Shots in the Dark

Sam Spektor and Harry Lewis are having an interesting back-and-forth about Summers’ role in the management of Harvard’s endowment. You can find it here.

About three months into the administration, we know that Larry Summers is feuding with Paul Volker, Joe Biden, and, some of the time, Tim Geithner.

(Am I forgetting anyone?)

Add another name to that list: Peter Orszag, the head of the OMB.

This is from a recent NYT profile of Orszag by Jodi Kantor:

Asked about his relationship with Mr. Summers, Mr. Orszag answered politely but stiffened visibly. The two have managed to work together congenially, several administration officials said, and Mr. Summers, known for his sometimes scathing assessment of people, takes Mr. Orszag seriously.

But Mr. Orszag seems to chafe a bit at the situation: Mr. Summers holds a job in which Mr. Orszag was initially interested, and as early as the transition period, Mr. Summers tried to control the budget process as well, by seeking to run meetings related to it.

Mr. Orszag won that battle, and he and others say he is enthused about his role. But as the administration tackles one policy challenge after another, the real test of his power may be the extent to which he can hold his own with Mr. Summers.

The relationship between these economic advisers is, I think, going to be one of the central threads of the first year of the Obama administration.

Some writers, like TNR’s Noam Scheiber, think Summers should be the dominant player of this group of economic advisers.

But for anyone who thinks that these men and women need to work as a team, it all seems to come back to one question: Will Larry Summers play ball?

The success of the Obama administration may hinge on it.

Should have blogged this before, but…20% of all the right whales left in the world gathered offCape Cod this week to participate in a plankton-fest.

…in many ways, scientists and whale lovers say, the gathering in Cape Cod Bay is almost a celebration - a sign that maybe things are beginning to turn around for the right whale. It is the third year whale numbers have been high in the bay; last year, scientists estimated 70 to 100 were feeding there, although later in the season.

Reasons for hope—nice.

Has Maureen Dowd written her worst column ever?

“We want the truthful history about all aspects of the Confederacy told. There are some good things that you can learn, and we think there are more good than bad.”

—Charles McMichael, commander in chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, on efforts to promote a “Confederate Memorial Day” in the South.

Some good things?

And here’s an assertion that (see below) truly is shocking.

Georgia state Sen. John Bulloch, a Republican who sponsored the bill recognizing Confederate History Month, said the observance would help tourism, particularly in areas with Civil War battlegrounds. It is no different, he said, from Black History Month.

And the GOP wonders why it is (ironically enough) a minority party…..

Not too long ago, in a post about Neil Labute’s play Reasons to be Pretty, I wondered what would playwrights do when the use of obscene language failed to shock audiences.

In today’s Globe, Louis Kennedy broadens the question and asks, Is anything in theater shocking?

Apparently not.

I’ve been trying to figure out why. After all, some of the plays I’ve seen deal with unquestionably disturbing subjects, from child abuse to incest to torture to rape, while others use a whole sex shop’s worth of props to shove their daringness in the audience’s face. Many do both, and they may also throw in a few hairpin-sharp twists to keep a viewer off balance. And yet, somehow, they fail to shock.

Kennedy doesn’t really define what it means to be shocking and why that’s important, which strikes me as a big problem: shocking and meaningful are usually different things, and she conflates the two.

But she’s starting to get at something interesting when she writes this:

I think a lot of what drives the latest wave of shock theater is a desire to be hip and current and cool, and to compete with the dominant media of our time: movies and television. Playwrights seize the tools of these essentially visual media - graphic imagery, turbo-powered plotting, and a heightened version of reality that can feel more involving than reality itself - and apply them to a medium that is quintessentially not visual but verbal.

I expect there’s some truth to the fact that modern playwrights are consciously competing against more visual, more popular media. But there’s another argument, an obvious one, that Kennedy ignores altogether. When we know what we know about the world we live in—he kept his daughter in a basement for 20 years!—how can the theater deliver the shock of the new? (For likely there is no shock of the old; shock is a function of surprise.)

When it comes to emotional horrors, shock at the immorality of the human animal, we’ve heard it all before; we’ve read it in our web browsers. Perhaps the real point that Kennedy fails to make is not, why isn’t theater shocking, but why does it try to be? Shouldn’t it really be trying, not to shock, but to explain?

Here’s a Red Sox/NESN ad (from the Globe online) that seems targeted straight for the Massholes. Heidi doesn’t even get a last name?

As you may know, “Heidi Red Sox Reporter,” who is unrelated to “Dora the Explorer,” is Heidi Watney, and she’s known as a top-notch “sideline reporter.”

Heck, she was…well…she was a Miss San Diego and a Miss California contestant (four times!) and a model.

Oh, never mind….

Here’s NESN’s ace reporter: Heidi, from the renowned sports website, sidelinehotties.com.

Silly Red Sox.

