Shots in the Dark

The Maldives by seaplane, October 16, 2024

Why hasn’t someone done this long ago? Hat tip to the Daily Beast.

In the wake of Virginia Thomas’ bizarre, apology-seeking phone call to Anita Hill, the Washington Post has a fascinating interview with Lillian McEwen, who was a longtime girlfriend of Clarence Thomas. At the time of Thomas’ confirmation hearings in 1991, McEwen was on good terms with her ex, and she was never called to testify. Now she’s shopping a book, and ready to tell all!

I don’t know that there’s much of a book in McEwen’s story, but what she says certainly backs up Hill and suggests that Thomas is a liar whose claim to be a victim of a “high-tech lynching” was dishonest, calculated race-baiting.

“He was obsessed with porn,” she said of Thomas, who is now 63. “He would talk about what he had seen in magazines and films, if there was something worth noting.”

…According to McEwen, Thomas would also tell her about women he encountered at work. He was partial to women with large breasts, she said. In an instance at work, Thomas was so impressed that he asked one woman her bra size, McEwen recalled him telling her.

…Another woman, Sukari Hardnett, who worked as a special assistant to Thomas in 1985 and 1986, wrote in a letter to the Judiciary Committee that “If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female” by Thomas.

I wonder if Virginia Thomas might now call Anita Hill back and be the one to proffer an apology….

Alas, I fear they are doomed; A.J. Burnett is 2010’s Kevin Brown. (Which is to say, bad juju.)

One hopes for a miracle, but this doesn’t feel like the Bombers’ year…..

I’m not usually a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s pop sociology (that’s kind of redundant, isn’t it?), which seems to me generally a dressing-up of common sense.

But I do think he’s right on the money with his most recent New Yorker piece, Small Change, on “why the revolution will not be tweeted.”

Gladwell takes note of the many grandiose claims for the organizing powers of Twitter and Facebook—claims about recent events which turn out to be wildly exaggerated, and claims about the future about which he is wildly skeptical.

The problem, Gladwell argues, is that Internet connections are “weak ties,” while the kind of connections required for committed activism to take place must be considerably stronger.

There is strength in weak ties, as the sociologist Mark Granovetter has observed. Our acquaintances—not our friends—are our greatest source of new ideas and information. The Internet lets us exploit the power of these kinds of distant connections with marvellous efficiency. It’s terrific at the diffusion of innovation, interdisciplinary collaboration, seamlessly matching up buyers and sellers, and the logistical functions of the dating world. But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.

…The evangelists of social media… seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960. “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,” Aaker and Smith write. But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.

I think this is right, and I’d add another factor: The Internet has made this kind of weak organizing so easy that invitations to join causes have become all too common and predictable. Therefore, one tunes them out; appeals to support this and that are now just another form of spam.

Not everyone agrees, of course. This post on Gigaom accuses Gladwell of using a straw man to make his case. I don’t think so. Gladwell uses the claims made by the promoters of social media….

The Times reports that Eliot Spitzer’s application to join the Harvard Club has been rejected, presumably because of his prostitution scandal.

Mr. Spitzer at first declined to discuss the rejection, but on Tuesday night, his spokeswoman, Lisa Linden, said in a statement. “The decision by the Harvard Club’s admissions committee is disappointing.”

Nicole M. Parent, the club’s president, declined to comment on the decision.

Nicole is a friend of mine and a really impressive person, so I’m a bit conflicted here—and, as the Times mentions, it only takes two objections out of a 15-person membership committee to block an application.

I will say, though, that there is a extreme conservative old guard at the Harvard Club that can’t abide any hint of controversy or even meaningful debate (one wonders if it was one of these nattering nabobs who leaked the news of Spitzer’s rejection to the Times); the Club once retracted a confirmed offer to me to speak there (on the subject of baseball) when some of these Harvard Cerberuses got wind of it. The reason? Because I’d written critically of Larry Summers.

The same reason, in fact, that the Club refused to host a talk on Harvard Rules when it was published….

A Crimson “roving reporter” interviews science and math majors regarding their thoughts on Larry Summers’ return to campus.

Writing in the Yale Daily News, Jim Sleeper uses the release of the Harvard-related film, “The Social Network,” to talk about Yale’s history of tension between idealism and materialism. (Guess which one he thinks is winning?)

…Yale’s economic-determinist confidence in materialism would horrify our founders, Adam Smith and even Marx, whose materialism has indeed invaded Wall Street and “The Social Network.” The real “social network” is collapsing along with millions of American homes and jobs amid road rage; lethal store-opening rampages; extreme or “cage” fighting; TV shows that gloat over others’ humiliation; rising crime in New Haven; and rising Christine O’Donnells and Linda McMahons, who bypass Americans’ brains and hearts on the way to our lower viscera, wallets and post-republican despair.

Still—if I read Sleeper correctly—he’s suggesting that, in comparison to Harvard, at least Yale tries to fight the good fight.

It is too damn high.

Watch as politics in New York only gets weirder.

Sunrise over Doha

Which is to say, I’m back.