Shots in the Dark

Is the bloom finally off Anderson Cooper’s rose? The reviews of his two hour-interview with Angelina Jolie are in, and they’re not good…. Even Gawker, which fell for Cooper like I fell for Miss Ferens in 4th grade, thought that the Coop was kind of boring with Jolie, and that the whole two hours felt like a Sally Struthers ad.

(“When I was in Africa….” “No, when I was in Africa…..”)

Jolie and Cooper:
What’s wrong with this picture?

What was clear from the interview was that Jolie dictated its terms; in exchange for giving CNN her first interview, she would get to talk almost entirely about Africa. Good for her and Africa, bad for CNN. Anderson, you couldn’t have slipped in just one question about Jennifer Aniston? Aside from the fact that it made for dull television, wasn’t there a time when CNN was above that kind of horsetrading? Or at least a little less naked about it?

The good news for Cooper: His book is #4 on the NYT bestseller list……

The Harvard president for five more days appeared on “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” yesterday, making his case that the reason for his ouster as Harvard president was because he wanted to change an institution that did not want to change.

George Stephanopoulos, the struggling host of the struggling show, announced that this was Summers’ “first and only network interview.” Curious. Does that mean that if Tim Russert picked up the phone and called Mass Hall, Summers would say no? And if Summers was only going to do one interview, why do it with the lowest-rated Sunday morning chat show?

A couple of guesses. First, maybe no one else asked. Second, Summers and Stephanopoulos surely know each other from the Clinton administration, so maybe their preexisting relationship was a factor.

(It would have been nice to hear Stephanopoulos throw in even a token disclosure: “Summers, with whom I worked in President Clinton’s administration….” But no.)

The interview went fine for Summers, I’d say; if I were he, I would be pleased. But that’s more because of Stephanopoulos’ embarrassingly uninformed questions and reverential attitude than Summers’ (much improved) interview skills; Stephanopoulos always comes across like the altar boy he used to be, trying to please his elders with his good manners.

Thus, his questions weren’t softballs; they were tee-balls. What went wrong at Harvard? Summers said, “Maybe I pushed too hard.” Stephanopoulos’ amorous follow up? “Where did you push too hard?”

Summers, as political as he is, wouldn’t answer even that gentle question. “Oh, a university like this has been around for 370 years and it may be resistant to changing too rapidly,” he answered.

Stephanopoulos’ next challenging question: “You were also pushing against political correctness on a number of fronts.” He mentioned ROTC, grade inflation, women in science. “Were you a victim of political correctness?”

Summers said no, then, basically, yes. “That’s much too simple a characterization. There are a lot of things that went on here. I do believe that universities like this one must be open-minded to every perspective, be prepared to take on every subject…and I did speak out on those things.”

A key to decoding Summers: When he says “universities like this one,” which he says a lot, he means “Harvard.” It’s a way of implicitly criticizing Harvard while trying to make it look as if he’s making a general point about higher education.

Stephanopoulos’ next question: “Isn’t one of the lessons of your tenure that you can’t engage in that kind of inquiry?”

Summers spoke, as he has often done, of turning “heat into light.” Then he ruefully conceded that “there may be some people who were deterred from my experience from doing studies they otherwise would have done.”

Stephanopoulos: “A majority of students said they didn’t want you to go. A majority of the Board of Overseers say they didn’t want you to go. Why did you resign? Why not stay and fight.”

It was, I think, at this point that I began savagely beating my head against the wall.

First off, no one has ever taken a count of the Board of Overseers that I know of, but from all I’m told they were more anti-Summers than the Corporation was at the end. So where did Stephanopoulos get this factoid, which is not only wrong but also misleading, in that most viewers will not know that Harvard also has a Corporation, which did want Summers to go? (Stephanopoulos thereby created the impression that Summers’s resignation was contrary to the wishes of the university’s governing board.)

It’s such a weird thing to say that someone must have fed it to him…because you’d never have seen that fact in print.

But more important, the whole theme of this discussion—Summers as change agent, taking on the insidious forces of political correctness—is, frankly, just asinine. (And it shows why Stephanopoulos, for all his pat-me-on-the-head smarts, really doesn’t think very deeply.)

