The producers of The Cove, the Academy Award-winning documentary on dolphin slaughter in Japan, have produced this PSA, timed for Earth Day. Maybe it’s just me, but I find it quite powerful.
By popular demand (i.e., one poster below), a Curb classic.
This story of an Apple newbie who tried to buy a bunch of iPads and resell them to people overseas—only to find himself banned from ever buying another—is getting a lot of web traction.
Scott Brown announces that he won’t run for president in 2012, but will instead back Mitt Romney (as opposed to Sarah Palin)….
I finally finished the 9th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which I’d DVRed. Any other fans out there?
I know some people find Larry David too annoying to watch, but really, he is a genius.
Here’s a nice little bit from the last episode.
“Bob is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception. We are like night and day, he and I.”
—Joni Mitchell, speaking about Bob Dylan, in today’s Los Angeles Times.
Every time one of my glam New York friends orders sushi or swordfish or grouper, etc.—people who consider themselves politically correct and eco-friendly—I wonder if they’ve given any thought to the impact their food choice is having on the environment. These are people who would never be spotted dead in McDonald’s, but don’t hesitate to eat unsustainable fish several times a week.
As you can imagine, it’s a slightly awkward situation. I can be (you’re shocked, I’m sure) a bit boring on the subject.
Having said that, the message has to get out somehow. Here’s a teaser for an upcoming film, “End of the Line,” about vanishing fish.
I woke up this morning and thought to myself, “You know, I think the Tea Party has peaked.” And I do.
Why?
Well, for one thing, because the health care bill passed and the world hasn’t ended.
Two, because the likely passage of financial reform legislation will slake some of their populist bloodlust.
Three, because they are a bunch of malcontent crackpots and are increasingly revealing themselves as such. (That Times poll allegedly showing they are better educated than the average American? I don’t think so.)
Four, because they are a bunch of malcontent (and racist, I forgot) crackpots, no political party particularly wants to align with them, and they don’t want to align with any particular party, which limits their role to that of spoiler, and let’s face it, nobody really likes a spoiler.
More than that, successful political parties succeed because they stand for something and express optimism and have ideas about how to make things better. No one really likes to hang out with a bunch of mean-spirited cranks for very long.
I don’t know what’s going to happen in November, but you know what? I don’t think anyone else does either, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s less turnover in Congress than the usual types are predicting. Voters hate Congress, sure. But they’re not exactly loving the Republicans either. And in general any Tea Party candidate hurts a Republican more than a Democratic incumbent.
Five, summer’s coming, and everyone forgets about politics in the summer; the Tea Party People will be off in their RVs.
And six, because I’ve always thought that their influence was exaggerated by the media.
(If I’m right, by the way—and I’m pretty sure I am—this is all bad news for Sarah Palin, who was so quick to suck up to the Tea Party People. She saw a bandwagon and hopped right on it…like hitchhikers in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.)
Two people who feel the same way are Jonathan Martin and Ben Smith, writing in Politico on the media’s obsession with the Tea Party.
The tea party “movement,” meanwhile, has little organizational structure to speak of. True tea party candidates – as opposed to establishment figures like former Florida House Speaker Marco Rubio who have gladly adopted the label – have failed to make a dent so far in Republican primaries. The one true tea partier poised to make a splash, Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul, is an imperfect example thanks to his being the son of Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who still commands a national following after his quixotic presidential race.
But the biggest reason for the Tea Party’s decline? The Obama administration is getting stuff done. If the economy stays on the uptick—I’m skeptical, but let’s posit that it does—health care and financial reform are passed, and there are no unpleasant and unexpected surprises, the Dems may be better off in November than most folks seem to think.
The most serious concern at this point? That one frustrated Tea Party nutcase, despondent over the slide of the “party” into irrelevance, tries to take matters into his angry-white-male hands and shoot the president.
