesting that this scenario of tightening pressure and shrinking pleasure defines Tony's future. We don't need to see it, because we can imagine it; Chase has given us all the information we need for that.

One of the most interesting themes of the Sopranos was that you can't leave the Mob voluntarily. (And how weirdly that theme began to echo Chase's own relationship to his creation.) Once you're in, you're in, until you either go to jail or die, usually violently. I thought that this last episode illustrated that theme wonderfully. Note Paulie's attempt to turn down a new responsibility; he wants to get out before he gets killed. But Tony knows just how to push his buttons, and with a sigh, Paulie concedes. There is no getting out.

This is true too with Uncle Junior, who may have, in a sense, escaped by losing his mind. But Tony, with his inimitable cruelty, reminds him: You and my father used to run north Jersey. You were a gangster, you are a gangster, you will always be a gangster. And if your memory ever returns, you have a gangster's responsibility, still: Give your stash of ill-gotten gains to the children of a murdered man.

There is no escape.

So let us give Chase credit for mining his themes with depth and consistency, and consider how this theme would apply to Tony himself. The Sopranos gave us plenty of examples of the fate of Mafia chieftains. They die badly. We don't need a neat and tidy ending to know that. Far preferable is the way that Chase continued to challenge us with his blank screen. He's been pushing us all along to engage with his characters and their nuances and the realities of life, which sometimes has loose ends. (The Russian!) Now, he's saying, this has been my responsibility for eight years. Now, it's your turn. You take the responsibility. You write the script.

The song playing in that scene is more evidence of that interpretation. It is, of course, by Journey, which is certainly what the Sopranos was for both its characters and its audience. It's called "Don't Stop Believing," and not only is it perfectly consistent with Tony's musical taste, it's loaded with suggestion.

Payin anything to roll the dice,
Just one more time
Some will win, some will lose
Some were born to sing the blues
Oh, the movie never ends
It goes on and on and on and on

Perfect, no? And then Chase cuts it abruptly short as singer Steve Perry utters the imprecation, "Don't stop." Boom. Black screen.

Don't stop, meaning what? Is Chase telling us to keep imagining, to continue the show in our own minds? Is he tweaking our desire to have the Sopranos continue forever? Is he making a statement on how we live life in defiance of mortality, plugging (heh-heh) away despite the fate that befalls us all? Pick the answer you want, or suggest one of your own. But appreciate Chase for his brilliance: This is one small detail in an hour-long show, and it alone provides more food for thought than a full episode of anything else on TV.

We have been conditioned by movies and half-hour sitcoms and hour-long dramas to think that everything has a neat and tidy ending. (It's happy! It's sad!)

It ain't so, of course. We owe Chase thanks for reminding us of that truth of that, and for not betraying the wonderful subtlety and nuance of his show in its last episode. Because, you see, by not telling us what happened, Chase did not, in fact, end the show. He gave us those eleven seconds of blank screen, time enough for our minds to ask questions, form memories, suggest possibilities—to wonder and imagine. Isn't an ellipse better than a period? Or, if not better, isn't it truer?

What happens to Tony Soprano after our screens go blank? The answer is up to us, and what a generous gift that is.  ¶ 7:31 AM 9 comments   

  Quote of the Day You want the Yankees to be good. They're more hateable when they're good.

—Bob Ryan in the Globe, arguing that the AL East race is going to tighten.  ¶ 7:24 AM 0 comments   

  Drew Faust's Bold Side In the Boston Globe, Drake Bennett writes a long essay arguing that Drew Faust is a bold, revisionist historian.

Faust's distinguished career as a historian suggests a temperament quite different from that of her reputation as a consensus builder. Although as an administrator she has by all accounts been a smooth inside operator, as a thinker and writer Faust has displayed a taste for shaking things up.

As evidence, he cites Faust's claim at one academic conference that the real reason the South lost the Civil War was because white women abandoned the cause.

I'm not entirely convinced. Read between the lines, the description of that assertion makes it sound, to put it crudely, like a publicity stunt. (Although bold in that way.)

What seems more accurate is that Faust has been smart enough to look at neglected areas of Civil War historiography—intellectuals and women, primarily. At least in part, this must be a consequence of her own social origins. And her new book, on how the Civil War changed Americans' understanding of death, also seems well-timed.