Fine, Summers was a change agent. But political correctness had nothing to do with what happened at Harvard in the last five years.

Which is more “politically correct” these days, opposing ROTC or calling for its return to campus?

Is it politically correct to question the reality of grade inflation? Or is it politically correct to decry it?

(I always thought that the truly politically incorrect voices in this debate were those like Stephen Greenblatt, who said, Of course Harvard students get good grades, they’re really smart. Surely that’s more likely to offend than simply saying, We must lower grades.)

Is it politically correct to be offended when the president of the world’s most important university makes off the cuff remarks about women’s genetic capabilities? Or is it politically correct to say that people who take umbrage at genetic insinuations are just being politically correct?

Perhaps what goes on at universities is simply too complicated to discuss on TV; perhaps Summers is too complicated a figure to explain on TV.

But please…can we discard this paradigm of bold intellectual warrior versus inert, change-hostile, politically correct faculty? That paradigm is reductive, tired, and wrong.

It’s one reason why Stephanopoulos’ show isn’t doing better: The man is too afraid to make anyone angry to challenge conventional wisdom, and as a result, even when he lands what should be a good interview, like Summers, he does nothing with it.

Note that I say “should be a good interview.” One thing about Summers that disappoints me these days: For a man said to speak with such candor and intellectual energy, he sure does mouth a lot of platitudes.

“Be willing to change, be willing to move forward….Ask what that institution is not doing today that it can be doing…..if Harvard could find the courage to change itself, it could make a significant contribution to changing the world.” Etc., etc.

Summers is constantly on message; he has his soundbites down. I suppose you can’t blame him for that. But I wonder if the outside world, which doesn’t know what Summers is like in private, would watch that interview and think, “What’s all the fuss about? This guy’s just a politician like all the rest of them….”

Anita Raghavan has a great tidbit in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

It’s brief, so I’ll quote:

Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers in his final commencement address offered praise for “a Bronx postman’s son,” a Harvard graduate “whose life was changed” by his education there. “This man,” Mr. Summers said earlier this month, “is now to lead one of America’s great financial firms.”

Though he went unnamed in the speech, the description fits Lloyd C. Blankfein, the incoming chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. What also went unmentioned: Mr. Summers has been talking to Mr. Blankfein about a job.

The pair met in New York three months ago to discuss employment possibilities at Goldman, according to people familiar with the meeting. Aware of the job talks, a member of the university’s governing board described the president’s allusion to Mr. Blankfein in the commencement speech as “self-serving.” A spokesman for Mr. Summers declined to comment.

So much to say about this, but a prior engagement beckons. Meantime, your thoughts?

Well, Ghana beat us, 2-1, yesterday, and the United States soccer team now goes away for the next four years. A shame. The penalty kick that put Ghana ahead came on a terrible call—just as the red cards that gave Italy a one-man advantage came on bad calls.

But unlike the Italy game, when the U.S. played spirited, aggressive soccer, we just weren’t very good against Ghana. The play on which Ghana scored its first goal, in which U.S. captain Claudio Reyna had the ball stolen from him just outside the box, was amateurish. Meanwhile, Ghana was tough; you have to give them credit.

Though they don’t deserve to continue, I hate to see the U.S. go.

I love, however, to see that Brasil is starting to get its act together. It beat Japan yesterday, 4-1. But it wasn’t just the goals that were fun to watch. The thing I love about Brasil is how well they do the little things in the game. No one traps the ball better, for example. Watch the way the Brazilians bring even bullet passes softly to the ground, how they catch the ball with their chests or the inside of a thigh and gently drop it to their feet. It’s incredibly hard to do that; they make it look so easy that you take it for granted. Then their passes thread the needle or go to unexpected spaces, leaving the other team scurrying to catch up.

