Shots in the Dark

Brain scientist Simon Baron-Cohen has a fascinating op-ed in today’s Times, playing off Larry Summers’ women-in-science brouahaha and positing a cause for autism. I’m a little tired to go into it, but this one is well worth-reading—and parsing for subtexts.

I didn’t know them, but it feels as if they were old friends….

Today marks the sad passing of ABC News anchor Peter Jennings. I won’t add to the already effusive praise of Jennings, except to say that he seems to have lived with class and dignity, all the way until the end. His death really does signify a passing of an era, and so in some curious way, it is doubly affecting.

Less noticed is the death of Cuban musician Ibrahim Ferrer, known as one of the members of the Buena Vista Social Club. In 1940, a 13-year-old orphan, Ferrer joined a band, and proceeded to make beautiful music for the next seven decades. He was temporarily retired, living on a pension and shining shoes to make extra money, when the American musician and musical anthropologist Ry Cooder rediscovered him and coaxed him back into playing. For this, we should all be grateful to Cooder. He gave an old man reason to sing again…and he brought Ferrer’s music to the world outside Cuba. Not a bad end to a remarkable life.

Over at HuffPo, Arianna Huffington reports that the Times has assigned reporter Doug Jehl—quite a good reporter, by the way—to investigate the role of Judith Miller, the paper’s currently jailed reporter, in the Valerie Plame case. That doesn’t bode well for Miller. But if Arianna’s right, kudos to the Times for having the guts to investigate its own reporter, who has become a major news story in her own right.

I’ve defended Miller in the past, arguing that despite her erroneous war reporting, we should respect her principled stand on sourcing (ostensibly the reason she’s in jail now).

But more and more, it appears that Miller is keeping quiet because her own role in this matter was not to report a story, but to spread dirt on Plame’s husband, Joe Wilson, who had attacked the administration’s efforts to build support for a war; Miller approved of those efforts.

My defense of Judith Miller, I’m sorry to say, is getting harder to sustain.

(Woe are the Yankees?)

Randy Johnson is hurt…Bernie Williams is hurt…Carl Pavano’s probably out for the season…Jared Wright is hurt…Kevin Brown is hurt…Chien Mien Wang is hurt…Ruben Sierra is hurt….

There are five—count ’em, five—pitchers on that list. Who would have thought that in August the Yankees would be limping along with a starting rotation of Mike Mussina, Randy Johnson (maybe), Al Leiter, Aaron Small, and…Hideo Nomo? Yikes. The latter three have all pitched in the minor leagues this season….

Just so you know, in case the Yankees don’t make the playoffs, I am laying the groundwork to claim a moral victory.

Marvin Weitzman, the Harvard economics professor arrested for stealing manure from a local farm, has settled his case for $600 in damages and a $300 donation to the local Boy Scout troop.

The Crimson summarizes: “On April 1—Weitzman’s birthday—the tenured professor was detained while trying to take manure from the Lane farm. In that incident, Weitzman reportedly tried to offer $20, and then $40, for the truckload of manure, but was not allowed to leave the property until police arrived on the scene. The malicious destruction of property charge came from damage Weitzman’s tires left on the farm.”

Now he’s paying restitution to “98-year-old Charles L. ‘Charlie’ Lane, Sr.”

I’m just trying to picture how exactly Charlie Lane, Sr., kept Weitzman from leaving until police arrived…. That must have been a bit surreal, don’t you think?

A small suggestion for the Harvard economics department: How about a mandatory course on ethics? For the professors, of course….

For those of you who take the New York Times…

Ever had to temporarily suspend your delivery because of, say, vacation? The Times gives you an option to donate your papers to “educational institutions” rather than just getting a credit on your bill. The way the Times’ phone-system is set up, it’s easy to do this unintentionally.

This option has always struck me as a scam only slightly inferior to “Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”

Think about it. You’re still paying for the papers, of course. So the Times not only makes money from your purchase, but also gets a tax write-off for all the papers it “donates.” I’ll bet that a) for tax purposes, the Times values those donated papers at a price greater than you pay for home delivery, and b) the number of donated papers actually adds up to a pretty substantial tax credit.

I wonder where all those donated papers really go, anyway, and if the recipients even read them….

Anyone?

On his always thought-provoking blog, Economic Principals, David Warsh adds his insights to the Andrei Shleifer scandal. Warsh has been following this story closely for years, and he makes a number of valuable points.

Such as:

—more bad news will come for Harvard in the form of journalist/author David McClintock, who’s working on a feature magazine story about the HIID scandal

—Warsh nicely sums up Shleifer’s malfeasance: “Judge Woodlock found that, once installed by the US as its adviser to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, Shleifer invited his deputy Hay to invest with him in Russian oil stocks despite contract prohibitions against such investments, then gradually upped the ante.