Another conclusion one might draw is that Drew Faust has an exquisite sense of timing and an appreciation for the importance of filling a vacuum.....  ¶ 9:09 AM 31 comments   

  Some Baseball Thoughts The Yanks have won six straight and are within one game of .500, now 9 1/2 back of the Red Sox...they're starting to look like the team they should be. A-Rod is having a ridiculous season: 24 homers and 63 RBIs, and it's barely June. The pitching is starting to pick up, and formerly slumping players like Bobby Abreu and Robinson Cano are finally starting to hit.

Problem for the Yankees is, the Red Sox, despite their loss yesterday—the only thing Randy Johnson did well when he was with the Yankees was beat the Red Sox—are less likely to fold than the '78 Sox, who were hampered by a lack of bench strength and some dubious managing by Don Zimmer, as well as a critical injury to shortstop (and team firebrand) Rick Burleson. This year's team has more depth and better pitching. Then again, how would they be doing if they had endured the number of injuries the Yankees have?  ¶ 8:34 AM 1 comments   

  More on the Hoxbys' Farewell The Globe and the Crimson follow up on yesterday's report here that Blair and Caroline Hoxby are leaving Harvard for Stanford.

In the Globe, the M-Bomb frames the story as an example of the difficulty universities face in dealing with academic couples.

The dilemma of the dual-career academic couple is becoming a major worry, not only for scholarly couples but for universities trying to woo top candidates and keep their faculty from fleeing town. Professors say the main reason is that more women are refusing to make their careers secondary to those of their husbands, although there are no data available to prove it.

While Marcella is surely right, the dual-career couple is not exactly a new phenomenon; I would have been more interested to see her report what actually happened—why Harvard didn't counter-offer, for example, as it appears it did not. I was interested, though, by her accounts of the lengths the Hoxbys had to travel to juggle their joint careers. What a drag.

The Crimson's piece provides more new information; it reminds, for example, that Caroline Hoxby once before threatened to leave Harvard for Stanford.

It remains something of a mystery that Harvard would not do more to retain this talented couple. Anyone know what happened?  ¶ 8:21 AM 35 comments   

  Monday Morning Zen
A Cozumel angelfish.  ¶ 8:17 AM 1 comments   

  At Harvard, Two Departures Though it has not yet been publicly reported, economist and Harvard College professor Caroline Hoxby and her husband, associate professor of history and literature Blair Hoxby, are leaving Harvard for Stanford University.

Caroline Hoxby has sent the following e-mail to her colleagues:

I am writing because I recently informed Jim Stock, our chairman, that my husband Blair and I will be accepting our Stanford offers. We do so with great enthusiasm: Stanford promises to be stimulating and productive place for us.

This, however, is not an email about Stanford. It is an email about you. I want to say how much I have valued working with you and all the members of the Harvard Economics Department over the past thirteen years. You have not just been great colleagues, but the best possible colleagues. It has been an honor to work with people who are dedicated to economics, to advancing the field, and to training the best students anywhere on earth. It's hard to think of anything better than working with people who are serious, creative, and very, very smart. Everything from thesis defenses to seminars to search committees has been a pleasure and a learning experience. Both Blair and I regret having to leave colleagues whom we respect so much.

I will personally miss everyone at Littauer, and I wish especially to express my heartfelt thanks to the staff, some of whom I have known for over twenty years! Every time the department manages to get itself through the beginning of a semester or the job market season, we have the staff to thank for pulling us through and providing our students with a sense that all things do indeed get done.

Jim Stock has done a wonderful job this year trying to ensure that the Harvard situation worked out for us, and I am clapping for him as I write (tricky but possible). He could not have been a better or more responsive chairman. Many people in the department, other departments in the FAS, and other schools in the University have also been concerned about the situation and have expressed their concern to me and/or the administration in emails, in telephone calls, and in person. I am deeply grateful for the concern and the support we've been lent. We could not have wished for anything more from our chairman, our faculty colleagues, the staff, or our students.

All good thoughts and wishes,

Caroline Hoxby

I know only a little about Blair Hoxby's work, but have heard good things about his scholarship and teaching. For her part, Caroline Hoxby is widely respected in her field, and the loss of a Harvard College professor—the title is intended to reflect excellence in teaching—does not bode well for the university's commitment to undergraduate teaching. Or diversity, for that matter: Caroline Hoxby is a female, African-American economist, and that is a select group.

This can only be considered a huge loss for Harvard.




