Shots in the Dark

Everyone seems to have an opinion on the Ines Sainz/New York Jets incident.

In the Guardian, the author of a book on sexual harassment says that no woman should have to endure what the Jets did to Sainz.

…whistling not only needlessly breaks all women’s train of thought and can make them pause to evaluate their safety; it could contribute to long-term body image and mental health issues. A 2008 study conducted by psychologists at Rutgers University in New Jersey found that young women who experienced high volumes of whistling and catcalls engaged in self-objectification and were consequently susceptible to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression.

While on Deadspin, a young female sportswriter is demoralized—not by the Jets, but by Sainz.

You were a Miss Universe, I would remind her, so why did you try to become a sports reporter? Que, I would ask, are Ines Sainz’s ambitions in this field? Is she merely attempting to compile a comprehensive list of NFL players’ bicep measurements? Is she trying to find unique ways to expose a bra in as many different outfits as she can in her time on this planet? These motives I can entertain. But is Ines Sainz really trying to be a sports reporter?

Below, hear Sainz’s side of the story, as a [male] Fox News reporter asks her, “Could those jeans get any tighter?”

To which Sainz rather charmingly replies, “It’s my size.”

For me, the real lesson of the story is this: Boo, Jets.

Red Sox fans often accuse Yankees fans of buying World Series victories. Aside from the general presence of Red Sox fans, two things bother me about this.

One is that the Sox have the second largest payroll in baseball. Yes, it’s substantially lower than the Yankees’, but we’re not talking the Florida Marlins here.

And two, as any Yankee fan will tell you, and certainly any Met fan, money generally helps a team be competitive, but it is no guarantee of anything, except maybe that you’ll pay a lot more for a beer and a hot dog at the ballpark. (That’s about $15-$20 at Yankee Stadium.)

Money doesn’t guarantee team chemistry (sometimes quite the opposite); doesn’t guarantee that the team spent it on the right players; and doesn’t guarantee that the recipient of a fat contract will play particularly well; doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be stuck with aging players you can’t trade or cut because they’re making too much money.

I was reminded of that in today’s Journal, where Matthew Futterman writes that this season, there’s an inverse correlation between payroll size and team success.

If the current standings hold up through the end of the season, this will be the first year in the game’s modern history—the period since the 1994 players’ strike—when the amount of money a ballclub pays its players bears almost no relationship with how many games it won.

And this is true even though the payroll disparities between the richest and poorest teams have actually increased in recent years.

Truth is, the small-market teams should be grateful to the Yankees, who pay a small fortune in luxury taxes that teams like the Pirates and Brewers use to line their owners’ pockets.

The problem, as Futterman points out, is that when small-market teams like the Rays and Padres make it to the World Series, most of the time, and as opposed to when the Yankees or Red Sox are in the Series, no one really gives a damn….

And that’s bad for baseball.

Despite the Harvard endowment’s embarrassing performance last year (well, compared to mine and Columbia’s, anyway), some university officials aren’t hesitating to use the ever-growing campus bureaucracy to send out emails promoting…themselves!

Like, for example, the one below…and the one below that…

Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Receives a Birthday Shout-Out on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” listen to the podcast ______________________________________ It’s the birthday of the scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., (books by this author) born in Keyser, West Virginia (1950). He said, “When I was a kid growing up, my friends wanted to be Hank Aaron or Willie Mays. I wanted to be a Rhodes Scholar.” He went to junior college for a year and then to Yale, and he was the first African-American ever to win a Mellon Fellowship to study at Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. He moved back to the United States, and he was hanging out in a bookstore in New York and found the novel Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black. Published in 1859, it’s the story of a biracial girl named Frado who is abandoned by her white mother and becomes an indentured servant to a Massachusetts family. Our Nig was attributed to Harriet E. Wilson, and for a long time the book had been dismissed as a sentimental novel written by a white man under a pseudonym. But Gates did some research and he was able to prove that Harriet Wilson was in fact a black woman, whose own life was similar to that of her main character. Gates’ unearthing of Our Nig made his name as a scholar, and he has been a prominent academic and writer ever since. Some of his books include Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992), Colored People: A Memoir (1994), and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley (2003). http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/ ______________________________________ W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Harvard University 104 Mt. Auburn Street, 3R, Cambridge, MA, 617.495.8508. dubois.fas.harvard.edu.

Dear Alumni and Friends, I invite you to view a live webcast of a year-opening conversation with President Drew Faust and former Good Morning America host Charlie Gibson, now a fellow at the Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center, as they discuss Harvard’s priorities, challenges, and opportunities in the coming year. The event will take place in Sanders Theatre next Tuesday, September 21, beginning at 4 p.m. EST. You can access the webcast link via the Harvard homepage the day of the event. I hope you’ll be available for what promises to be a fascinating discussion. Sincerely, Tamara Rogers Vice President Alumni Affairs and Development Harvard University ______________________________________________________________________ Good thing the university has so many press secretaries!

