Shots in the Dark

The Crimson reports today on an important watershed in the partnership between Harvard and Google: In the next few weeks, students will be able to use the Hollis computer system to access tens of thousands of books from Harvard libraries that Google has digitized.

These books are out of copyright, so this move is a good one for both readers and writers.

But here’s the worrisome part:

Although Harvard’s collaboration with Google currently only involves out-of-copyright books that are not too fragile to scan, [director of the University Library Sidney] Verba has said he hopes the project will eventually include all the books in the Harvard collection.

It’s true: Verba has said this on several occasions, and that’s alarming. Google’s attempt to scan every book has profound and problematic implications for copyright and intellectual property issues. Those concerns have prompted publishers and authors to sue the octopus-like tech company.

But even though it is a move with huge public policy ramifications that will affect hundreds of thousands of authors, Verba’s decision to cooperate with Google was never publicly discussed. It was, in fact, only announced after the decision had been made.

And just how did that decision get made? It followed a secret meeting between Verba and Sheryl Sandberg, a Google vice-president who just happened to be Larry Summers’ chief of staff at Treasury. What a coincidence! Sandberg happened to meet with Summers before visiting with Verba.

Verba may not have known what he was getting into—or what he was being pressured to do. As he later told the Times, “It’s become much more controversial than I would have expected. I was surprised by the vehemence.”

This is why Harvard requires more transparency: to avoid, as the song says, dirty deeds done dirt cheap. The Google decision is one that will affect every professor at Harvard, but there wasn’t a single meeting, forum, editorial or other means of public discussion that took place before the decision was made.

Instead, a single person at Harvard made this partnership with Google. I’m betting it wasn’t Sidney Verba.

Cactus by Claudia Zamorro

It’s fascinating to see how, in the vacuum of federal leadership, the states and the private sector are taking the lead in public policy.

In New York, for example, Mayor Bloomberg introduced a 25-year “master plan” to help deal with expected growth in the city, and particularly the environmental toll that growth could take. A central part of the plan: “congestion pricing,” in which drivers would be charged $8 for driving south of 86th Street in Manhattan.

This is a wonderful idea. Manhattan is a city of pedestrians, perhaps the only such city in the United States, and it is absolutely nuts for people to drive around the city just because they love to park their asses in their SUVs. Anything that can encourage the use of public transportation and leave fewer cars crawling around city streets sounds like a good thing to me. Not to mention the obvious energy savings it would provide….

Also yesterday, New York governor Elliot Spitzer announced that he’d be introducing a bill to legalize gay marriage in New York. Good for him—during his campaign, he said he would, and now he’s keeping his promise. New York—well, New York City, anyway—is a place of diversity and tolerance, and we should affirm that by extending this right.

In the Washington Post, Al Kamen floats Larry Summers’ name as a possible successor for Paul Wolfowitz, should Wolfowitz resign as head of the World Bank.

Some thoughts.

Would he be a good choice? This pick might run into fierce opposition. Obviously, Summers is more than well-versed in the issues…but I imagine that there are people there who never thought much of the draconian tight money policies he and Bob Rubin imposed on various nations during the 1990s.

Would he do it, though? I could argue it round or flat…. It’s a high-profile job in the kind of work that Summers loves. But on the other hand, the second that he takes a new job, Summers will be held accountable for results in a way that he isn’t now. Also, Summers is probably making much more money now than he would at the World Bank, where he couldn’t rake in speaking fees and which would probably require him to step down from his hedge fund position.

Most interesting, though, this is more evidence of how Summers’ reputation outside Harvard continues to rise like the proverbial phoenix.

In the post below, I mentioned that Trent Reznor has posted a song online that anyone can download and remix, using the Apple program “Garageband.”

Kind of cool, right? An approach to making music that fosters interactivity, democracy, creativity, individualism and collective effort, all at the same time.

So here’s a suggestion: Why doesn’t some Harvard professor post a paper online and allow contributors to create similar mashups? Wikipapers, if you will?

(What if, say, a professor did so with a class he or she was teaching?)

Of course, doing so would require someone with a high degree of intellectual self-confidence. You never know what might happen. But isn’t that the fun part?

Yes, picks. Two of them, actually.

I’ll be so busy writing about baseball this weekend that I won’t have much opportunity to watch it, which is near-tragic, because it’s Yankees-Red Sox time. Three games at Fenway, both teams at the top of their division, Manny Ramirez showing signs of coming out of his worst slump ever, A-Rod reminding people how awesome his talent is…(Is there a more graceful swing in baseball?)….

It’s early yet, and there are lots more Yankees-Red Sox games coming up, including three at the Stadium beginning next Friday. (Perhaps the temperature will break 50 by then.) But this is not just baseball’s best rivalry, it’s baseball’s best baseball.

My second pick of the week is radically different from the utopian optimism that is, despite everything, baseball.

Some years ago, I fell completely for a woman because—well, for many reasons—but one of them was that we both loved the Nine Inch Nails’ song “Closer.” We used to joke that if we ever got married, that would be our first dance, which, if you happen to know the song, would pose certain technical issues. (As it turned out, we didn’t, so that was all right, then.) Closer had a bizarre combination of an absolutely addictive melody and lyrics of utter, primal desperation. (Romantic, eh?) The relationship didn’t work out, but over the years Nine Inch Nails continued to make music that was simultaneously dark and beautiful.

Now Trent Reznor, the mastermind behind Nine Inch Nails, has come out with his first album
since 2005’s “With Teeth.” It’s called “Year Zero,” and it is brilliant. In my experience, it’s almost impossible to praise a record without making a complete ass of oneself, so I will just throw out a few adjectives: ambitious, angry, complicated, anxious, mature, serious, catchy, beautiful, haunting.

And political. American musicians have, by and large, failed to address the politics of the Bush administration and the war, which is one reason, in my opinion, why the music business is slumping and irrelevant. But Year Zero is both explicitly political—in the song “Capital G,” for instance—and implicitly so, in its consistent tone of loud desperation and relentless paranoia. This is a record about a country on the verge of extinction, which is an apt description of the United States in the twilight years of the Bush administration. (We will continue to exist, but everything we stand for, everything that makes the United States distinctive and uplifting and meaningful and special, is threatened.)

In the song “Zero Sum,” for example, Reznor sings, “Shame on us/For what we have done/May God have mercy on our dirty little hearts/And all we ever were/just zeros and ones.”

It’s not easy to listen to; it’s surprisingly easy to listen to.

A few more facts about Reznor and Year Zero:

You can hear the whole record online here.

Reznor has an astonishingly good website.

He creates most of his songs on a Macbook.

He gets it: You can download the song “Survivalism” in a format that allows you to remix the song with Garageband.

Reznor’s song about drug addiction, “Hurt,” was covered by Johnny Cash a year or so before Cash’s death.

Check out “Year Zero.” For all its gloom, the mere fact of its existence brings hope.

Microsoft plans to sell $30 copies of Windows to Third World nations.

Because that’s just what developing countries need—more bugs.

The Iranian Supreme Court has just freed six vigilantes who killed five people because they considered the victims to be “morally corrupt.”

Two of the victims, for example, were an engaged couple who allegedly walked together in public.

On what grounds did the court free the murderers?

That they were acting “according to Islamic teachings.”

Nice religion you got there, guys…..

I guess dating Giselle makes a man feel secure about his sexuality. Tom Brady is doing perfume ads…but reportedly acting like a diva.

As if to reaffirm its subordinate status to the mother ship, the Boston Globe simply reprints the International Herald Tribune’s piece about Larry Summers’ influence and popularity in Asia…..