Blair and Caroline Hoxby.  ¶ 11:51 AM 15 comments   

  The Culture of Secrecy Ted Gup, a very fine and serious journalist, has an important essay in today's Washington Post on the American culture of secrecy. More and more information is being classified as secret by the government, courts, and corporations, Gup writes, and this obsession with secrecy is a real threat to American citizens and security.

For the past six years, I've been exploring the resurgent culture of secrecy. What I've found is a confluence of causes behind it, among them the chill wrought by 9/11, industry deregulation, the long dominance of a single political party, fear of litigation and liability and the threat of the Internet. But perhaps most alarming to me was the public's increasing tolerance of secrecy. Without timely information, citizens are reduced to mere residents, and representative government atrophies into a representational image of democracy as illusory as a hologram.

The examples Gup provides are truly horrifying.

Fourteen states have signed secrecy agreements with the Agriculture Department under which they will be notified about contaminated foods but agree not to ask about the source of those foods or the markets and restaurants that carry them. A federal database set up to warn people about dangerous doctors is inaccessible to the general public and available only to those in the health-care field. A government-run database designed to give the public early warnings about unsafe vehicles and tires does not reveal certain negative findings out of concern that they may "cause substantial competitive harm" to the manufacturers.

Gup has a new book out on the subject, Nation of Secrets. Check it out.  ¶ 7:55 AM 1 comments   

  Crimes and Punishments While Paris Hilton cries about going to jail for a few days, two parents from Charlottesville, VA, are headed to the slammer for 27 months for serving alcohol to minors at a party. Instead of being driven there in a Mercedes, they'll be driven by their two sons.....

Albemarle County Commonwealth's Attorney James L. Camblos III, who prosecuted the parents, said it was the worst case of underage drinking he has had to deal with in 15 years. "Not only were they serving alcohol to 15- and 16-year-olds, they misled parents who called to ask about alcohol, and they tried to get the kids to cover it up after police got there," Camblos said.

But the mother, who helped arrange the party for her 16-year-old son, thinks the punishment is too harsh for the crime.

"No one left the party," said [Elisa] Kelly, 42, who collected car keys that night almost five years ago to prevent anyone from leaving. "No one was hurt. No one drove anywhere. I really don't think I deserve to go to jail for this long."

I'm inclined to agree—two years in jail? Surely that doesn't serve the public good. The difference, it seems to me, is that Paris Hilton had gotten in trouble for drunk driving, while these two people made sure that no one could drive....







Brandon, left, and Ryan Kenty will drive
their mother, Elisa Kelly, to jail Monday,
when she is to start a 27-month sentence
for providing alcohol at Ryan's 16th
birthday party in 2002.
(Washington Post photo)











Paris, before the fall.  ¶ 10:09 AM 0 comments   

  Drew Faust in the Globe Marcella Bombardieri covers Drew Faust's address to Radcliffe.

Faust promised not to forget her allegiance to the institution that has so often been overshadowed by the larger university.

"My commitment to this experiment in faith will remain unfaltering," she said. "I have loved being Radcliffe's dean."

Faust looked close to tears when the audience, gathered under a breezy tent in Radcliffe Yard, gave her a standing ovation.

Sounds like a nice moment—and one that would be hard to imagine with prior presidents.  ¶ 8:49 AM 0 comments   

  Larry Summers in the Times In the Times magazine, David Leonhardt writes an interesting, generally glowing essay about Larry Summers and his intellectual, professional, and personal (not so much personal) evolutions. It's even illustrated with a portrait by fashion photographer Nigel Parry.



(Summers does not always photograph flatteringly, but he usually photographs interestingly, as this portrait shows.)

The piece reinforces the impression that Summers is a fascinating guy with enormous intellectual energy and a certain physical restlessness; I'd bet if you asked him to lay on the beach for two hours, he'd bolt after twenty minutes. He's now on the board of Teach for America, he's joined an advisory board of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, and of course he's returning to Harvard. His Clinton era friends are ubiquitous. "In effect, Summers is assembling a virtual think tank," Leonhardt writes, though he strangely doesn't mention that Summers has already helped assemble a real thinktank, the Hamilton Project.

There are a couple of Harvard-related things that I think Leonhardt doesn't get quite right.

..The notion that Summers can be a bully misses one thing: he likes it when people fight back.

