Shots in the Dark

…and we’re still burning copies of the Koran by the truckload?

The mind reels….

The paper reports on ESPN firing a web writer for using a racist headline—but declines to print the headline.

Instead the paper’s Richard Sandomir writes this of the headline’s racist language:

The phrase had two meanings, one of them an ethnic slur.

It was “Chink in the Armor,” which, you know, you should get fired for writing.

I don’t understand the rationale for withholding the salient fact of a news story-to protect our delicate sensibilities?

If someone at, say, Fox News used a racist term to describe President Obama and got fired—would the Times censor that as well? What if the President in an irate moment used a racist term to describe China’s new premier? When George Wallace used the n-word, did the Times delete that? (No, it did not.)

There’s no good reason to withhold “chink in the armor” in a news story, and lots of good reasons to include it-such as the fact that it contributes to a public discussion and informs the public of a the central fact of a newsworthy event.

Is it sexist to call Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, a book about the First Marriage (if you will), “chick nonfiction”?

As pop historian David Doug Brinkley just did in the New York Times Book Review…

Call it chick nonfiction, if you will; this book is not about politics, it’s about marriage, or at least one marriage, and a notably successful one at that.

I don’t much like the term, especially the first half of it—but then, no one gets very upset about “chick lit,” a term used to describe novels about interpersonal relationships which, it’s generally assumed, are written for (or at least read by) a female audience.

Is it fair to apply that term to a book about the Obamas’ marriage? Well, I can’t imagine that the audience for this book includes many men; to me, at least, his marriage is perhaps the least interesting part of the president. But if you’re a woman who thinks a lot about your professional role when married to a successful man and the sacrifices women make in that kind of marriage, I could imagine it’d be quite interesting.

Curious what other folks think….

One final note: On balance, I’m just surprised to find anything of interest in the New York Times Book Review, the world’s dullest weekly publication.

The Red Sox should apologize.

And not just for getting fat and stupid last season and wasting the fans’ money. But you know…just for being the Red Sox. It is my theory that the Red Sox should pretty much go through every day of every season hanging their heads for being Red Sox and feeling bad about themselves. They can never apologize too much.

Maybe David Ortiz could kick it off….

“I really don’t know where to go from here—I’m pretty happy as it is.”

—Ed Weiland, the FedEx truck driver who predicted Jeremy Lin’s basketball success

I was up in New Haven for an interview a couple days ago, and traveled to some areas of campus I don’t usually visit on my trips back. The difference between now and a quarter-century (gulp) ago when I was an undergraduate is astonishing; in fact, the difference between now and, say, five years ago is astonishing. The landscape on the side of campus dominated by science, economics and business is now dotted with new buildings, some of which are quite beautiful. And there’s an absolutely enormous new building rising up, future home to Yale’s School of Management.

New Haven certainly doesn’t have the beauty and the energy of Cambridge—though I’d forgotten how absolutely gorgeous Hillhouse Avenue is—but one thing it does have is plenty of relatively cheap real estate, and the university is clearly taking advantage of that.

Writing for Bloomberg, Ezra Klein analyzes why so many Ivy League grads go work for Wall Street.

(The numbers are ridiculous: 17% of Harvard grads, 14% of Yale grads, 36% of Princeton grads. Princeton, that is pathetic.)

Klein references Drew Faust’s cri de coeur protesting Wall Street’s “all but irresistible recruiting juggernaut,” but Klein suggest she would do better by taking a good hard look at the failures of a Harvard education.

What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, incredible work ethics and no idea what to do next. So the finance industry takes advantage of that confusion, attracting students who never intended to work in finance but don’t have any better ideas about where to go.

One very astute point that Klein makes: Wall Street firms deliberately make applying to them feel like you’re applying to Harvard…because it’s a familiar process to the kind of kid who’s been applying to Harvard, in a sense, all his or her life.

And then there’s this:

A bigger draw, explained a recent Harvard graduate who majored in social science and worked at Goldman Sachs for two years, is how Wall Street sells itself to potential applicants: As a low-risk, high-return opportunity that they can try for a few years and, whether they like it or hate it, use to acquire real skills to build careers.
In other words, Wall Street is promising to give graduates the skills their university education didn’t.

I remember from my own college days that, if you wanted to go work for a bank or, to a somewhat lesser extent, a Fortune 500 company, Yale’s Office of Career Services had plenty of opportunities. For journalism, pretty much zip. And I’d been writing for a student magazine while at Yale, something relatively pre-professional. What of all my fellow history majors who didn’t have at least that? Hello, Goldman!

“He then ran about 50 yards alongside the motorcade with an Australian flag between his buttocks.”

From this.

I did an interview for Worth with Cameron Block, who is pretty well known in the financial world as the founder of Muddy Waters, an equity research firm that has earned renown-and revile—for poking holes in the valuations of several Chinese companies.

If you’re interested in China, stocks, finance, or just about anything really, you’ll like it. Take a look.

Harvard grad Jeremy Lin, the only Asian-American player in the NBA, has become an unexpected hit with the New York Knicks.

With every game, every precision pass and every clever drive to the basket, Lin is raising expectations, altering the Knicks’ fate and redefining the word “unlikely.” On Twitter, fans and basketball pundits are using another term to describe the phenomenon: “Linsanity.”

Great story.