On the Daily Beast, Harvard student Isabel Kaplan—she published her first novel already—writes about Harvard’s policy to encourage people who are hammered intoxicated to visit University Health Services with no fear of punishment.
As other colleges and universities crack down on underage drinking, Harvard and many other elite schools are trying to do with their alcohol policies what they do with their students: Make them smarter. This has often meant a less penalty-driven attitude toward alcohol, and policies that emphasize to students that they will not get in trouble if they reach out for help.
But the efforts, whether they’re working or not, are having an effect that could make some parents squirm….
Apparently more people are showing up totally wasted inebriated at UHS, which leads Kaplan to wonder if Harvard’s tolerance is actually encouraging drinking. More likely, her article points out, is the possibility that people are drinking no more than they were before, but they are more willing to seek medical attention.
This sounds to me like a good policy, and I think Kaplan feels the same way….
At Harvard, at least, reducing the harm means literally teaching students how to make a drink correctly. Later on in that meeting I attended, the DAPA placed an empty blue plastic Solo cup on the table and next to it, a Nalgene bottle filled with water. He asked for volunteers to try and pour one drink—12 ounces of beer, 4 ounces of wine, 1.5 ounces of hard alcohol. The point was to teach us what one drink looks like, so that when we’re at parties, we wouldn’t fill a cup with half rum and half Coke and call that one drink.
Sort of like giving condoms to kids, right? If you’re going to do it, do it safely.
In the New York Observer, former Crimsonian Leon Neyfakh writes a piece of “Ivyology” about the nature of Yalies in Manhattan.
(This is pretty rare air, right?)
Yaliens in New York continue to have a unique relationship to their city. Part of the problem is that some of them actually do see it as their city.
“New York is Yale’s backyard,” said Richard Bradley, the magazine journalist who graduated from Yale in 1986 and went on to write a book about Harvard. “It’s something you take for granted—you’re fish, so you swim in the ocean.”
Sort of a douchey quote, I guess. (You may notice that it sounds oddly like a man who just returned from a week on a small boat in the Pacific.)
But here’s the funny part: Before I agreed to be interviewed, I asked the writer if we could speak on background—meaning that he couldn’t quote me unless he subsequently called me back and asked for my permission—because, a) I hadn’t really thought about the subject very much and wasn’t sure how coherent I’d be, and b) I’d just returned from a week on a small boat in the Pacific, and wasn’t sure how coherent I’d be.
So I wanted to be able to speak freely to the guy but know that, if he needed to quote me, I’d have the chance to think more rigorously about how to articulate my thoughts.
And then a weird thing happened: He quoted me anyway! Just…without calling me back.
And not always entirely accurately, I might add.
“Yalies compete with each other by trying to do more interesting and creative and unusual things, whereas Harvard people try to compete with each other in a more conventional way, by getting farther, faster in their careers,” said Mr. Weisberg. “Harvard people try to be more, and Yale people try to be different. The way to impress your Yale coterie is not to make partner at an early age or to run something at an early age—it’s sort of to invent a job or just do something really cool and hopefully socially conscious.”
At Harvard, Mr. Bradley added, “you’re basically going to school at a mall—a place that doesn’t want to admit it’s a mall.”
So here’s the deal: I made that comment in the context of talking about how going to school in New Haven shapes Yalies, grounds them in a way that doesn’t happen to Harvard students in Cambridge; when I referred to a mall, I was explicitly referencing Harvard Square, and Leon laughed and said something like, “Oh, I think they pretty much admit that now.”
So there you are.
Nonetheless, I contacted Leon about it, and he admitted that he goofed, which was the right thing to do, and no major harm done, onward and upward. (I’m just glad we weren’t talking about something serious.)
What I did try to get at was Yale’s influence in New York in particular in law, politics and the arts, and how for generations of Yalies New York exerted a gravitational pull just as Boston did for generations—past generations—of Harvardians.
Not sure I was entirely successful at that, though.