Archive for January, 2006

I’m a Bad Person for Saying This…

Posted on January 19th, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

…but you know who I really wish the tabloids would get a picture of? The face transplant woman.

I know: crummy me. But I’m fascinated by the whole thing—the medical technique, which I still haven’t seen well-explained; the ethical issues involved; the murky circumstances of the woman’s facial damage (she took too many sleeping pills and her dog, trying to wake her up, ate her face?).

Apparently she took a walk in Lyon the other day. Where are our best paparrazzi when we need them? Come on, guys. Do we really need yet another photo of Lindsay Lohan?

A Congressman Goes to Brazil

Posted on January 19th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Massachusetts congressman Michael E. Capuano is taking heat for accepting an all-expense paid trip to Brazil, paid for by a nonprofit business organization, that cost $19, 403.

According to the Boston Globe, the trip was paid for by a group called the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute, which is funded by big business.
(But don’t expect to find that out on its website; if you click on the link that says “Funding,” you get this — “The requested URL /mission.htm. was not found on this server.”—which is the web equivalent of a middle finger.)

Capuano, a Democrat*, was accompanied by lobbyists on every stage of the trip, from Sao Paulo to Brasilia to Rio.

Asked if that was a problem, David M. Klaus, executive director of the Congressional Economic Leadership Institute, answered, “‘We have an unofficial rule that you leave your lobbying hat at the door.”

Don’t you just love it when people say things that are so blatantly false, you wonder if they’re not kind of giggling when they say it?

Capuano was also accompanied by his wife, which was probably a good thing for his marriage—trust me, I’ve been to Brazil—but, ethically speaking, seems a bit problematic.

When asked about the substantial price of the trip—essentially a $20, 000 bribe—Capuano told Globe reporter Michael Kanish, ”My reaction was the same as yours: What the heck cost so much?”

Capuano added that he was surprised that his business-class airline seats were so expensive. ”I had no clue,” he said. ”I didn’t pay for it.”

Well…yes. That’s the point.
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* Thanks to those who pointed out that Capuano is a Democrat and not a Republican, as I had originally posted.

Is It Real? Or Is It Jim Frey?*

Posted on January 18th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

Jim Frey’s website, which was password-protected as of yesterday, now sports this disclaimer (Frey is full of disclaimers these days):

Hello to the Friends and Supporters of James Frey -

Unfortunately the BigJimIndustries site is down right now because of the enormous amount of traffic it was getting. There were over 300,000 unique visitors in the past week, his bandwidth was up around 3200kb/s, and most importantly it was affecting access to other clients who share the same network connection as BigJimIndustries.com. As you probably saw in the first few days during the heat of the controversy the site was still up, so it is not down now b/c of the criticism or detractors. We basically forced James to take the site down, and for that we apologize to his friends and fans. As the controversy and resulting traffic dies down, I’m sure the site will go back up.

Thank you for your understanding and patience.

Is it true? The “essential truth”? “Some form of journalistic truth”? Who the heck knows? I guess that’s what happens when you lie like a cheap rug.

(Although the fact that the “we” who “basically forced James to take the site down” go unidentified does make one wonder….)

Hey, folks, come on over to Shots in the Dark…I won’t lie to you: I have never been arrested.
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P.S. For you young folks out there, the title of this blog entry is a play on an old ad for Memorex cassette tape. (Don’t you just love that company name? Memorex!)

Cassette tape was…oh, never mind.

James Frey: Just Can’t Get Enough

Posted on January 18th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

Tom Scocca, in the New York Observer, writes brilliantly on James Frey.

If you really, really like and support James Frey, you won’t read it, because you are making your decision based on emotion rather than reason. Which is your prerogative.

If you think that what he did is appalling, as I do, then you should read this piece, just…well, because you’ll feel even more that way.

Knowing as we now do that James Frey never went to jail for hitting a cop with his car, here’s my favorite part of Scocca’s story:

…the copyright page of My Friend Leonard informs readers: “Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed. Some sequences and details of events have been changed.”

Fine. Then comes the opening sentence: “On my first day in jail, a three hundred pound man named Porterhouse hit me in the back of the head with a metal tray.”

In other words: “On my first day in jail*, a three hundred pound man** named Porterhouse*** hit me in the back of the head**** with a metal tray*****.”

*The author never went to jail.

