Amazon has filed a patent application for a way to embed advertisements in e-books. The ads may be individually tailored to the reader based on Amazon’s knowledge of your purchase history…..
You know what’s a nice feeling?
When the Yankees lose in the afternoon, and you think, oh darn, the Red Sox are going to see that and win their night game and pull two games ahead again…
…and then the Red Sox get shut out by Oakland!
The Sox have batted .193 over their past four games, three of which they have lost, and .231 over their last 10. The All-Star sluggers who carried them the first part of the season have tapered. Kevin Youkilis flirted with .400 deep into May, but he is 2 for his last 22 and batting .214 since June 1. Jason Bay is 4 for his last 32 and .220 since June.
Still, the Yankees are going to have to actually beat the Red Sox at some point this season if they hope to win the division….
The Times’ newest conservative, Harvard grad Ross Douthat, says that we shouldn’t make fun of Sarah Palin because she represents the realization of an American dream.
Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard.
This is clever but dumb. Yes, great, one doesn’t and shouldn’t have to attend an Ivy League school to be president. But Douthat, his cleverness now constructed, begs the question whether in this case that’s a good thing.
After all, Sarah Palin seems not just uneducated, but uninterested in education, her own or anyone else’s. Can anyone even name what college colleges she went to? Or her feelings about higher education?
To praise Sarah Palin’s rise is not to praise the ascent of the autodidact or the graduate of the school of hard knocks and mean streets, but to make a virtue of ignorance and incuriosity.
Douthat continues:
Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)
What a lot of hoo-hah. Palin’s children were put through the tabloid wringer by her—she knew Bristol was pregnant when John McCain came calling—and then by the children themselves, when Levi and Bristol took to the airwaves to spat, and then by Todd and Sarah, when they forced Bristol to speak out for abstinence although she’d already spoken against it. If your sanctimonious political values, which you would like to impose on others, contradict your personal life, yes indeed, the tabloids are going to swing away. It’s the democratic ideal, baby. (And who exactly, Mr. Douthat, do you think reads those tabloids?)
Meanwhile, let’s face it: No one has toted Trig the Prop around more than Sarah. (Look at those Runner’s World photos, for instance.)
At her press conference, Palin went out of her way to say how great Trig was: “There should,” she proclaimed, “be more Trigs, not less.”
Now, I have nothing against mentally retarded children or children with disabilities. They should be accepted and loved and nurtured and cherished. But the idea that the world would be a better place if it contained more mentally retarded children? That is an argument I would like to hear Palin develop. I know several parents of children with deficiencies who love their children very much but would profoundly disagree.
In any event, no one forced Palin to make an issue of Trig at her resignation press conference, just as no one has forced Palin to make Trig a prop, a testament to her anti-abortion views. She doesn’t wave Trig around like a flag on a stick to praise him; she does so to show us what a principled and sacrificing person she is. Which is to say that, for Sarah Palin, Trig is not valuable because of his humanity, but because of what he says about Sarah Palin.
One could go through Douthat’s recitation of the wrongs against Palin and find that there’s some legitimate purpose in each case.
But here’s the larger point: While we should appreciate the fact that someone does not have to be an intellectual to be president, this is not the same as venerating anti-intellectualism.
Did anyone else, for example, catch Palin’s sneer about “the real climate change” at her press conference. She meant that a change in the relationship between the media and her was real, but global warming is not. Could one be more narcissistic? Or, well, stupider?
Yes, some of the commentary on Palin has gone too far. But it’s understandable. People are angry at her. They respect the presidency and the vice-presidency, and they are offended that a woman who is so clearly unqualified for either job so blithely and vainly put herself forward for them.
That respect for the White House is a genuine and deep form of patriotism, and Sarah Palin does not have it. That’s why it’s hard to feel sorry for her. She got exactly what she asked for.
Melissa Trujillo of the Associated Press (this may be she/nope, not her) interviewed Drew Faust, and the resulting article has gotten a lot of pick-up in newspapers and online.
In the article, Faust talks about the tough choices that Harvard is going to have to make in the months ahead.
“We can’t have chocolate and vanilla and strawberry. We have to decide which one,” she said.
This prompted the Yale Daily News to have a little fun at Faust’s expense.
Dealbreaker.com, too.
That is, however, about the most substantive thing Faust says in the interview. Regarding Allston, for example, she suggests that the science building is paused so that its fate can be really thought through, and that at the end, all the constituencies involved can be sure that the matter has been really thought through.
Put through a truth filter, that means, stick a fork in that baby, it’s done.
Warren Goldfarb articulates some faculty concerns:
“Because of[Faust’s] sort of mild demeanor, we’re kind of wondering what’s going to happen,” philosophy professor Warren Goldfarb said. “She hasn’t stepped up and said, ‘This is what we’re going to have to do.’ ”
So she’s (forgive me) the thrilla from vanilla?
On July 10, they’re hosting Depeche Mode on the program “World Cafe with David Dye.”
Who’d have thought that NPR would get so funky?