You knew it had to come from Nicholas Kristoff. Here, from today’s Times:

“Mr. Tetlock called experts such as these the “hedgehogs,” after a famous distinction by the late Sir Isaiah Berlin (my favorite philosopher)….”

It’s that parenthetical that takes a banal sentence and transforms it into something quite especially bad. But I suppose even the choice of Isaiah Berlin as one’s favorite philosopher is kind of banal.

My own favorite philosopher is the Australian, Angus Young.

All right, that’s not exactly true. I’ve gotten a few puzzled looks, literally and figuratively, about my fandom of the site.

On the other hand, many of you seem to be reveling in its brilliance.

Here’s the thing. The dirty little secret of FUP is that the guy who writes it—it’s got to be a guy—loves animals. Also, he loves cute little pictures of animals.

But like a guy, he can’t bring himself to express his love in straightforward ways. And we respect him for that. No one wants a guy who coos over kittens. What kind of man would that be?

And so our blogger voices his passion for animals by pretending to be grouchy about them. And the tension between those adorable pictures he runs and the crazy curmudgeonliness of his posts—therein lies the brilliance.

Take today’s FUP post, for instance.

Underneath a picture of a dormouse curled up in a rose, the author writes this lede…

We place a lot of blame on the animals on this blog, and yeah, this dude has his tail curled up over his body and he’s fitting on the top of a rose which basically makes me want to JUMP UP AND DOWN AND RUN INTO THE STREET WAVING A GUN SHOUTING “IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS.”

I’ll come out and say it: This is terrific writing. It looks casual, and it reads casual, but in fact it’s not easy to do this well. There’s a rhythm to the extended sentence, and a surprise—what Tony Gilroy would call “a reversal.”

The narrative voice starts as unexpectedly low-key and accessible—a confession of technique that catches the reader off-guard and builds trust. For just a split second, we bond with the author. He’s letting us in on the joke.

But then there’s that middle section-a comedic bridge, with its little hint of backtracking. “And, yeah, this dude…”

Until finally we get to Act III of that sentence and the tempo and mood (partly signified by the punctuation) dramatically and abruptly change.

“…makes me want to JUMP UP AND DOWN AND RUN INTO THE STREET WAVING A GUN SHOUTING “IT WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS.”

It’s like a Pixies song or a Lewis Black monologue. There’s shock and surprise in the 0-to-60 shift. And then, of course, the image of the author running down the street and shouting “it wasn’t supposed to be like this” because of a picture of a dormouse lying in a rose is pretty darn funny.

(Essentially, here, we must know that the threat of violence isn’t serious, or the humor, um, dies. How could it be serious? This is a guy who loves cute pictures of animals.)

And, in a strange way, can’t we all relate to that? Don’t we all have things that make us want to just completely lose it? (For me, it’s people who block subway doors, or men who hawk up a big phlegm ball and spit on the street as they’re walking in your direction. Also: anyone who whistles, ever.)

Of course, it’s a mistake to over-analyze humor. Much more fun just to laugh.

Here’s some Lewis Black. The man’s a genius. (NSFW, by the way.)

The Globe columnist has a timely piece today about how perceptions of Larry Summers’ time at Harvard are again changing, thanks largely to the university’s financial decline.

Now, as Summers prates and japes on the national stage as Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, the tale of his Cambridge tenancy is mutating.

A recent Forbes magazine cover story on the university’s financial meltdown suggests none too delicately that Summers helped break up the university’s successful investment team, and that he pushed the university into risky, money-losing interest rate swap investments….

Beam also gives this blog a shout-out for pointing out that the Harvard-Google deal was brokered by Summers and his former Treasury chief of staff, then a Google exec, in a private meeting. Appreciate that. I always felt that this was a decision with far-reaching implications, and the fact that it was made, in secret, by two old buddies just didn’t feel right.

There’s something else I like about this column. I’ve been astonished at how quickly the Washington press has just blown off Summers’ experience in Cambridge. It’s as if, somehow, the inside-the-Beltway types have just decided that it’s not relevant. And in their glowing, please-be-a-source-for-me-later profiles of Summers, they give his time at Harvard perhaps a paragraph. There’s a Washington arrogance and/or ignorance here that’s typical of the city.

But Beam’s column rejects that fallacy and says, wait a minute—what happened here is relevant. Thus the “prates and japes,” which is a nice turn of phrase. It says to the reader, Summers may have fooled you guys up there, but we know him. And whether you agree with that position or not, it’s the kind of thing that makes Beam’s contrarian voice so valuable.

What’s bad for Summers, Beam concludes, is good for his successor.

The new Larry Summers narrative does bode well for the current president, Drew Faust. Comparisons are odious, but as Summers’ stock declines, hers rises proportionately.

One possible challenge for Faust, though: Did Summers damage the university so much that most of her presidency will be devoted simply to restoration?