**Weight is an estimate; also the author, not being in jail, never met such a person.

***Not his real name; also the author never met such a person.

****Because the author’s head was not present in jail, such a blow did not actually land.

***** The composition of the tray is a guess, because the author did not actually get hit by it, because the author was never in jail.

Frigging brilliant.

Teddy Dumps the Owl

Posted on January 18th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Ted Kennedy, chastised by Republicans for being a member of an all-male club, has announced his intention to resign from the Owl, a Harvard final club.

I admire Teddy quite a bit, particularly for his courage at the funeral of my old boss, but sometimes he can frustrate. “I’m not a member; I continue to pay about $100,” Kennedy told the Boston Herald, which then added, “He then said of being a member in a club that discriminates against women, ‘I shouldn’t be and I’m going to get out of it as fast as I can.'”

Um…Senator…if you’re not a member, you don’t have to “get out of it.” So, obviously, you are.

I doubt this will happen, but Kennedy’s resignation could reinvigorate the conversation about Harvard final clubs.

Here’s the bottom line: Gentlemen, if Skull and Bones can go co-ed, so can—and should—you.

Shrouding Summers

Posted on January 18th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

The Crimson runs part two of Zachary M. Sewards’ tick-tock of last winter’s crisis in Mass. Hall. There’s not a lot of breaking news in it, but the story is fascinating reading nonetheless for its meticulous description of the strategizing within the president’s inner circle as his strategists desperately fought to save his job.

A couple of particularly interesting tidbits emerge.

One is the makeup of Summers’ inner circle: Bob Rubin, Jeremy Knowles (what a crafty fellow that Knowles is—he’d have made a great spy), David Gergen (not so much crafty as craven; Gergen doesn’t care who’s in power, as long as that person gives Gergen access), and Sidney Verba.

(You will remember that it was Verba who singlehandedly okayed Google’s project to digitize Harvard’s libraries, a project which was pushed by Larry Summers’ former chief of staff, Sheryl Sandberg. We know what’s in it for Google: the legitimizing effect of Harvard’s participation in a very controversial matter. Who knows what’s in it for Verba?)

(Also, check out David Gergen’s website, with its hilarious picture of Gergen superimposed on an image of the White House, as if he were Abe Lincoln or something. The “latest news” section is a collection of Gergen media soundbites. Sheesh. And people gave Cornel West a hard time.)

The second interesting factoid from Zachary Seward’s article is the suggestion that Corporation senior fellow James Houghton pressured Summers to release the transcript of his remarks, and that Houghton’s role was decisive in the decision to do that.

I don’t know if Seward is running a third piece, but the article that I’d really like to read would detail the inner workings of the Corporation during this period. What the hell was going on inside that bizarre little group? I’d love to know. Tough story to report, but Seward’s sources seem to be pretty good…..

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P.S. Here’s a small-world, full-disclosure tidbit for you: After my mother read Harvard Rules, she casually mentioned to me that, almost half a century ago, she used to date Jamie Houghton rather seriously…until the man who would be my father came along.

Mom, you could have told me that before I finished the book…

Frey: An Addendum

Posted on January 17th, 2006 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

James Frey has now password-protected his webpage, www.bigjimindustries.com.

Which is kind of bad enough…but since the site doesn’t actually give you a way to register, what it means is that you can’t access it at all.

You know, for a guy who says he’s so tough, constantly wanting to “kick the crap” out of people, enduring a full root canal without anaesthesia (uh-huh, I’m sure), James Frey is kind of a wuss.

Why James Frey Matters

Posted on January 17th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 11 Comments »

Some of you have written asking why I care so much about James Frey’s fabrications. It’s still a good book, you’ve said. It’s helped a lot of people.

I have some personal feelings related to having written a memoir myself and also my training in the craft of journalism. But mostly, I believe that truth does matter, and I worry that our culture is stumbling down a slippery slope of reality TV, presidential spin, academic corruption and made-up memoirs in which truth is becoming malleable, obsolete and irrelevant.

Michiko Kakutani writes about this phenomenon in a similar, more eloquent vein in today’s Times. Frey’s book, she argues,

…is not, however, just a case about truth-in-labeling or the misrepresentations of one author: after all, there have been plenty of charges about phony or inflated memoirs in the past, most notably about Lillian Hellman’s 1973 book “Pentimento.” It is a case about how much value contemporary culture places on the very idea of truth. Indeed, Mr. Frey’s contention that having 5 percent or so of his book in dispute was “comfortably within the realm of what’s appropriate for a memoir” and the troubling insistence of his publishers and his cheerleader Oprah Winfrey that it really didn’t matter if he’d taken liberties with the facts of his story underscore the waning importance people these days attach to objectivity and veracity.

