Shots in the Dark

After 32 years, an Australian coroner has confirmed it.

Two political moderates-Maine’s Angus King and Florida’s Jeb Bush—are pushing back against the ideological rigidity of the GOP.

Bush even gives Obama some cover on the economy, which he can use after last week’s “the private sector is doing fine” gaffe.

From the NYT:

“He also said that he doubted any president — no matter who is in office — could do much to improve the economy given the problems elsewhere. “I think we’re in a period here for the next year of pretty slow growth; I don’t see how we get out, notwithstanding who’s president,” he said. “We’ve got major headwinds with Europe and a slow down for Asia as well.”

Notwithstanding who’s president-you can be sure the Romney people are heating up the phone lines to Florida even as I type….

People have been telling me for years how “impressive” Sheryl Sandberg is—Henry Blodget said she should be Treasury secretary—and though I try to listen with an open mind, I’ve never seen the evidence of it. In every article I’ve ever read about her, I’ve struggled to discern what it is she actually does, and why people say she does it so well. Not easy. (This may be the fault of the people who’ve written about her.) I’ve always thought she does two things well: Ally herself with powerful men for whom it is helpful to have a woman around, and be in the right place at the right time (Treasury in the Clinton administration, Google after that, then a jump to Facebook). My impression is that she was good at selling advertising for Facebook when it was easy, and now that it is becoming more challenging, the results are mixed.

So I found this nugget from Felix Salmon interesting:

The WSJ has a good post-mortem on the Facebook fiasco today, pointing fingers very much at Nasdaq. And clearly Nasdaq was Ground Zero for the trading problems the day that Facebook went public. But this kind of thing smells fishy:

“Some hedge-fund managers called Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, because they hadn’t received any trade confirmations from Nasdaq, says a person familiar with the phone calls. Some hedge-fund managers apologized to Ms. Sandberg and said they needed to sell their entire positions because of the confusion, the person added.”

This clearly comes from Sandberg’s office, if not Sandberg herself — and it sounds very much as though she’s blaming Nasdaq for a lot of investors dumping Facebook shares on the opening day. If I were in her position, I’d do the same thing: it’s a lot easier than finding fault with, say, Facebook’s CFO, or blaming herself.

Or acknowledging that Facebook wasn’t really worth what it thought it was…

I was reading this quietly humorous (as it would be) article about Swedes who have the chance to blog as @Sweden-the country’s official Twitter moniker—when I realized that it was by my old friend and fellow Yalie Sarah Lyall.

(She writes terrifically well about England-lots about Rupert Murdoch, lately, but to my mind her best stuff is about culture.)

One @Sweden posted photographs of his Christmas moose hunt. Another tartly criticized the foreign secretary, Carl Bildt. Another declared that she would like to be making love, so to speak, right that very second. Another, a Muslim lawyer, discussed the ubiquity of the name Muhammad among immigrants and joked that if anyone forgot the names of her six brothers, Muhammad would do fine.

That “so to speak, right that very second” is genius.

As I read Michael Roth’s review of Andrew Delbanco’s new book, College, I couldn’t help but notice this curious coincidence:

Michael Roth [emphasis added:
It’s no wonder that politicians on the right are now exploiting resentment about higher education, even though their own economic policies would increase income inequality. Universities have become complicit in solidifying the class divide by instilling in their students a sense of entitlement: you got in because you deserved to, and once we certify your talent, you’re entitled to whatever you can accumulate in the future.

Drew Faust, speaking to the class of 2012 [emphasis added]:
You are remarkable. As I assured you nearly four years ago: None of you was an admissions mistake, and you have proved it by the hard work that has brought you here today.

To be fair, Faust did go on to emphasize the role of luck in life’s outcomes, but still…how many students will most remember that part, versus the “you are remarkable” part?

Delbanco also makes this point in his book:

Modern universities are meant to produce knowledge through specialization, and they often reward faculty members by giving them “relief” from teaching. Our best universities are adept at steering resources to their most productive researchers, but the undergraduate curriculum gets little more than lip service. “Very few colleges tell their students what to think,” Delbanco notes, and “most are unwilling even to tell them what’s worth thinking about.”

I wonder: In the absence of a curriculum that makes any attempt to shape a student ethically, what values do shape students during their time at college? Those of their professors? The overarching ethos of an institution?

Update: I read of this unconventional commencement speech by a teacher at Wellesley High School in Massachusetts.

