Shots in the Dark

As if you needed them…

Politico has suspended one of its reporters, Joe Williams, for making disparaging comments on Twitter about Mitt Romney.

As Times reporter Jeremy Peters puts it,

A Tweet-first, think-later mentality has become the norm among many journalists, who see Twitter as an outlet for fleeting, unvarnished observations, and not as something that requires the same level of discretion and caution they would ordinarily apply to a news story.

I’m tempted to say that this makes them morons, but in fairness, many editors pressure their reporters to tweet as much as they can-it drives traffic to their websites! And when you tweet because you have to tweet, sooner or later, you will say something stupid. Which, indeed, Mr. Williams has done: The Tweets are incredibly unprofessional—in one of them he calls Romney “a dick”—and like NPR intern Emily White, Williams should probably get the ax. (But how come no one noticed them before?)

Other than bringing attention to just-published stories and, occasionally, breaking news, I’ve yet to see the point of any reporter tweeting…

You got it.

The Washington Post has a trail of emails between members of the university’s “board of valors visitors” (too funny) in which they discuss canning the president, Teresa Sullivan.

The reason?

Apparently she was moving insufficiently quickly on “distance learning.”

For example:

June 3: Jeffrey Walker, a prominent U-Va. alumnus, urges Dragas to watch a video that, in his view, signals “that the on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind.”

Are you kidding me? A popular, serious president was sacked because she wasn’t quick enough to put up free courses on the Internet?

You know, I love Virginia-half my family is from Virginia—but it is a really messed-up state right now….

…but may I point out that the Yankees have won 10 straight?

How’re those Sox doing?

Heh.

…because of her admission, in an NPR blog post, that while she has 11, 000 songs in her music library, she’s only bought 15 albums in her life? (She’s 21.)

I wish I could say I miss album packaging and liner notes and rue the decline in album sales the digital world has caused. But the truth is, I’ve never supported physical music as a consumer. As monumental a role as musicians and albums have played in my life, I’ve never invested money in them aside from concert tickets and t-shirts.

But I didn’t illegally download (most) of my songs. A few are, admittedly, from a stint in the 5th grade with the file-sharing program Kazaa. Some are from my family. I’ve swapped hundreds of mix CDs with friends. My senior prom date took my iPod home once and returned it to me with 15 gigs of Big Star, The Velvet Underground and Yo La Tengo (I owe him one).

Ms. White doesn’t seem to realize that, for example, having your prom date put 15 gigs of music on your iPod is actually stealing music…

The reaction to this piece has been pretty intense, with some people like me feeling that Emily White has some ‘splain’ to do, while others saying, it’s not her fault, it’s the mindset of her generation…

I dunno; I’ve never thought that this is such a complicated issue. People know when they’re stealing music—they just do. How they rationalize it is one thing, but the fundamental nature of the act is pretty straightforward…

Isn’t this sort of an awkward position for a public radio network, having a digital thief on staff? (Even unpaid staff.) Or, as some commenters argue, is it just consistent for a government-supported radio network to employ someone who also mooches off the hard work of others?

…About Facebook’s IPO?

According to the Wall Street Journal,

In an internal webcast 11 days after the offering, Morgan Stanley Chief Executive James Gorman told employees that Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg had called him after the offering and praised Morgan Stanley’s work on the deal...

Which would be odd, as most observers think that Morgan Stanley did a disastrous job of managing the IPO.

But it’s consistent with a prior Journal article which had Sandberg blaming NASDAQ for the IPO’s stumbles out of the gate.

Sandberg herself is keeping an unusually low profile, perhaps in an effort not to be associated with the IPO debacle…

Usually about the most boring subject imaginable, I find. But I loved this NYT interview with John Irving.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, but didn’t?

Everything, except for a few of the short stories. His write-what-you-know dictum has no place in imaginative literature; it’s advice for a journalist, not for a novelist or a playwright. Imagine if Sophocles or Shakespeare or Dickens had heeded that advice! And Hemingway’s sentences are short and simplistic enough for advertising copy. There is also the offensive tough-guy posturing — all those stiff-upper-lip, don’t-say-much men!

Yes! I’ve always read Hemingway and thought, What is all the fuss about? So happy to discover that I’m not alone.

It’s also interesting to compare this interview with the one conducted a few weeks back (and blogged about here) with Drew Faust. The Harvard president, it read to me, made the Times send her written questions and wrote her responses, which made the interview feel flat and artificial and manipulative—not very interesting, except insofar as what it suggested about Faust’s obsession with image control. (Or at least that of the people who work around her.)

But Irving seems to have gotten on the phone with the Times—either that, or he’s just a better, more natural writer than Faust, more sure of his voice—and as a result his personality practically jumps off the page. Like or dislike his answers, you know where he stands and admire his conviction—and he does it all with such flair and erudition.

Have you ever written to an author?

I’ve written to many authors; I love writing to writers.

And do they usually write back? What’s the best letter you’ve received from another writer?

Yes, they write back. Gail Godwin writes exquisite letters. James Salter, too — and Salter uses an old typewriter and rewrites by hand. His handwriting is very good. He uses hotel stationery, some of it very exotic. Kurt Vonnegut was a very good letter writer, too. As you might imagine, he was very funny. Grass writes me in German and in English, which is how I write to him, but his English is much better than my German.

It’s hard for anyone these e-book days to successfully conjure the romance of being a writer, but justthatfast, Irving does it. (“He uses hotel stationery, some of it very exotic”—doesn’t that send the imagination running?)

I’ll admit: I’d love to have a life in which Kurt Vonnegut and I wrote letters back and forth. To my mind, wouldn’t everyone?

Here’s the first razor Dollar Shave Club sent me (parked on top of my MacBook Air)…the blade is good, and the razor itself is actually pretty nice. This and four blades for $6; you can’t beat it…

My friend Tucker posted this…funny!

(If you don’t get it, too hard to explain…)

It’s laughter.

(Thanks to Andrew Phelps, for his Brief History of Car Talk, from which I pinched this clip.)

With JP Morgan running into trouble in recent weeks, many financial experts have called for CEO Jamie Dimon to step down from the board of the New York Federal Reserve.

As the Wall Street Journal puts it,

The critics say a person who is leading a bank that is under regulatory scrutiny shouldn’t be a director at a regional Fed bank. More broadly, they say, bankers shouldn’t be Fed directors.

Now one other member of the NY Fed has come out in support of Dimon: Columbia University President Lee Bollinger.

“I do not think he should step down,” Mr. Bollinger said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal. He said Mr. Dimon appears to have done nothing wrong, that critics attacking the Fed have a “false understanding” of how it works….

An unexpected opinion from someone who in the past has styled himself as a voice of independence and reform. (Why a lawyer/university president is the chair of the NY Fed’s board of directors is, of course, another question.) Simon Johnson, the very smart MIT economist, called Bollinger’s remarks “out of touch with informed expert opinion.”

But the relevant question isn’t really whether Bollinger’s remarks are part of a consensus or not; the question is how much Bollinger and/or Columbia stand to gain from being owed a favor by Jamie Dimon. Columbia is currently in the midst of a huge expansion north of 125th Street. Will we one day see a Dimon Center for Business Studies? Or perhaps in a few years, Bollinger may join the board of JP Morgan?

The point is, as with Ruth Simmons at Brown, Drew Faust at Harvard, and scores of other university presidents, these outside jobs are compromising the integrity of the university president’s role….