Shots in the Dark

By the way, if you feel like contributing to the Monday Morning Zen feature, feel free to send a photo.

After all, zen is nothing if not communal.

Did you know they had a “Sex Week” at Yale?

Its goal? “To promote an open discussion of love, sex, intimacy, and relationships.”

Also, probably, to have sex.

Shocker, the National Review was upset.

It’s not just that Sex Week was in bad taste: It went beyond vulgarity to promote downright pernicious behaviors, and sometimes with odd allies.

Pernicious behaviors with odd allies? Sign me up!

Perhaps it’s working, though—Trojan Brand Condoms recently rated Yale the most sexually healthy campus in the nation…..

In the Yale Daily News, a writer tries to explain the difference between Yale and Harvard:

Yale is not impervious to negative exposure in the same way that Harvard is. Harvard’s reputation to prospective students is built entirely on prestige - it is Harvard, and refuses to let them forget it. So what if a scandal or two breaks out? It is the most prestigious school in the world, and the diploma means no less without Summers than with him.

Yale, by contrast, has no need to build its marketing campaign to high-school students on name only. This is because, to put it plainly, Yale is actually fun; Harvard is not. For evidence, please refer to the weekend before last.

So I’m guessing that Yalies had more fun at the Game than Harvard folks?

Thought that would get your attention.

Anyway, the New York Daily News—which is frantically trying to reclaim its top spot in the New York tabloid war by becoming more like the NY Post—says of Columbia that…

While their parents shell out $33,246 a year in tuition, Columbia University students doff their clothes at naked parties, flock to sex toys workshops, broadcast porn on campus TV, bake anatomically correct pies for the “Erotic Cake-Baking Contest” and heat up the steps of the Low Library in a mass makeout session called the “Big Kiss.

Good for them! They’re learning about their bodies and their selves.

Whatever happened to H-Bomb, by the way?

In the first issue of 02138 magazine, in my story on the Harvard Corporation, I wrote the following about Larry Summers’ severance package:

Summers…extracted a promise that his speech at Commencement would be mailed to all Harvard alumni. That has not yet happened—apparently because no one involved wants to sign an accompanying cover letter.

Well, it’s happened now. Thanks much to the professor who mailed me the pamphlet recently put out by the Harvard Alumni Association titled, “Lawrence H. Summers,” with the subheds, “2006 Commencement Address,” “A Chronological Sampling of President Summers’ Tenure,” and “Harvard Gazette Article, June 8, 2006.”

The pamphlet is introduced by Jack Reardon, executive director of the HAA, who writes:

During his tenure, Larry initiated many important new programs and helped support and guide many others. This booklet…provides an opportunity to reflect on and to capture the spirit of those years.

Poor Jack. He is a loyal Harvard man through and through, but you know that even he had to hold his nose while writing this stuff.

He concludes:

This snapshot of the past five years underscores the role that all of us can play in making Harvard the best that it can be.

I have tried and tried to figure out exactly what that sentence means—it is brilliant in its ambiguity, and I mean that seriously, this kind of piffle is not easy to write—and my best answer is something like this: Okay, I’ll do it, but don’t ask me to say anything nice about the guy.

And do give to Harvard.

The following document is propaganda with a Soviet deftness. “Summers Lays Foundation for Renewal and Expansion,” says the Gazette. (You almost—almost!—expect the exclamation point.) Summers once referred to the Gazette as “my Pravda,” and you can see why.

You have to believe that Summers controlled every inch of this booklet, so I was particularly interested in the choice of photos. (Summers vigorously controlled the choice of photos of himself that ran in Harvard publications.)

In a 16-page booklet, there are 15 photos of Summers. They show him meeting with undergraduates, with poor people, with black people, with the Dalai Lama, with Bono, with Bill Clinton, and with Elena Kagan.

(Will this photo be Kagan’s Amy Gutmann—Halloween picture? The presidential candidacy-killer? It, um, underscores the close relationship she and Summers had…a reminder which Kagan probably isn’t dancing in the hallways about, and which Summers would have avoided were he not more interested in promoting the fact that he appointed the first female dean of the law school.)

The photos portray Summers as a celebrity who can range from low—he meets with public high school students!—to high. He hangs out with Bono! OMG! He’s, like, a rock star!

And then there is that photo of Summers in Annenberg Hall, surrounded by sycophantic students asking him to sign their dollar bills. Of all the things that Summers did, I found this perhaps the most telling. It symbolized so many things alien to the best aspects of a university: celebrity culture, the cult of personality, the greed culture, the shallowness of modern students’ choice of Harvard…

I was always startled that Summers encouraged this practice, and I remain startled that Summers chose this photo for his agitprop. Can you imagine Derek Bok even allowing such a thing to be printed about himself?

Alumni who receive this brochure might be puzzled; it is a curious document.

They should know that Harvard did not want to publish this, but the Corporation agreed to do it as part of Summers’ severance package. It makes much more sense when read with that fact in mind. Call it the new New Historicism.

