Shots in the Dark

When a Facebook commenter criticized Sarah Palin’s reality show, 16-year-old Willow Palin wrote back “stfu” [you can figure that out] and added, “Your such a f**got.”

(Apparently those schools aren’t doing such a great job in Alaska.)

Bristol Palin chimed in, telling the boy, “You’ll be as successful as my baby daddy.”

When will the Palins just go away?

Thanks to TMZ….

The Huffington Post reports on Larry Summers’ behavior in the White House, as detailed in a forthcoming book by Richard Wolffe, “Revival: The Struggle for Survival in the Obama White House.”

According to excerpts that were provided in advance to the Huffington Post, [Summers] is cast as manipulative and self-impressed and a routine source of frustration for a team of advisers grappling with a deep and difficult crisis. He fought with his colleagues over policy prescriptions both bold and routine and often played the roll of bottleneck to basic reforms.

The picture of Summers seems balanced enough, and as is always the case with him, it’s not easy to figure out what he actually believes. (Try—as I once did—to trace the arc of his intellectual development. You’ll go mad.)

Summers, for example, championed the new consumer financial protection agency, headed by Harvardian Elizabeth Warren, enacted by the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. (Perhaps he was trying to get back in good with the ladies?)

But he also resolutely opposed the Volcker Rule, contained in the same legislation, which progressives supported because it would have prohibited banks from investing with their own money, sometimes against their clients’ interests but also generally putting the financial system at risk.

The book also suggests how pivotal Harvardians were in the Obama White House, detailing Summers’ conflicts with Christy Romer (oh! wait! she’s not a Harvardian!) and Cass Sunstein.

Summers was squabbling with Christina Romer, whose academic credentials were hardly superficial: an economics professor at Berkeley and a specialist in the Great Depression. Romer began to build economic models of the tax credit to boost what little academic literature existed. Summers would often say he did not believe her arguments and models, demanding new tests and new assumptions. So Romer dutifully reworked the models and talked to outside economists who were just as skeptical as Summers. She found that many well-established economists were initially hostile, but would change their minds on hearing about her studies. Even if most of the jobs would have been created anyway, Romer found the fraction generated by the tax credit was still cheaper than the Recovery Act. Much of Romer’s work was designed to convince one man - Summers, not Obama - that her calculations made sense.

To be fair, it’s a little hard to tell from these snippets whether Summers was his old steamrolling self or not. It certainly sounds like it. But, on the other hand, there’s always another hand.

In any case, I’ve always predicted that the dishing about Summers would start as soon as people could get their White House books published, and that this revenge leaking would be a real distraction for Obama. It’s starting now, and it’s going to continue for years to come.

As if to validate my concerns about the Boston Globe manifested below, the Sunday New York Times and the Boston Globe carry a special insert.

The entire section is devoted to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the cover reads, “The MFA Takes Wing—With a Bold New Expansion, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts broadens its artistic horizons.”

The content is gushingly laudatory of the MFA and looks like something produced by the museum.

But in fact, it’s branded as a “special issue” of the Boston Globe, and the issue is created by Globe writers, photographers and editors.

Except it doesn’t look like journalism at all. It looks like a special advertising section for which Globe reporters created promotional copy.

I understand the Globe needs to make more money. But this kind of thing—farming out reporters to create advertorial—only damages the brand.

I don’t have a lot of time to go into it now, but I fear I was too hard on Amalie Benjamin.

It’s true, I don’t like her writing and it drives me nuts to hear a 20-something reporter make a story about her when it isn’t.

That said, she is a young person, and may very well grow as a writer and reporter.

The people who ultimately upset me are the people who didn’t edit her, and that speaks to the decline of newspapers and in particular the rapid decline of the Boston Globe, a paper I once really admired. Her copy was certainly fixable (at least, judging from what was published); and a sage hand could should have said to her, Amalie, write your farewell column about the Red Sox, not about yourself.

Amalie Benjamin represents a lowering of standards that is not her fault—Who cares about her writing? She blogs! She goes on TV!—and ultimately that’s the larger point to make.

You never know: Freed from daily deadline pressure, maybe she’ll write some terrific stuff. I do hope so.

In her blog, Amalie Benjamin announces with characteristic flair that she and the Red Sox beat are parting ways.

Allow me to deconstruct/correct.

I am not leaving the Globe, just moving on to work on features and other daily duties in sports.