Ronaldinho is an excellent example. The ESPN announcers, who cannot say his name without prefacing it with the words “the great,” have lamented the fact that he hasn’t scored. Not me. Watching the game, you can see that Ronaldinho is the key to the Brazil midfield; his passing is so creative, he unsettles his opponents. They never know where he’s going to put it, and he can put it anywhere—a chip into the penalty box, a blast to the opposite field, a push pass down to a sprinting wing. And his ballhandling is astounding; every time he touches the ball, it seems, three or four defenders surround him. But he never looks fazed, and he doesn’t lose control. Then, generously, he’s always pushing the ball to a player left open by the swarm of defenders he attracts.

There was a moment yesterday near the end of the game where Brasil was trying to kill time
and just began passing the ball around. I lost count, but I’m guessing they completed about 30 passes before Japan was able to take the ball away. It was breathtaking, beautiful soccer. (I love the geometry of the passing game, the way triangles and squares and parallelograms take shape on the field, then disappear and become something else.) To me, that was more embarrassing to Japan than the lopsided score; gently zipping the ball from one player to another, Brasil made the Japanese, desperately running around trying to follow the passes, look like a bunch of high schoolers.

Too bad about the Americans…but Round Two is going to be very exciting.

I suggested yesterday that a flurry of stories about Larry Ellison’s non-existent gift to Harvard was curious. After all, there was no news in any of the stories; a gift that hadn’t happened…still wasn’t happening. Not usually cause for the media to go ballistic.

So why the stories in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Bloomberg, the Washington Post, the San Jose Mercury News, the Boston Herald (and this wasn’t a wire story), etc.? I know the media has herd-like tendencies, but still…that was weird.

Could it be, I suggested, that someone at Harvard was pushing this story? And if so, who would have a self-interest in doing that?

I saw some evidence of a Harvard role in the fact that Harvard officials appeared to be cooperating with the story on background—the Herald reported that Ellison’s secretary told one Harvard official that Ellison was on safari, and the Herald sure as hell didn’t get that from Ellison’s secretary.

(Prompting one of you to fault me for blaming “every single thing that happens at Harvard on Larry Summers.”)

Problem was, I couldn’t see quite why Summers would have any particular reason to publicize the non-existent gift and embarrass Ellison.

Silly me.

Two pieces of circumstantial evidence now make me think that the point of the articles wasn’t to embarrass Ellison and secure the money, but to make Larry Summers look good.

First, there’s this little squib in the Financial Times, a paper with which Summers has cooperated in the past:

Correction: Harvard

Huh. Who would want to correct the impression that fundraising didn’t go like gangbusters during the Summers presidency? That phrase “the second best year in dollar terms in Harvard’s history” is an unnecessary part of the correction, a little gift, and clearly someone at Harvard asked for it. The language—”in dollar terms”—sounds like that of an economist, don’t you think? (Since the dollar amount had just been stated, wouldn’t the rest of us just say “the second best year in Harvard’s history”?)

Second, an article in the San Francisco Chronicle quotes anonymous sources saying that, were it not for Larry Summers’ ouster, Ellison’s millions would be en route.

<Ellison delayed the project because of controversy embroiling economist and then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers.

The sources, who asked to remain anonymous because they feared losing their jobs, said only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an ambitious project, which involved tracking how health care dollars are spent and what impact they have in the developed and developing worlds.>>

That is too funny. “Only Summers had the international clout needed to roll out such an ambitious project….”

He’s the only guy in the entire world who could do it, huh? Let’s remember: the project is basically evaluating data on health care spending in foreign countries. But only Larry Summers has the international clout for that. (Someone should tell Condi Rice.)

Now, to be fair, this storyline could be coming from Ellison, an excuse for not giving the money. It’s certainly not impossible.

But then today we have this headline in the New York Sun, a newspaper which has been supportive of Summers:

Summers’s Ouster May Be Behind Delay in Oracle CEO’s $115M Harvard Gift

And more evidence that Harvard folks are cooperating with these stories:

The delay is curious in part because, according to Harvard insiders, Mr. Ellison was insisting at one juncture that his entire gift be spent in three years, with possible additional sums to follow based on performance. The speed with which the money was to be burned through made some Harvard officials, including Mr. Summers, nervous. During negotiations, Mr. Ellison reportedly agreed to add five endowed professorships, adding some long-term stability to the effort.