Is there any team more heartbreaking to root for than the New York Giants?

Two weeks ago, they lost to the Chicago Bears after they tried to make a 52-yard field goal, missed it, then watched as a Bear caught the ball in the end zone and ran it back 108 yards to break the Giants’ backs. I have never seen a more dispiriting play in football.

Then, yesterday, they lost to the woeful Tennessee Titans, who entered the game with a 3-7 record, by giving up 24 points in the fourth quarter and losing on a 49-yard field goal with six seconds to go, 24-21.

It was a quarter filled with mistakes. Wide receiver Plexico Burress simply stopped running on a long pass from quarterback Eli Manning, allowing it to be picked off and substantially returned by defender Pacman Jones. Boo. Then Giants linebacker Mathias Kiwanuka appeared to have ended the Titans’ last drive of the game by sacking Tennessee quarterback (man, is he going to be good) Vince Young on 4th down. But Kiwanuka inexplicably just…let him go. (I had the image of a shark grabbing a human being, shaking him, then swimming off.) A delighted Young promptly ran for a first down, then led his team to the tying touchdown….

…after which, the Giants got the ball back with about 40 seconds left and the game tied. Let it go into overtime! I screamed at the television. Take a breather!

Oh no. Manning casually lobbed an interception, his second, to the same Pacman Jones, on a ball that wasn’t even close to his receiver. A rookie mistake; he should have thrown the ball out of bounds.

And a couple plays later—you knew the kicker wouldn’t miss it—here comes that 49-yard, game-winning field goal.

Tragedy. One of the top three losses in Giants history.

My prescription for the Giants:

1) Fire Tom Coughlin. His players consistently complain about the coaching, even players, like Tiki Barber, who don’t make a habit of complaining. They also make mistakes that they should never make at this point in the season. J’accuse.

2) Dump Burress. Every game or two, he simply gives up in the middle of a play. It’s killing the Giants.

3) Eli Manning is done, baby, done. Stick a fork in him. He can’t run, he can’t throw, he doesn’t inspire the team, and three years into his career, he looks no better than when he was a rookie. Get rid of him and find someone who can play in New York.

The amazing thing is, the Giants can still win the division, if they beat the surging Cowboys next week and hold on for the rest of the season. But I wouldn’t bet the ranch on it.

Red Sky over the Galapagos
Photo by Evan Cornog

The Times today runs two obituaries that seem strangely appropriate for the Thanksgiving holiday.

The first is of Steam Train Maury, “King of the Hobos,” dead at 89.

I’ll let the paper tell you….

By 1971, he was a day laborer with a wife, two children and a bad hip that kept him from working much. His hanging around the house was getting on his wife’s nerves, The Los Angeles Times reported in 1989.

So one day in 1971, he hopped a freight on the edge of town with a vague idea he would relive hobo memories and see his wife, Wanda, in a few weeks.

It was 1981 when Mr. Graham finally returned. He had not communicated for more than a decade. Wanda agreed to go out for dinner and talk. (She paid, of course.) He wanted to come home, and she ultimately could not resist his charm.

“It was better than living alone,” she told The Times.

What happened in those ten years is a sometimes wonderful, sometimes mysterious, sometimes painful story.

The second obit is of Jack Werner, a Holocaust survivor who helped save the lives of more than 700 children brought to the Buchenwald slave labor camp in the waning months of WWII. He was 92.

Mr. Werber, a son of a Jewish furrier from the Polish town of Radom, was the barracks clerk at Buchenwald in August 1944 when a train carrying 2,000 prisoners arrived, many of them young boys. By then, with the Russians advancing into Germany, the number of Nazi guards at the camp had been reduced. Working with the camp’s underground — and with the acquiescence of some guards fearful of their fate after the war — Mr. Werber helped save most of the boys from transport to death camps by hiding them throughout the barracks.

But before that happened, Werber lost his wife and daughter to the Nazis…

These stories remind me of what a great gift life is—one’s own, of course, but also the gift that other people bring to you through their lives—and what an incredible journey is our time on this earth.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

The Los Angeles Times has this piece on “slide-rule celebrities,” about how economists who blog can attract a large new audience for their writing.

Nobel laureate Gary S. Becker and former Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers are among those who have set up blogs, which are typically part lecture, part journal and part college seminar, with reader participation expected.

Unless there’s something I don’t know, that’s a reference to the New Republic blog, Open University, for which Summers is listed as a contributor but to which he has not, so far as I know, contributed.

So…kind of a mistake on the LA Times’ part. But the piece does more accurately go into Harvard economist Gregory Mankiw’s blog.

Who will be the first Harvard humanist to blog? And more to the point, why is is that at the world’s greatest university, to borrow a phrase, the number of faculty bloggers can be counted on the fingers of one hand? Something is wrong with this picture.

A poster found one: Econ prof Greg Mankiw’s blog.

Nicely done, Professor Mankiw. (It’s quite a good blog, in fact. Lots to think about.)

Are there more? Anyone?