“Their illicit activities culminated in an attempt (at a regulatory agency they advised) to vault to the head of the licensing queue a company formed by Shleifer’s wife and Hay’s girlfriend to offer the first Russian mutual funds. That was the caper which scandalized Harvard’s Moscow office. USAID investigated and swiftly shut the project down.”

—While the Harvard case is a huge story in Russia, it’s gotten almost no play here. The NYT and the Washington Post story both ran only an AP piece on the scandal. (RB: This is lousy editorial judgment.) Only the Journal covered the story well. (RB: So irrelevant is the Globe, Warsh doesn’t even mention it.)

—Warsh also parses the connections between Shleifer and Larry Summers, making clear that Summers’ role in this matter is more complicated than just a matter of friendship. [Italics mine.]

“A somewhat more intriguing figure than Shleifer in the Russia Project is economist Lawrence Summers, Shleifer’s mentor and old friend, who taught him as an undergraduate; sent him to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to train; took him to Lithuania to practice country-doctoring; brought him back from the University of Chicago to teach at Harvard; helped put him in the Russia job; oversaw, as an increasingly senior Treasury Department official, Shleifer’s efforts in Moscow; and, once he returned to Harvard as president, defended his protégé.

“Friendship explains much of Summers’ role. A combination of patriotism, arrogance, marital hard times and plain bad judgment explains the rest. The Harvard president is in a world of woe. The likelihood that justice will be meted out to him on any separable basis is not great. The Bad-News Train is bearing down on Larry Summers at 40 miles per hour.”

Warsh sums up by wondering why Harvard didn’t just come clean in the first place—why the university decided to stand by a figure who, even then, seemed pretty clearly to have ripped off the US government in his desire to enrich himself.

He writes: “Why not acknowledge obvious wrongdoing? Why prefer intelligence to integrity? In the autumn, the venue of the Shleifer matter will shift to the inner councils of the Harvard faculty and to the economics profession. These are the questions they’ll be asking then.”

That second question—why prefer intelligence to integrity?—goes to the heart of much that is wrong with current Harvard. After all, the fetishization of intelligence over character was the primary, if unspoken, rationale for choosing Larry Summers as president. These hyper-smart chickens are coming home to roost.

Back in May, I wrote a post called “Jason Giambi Gets a Hit,” in which I talked about the New York Yankee’s struggle to come back from steroid use and illness—a tumor on the pituitary gland. Giambi was having a terrible season at that point. He looked helpless at the plate, like he was battling not just pitchers and fans, but also his own internal demons. And the New York media was vilifying him; “Boot the Bum,” said the ever-civil New York Post.

But I always liked Giambi, and I thought he deserved some credit for being the only man in baseball to admit that he used steroids.

“Jason Giambi is trying to make up for his mistakes, and I, for one, am pulling for him,” I wrote. “Wouldn’t we all feel better if Jason Giambi succeeded?”

Well, as today’s New York Times chronicles, Giambi has succeeded. Last month he hit 14 home runs, tying Mickey Mantle for the most home runs ever hit by a Yankee in a single month. In a nice piece of baseball poetry, Mantle is Giambi’s hero; Giambi wears the number 25 because it adds up to Mantle’s seven.

But home runs are over-rated, in my opinion. Two seconds of excitement followed by anti-climax. What’s really cool about Giambi is his league-leading on-base percentage of .457. Giambi doesn’t swing at bad pitches, and his finesse at the plate adds more drama and tension to a typical at-bat than a random hope for a long ball.

Other steroid users around the league are not faring so well. Barry Bonds is sulking his way out of baseball. Rafael Palmeiro is almost certainly a perjurer. Sammy Sosa is the incredible shrinking power hitter.

But Jason Giambi has scratched and clawed his way back to the top by working hard and refusing to succumb to the vicious criticism he’s received. No matter how he and the Yankees finish this year, he’s shown baseball a road back from the scandal of steroids. Other players will have better statistics, but no one will have done more for the sport. No story this year is more human or more inspiring. Jason Giambi should be the American League’s most valuable player.

The Rolling Stones catalogue has just been released on iTunes, and a quick perusal of it makes a few things obvious.

1) They used to be really good.
2) They suck now. Can anyone name a song off, say, the past six records they’ve made?
3) It’s very likely that they’ve put out more greatest hits albums than they’ve put out albums of new material.
4) They are corporate whores.