Harvard is leaking like a sieve….and the picture those leaks paint is that of Larry Summers, the voice of reason, outnegotiating Larry Ellison….

It’s a little confusing, I know. So let me just take a shot at what’s going on here.

The most plausible explanation I’ve read about why Ellison isn’t coughing up the cash comes from the Wall Street Journal article a few months back suggesting that Ellison was having cash flow problems, and various reports saying that Ellison wanted to use this Harvard gift to pay off court-ordered gifts for charity—Ellison settled charges of insider trading. But when it turned out that this donation might not count against that legal settlement, Ellison backpedaled.

That’s part one.

Part two is that Larry Summers is trying to shape the current perception and historical evaluation of his presidency by trying to establish via the press that fundraising was booming during his tenure. (Remember that Mary Peretz, a Summers ally, has also been pushing this storyline in the New Republic. Coincidence? Doubt it.)

Summers already promotes the idea that the undergraduates support him, as well as the graduate schools . Now, if my guess is right, he’s pushing the theme that the alumni are also on his side.

Next thing you know, he’s going to be endorsed by Angelina Jolie.

It’s all about isolating and blaming the FAS…. and making himself look good while making Harvard look bad.

Did the Harvard Corporation include language in Summers’ severance agreement to the effect that the outgoing president could not act in ways detrimental to the University?

If not, they are strangely naive, and Summers truly outnegotiated them…..

Suddenly stories about Larry Ellison’s missing gift to Harvard are everywhere. The Financial Times, the San Jose Mercury News, Bloomberg….

This can not be a coincidence. Is someone planting them? Answer: Yes. The question becomes, Who would have a vested interest in embarrassing Ellison?

In any case, this story from the Boston Herald details Harvard’s troubles trying to get Ellison on the phone. Given the level of detail, it would appear that Harvard officials cooperated with the article.

Hmmm……..

If Harvard is actually planting these stories, I’d like your thoughts on whether that’s something that would ever have happened pre-Larry Summers. It seems a bad business to publicly embarrass a donor who won’t pay up.

This website says no…but then, it wants you to “eliminate lobsters, crabs, and other sea animals from your diet” (fat chance), so you can’t really trust it then, can you?

Meanwhile, lobsterlib.com (yes, seriously) makes the case that lobsters and humans actually have a lot in common—lobsters carry their young for nine months, they have “an awkward adolescence,” and so on.

Hmmm. While it’s true that my ex-landlady bore a certain resemblance to a lobster, I remain unconvinced.

Trevor Corson, author of The Secret Life of Lobsters—which they say is pretty good, actually—agrees that the whole dropping a lobster into boiling water is not such a fine thing. He’s got a better technique—with pictures!

He also has a nice piece in Boston Magazine on anti-lobster activism…..

Who knew that people spent so much time thinking about how best to kill a lobster? Me, I find it heartening. With some exceptions (veal, foie gras), I’m not against eating animals—they do it, so why shouldn’t we?—but I am for treating natural things with respect….

I’m coming around on Stephen Colbert, who seems to be getting better and better. Of course, it helps that conservatives give him such great material to work with. Like Dan Henninger, deputy editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal, who noted on Fox News that a woman in India had apparently married a snake and he’d like gay people who want to marry to “absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement is not going to be allowing people to marry their pet horse, dog or cat.”

“And you know what?” Henninger sneered. “Given the “anything goes” culture we live in, I don’t think they can deliver that guarantee.”

What a jerk.

Colbert’s response: “I think we can all agree with Henninger’s flawless logic. If a woman in India marries a snake, gay people in America should have to justify it.”

Check out the video—it’s hilarious.

I misspoke recently when I said that Harvard was still waiting on Larry Ellison’s promised $20 million gift.

According to InsideHigherEd.com, it’s actually a $115 million gift…and it still isn’t showing up. I think we can just write that one off, don’t you?

Maybe it’s the occasional sanctimony of its proponents, maybe it’s the hypocrisy of some of its advocates, but there’s something about environmentalism that seems to invite contrarians to oppose it.