Kakutani smartly places Frey in the context of other cultural trends, such as postmodernism, which suggest that all truth is relative and, indeed, there may be no such thing as objective truth.

The Bush White House has used similar arguments to try to discredit the mainstream press and its watch-dog role, suggesting that there is no such thing as truly independent reporting or even a set of mutually agreed upon facts, that there are no distinctions between willfully partisan hacks and reporters who genuinely strive to deliver the best obtainable truth.

This relativistic mindset compounds the public cynicism that has hardened in recent years, in the wake of corporate scandals, political corruption scandals and the selling of the war against Iraq on the discredited premise of weapons of mass destruction. And it creates a climate in which concepts like “credibility” and “perception” replace the old ideas of objective truth - a climate in which the efforts of nonfiction writers to be as truthful and accurate as possible give way to shrugs about percentage points of accountability, a climate in which Ms. Winfrey can declare that the revelation that Mr. Frey made up parts of his memoir is “much ado about nothing.”

Now you know why James Frey matters—because truth matters, and the skepticism that objective truth exists doesn’t stay confined to the genre of memoir, but creeps into historiography, politics, the law, and every other aspect of society. If you don’t believe me—if you think that James Frey’s book helped millions, and so whatever he did is acceptable—let’s turn this around:

You weren’t really alcoholic, you just say you were.

Are you sure you were raped? Maybe you just have a different perspective on a sexual encounter?

It doesn’t matter if there weren’t weapons of mass destruction in Iraq—there could have been.

Patrick Tillman died a hero’s death.

Despite what Elie Wiesel says, the Holocaust didn’t really happen. After all, his book is just a memoir.

You see? James Frey’s game isn’t hard to play. Anyone can do it, and if no one objects, soon everyone will. And the resulting cynicism, corruption, historical revisionism and violence is far more damaging to society than even the very painful—and real—problems of alcoholism and drug abuse.

More Lies from James Frey

Posted on January 16th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Did James Frey’s lover Lilly really commit suicide, as he describes in his sham-book, “A Million Little Pieces”?

Stephen Levitt, writing on his Freakonomics website, doesn’t think so….

I don’t really have the time to check out any of Frey’s claims myself, and I don’t feel the need to; to my mind, what’s already been disproved about the book undermines its veracity so fundamentally that there’s no need to continue.

But I will go on record as venturing that the book contains far more lies than facts. If Frey lied about things like his criminal record—things that could be checked out—why wouldn’t he lie about things that would be virtually impossible to check?

Answer: Of course he would, and surely did…..

Because of my unfortunate experience with fabulist Stephen Glass, I keep thinking about why Glass was drummed out of journalism and Frey’s book continues to sell by the barrelful.

What’s the difference between them? Morally, none. But Frey has at least two powerful institutions with a self-interest in propping him up—Random House and Oprah—not to mention all those self-deluding readers who feel that Frey helped them “get back on their feet,” or some such self-help claptrap…..

Larry Summers: "The World’s a Shitty Place"

Posted on January 16th, 2006 in Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

That’s what obscenity-prone Larry Summers told scandal-tarred financier Nancy Zimmerman, the wife of equally scandal-tarred economist Andrei Shleifer, when discussing the possibility of Zimmerman and Shleifer becoming involved in Russia’s economic transition from communism to democracy.

Respected journalist David McClintick, author of Indecent Exposure, reports that fact for his story, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” reported in this week’s Institutional Investor. (You may have to sit through an E-bay ad to get to the story.) McClintick’s article is a lengthy, exhaustively-reported, and utterly damning account of Shleifer’s corruption—and it doesn’t make Larry Summers look so great either.

Shleifer, as you may know, was found liable for conspiracy to defraud the United States government; Shleifer, some of his associates, and Harvard were compelled to pay $31 million to make restitution.

It would appear from McClintick’s story that Shleifer got off easy.

McClintick’s article, as the magazine describes it, “chronicles Shleifer’s role in the university’s Russia Project and how his friendship with Summers has protected him from the consequences of that debacle inside America’s premier academic institution.”