Sarah Palin poses for Runner’s World magazine. Your blogger can’t think of a thing to say about this which won’t somehow get him into trouble.
So I’ve now read Nina Munk’s article about Harvard in Vanity Fair, and it is, well…brutal. If you thought my Boston magazine piece on Harvard’s financial crisis was tough (and yes, I scooped Vanity Fair, ta-da!), multiply that by about three.
Munk is—how can I put it?—dismissive of Drew Faust, Jane Mendillo, Bob Rubin, Evelynn Hammonds, the Harvard press people, Harvard bureaudiction (a fusion of “bureaucrat” and “diction,” the BS language of “reshaping” and “resizing,” which makes Harvard look oh-so-stupid and equally guilty) and many others.
Munk is conspicuously flattering to Jack Meyer, which…hmmm…makes one wonder. Did Meyer talk?
Here are some of the naughty bits.
The coverline:
“Annals of Arrogance—Harvard’s Big, Dumb Financial Train Wreck.”
Quoting Evelynn Hammonds:
“I’d rather use the words ‘reduction,’ ‘shifting things around,’ ‘reorganizing’—rather than saying something that says ‘cuts‘……
[Blogger: Bureaudiction! A wonderful example. Hammonds is a master of it.]
On the mood at Harvard:
Harvard is in trouble, and no one can decide who’s to blame, or what to do next. …Harvard’s hostile fiefdoms are pointing anonymous fingers…They disagree about who made the flawed investment decisions in the first place, insisting that they themselves had never been consulted on the matter, or had been overruled, or pushed aside and ignored…
On taking responsibility:
If Harvard were a publicly traded company, [the men and women who run Harvard] would have been fired by now….
[Blogger: Maybe. Munk has more faith in the private sector than I do.]
And again:
If Harvard were a serious business facing a liquidity crisis, it would have done something drastic by now: fired senior employees, closed departments, sold off real estate. But Harvard…is stubborn and inflexible….
On Harvard’s financial optimism:
While I was reading through Harvard’s financial reports from the past decade, the word “delusional” sprang to mind…
On Larry Summers’ relationship with Jack Meyer and HMC:
“… Larry is largely responsible for blowing up the place,” one Meyer loyalist told me. “Harvard Management Company worked perfectly when the board left them alone!”
On Bob Rubin and Jack Meyer:
Rubin…was contemptuous of Meyer’s daring investment strategies. As one person put it to me, Rubin was on the “warpath.” To anyone who would listen—Harvard’s board, Wall Street, Larry Summers—Rubin kept chipping away at Meyer’s credibility.
On Mohamed El-Erian:
According to a friend, El-Erian felt suffocated at Harvard and couldn’t wait to get out.
…El-Erian, an outsider, quickly became the subject of unsubstantiated attacks, many of them based on rumor and malice. Harvard tends to be like that.
On Jane Mendillo:
…pleasant…
…We do know that she’s laid off about a quarter of her staff and that she’s cautiously moved more of Harvard’s portfolio into cash even as the market climbs…
On the endowment:
It will probably take more than a decade for the value of the endowment to return to where it was in the heady days of 2008.
On Larry Summers’ tenure at Harvard:
As Summers recently remarked to one of his colleagues, “I held out the hope that Boston would be to this century what Florence was to the 15th century.”
[Blogger: I do not believe that Summers said this to a colleague; it’s just not the sort of thing one says in normal conversation. I think he said it to Munk in an interview either on background or off the record, and Munk liked it—it’s a money quote, just the kind of soundbite Summers carefully hones—and asked Summers if there was any way she could use it, and they decided to attribute it to him saying it to a colleague.]
On Harvard bureaudiction:
Earlier this year…construction at Allston was abruptly stopped. Not, mind you, that the verb “to stop” is part of Harvard’s current vocabulary—the project is being “re-assessed” and “recalibrated.”
On Summers’ firing:
“The fact that they fired him is symptom of everything that’s wrong with Harvard,” one of Harvard’s big donors told me. “He’s not politically correct….”
[Blogger: Lame. It’s a dumb quote, not to mention a wrong one, and isn’t connected to any of the other arguments in the piece. Munk should have resisted putting it in. Also: Aren’t we at the point where we can safely assume that anyone who uses the term “politically correct” is substituting jargon for thought?]
On Drew Faust:
Faust is not known as a visionary. In fact, outside of academia, no one I’ve spoken to has any idea who Drew Faust is or why she got the job in the first place. One undergraduate I spoke to described Faust as “expressionless.” An alumnus, having recently attended a dinner where Faust was the guest speaker, told me she was exceedingly dull—so dull he was reminded of those animated Peanuts cartoons from the 1970s, the ones where adults appear offscreen as so many disembodied, insubstantial “voices” that say nothing but “wa-wa-wa.”