David McCullough Jr., an English teacher at the school [Blogger: and son of historian David McCullough], delivered his rather unusual speech Friday, telling graduating seniors that they had been “pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble-wrapped.”.

Here’s some good stuff:

You see, if everyone is special, then no one is. If everyone gets a trophy, trophies become meaningless. In our unspoken but not so subtle Darwinian competition with one another — which springs, I think, from our fear of our own insignificance, a subset of our dread of mortality — we have of late, we Americans, to our detriment, come to love accolades more than genuine achievement.

…If you’ve learned anything in your years here I hope it’s that education should be for, rather than material advantage, the exhilaration of learning. You’ve learned, too, I hope, as Sophocles assured us, that wisdom is the chief element of happiness. (Second is ice cream… just an fyi.) I also hope you’ve learned enough to recognize how little you know… how little you know now… at the moment… for today is just the beginning. It’s where you go from here that matters.

It’s a fascinating speech, and I admire its contrarianism. (The one time I was asked to give a commencement speech, to my grade school, I talked about what a bunch of mean bastards most of us were in 9th grade, and how the one thing that we all should have been was not more accomplished, but more kind.)

I wonder what would happen if Drew Faust spoke the words above: Could she tell Harvard students in 2012 that education is not for material advantage, but for the exhilaration of learning? Or would today’s college seniors find such a thought absurd if not hilarious?

In what is apparently their first co-bylined piece since 1976, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein ask the question, “What was Watergate?”

Their answer?

“Five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency.”

It’s a fascinating piece and essential reading to counter those historical revisionists out there who would downplay the scandal. Even today, 40 years later, Watergate retains the power to shock.

How could they get upset over this? It’s kind of sweet. Weird, but sweet.

(LAT photo)

Here’s the video:

The Wall Street Journal interviews Edward A. Snyder, dean of the Yale School of Management.

WSJ: When people talk about the top U.S. undergraduate schools, they mention Harvard [University] and Yale in the same breath. For M.B.A.s, that list is usually Harvard [Business School], Stanford [Graduate School of Business] and [University of Pennsylvania’s] Wharton [School]. Can Yale join that triad?

Mr. Snyder: I would not be candid if I didn’t say that was the objective.

The game is on!

Michael Lewis at Princeton.

The “Moneyball” story has practical implications. If you use better data, you can find better values; there are always market inefficiencies to exploit, and so on. But it has a broader and less practical message: don’t be deceived by life’s outcomes. Life’s outcomes, while not entirely random, have a huge amount of luck baked into them. Above all, recognize that if you have had success, you have also had luck — and with luck comes obligation. You owe a debt, and not just to your Gods. You owe a debt to the unlucky.

I make this point because — along with this speech — it is something that will be easy for you to forget.

Smart, funny, self-deprecating. Nice.

The NYT reports that Larry Summers appeared today on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and called for the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, which dramatically lowered taxes for people making more than $250, 000 a year.

“The real risk to this economy is on the side of slow down,” he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” news program. “And that means we’ve got to make sure that we don’t take gasoline out of the tank at the end of this year.”

The Times argues that those comments contradict the policy of the Administration Summers worked for until relatively recently, which the Romney campaign will almost certainly use against Obama this fall: “Even the Obama administration’s top economic adviser has called for the preservation of these tax cuts.”

So….regardless of the merits of Summers’ argument, it’s a bit odd of him to go out and make it in public. But then, anyone who’s ever hired Summers has learned the hard way that this man is not a team player. Is it possible that he’s gunning for a slot in a potential Romney administration? (Given the subsequent update below, this remark now seems off-base.)

Update: Wait! The WSJ reports that Summers did not specifically call for the extension of the tax cuts, and that he has issued a statement saying that he opposes the move.

In a statement released later in the morning, Mr. Summers said: ”I fully support President Obama’s position on tax cuts. I have often said and continue to believe that promoting demand is the most critical short run priority for the American economy. Extending the high income tax cut does little for demand and poses substantial problems of fairness and fiscal prudence.”

The NYT piece, updated minutes before this post, does not mention Summers’ statement, which, if I were Larry Summers, would seriously irritate me.

Update 2: Summers’ walk-back doesn’t matter! As this Google search shows, the story-spread in significant part by FoxNews stations around the country—is that he backs the extension of the Bush tax cuts.