I didn’t agree with Christopher Hitchens half the time, but who cares? He set a standard for learning, eloquence and rigor, and he was a gifted writer. What a loss. For the journalism community in particular, this is a tough one—everybody knew Christopher Hitchens, and there just aren’t many, if any, left like him.
I was glad to read in the New York Times yesterday that bookstores are enjoying a resurgence of business this Christmas, somewhat diminishing bookseller anxiety about the impact of e-books.
...the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.
I’m not surprised. I don’t have a lot of experience with e-books—the only electronic book I’ve read was Ron Susskind’s The Confidence Men (notes on Larry Summers forthcoming)—and it just isn’t the kind of pleasing sensual experience that a physical book provides.
Besides, who wants to give an e-book for Christmas?
That said, I do still worry about the future of bookstores, partly because of a purchase I made the other day. I went to the Union Square Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of Peter Englund’s new history of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow.
I was disappointed to find that the book, with its $35 cover price, wasn’t discounted. Pretty hefty for a book.
So I pulled out my iPhone and opened the Amazon app. It asked me to scan the book’s bar code, which was easy enough to do, and up popped Amazon’s price: $23.10.
I one-touch ordered it (free shipping, a couple bucks tax)-voila!
I ordered the book Monday; it arrived in the mail yesterday (Tuesday). Saved about $13.
How can Barnes and Noble compete with that?
That’s what was happening in the row in front of me at Lincoln Center last night.
Smarter minds than me can unpack the semiotics of that moment; I just like the way the phrase rolls off the tongue.
“If guys can have groupies and be celebrated for it, I plan on doing the exact same thing. My most proud groupie moment was picking up a guy from Harvard. We hung out all night* and then I dropped him off at a truck stop and he took a $300 cab ride back to Harvard.”
—Ke$ha, in the 12/22 issue of Rolling Stone
Scholars of academia and decoders of Harvard will note that Ke$ha doesn’t say why picking up a Harvard guy was her “most proud” groupie moment, but perhaps we can interpret it as a sign of the recurring power of the American ideal of self-improvement. Hey, I may not have gone to Harvard, but I spent the night with someone who did!
Harvard men will be pleased to hear that dropping the H-bomb still works.
* And linguists will note Ke$sha’s use of “hung out,” which here replaces “hooked up,” which itself (kind of) replaced “had sex.” Perhaps a new book, Steve Pinker?
…for Albert Pujols? Even the Angels must know that Pujols, whose batting prowess is already declining, isn’t going to be worth $25 million a year in five more years. So is this just a bad deal…or is Pujols just a loss-leader, an attempt to lock up the LA market while the Dodgers are in chaos?
Don’t think Rupert Murdoch has dragged the Journal into the mud?
As I read (5:58 AM Friday), the Journal is featuring this paparazzi footage of Alec Baldwin after he got kicked off a plane on its front (web) page.
Wonder if it’s a coincidence that Baldwin is liberal, or if that’s just a measured editorial decision by the Journal…
(By the way, it’s amazing to me that celebrities don’t take swings at those guys more often. They really are scummy.)
I was saddened to read in the Yale Daily News of the death of labor historian David Montgomery, whose courses in 19th- and 20th-century labor history I took as a freshman.
Montgomery joined Yale’s History Department in 1979 after a 14-year career in the University of Pittsburgh’s history department, which he chaired from 1973 to 1976. Before entering academia, Montgomery organized labor protests for unions in St. Paul during the McCarthy era, and was ultimately blacklisted by a number of industrial companies in Minnesota for those efforts. Montgomery continued to support labor unions during his tenure at Yale, and helped organize members of the University’s Locals 34 and 35 in the 1984 Yale clerical workers strike.
That description doesn’t come close to capturing Montgomery’s passion. He believed deeply in the dignity of labor and the labor movement, and he conveyed his excitement about the history of American labor through intense, gripping lectures, occasionally punctuated by Montgomery bursting into labor work songs and protest chants. But Montgomery wasn’t just a cheerleader; he was a serious scholar, and these were quite difficult courses. (I didn’t do very well in them, for what that’s worth.)
The Times says this of Montgomery:
Known as a shy and humble man who came alive behind a lectern or on a soapbox, Mr. Montgomery won teaching awards at both Pittsburgh and Yale, where he gained local fame for, among other things, actively supporting the campus clerical workers in their 1984 strike.
“He was part stump speaker, part academic, part public intellectual,” said Shelton Stromquist, a professor of labor history at the University of Iowa who was Mr. Montgomery’s student at Pitt in the 1970s. “David was never shy about demonstrating the relationship between his scholarship and activist commitment. The same is true of a lot of us.”
I could never think of David Montgomery as shy; I never saw him away from the lecture hall, where he was so enamored of his material, so completely convinced of its import and, I think you could say, its beauty, that he lost himself in it entirely; he became a man transformed. I had never had a professor so passionate about a subject so foreign to me (I was 17 at the time).
David Montgomery really initiated whatever intellectual growth I had at Yale, and made me conscious of a world of workers I’d never previously given much thought to. I’ll always be grateful to him for that, and I am sorry to hear of his passing.
Watch.
While a debate rages in the comments section of “A Harvard Student (re)Considers Ibanking,” below, here’s something about another university president.
The Times has a “Corner Office” interview with Ruth Simmons, who is stepping down as president of Brown next year.
Q. What do you consider some of your most important leadership lessons?
A. I had some bad experiences, and I don’t think we can say enough in leadership about what bad experiences contribute to our learning.
Unfortunately, Simmons proceeds to not say very much at all about what those bad experiences are.
Q: Can you elaborate?
A. I worked for someone who did not support me. And it was a very painful experience, and in many ways a defining experience for me. So having a bad supervisor really probably started me thinking about what I would want to be as a supervisor.
That sounds really bad. I guess it was a lot worse than the heated criticism Simmons took for making $550, 000 a year serving on the boards of Texas Instruments and Goldman Sachs, where she voted in support of $17 billion in bonuses in 2009.
As one Brown student noted,
Simmons was, through her seat on the Compensation Committee at Goldman, directly tied to one of the most shameful and embarrassing business decisions in memory…we students need to start thinking about whether she’s lived up to the de facto canonization we’ve thoughtlessly, almost instinctively, bestowed upon her.
For some reason—speaking of de facto canonization—the Times didn’t ask Simmons about Goldman. I wonder if Simmons only agreed to cooperate on the condition that she not be asked about it?
I have never been able to understand the adulation—and kid gloves—with which Simmons is widely treated. I have always found her to be cynically disingenuous, as when she insisted that the controversy over Goldman had nothing to do with her decision to resign from the board. Instead, she said, serving on Goldman’s board was taking up too much of her time. It had been taking up that much of her time for 10 years at that point.
I remember laughing (but crying inside) at Simmon’s defense of her work at Goldman and its billions in bonuses (which, to be fair, she told to the Times):
“There are going to be lots of books written. I think people will make their own decisions,” Dr. Simmons said. “It’s easy to look back and say, ‘Gee, that was a lot,’ but you have to look forward and see how people react.”
Inspiring words from a university president.
Here’s a more thoughtful and balanced piece, written by another Brown student, about Simmons’ legacy. How many corporate boards will she rejoin, and how quickly, once she is no longer president?
The Red Sox have a pederast problem.