[Blogger: I’ve been making this point more gently about Faust for years. Her response? Rather than recognizing the validity of the criticism, her flunkies and she refuse to talk to me…and then Vanity Fair comes along and makes the point far more viciously. The people who surround Drew Faust do not know what they are doing; they know only how to cover their asses, and as a result, her reputation has been deeply, perhaps permanently, damaged. But Faust ultimately has to accept responsibility. This is a time for the president to be bold, to make her voice heard, to separate herself from the puppeteers on the Corporation. (What are they going to do—fire her? She is un-fireable.) Instead, we have “green is the new Crimson,” blah-blah.]
On Faust’s “vision”:
To leave her imprint on Harvard, and possibly to distance herself rom Summers with his tight focus on the sciences, Faust has dedicated herself to elevating the arts. Last December, outlining her vision of the future, Faust released a written statement: “In times of uncertainty, the arts remind us of our humanity and provide the reassuring proof that we, along with the Grecian urn, have endured and will continue to do so.”
[Blogger: Oh, dear. Remind yourself that this is the president of Harvard, not a high school valedictorian.]
On Harvard’s PR machine:
…Harvard refused to cooperate when I was reporting this story. At first, the university’s public relations apparatus ignored me. Week after week, e-mail after e-mail, I’d be assured that someone or someone else was unavailable—in meetings, or on vacation, or away from his desk, or out of the office, ill. When I did manage to track someone down, I was thrown a sop of evasive prose. (“I don’t feel we’ve made a decision about how to best engage for your piece,” the vice-president for public affairs told me in an e-mail.”)
Blogger: Bureaudiction!
(I love the term “engage for.” Is this possibly the same person who ghostwrote Mike Smith’s, Evelynn Hammond’s and Allan Brandt’s embarrassing Crimson op-ed, “Our Plans for the Future”? Remind yourself that these are three deans of Harvard University, not high school valedictorians.)
Here is Harvard’s problem: Incompetent leadership.
(And this is one failing of Munk’s article: She does not address the problem of the Corporation at all.)
The Corporation is a disaster, and—I’m sorry, presidential defenders, but it’s true—so far, so is Drew Faust. Jane Mendillo is a question mark. The bureaucrats are leaving in droves. [FAS dean of administration and finance Brett Sweet—oh no he ain’t!—being the latest.]
I think it’s time for the faculty to step up again, just as it did in 2006. The fate of your university is at stake.
What was the Washington Post thinking? The paper recently decided that it would host intimate dinners with lobbyists, politicians and its own reporters and editors at the chi-chi home of publisher Lally Weymouth.
The catch? The lobbyists had to pay to be there. The Post was selling access.
When word got out, Weymouth canceled the deal, and a flunkie took the blame.
Other news organizations do things that are sort of similar—conferences, basically—but those feel qualitatively different than a small dinner at the publisher’s house.
In any case, here’s an interesting tidbit [emphasis added] from the article:
In March, the Wall Street Journal brought together global finance leaders — including Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd — for a two-day conference sponsored by Nasdaq and hosted by Robert Thomson, the Journal’s top editor, and other editors and reporters. Outside journalists were invited to the session, which was on the record and webcast by the Journal. Participants, who paid several thousand dollars to attend, also had a White House meeting with economic adviser Lawrence Summers, which was off the record at his request.
This is troublesome—the part pertaining to Larry Summers, that is.
I don’t see any problem with the Wall Street Journal hosting a conference, or with government officials appearing at it, as long as they’re not making anything off it.
But to sell a private meeting with Larry Summers? That’s not appropriate. It’s influence-buying—and selling—pure and simple. Selling a White House meeting is only barely different from renting out the Lincoln bedroom.
It’s things like this, and the millions he made from Wall Street banks, that worry me about having Summers in government. The man does not give a damn about ethics. His arrogance supercedes any idea of appropriate behavior: He thinks the rules don’t apply to him. I would not be surprised if some similar behavior gets Summers in real trouble at some point—but only after the taxpayers pay a price.
(And for what it’s worth, the Journal shouldn’t participate in such an arrangement either: It leaves the paper feeling indebted to Summers, which will certainly affect its coverage of him, which Summers well knows.)
By the way, the White House published a list of staff salaries. (Good for Obama! The Clinton White House didn’t do this, and the Bush White House? Not a chance.)
Summers is making $172,000.
A poster below draws my attention to this Sports Illustrated blog post, which argues that David Ortiz and A-Rod are both having off years because they’ve turned 33, and, well, baseball players start to suck when they turn 33?
I’m not convinced….
She issued a response to the Vanity Fair article claiming that the endowment would be down only 22-23%.
According to the Boston Herald, Faust says 30% is still the magic number.
She writes:
… “the virtually unprecedented market conditions of the past year lead us to believe that, when the valuations on all of our illiquid investments come in and our year officially closes, our returns will be in line with our earlier projections of a 30 percent decline, and in line with our peers who are following similar investment strategies. Recently reported assertions about Harvard’s endowment performance are inaccurate.”
My guess is still 27-28%…with the caveat that the number is virtually meaningless, because you can’t trust the valuations of the illiquid investments. But it’s interesting that Faust felt compelled to respond to an anonymous quote….