I know this is Summers' reputation, and it's surely true some of the time; but as many people told me while I was reporting Harvard Rules, it isn't always true, and there were plenty of occasions when people tried to argue with Summers and he did not respond well. This usually seemed to be the case where a matter of policy was at question, rather than an intellectual issue. In other words, Summers was more comfortable having his intellect challenged than his authority or his decision-making.

Leonhardt also writes: But back in academia, where social skills are not a prerequisite for success, he seemed to forget that his new job had more in common with being a cabinet secretary than with being a professor.

Social skills are not a prerequisite for success in academia? Nonsense. If you're engaged in pure intellectual work, perhaps not. But if you have the slightest administrative authority, or wish to, social skills are absolutely vital. I would point you to Neil Rudenstine, Skip Gates, Derek Bok, and Drew Faust. Imagine a President Lawrence Summers with social skills—things could have been very different. Would have been very different.

That said, Leonhardt's piece does capture some of what makes Summers such a compelling figure, and you have to respect the way that he has rebounded from his fall last spring. In some ways, his current role as a sort of intellectual free radical almost seems to suit Summers better than his role as president of Harvard. He's become a kind of economic ombudsman, working on policy issues in numerous different contexts and fora.

Leonhardt's piece was written before Summers received an honorary degree, and I gather from posters below that he received a substantial ovation when his award was announced. The rehabilitation is virtually complete. I look forward to see what happens next.

And a final note: The timing of the piece is interesting indeed, hitting the stands just in time for the Harvard reunions. Leonhardt writes that Summers has the reputation of considering himself the smartest guy in every room that he's in. Maybe, maybe not. What I think more true is that Summers can not help but upstage everyone else in every room he's in. Which surely will make life interesting for his successor.  ¶ 8:06 AM 23 comments   

  Drew Faust in Bloomberg I'm still catching up after vacation on all the Harvard news, but I did want to post this short Bloomberg profile of Drew Faust.

``Harvard needs to be far more one university than it ever has before,'' Faust said. Science ``is an area in which structures need to catch up with realities of knowledge and how knowledge is unfolding.''

I know that President-elect Faust wants to be cautious, and understandably so, in her public rhetoric. And yet, she is getting so good at saying nothing that she runs the risk of adopting boilerplate as her native tongue. If Larry Summers defined one rhetorical extreme, Drew Faust seems to be staking out the other.

In the midst of all the catching-up, I didn't have the chance to watch much of Commencement. I know there was a lot of star power there, but it sounds like the new president was still a fairly low-key presence. I would have thought that the university would have taken the occasion to help elevate her profile, but apparently that was not the strategy....  ¶ 7:44 AM 31 comments   

  The GOP's Shrinking Future Two pieces in the Times today suggest that the Republican Party is so enslaved to its bigotry that it'd rather commit political suicide than abandon old biases.

The first news, of course, is that Republicans in the Senate killed the immigration bill, and now resolving the immigration problem has been put off indefinitely. American Latinos will get the message: the GOP just doesn't want them here. Though there are plenty of reasons why this largely religious, socially conservative group of immigrants could gravitate toward the Republicans, the GOP seems determined to push them away. It's political suicide.

The second issue is the continuing division between the two parties on "don't ask, don't tell." Democrats are repudiating it; Republicans continue to endorse discrimination against gays in the military. John McCain says that reconsidering the issue would be a "terrific mistake." Rudy Giuliani, who surely knows better—who shared an apartment with two gay men after he cheated on his wife and left her—says that "at a time of war, you don't make fundamental changes like this." This despite polls saying that a majority of men and women in the military no longer care, not to mention a severe shortage of soldiers. In any case, the supposition presupposes a logic that it does not contain. Why not make fundamental changes in a time of war? We've made fundamental changes in other means of conducting the war—the "surge," for instance. Why not this one?

Imagine a conservative who wasn't a bigot but advocated fiscal and foreign policy caution—he or she would be a very powerful candidate. But perhaps those primary voters just won't accept such a trailblazer.

In other Republican news, Alaska senator Ted Stevens turns out probably to be a crook. No surprise there, but...good! For four decades in the Senate, Stevens has done nothing but funnel pork barrel dollars to his home state and agitate against every pro-environment measure to come before that body. Stevens is, simply, an awful senator, and anything that could get him out of office is a good thing.  ¶ 7:16 AM 3 comments   

  These Degrees Are Getting Hotter As a poster below first mentioned, Harvard is giving Larry Summers and Conrad Harper honorary degrees today.