Boy, does it ever. The chronicle of Shleifer’s unbridled greed, arrogance and deception is incontestable and sickening—and Summers is deeply implicated in trying to cover it up.

A few things, with some italics on my part.

1) McClintick writes that Summers “knew [Shleifer and Zimmerman] were investing in Russia” even while they were on government contract to help build Russian economic institutions. “Summers had heard enough to caution the couple,” McClintick points out.

Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, surely knew the federal conflict-of-interest laws surrounding such work, and as current Harvard president, he must have known that, by investing for personal gain, Shleifer and Zimmerman were breaking both federal law and Harvard regulations.

I don’t know if this makes Summers legally culpable as some sort of accomplice (though he certainly wasn’t charged with any crime)—but if you know someone is committing a crime and you do nothing about it, what does that make you? Does it make you fit to lead a university filled with young people? A university with the motto “Veritas”?

2) And what if you do more—what if you actually work on behalf of your friends’ illicit interests? In a deposition, McClintick writes, “Summers hinted [that]…he felt his friend Shleifer might have been unfairly accused—that there was nothing necessarily wrong with ‘providing advice on a financial issue in which one had an interest.'”

Let us remember the specifics here. Shleifer was giving advice about U.S. investments in Russia event though he had made secret financial investments in specific companies; he had not disclosed his financial interests, because he was legally forbidden to have them in the first place.

If Larry Summers doesn’t think it inappropriate to give financial advice without disclosing a financial interest in the matter at hand, the possibility for corruption on the Harvard Corporation is significant. Let us not forget that one of the reasons Jack Meyer left the Harvard Management Corporation is because Larry Summers and Bob Rubin were trying to compel him to make specific financial decisions. Members of the Board of Overseers should immediately ask whether Summers and Rubin have given advice on any matters in which they have financial interests.

3) What if you not only knew of your friends’ illicit activities, not only tried to cover them up, but actually promoted the wrongdoer?

Here’s McClintick, again with italics added, on the quid-pro-quo between Summers and Shleifer:

“[When] it became known in early 2001 that Summers was on the short list of candidates to succeed Neil Rudenstine…Shleifer and Zimmerman began campaigning for Summers to get the Harvard post, giving meet-and-greet parties for him at their home. Summers stayed with them when he visited Harvard…

“Having his close friend as his boss would turn out to be quite helpful for Shleifer. Summers asserted in his deposition that he recused himself from any involvement in the university’s handling of the Shleifer matter, but the new president stayed involved anyway. [R.B.: Is this perjury?] Early in his presidency [Summers] told the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Jeremy Knowles, to keep Shleifer at Harvard… Not long after Summers says he intervened on the professor’s behalf, Knowles promoted Shleifer from professor of economics to a named chair, the Whipple V.N. Jones professorship….

“Shleifer’s legal position changed on June 28, 2004, when Judge Woodlock ruled that he….had conspired to defraud the U.S. government…. Still, there was no indication that the Summers administration had initiated disciplinary proceedings. To the contrary, efforts were seemingly made to divert attention from the growing scandal.”

Even after Shleifer was convicted, Summers kept the professor close. “The Summers-Shleifer friendship flourished. They spoke on the phone more than once a day, on average. Two months after the court ruling against Shleifer, he hosted Summers at a break-the-fast dinner on Yom Kippur.”

And when a number of professors tried to initiate disciplinary proceedings against Shleifer, they became convinced that Summers was blocking any such action.

The decision whether to take any action regarding Andres Shleifer is, ostensibly, before Bill Kirby, but there’s circumstantial evidence that he, too, has been intimidated by Summers. On two occasions, when pressed by faculty members to do something, Kirby “turned red in the face and angrily cut off discussion.”

Does Bill Kirby have a spine? And if so, could someone find it for him?

Two concluding thoughts.

It is a moral embarrassment to Harvard that a crook—a man hired to help a new democracy take flight who instead plundered its emerging riches, and defrauded the United States government in the process—is still a member of its faculty, sheltered under the wing of its president.

And second, Larry Summers has consistently argued that Harvard must take a broader and more proactive role in international affairs. If the Shleifer matter, and Larry Summers’ role in it, are any indication of what a greater overseas presence for Harvard would look like, then his argument must be rejected. Because Harvard’s international presence can only be as moral as the men and women who are involved in it.