Take Alex Beam, the definition of contrarian, writing in today’s Boston Globe. Beam takes aim at a target that you knew he couldn’t resist: the decision by Whole Foods to stop selling lobster because of the brutal way it is generally transported and killed. For Beam, this smacks of political correctness; it’s a denial of the fact that humans are predators. He extends his criticism to what he calls the “do no harm” movement—people who use fallen timber to build their houses, or aspire to stage “carbon-free” weddings.

Writes Beam, in an enormous leap of illogic,

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just wait for trees to fall down so we could build houses for people? Wouldn’t it be great if millions of chickens and cattle could be convinced to sign up for voluntary euthanasia programs so we could eat meat? Wouldn’t it be nice if those nasty insurgents who are killing our sons and daughters in Iraq would just come talk to us over some Organic and Fair Trade Certified Monkey King Jasmine Green Tea, always available at you-know-where?

Of course, the desire to minimize the environmental damage one does during one’s life has nothing to do with the recognition that there are bad people in the world whom we must, on occasion, kill. Beam knows this…but people who can afford to use fallen timber are rich, easy targets.

On the lobster front, Beam is particularly wrong, I think, both in the specifics and on the general principle. An ex of mine used to be a chef, and she told me horrific tales of how lobsters were treated in restaurants—placed inside the ovens while they were still alive because it was easier and, for some of the cooks, funny. Dropping a live creature, even one pretty low on the pecking order, into a pot of boiling water doesn’t exactly soothe the conscience either. If one can minimize the pain of a fellow creature, even one that you’re about to eat, why not?

Truth is, there’s value in treating the animals we kill for food with respect and decency, and not just because it’s easier on them. It’s good for us. Killing animals with a minimum of pain increases our respect for the natural world and makes us more deeply appreciate the food we consume. If we value the animals that give their lives to be eaten by humans, then doesn’t it become harder to kill a beautiful shark just to set a record? Or fire an explosive spear into a whale’s head? Or slaughter a manatee with a powerboat because speed gets you off? And while treating animals humanely doesn’t mean that we deny the existence of bad people, might it not carry over into how we treat our peaceful fellow citizens? If you treat animals with respect, aren’t you more likely to do the same to people? And isn’t the same true regarding disrespect?

Thinking about how we kill lobsters before we eat them may sound trivial. I’d suggest it’s a small step in redressing how we think about the relationship between humans and other animals.

Now, on to another contrarian: the science and environmental writer Gregg Easterbrook. For years Easterbrook has campaigned against the existence of global warming. Not long ago, he realized that history was moving on and leaving him behind, so he conceded that he was wrong.
“Based on the data,” Easterbrook wrote, “I’m now switching sides on global warming, from skeptic to convert”—as if everyone who was already there was basing their opinion on mumbo-jumbo, while Easterbrook was dutifully busy crunching the numbers.

But he’s still cranky about being wrong, as evinced in this piece he’s just done for Slate, in which Easterbrook argues that the reason hurricanes are causing greater damage now than in the past is because, thanks to development, there’s more stuff for them to wreck.

Well…duh.

This is a point that anyone who’s thought about the issue even the tiniest bit recognized long ago. In fact, in an interview in Plenty magazine last February conducted by, um, me, MIT atmospheric scientist Kerry Emanuel spoke of just this truism.

RB: As damaging as they are in the United States, aren’t hurricanes far more devastating in places we don’t pay much attention to?

KE: It depends on what your definition of devastation is. In terms of the monetary loss, it’s the United States. In terms of loss of life, hurricanes do far more of that in developing countries—in Central America, Bangladesh, places like that.

Which is to say that Easterbrook misses the point. While we obsess about the tragedy of New Orleans, we overlook the fact that hurricanes are much more lethal in less-developed countries, and worrying about the damage done to buildings, even cities, is to some extent an example of how lucky this nation is. As terrible as New Orleans was, other countries have got it worse…and will continue to do so because, as Emanuel has argued, hurricanes are growing increasingly powerful because of global warming.

I love contrarians—there are those who would say I am one myself—but on the other hand, just because they’re contrarian doesn’t mean they’re right.