At last, the Globe has heard the anguished cries of sports fans and language-lovers everywhere. I’ve been demoted, but they don’t want to fire me. I have no idea what the hell I’ll be doing.

I won’t be gone from Fenway Park, in fact, I’ll still be there quite a bit.

Just not necessarily in the press box.

But the daily grind of the beat — the hundreds of thousands of airline miles, the hundreds of hotel nights, the thousands of unhealthy meals — is over for me, a move that will allow me to report on the stories that are so important to me, and hopefully to you.

Reporting on the stories that are “so important to me”? Aside from the melodrama of the phrase, are we to then assume that reporting on Red Sox games wasn’t particularly important to her?

No wonder she won’t be doing it anymore.

…and hopefully to you.

Which should read: “…and, I hope, to you.” Just because of that, you know, expectation that professional writers know basic points of grammar.

But, before I move on from the daily business of the Sox beat, I want to thank all of you. You have been some of my biggest advocates, allowing me into your lunch hours and Twitter accounts, allowing me to be a part of your enjoyment of the Sox. You accepted me as a female beat writer in her 20s, not an easy position in which to be….

You know what, Amalie? Aside from the fact that you don’t need that comma after the “but”? And that “allowing me into your lunch hours and Twitter accounts” is a line that no one should ever, ever write again? Or that you have actually detracted from my enjoyment of the Red Sox, but in any case it’s not up to you to say that you’ve added to our enjoyment?

That aside…

I don’t give a damn that we “accepted [you] as [sic] a female beat writer in her 20s, not an easy position in which to be…”

You’re an f’ing reporter, and this isn’t a Judy Blume novel. Whether it’s hard or not to be a female beat writer in her 20s—and, to be fair, I’m sure it poses issues—that’s not our problem, and there’s no reason for you to be blogging about it. This is not about you. As soon as you bring gender and age into the mix, everyone else has fair game to suggest that, hey, you probably only got the job because you’re a young woman and the Globe needed a female sports reporter, even though, as a 20-something reporter, you didn’t seem to know a lot about baseball, and your writing was and remains execrable.

I mean, could you imagine Red Smith or Roger Angell musing about how hard it is to cover baseball given the challenges of identity politics?

Apologies to readers for manifesting more than the usual anti-Amalie sentiment, but I can’t stand this crap. Amalie, you’re a newspaper reporter. This is the Boston Globe’s website, not Facebook. You want us to treat you like a professional, don’t ask us to be sympathetic to all the challenges that come from having a dream job at age 26.

One would think that moving on from the job of covering the Red Sox might prompt some nice memories or added insights about the team during the years in which AB covered them. That’d be kind of interesting, right?

Instead, it’s all about Amalie. And that isn’t interesting at all.

This can be a tough city in which to live. Sometimes, it’s nice to remind ourselves that it’s an amazing city in which to live.

This essay by the late historian Tony Judt, run in the NYT, does that quite nicely.

A short sample:

….New York remains a world city. It is not the great American city — that will always be Chicago. New York sits at the edge: like Istanbul or Mumbai, it has a distinctive appeal that lies precisely in its cantankerous relationship to the metropolitan territory beyond. It looks outward, and is thus attractive to people who would not feel comfortable further inland. It has never been American in the way that Paris is French: New York has always been about something else as well….

Because yesterday was too busy even for zen.

A kite over Bali, July 2008.

So Depeche Mode has a new live album out—Tour of the Universe, 21 songs for $12.99, a bargain!—and as some of you may remember from the extensive Depeche Mode concert warm-up series of posts I wrote a few years back, I’m a fan.

Here’s a terrific version of Personal Jesus from a concert in Barcelona. One of the fun things about it is watching/listening to Martin Gore’s guitar playing, which is more robust, bluesier than it’s been in the past. Technically, he’s not a very good guitar player; Clapton could play this stuff while making breakfast.

On the other hand, Gore’s limitations help him play simple, memorable riffs; the melody in Personal Jesus is one of the most recognizable in rock ‘n’ roll. You hear the first four notes, you know the song. (Arguably the first note.)

And he’s very selective about his on-stage playing (and movement)—so that when he does play/move, you notice it, and it has a greater impact. His playing/presence is so minimalistic, it’s oddly compelling.

To me, anyway. See what you think.

From my notes five minutes in: “This wet blanket, this occupier of the least interesting corner of the faculty lounge, this joy-free zone, this inert gas.”

—Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, describing her jottings as she watched President Obama’s post-election news conference.