The LA Times reports on the Mad Men-inspired resurgence in…swizzle sticks.

Beautiful, aren’t they?

Anne Cusack/LAT photo

In the race to see who can earn better returns on investment, Harvard (11% on endowment) or me (better than that, although, you know, less money)…Columbia wins!

My neighbor in Morningside Heights announced yesterday that its endowment returns were a whopping 17.3% last year. Or, you know… 50% better than Harvard’s.

Schools are only beginning to report their investment performances, and some closely watched institutions, including Yale and Princeton, have yet to release their figures. But a few other schools did almost as well as Columbia. Investure, which manages $6.5 billion for six schools and four foundations — including Barnard, Smith, Middlebury, Trinity, Dickinson and the University of Tulsa — posted returns of 15.2 to 17.7 percent.

The University of Tulsa beat Harvard?

True, Columbia has a lot less money than Harvard—a paltry $6.5 billion (still, more than me, so they’re happy about that)—but is that really any solace to Cambridge’s money honey?

Or, as Harvard starts beating the drums for another fundraising campaign, is the pressure on Jane Mendino growing?

Huge news!

A reader who knows of my anti-Twitter obsession sends the news that rock star John Mayer—one of the most followed of Twitter users—has abandoned Tweeting.

Mayer had 3.7 million followers.

CNN reports:

“With the Battle Studies Tour now at a close and a return to the studio planned, John has discontinued his Twitter account,” a representative said Tuesday. “However, he continues to communicate with his fans via his blog as he always has.”

Ah…satisfaction.

They may yet be good, but…there’s nothing more satisfying than seeing a team filled with obnoxious jerks score a measly nine points and lose their opener, 10-9, in a new stadium.

Especially after the Giants won the day before.

Enough talk about winning the Super Bowl, Coach Ryan. Perhaps you should focus on winning a game.

Meanwhile, Mexican sideline reporter Ines Sainz has accepted an apology from Jets owner Woody Johnson.

(Below, the New York Post showed what she was wearing to last night’s crushing Jets loss.)

The reaction to this story has been enormous; what’s shocking about it is the latent racism and xenophobia in many online comments and remarks from theoretically more civilized editorialists.

(Think the Post’s Andrea Peyser would so easily call—the double entrendre is pretty clear, I think—a white girl a “publicity whore.”)

Here a New York Post reader refers to here as “another attention-seeking wetback,” while another asks why she isn’t reporting on the Arizona Cardinals and asks to “see her papers.”

Astonishing. To be honest, I would have thought that many Americans would have been surprised to see a Latina (I think Sainz is actually Spanish) who looks so blonde and California-girly.

But I guess people hear “Mexican” and appearance doesn’t matter—every type of Latino, no matter how they defy stereotypes, can be called “just another attention-seeking wetback.”

Ugh.

I’m fascinated by the news that Cuba is laying off hundreds of thousands of state employees and trying to bolster its private sector.

One move: Giving more private licenses to taxi drivers.

While I was there, I hired a taxi driver to take me around for the day. It cost about $75. (Cuba, for foreigners, isn’t as cheap as you think it’s going to be.)

Of that sum, the driver told me, he would receive something like 45 cents. The state got the rest.

As you can imagine, I tipped him well….

Yale prez Richard Levin just emailed Yale alums to notify us of a new partnership Yale is entering into with the National University of Singapore.

Yale has now been asked to consider joining with NUS as a full partner to establish Yale-NUS College in Singapore, with an intended opening in the fall of 2013. The College would be a highly selective, small, autonomous school within NUS, with approximately 1000 undergraduate students in its early years. The COllege would award its degrees through NUS, not Yale….

A co-branded college? There have certainly been offshoots of other American universities in foreign countries, but this does sound new.

Levin writes that he’s writing “to share our current thinking and to invite your counsel”—if I recall, he did the same with the addition of two residential colleges to Yale—but he clearly supports the idea…

Here’s the YDN story about it—looks like a nice campus, anyway.

The New York Post reports that the NFL brass is “investigating” whether the Jets, and Ryan, sexually harassed Mexican TV reporter Ines Sainz when she came to interview quarterback Mark Sanchez.

During the portion of practice open to the media, Ryan and defensive backs coach Dennis Thurman purposely overthrew passes so they would land near Sainz, she said.

Later, during a locker-room availability, several players allegedly hooted and hollered when Sainz walked in.

I’m a bit torn about this particular item.

On the one hand, seems to me that a sports “reporter” who dresses like the below shouldn’t be all that surprised when football players make some catcalls in her direction. Football players are not hired for their manners. And, if you’re blatantly using your sexuality to get ahead, people are going to respond to you in kind.

On the other hand, there’s no excuse for not acting like a gentleman. Plus, the perpetrators were members of the New York Jets, including their obnoxious coach, Rex Ryan, whose appetite for cheeseburgers is surpassed only by his hunger for media attention.

The Jets have rapidly made themselves probably the most unlikeable team in the NFL….