Shots in the Dark

It is not my intention to be mean, and if I ever met Amalie Benjamin in person, I’m sure I’d feel bad. I bet she’s a wonderful human being and probably she’s much nicer than I am.

But here is a reason why I repeatedly point out the bizarrely bad writing and flagrant grammatical errors in Amalie Benjamin’s writing. Two of them, actually.

The first is that I believe people should still demand good writing—or at the least, correct writing—especially in public fora. Just because there are a lot of McDonald’s in the world doesn’t mean we should settle for Big Macs.

The second is to remind people that the Globe used to be a fine newspaper and to remind people there, if anyone there reads this stuff, that some readers do care about writing and editing.

Okay. That said, Amalie Benjamin has some beauties in her story today about the Red Sox’s likely deal to acquire pitcher John Lackey.

I’ll just lay ’em out there—you can figure out the issues yourself.

He wasn’t ready to leave the game, a personality trait that would play well in Boston.

A step was taken to fill an outfield spot by agreeing to a deal with veteran Mike Cameron.

With Josh Beckett in the last year of his contract, the Sox are in a better position to negotiate with him, negotiations which may have already begun.

The 31-year-old righthander is second only in available players to Roy Halladay….

[Blogger: I have to interject—what does that mean?]

When Angels manager Mike Scioscia went to the mound to remove Lackey from Game 5 of the 2009 American League Championship Series, the pitcher yelled, “This is mine!’’ though he was taken out of the game.

How can newspapers expect to survive when they are so poorly written and edited?

Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking, but I long to believe that quality still matters.

This has the potential to be a huge story.

Sunday’s NYT editorialized against the court decision that denied the state of New York the right to use eminent domain in support of Columbia’s Manhattanville expansion.

The decision is completely out of step with eminent domain law, including a recent 6-to-1 decision from the New York State Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. That court ruled that Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, a commercial development, can use eminent domain to secure land to build new housing and a basketball arena for the Nets. That was the right decision, and the case for Columbia is even stronger.

The civic purpose in the Columbia expansion is clear, given the contributions it would make to education, the job market and community life. The Empire State Development Corporation also made a thoroughly defensible decision that eminent domain was appropriate given the blighted condition of the land at issue, between 125th and 133rd Streets near the Hudson River.

Funnily enough, given my sympathies towards Columbia’s expansion, I find myself unimpressed by the Times’ op-ed, which doesn’t really engage with the issues at stake, issues debated here on this blog. Though this ruling is inconsistent with the Atlantic Yards decision, that ruling was pretty controversial. And the question of blight—or at least, how the conclusion that the area is blighted was arrived at—is murkier than the Times makes it out to be.

(I think the area is blighted, but suspect that the way the state and Columbia went about establishing this was rigged.)

Incidentally, there was a protest against the Manhattanville Project on Saturday. The Columbia Spectator reported that the rally drew 50 people. I happened to drive by it a couple times (more of the DMV odyssey) and would guess more like 25. None of those protestors (that I saw) was African-American—which is not to say that locals support Manhattanville (or not), but rather to say that you can round up a coupla dozen Columbia students to protest anything if you tell them it’ll hurt Columbia.

Sam Spektor reports in a comment below that Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton is stepping down.

If he’s right, that leaves—oh, the irony—Bob Rubin in charge.

Addendum: Harvard Mag’s story is here. And here is the Crimson’s.

I wonder if Houghton will give any interviews to a legitimate (i.e., not the Harvard Gazette) news source, or if he’ll just slip away.

“Joe Lieberman really is the most appalling human being.”

—Gawker, “Just When You Thought Joe Lieberman Couldn’t Get Any Worse,” on Lieberman’s latest plea/ploy for attention.

In today’s Globe, Harvard profs Harry Lewis and Fred Abernathy take a public stand against the Secret Seven—the Harvard Corporation.

I’ve got my first cold of the season. Bleh. Also, had to tangle with the New York DMV yesterday bright and early. It was a close call—a classic tale of man against machine—but in the end RPB came out on top. That and a fever pretty much wiped me out.

A plainclothes cop just shot and killed a guy in Times Square. The man was one of several scam artists I’ve seen there in recent months who pretend to be giving away copies of “my CD,” and then, if you make the mistake of taking it, pressure you to give them “a contribution.” These guys can be pretty intimidating; they’re up in your face asking for money.

The cop is part of an undercover unit trying to crack down on this illegal practice. The con man in question turned out to be carrying a Mac-10 semiautomatic pistol he bought from a Virginia gun dealer—massively illegal in New York—and fired first at the cop. He missed. The cop didn’t.

On the man’s body, police found a business card for a Virginia gun dealer, Gary A. Lewis, who runs Gary’s Guns & Transfers in Manakin-Sabot, a pair of villages northwest of Richmond.

[From Gary’s website: “First-time and other inexperienced gun buyers may find Gary offering guidance and advice more readily than some other local gun dealers..Gary’s Guns & Transfers operates by appointment only from a residence in Manakin Sabot, but Gary and his crew are regulars at most Central Virginia gun shows.”

Dude sells semiautomatics from his apartment. Nice.]

Hand-written on the back of the card, the police said, were these words: “I just finished watching ‘The Last Dragon.’ I feel sorry for a cop if he think I’m getting into his paddy wagon.”

Apparently I’m getting more conservative as I get older, because, well, I just can’t get upset about this death. It’s a great example of the Broken Windows theory of policing; little crimes are connected to bigger ones. I’m just glad the cop wasn’t hurt.

To no one’s surprise, you can stick a fork in Harvard’s Allston campus—it’s done.

Harvard Mag reports,

…Harvard is in effect rebooting its planning effort for that expansion overall, implying a longer deferral of Allston development—and raising the prospect of significant changes from the prior vision of new homes for Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) and Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), a cultural and performing-arts complex, additional and expansive laboratories, and other facilities.

What a sad and difficult and fascinating moment for Harvard. After decades of educational supremacy, the university, largely because of fiscal mismanagement, is getting hammered. From faculty retirements to staff retirements and layoffs to undergraduates without hot food to the demise of campus expansion, Harvard has been ravaged by financial losses.

The only question, really, is whether any other university is in a position to surpass it—or whether Stanford, Yale and others are equally hampered.

Regardless, this announcement makes clear that Harvard’s golden age is over. How long will the rebuilding process be?

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Addendum: Sigh. The Globe gets the story completely wrong here. No, education reporter Tracy Jan, it’s not just that Harvard isn’t going to build the science center; the university is bowing out of the entire project and reevaluating the entire plan.

Hmmm. Columbia has the money to build but can’t buy the land. Harvard has the land but not the money. Perhaps Columbia should give up on Harlem and think about Allston?

The Columbia Spectator, which, in keeping with a long tradition of Columbia students, has been pretty consistently biased against its parent university, runs a softball interview with multi-millionaire landlord Nick Sprayregen, who is doing his best to position himself as a man of the people.

Sample question:

Do you feel comfortable in that role of David [versus Goliath]?

Hello, Columbia School of Journalism? I have a raison d’etre for you.

To be fair, the second half of the interview features a much more substantive interview with Columbia law professor Michael Heller addressing the legal issues in play.

How does Manhattanville fit within the general trend of major developments?

...this is a very general problem in the American economy, which is that more and more today, the really valuable forms of economic development—job creation, job growth, cultural creation—require assembly of large parcels of land. It used to be the case that you’d buy a piece of land, subdivide it, build houses, and that would be the path to creating economic growth. Today, more and more, the path for jobs and growth is that you put pieces together and you create the kinds of economic development that require large parcels.

Useful information.