I presume this is an attempt to make them both feel better about the university that, for various reasons, each felt forced to leave, even if only temporarily. An act of healing. And, of course, the better Summers and Harper feel about Harvard, the more likely they are to keep quiet about what really happened during the Summers' years.

Think I'm being too cynical? Surely it can't be coincidence that Harper and Summers are getting honorary degrees the same year.... Wouldn't you have loved to have been a fly on the wall for those meetings?

Lots of fun questions surround this one. What exactly will that honorary degree commendation to Larry Summers say? How do you finesse the fact that you're giving an honorary degree to a man who was forced to resign from the presidency of the university? And why not wait a little longer to do it?  ¶ 7:26 AM 5 comments   

  The Race Thickens Is it just me, or have the Red Sox lost four straight, while the Yankees are playing pretty good ball?
Chien Ming-Wang, my favorite Yankee pitcher, pitched a complete game last night—the team's first in almost a year. Love that. The complete game has almost vanished from baseball, but in the time period I'm writing my book about—the late 1970's—it was basically assumed that pitchers would go nine unless they were getting shelled. Perhaps that was too extreme, too hard on pitchers' arms. But I'm not a fan of having a guy go five innings, then bringing in a multitude of relievers who face one or two batters each. It makes the games go on forever, and it reduces the drama of seeing one pitcher work for an extended period.




Chien-Ming Wang won 19 games last year, more than anyone else in the American League.
Will he win 20 this year?


  ¶ 7:14 AM 5 comments   

  Drew Faust in 02138 My profile of Harvard's new president is online now on the 02138 website.

Here's the blurb:

As Drew Gilpin Faust prepares to take Harvard’s helm, the president-elect remains a little-known figure to many faculty, students, and alumni. How did the Civil War historian and Radcliffe dean make her way to the top of the world’s most powerful university? And what does she intend to do now that she’s there? Richard Bradley reports on the big questions surrounding Harvard’s new president.

And the mag's cover:

  ¶ 10:30 PM 23 comments   

  Harvard Has a Dean... ...and his name is Michael Smith. He's an associate dean for computer science and engineering, and by all accounts he's a very nice guy.

Also, his name first surfaced as a decanal candidate on this blog on March 30....

Smith is not a well-known figure on campus, and the Crimson suggest that administrative experience is a question mark.

Though the chairman of a private software company and former swim coach has a wide range of leadership experience outside of the academy, his administrative experience at Harvard is limited when compared to the three deans who preceded him.

In the Globe, the M-Bomb suggests that the choice of Smith is something of a surprise.

However, Smith, associate dean for computer science and engineering, was a surprising choice to many professors because he is not widely known outside [his] scientific areas.

But in both the Globe and the Crimson, Harry Lewis is quoted as being highly supportive of Smith, calling him "a wonderful person."

Your thoughts?  ¶ 10:40 AM 0 comments   

  Eric Alterman...Busted! Journalist Eric Alterman, whom I've described as the most unpopular person in journalism, but Gawker describes as "generally acknowledged...to be the biggest putz in journalism," has been arrested for trespassing after he repeatedly refused to leave the "spin room" after the recent Democratic debate.

Police said he was asked by an executive at the party if he was invited to the private area and was asked to leave. A police officer was called after a verbal altercation ensued. According to police, Alterman was asked seven times to leave and became increasingly loud as he refused.

Alterman revels in the confirmation of his existence. Other journalists are bemused....  ¶ 10:18 AM 1 comments   

  The End of the Innocence It's the end of my vacation, and I'll be getting on a plane in a few hours. Now it's time for a relaxed breakfast—no need to get ready for going out on the water today—a little last-minute shopping, and packing up the gear for the flight home. I may try to develop the film I shot on our final dive yesterday. If it comes out, I took some photos that could be terrific: spotted trunkfish, angel fish, toad fish, a flounder, and much more. But that's a big if.

Meanwhile, I see that Drew Faust still hasn't chosen a dean. In the long run, this delay probably won't matter. In the short run, it's not making her look strong.

I also see that Derek Bok has announced that he is close to making a decision on calendar reform. Curious. It's a big decision to make when your predecessor has been named for, what, almost four months now? Presumably this is something they would do in sync, but you never know...

Bok may be doing something so that Faust doesn't have to, but this act of unilateral authority, it seems to me, also has the effect of making Faust look less than strong....  ¶ 7:38 AM 25 comments