Actually, I don’t mention number four because of iTunes, but because of the excruciatingly bad Ameriquest ads all over television at the moment. They feature a guy in a suit who’s supposed to be in the front rows of a Stones concert—and boy, there’s a telling image—although I think the crowd is actually superimposed on footage of the Stones playing. He’s talking about how Ameriquest, which is a mortgage company, is sponsoring the new Rolling Stones tour.

This is such a bummer for so many reasons….

I guess there’s a certain appropriateness to the fact that a rock and roll tour by a group of sexagenarians is being sponsored by a mortgage company. But for the consumer, what exactly does sponsorship mean? Other than a barrage of poorly-produced ads?

The Rolling Stones were, if memory serves, the first band ever to have a tour sponsored. Back in 1981, Jovan Musk (also high on the list of deeply uncool sponsors) paid the band $500,000 to underwrite the tour. Since then, Budweiser and Sprint have paid significantly more.

The band originally explained this sell-out as a way of keeping ticket prices down, but that’s a rationale they don’t even try to throw against the wall anymore, because they know it won’t stick. Every time they hit the road, the Stones charge the highest ticket prices in the world of music—face value for Stones tickets is often in the hundreds of dollars.

If these guys have managed their money well, they must all be worth in the nine figures. And yet, they constantly debase their reputation (sponsorship, playing corporate gigs and birthday parties, licensing their songs) in their lust for lucre. How much money do you need to be happy? How much is enough?

The idea that rock ‘n roll is a pure art form, free of commercial corruption, has of course never been true. But there are degrees. The Rolling Stones make me respect even more artists like Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Tom Petty, who a) don’t accept sponsorship and would never let their music appear in ads, and b) manage to keep their ticket prices down nonetheless.

I have this naive idea that greed is wrong (which is one reason I can’t watch “The Apprentice“). It often makes me feel alienated from mainstream American culture. But it also makes me really appreciate people in high places who feel the same way.

Next on the musical whore list: Sheryl Crow.

The Times weighs in with a piece on Harvard’s difficulty replacing Jack Meyer, the brilliant money manager who’s overseen the truly remarkable rise in the university’s portfolio—I’m guessing it’s hit the $25 billion mark by now. The Times reports that, in the decade ending in 2004, Harvard had an average annual return of 15.9%. Wow.

No one wants the job, the Times suggests, because a) it’s high-profile, and money managers don’t like to be in the spotlight (RB: that’s far from universal, IMHO), and b) while they can make, say, $30 million a year at Harvard, if they ran a hedge fund, they might make something more like $250 million annually.

Lots of thoughts about this.

First, and most important, the Times completely ignores another, oft-whispered reason for Meyer’s departure and the reluctance of anyone else to take the job: the role that Summers may have played in Meyer’s decision to resign.

I’ve heard from multiple sources in the Harvard world and the financial community that Meyers had grown frustrated with Summers’ desire to have direct involvement in the Harvard Management Company, the investment firm Meyers ran to manage Harvard’s money—even to the point of suggesting specific investment strategies and choices. That, more than the controversy over his staff salaries, may be the reason Meyers quit.

It may also be the reason no one else wants the job.

The Times inadvertently nibbles around the edges of this by reporting that the original search team for a Meyers replacement consisted of Summers, brother-in-arms Robert Rubin, and University treasurer James Rothenburg. (Both Rubin and Rothenburg are Summers’ appointees to the Corporation.) That trio failed to find anyone, but its existence alone suggests that Summers must have wanted someone he could keep close, someone he could control. The fact that it failed might also suggest that those interviewed by the threesome were wary of Summers’ role.

(The search is now being undertaken by a search committee. One wonders at what point Summers, Rubin and Rothenberg realized that their failure to hire someone was going to make them look silly.)

Because, truth be told, the salary differential between Harvard and hedge funds can’t alone explain the fact that Harvard hasn’t found anyone in the eight months it’s been looking. Surely there must be a money manager somewhere who thinks that $25 million a year is enough; surely there must be a Harvard alum somewhere who believes that taking a money hit from the offensive to the insane is worth it, to serve the old alma mater. Perhaps it’s not the money that matters, but the boss.

I know that some reporters have tried to get at the real story of Meyer’s exit, but as long as Meyer won’t talk, it’s a tough nut to crack. Still, it’s a huge and important story. Harvard can survive tension between the president and his faculty. But it will not stand for a president who may have driven out a money manager with an unprecedented track record. Because in the end, the key to Harvard’s success, its titanic image, its aura of fortress-like impregnability, is money.

One wonders, too, how those alumni donations are going…wasn’t that capital campaign supposed to start by now? Or has it been postponed again?

It would be interesting for someone at some point to create a chart of the problems that Summers was supposed to have solved…versus those he has created.