Archive for June, 2007

Harvard Hires a Coach

Posted on June 16th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

After the Boston Globe reported that Harvard didn’t have a single African-American head coach, the university has now hired its second (basketball coach Tommy Amaker was the first): former University of Florida star Traci Green.

Caroline Hoxby in the Wall Street Journal

Posted on June 15th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 78 Comments »

The Wall Street Journal reports on the departure of Blair and Caroline Hoxby for Stanford.

Aside from a sunnier clime, Stanford offered Ms. Hoxby the attractive lure of a tenured position for her husband, Blair Hoxby – something that Harvard, where Mr. Hoxby taught history and literature, had failed to do.

….In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Ms. Hoxby, 41, said the tenure offer had helped clinch the deal. She said she and the Harvard economics department had made various attempts to give the university a chance to keep her, but that “there is a sense in which no one is in charge” at the venerable institution.

Here’s the most relevant part of that interview:

Ms. Hoxby, who is 41, joined Harvard’s economics department in 1994. Her chairman tried hard to keep her, she said, but she never heard from anyone in the administration. She even telephoned Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s incoming president, to let her know the couple was about to leave, but nothing happened, Ms. Hoxby said.

Hoxby’s is a profound criticism: There is no one in charge at Harvard. Is it true? Is Harvard a little, well, adrift?

In Which I Take a Job

Posted on June 15th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

After seven years of book-writing, I’m going back to office life; starting now, I’m going to be the new executive editor of 02138 magazine.

In the New York Post, Keith Kelly reports on me and my controversial past.

And in Shark News

Posted on June 14th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 10 Comments »

The Human Society is pressuring the organizers of shark-fishing tournaments to cancel them. I hope it works. These tournaments don’t kill a huge number of sharks, certainly nothing compared to the hideous practice of finning, in which millions of sharks are slaughtered because Chinese people erroneously believe that their fins are an aphrodisiac. Because the shark meat isn’t nearly as valuable—it’s not considered an aphrodisiac—the rest of the animal is then generally dumped overboard. An eco-catastrophe.

But back to these tournaments….

Though they don’t kill many sharks relative to finning, they still send the message to Americans that sharks are evil, awful animals which should be hunted for sport, merely so that some macho fisherman can get a good picture next to a corpse. (Most shark tournaments in the US commenced after the publication of Jaws, and author Peter Benchley came to decry that impact of his book.)

So the symbolism of these tournaments outweighs their statistical impact, and indeed, has relevance beyond the slaughter of sharks. They send a message regarding our relationship to all animal life: It’s okay to kill for fun. It’s the 21st century; we know better.

Oak Bluffs tiger shark 2005  184x265

A once-beautiful tiger shark
caught, killed, then thrown away
in a Martha’s Vineyard
“Monster Shark Tournament.”

Free the Whale Sharks!

Posted on June 14th, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

I’m a big fan of aquariums and zoos, and I believe that their mission of research and promoting awareness of animal life justifies holding some animals in captivity. Just not this one:

That was a whale shark held in captivity at the Georgia Aquarium. Named “Norton”—an improbable attempt to turn something magical into something cute—it died yesterday, the second whale shark to die there this year.

Whale sharks can grow to be about 45 feet long, and no other aquarium has ever tried to hold them on display. They are also migratory animals, and though their patterns of migration are not well understood, some think that their migrations can last for years.

So even if the aquarium could keep these animals alive, it still shouldn’t keep them. There’s no tank big enough for an animal that migrates hundreds of miles…..

Yale’s Allston?

Posted on June 14th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Yale University has just purchased 137 acres of property and 1.5 square feet of buildings in nearby West Haven and Orange, Connecticut, the Yale Daily News reports today. The buildings include 550, 000 square feet of laboratory space.

According to Yale president Rick Levin, “To build new would be much more expensive than what we had to pay to buy the entire site…. This is a once in a century opportunity.”

This is clearly not a project on the scope of Allston, but it seems like a quiet coup for Yale…..

Another Harvard Refugee

Posted on June 13th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 13 Comments »

In the Globe, Steve Bailey tells the story of Stephen Wong, a former Harvard medical scientist who recently decamped to Houston because he got a “an offer he couldn’t refuse.”

In a star economy, it is stars like Wong we are counting on to again reinvent New England’s future. And now Wong is telling us that the old rules no longer apply, that Boston no longer has some inherent intellectual lock over places like Houston. Or two-score cities around the globe for that matter.

Houston is very hot, Wong says. But it has its advantages. It is newer, he says, with more collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston. “It seems they need me much more than Harvard did,” he says.

More collaboration and fewer institutional barriers than Boston….

Drew Faust has spoken about the need for collaboration across boundaries at Harvard, and she’s clearly right. This is a significant problem. What many folks at Harvard seem not to want to admit, though, is that the problem is not just structural, fixable with calendar reform and so on. It’s cultural. Competition exists much more comfortably at Harvard than does cooperation.

If Faust manages to diminish the culture of cutthroat competition and the death grip of secrecy that pervade Harvard, she will really have accomplished something…..

Halberstam Remembered

Posted on June 13th, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

David Halberstam was remembered yesterday at a service at Manhattan’s Riverside Church, the spiritual home of all fighting liberals.

The Times piece does a fine job…of mentioning how many people from the Times knew Halberstam.

The Leviathan, Redux

Posted on June 13th, 2007 in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Here’s another piece, from the Boston Globe, on that slaughtered whale, including a photo of the “exploding lance,” manufactured in Bedford in the late 1800s, found inside its corpse after humans finally killed it.

The Death of History

Posted on June 12th, 2007 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

The following AP story is so sad, I just want to reprint the whole thing.

A 50-ton bowhead whale caught off the Alaskan coast last month had a weapon fragment embedded in its neck that showed it had survived a similar hunt — more than a century ago. Embedded deep under its blubber was a 3.5-inch arrow-shaped projectile that has given researchers insight into the whale’s age, estimated at 115 to 130 years. “No other finding has been this precise,” said John Bockstoce, an adjunct curator of the New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts. The bomb lance fragment, lodged in a bone between the whale’s neck and shoulder blade, was probably made in New Bedford, Mr. Bockstoce said. It was probably shot from a heavy shoulder gun around 1890. The 49-foot male whale died when it was shot with a similar projectile last month; the older device was found as hunters carved it with a chain saw for harvesting.

We haven’t made much progress in 115 years, have we?