Shots in the Dark

Sort of.

I was riding home on the subway last night, standing on the N train to Brooklyn, when who did I see sitting down right in front of me but New York writer and general woman-about-town Fran Lebowitz. She looked exactly like she always looks, and was even wearing these gloves. I looked at her long enough for her to realize I was looking at her, and then I looked away, because I didn’t know quite what to do—nod or say hello or whatever. (I’ve never met her.) She looked at me long enough to discern the title of the book I was reading, Stephen King’s latest, 11/22/63. Hey, we all need some escapism, and Errol Morris liked it a lot. I thought about asking her to sign it—I once got Garry Trudeau to sign a copy of the Iran-Contra report, which was kind of great—but then I wondered if she might be offended by being asked to sign someone else’s book. (She’s incredibly funny, Fran Lebowitz, but you know, who walks around carrying one of her books? No one.) For a second I thought I might wind up in one of her monologues, or in a jocular anecdote at a panel discussion. You can imagine it—”so this guy on the train, he hands me this book and says…” New York is tough that way.

So I said nothing and then she got out at 8th Street/NYU.

I donated some money to a friend’s charter school for the opportunity to play on center court at the US Open…. We drew a big crowd.

(Photo by iPhone’s Panorama function.)

Someone posted below that surprising not-at-all surprising story of someone bilking an Asian family out of a couple million bucks by promising (allegedly promising) to help get their kids into Harvard. (They should have read this story in Worth.)

The only really shocking thing about this matter is that it hasn’t happened sooner. So many faculty members at Harvard have little-known side gigs which exploit their relationship with the university, it was inevitable that someone would get into the biz of selling access to admissions—and since you really can’t sell access to admissions, it’d make sense that it would be someone who could claim ties to the university but was in fact a marginal figure.

The alleged bilker is Mark Zimny, who is being described in the Boston Globe and elsewhere as a “former Harvard professor.” This appears not to be true; from what I can see, he was a lecturer in sociology, which is—sorry, sociology—pretty far down on the Harvard totem pole. He was also a “visiting assistant professor” at the GSE. About which, ditto. But as I’ve argued before, most laypeople won’t appreciate the significant professional difference between being a professor and being an assistant professor or lecturer.

Mr. Zimny has been in legal trouble before: According to Harvard police records, he was arrested in 2005 and charged with “domestic assault & battery kidnapping”; I can’t find any record of how the case was resolved. But it is probably not a coincidence that this is the period in which his professional connection to Harvard ends.

From an economic perspective, the case is fascinating. Think about it: A family thinks that a Harvard education is so valuable, it’s willing to pay $2.2 million just to get a kid in. How much would a Harvard grad have to make over a career—as opposed to what he or she would make graduating from another college—to make that investment fiscally worthwhile? Because if you just stuck that money in an ETF, it’d probably double over ten years; then again in another ten; etc. So 16 years after college, you’d have close to $10 million in the bank—if you hadn’t spent it on trying to get your child into Harvard. And that’d be on top of the salary you’d earned after graduating from New York University or something.

Of course, there are other reasons why you might pay $2.2 million to get your child into Harvard. I’m not sure what they are, but…well, family pride and/or prestige, I suppose.

Perhaps what Harvard may take out of this is the strength of its brand in Asia—that there are folks in Asia (as, I’m sure, there are elsewhere, but perhaps not as many.) who will pay an economically irrational sum, an amount that’s very unlikely to provide an economic return on the investment, to get their kid into Harvard. (One has to wonder about Bo Guagua).

(And with Harvard reportedly soon hawking Jeremy Lin jerseys kind of like this one overseas, the university is fueling this money-is-no-object desire for the Harvard brand.)

Is such pay-to-play behavior the definition of a bubble? Or just the reality of the future?

I’m thinking of starting a regular feature….

Listen, little boy-when you do something wrong you change it. That’s what a grown up journalist does. Grow up, child.

—Conservative “journalist” John Podhoretz, complaining about a BuzzFeed headline. He subsequently wrote:

I apologize to @BuzzFeedAndrew. I’m 51 years old and Twitter annoyances occasionally reduce me to adolescence.

Not to worry, John! It does that to everyone.

(Thanks to Gawker.)

He really will say anything.

Apple has posted a video in remembrance of Steve Jobs, who died a year ago today. It reminds me of how just how amazing Jobs was. (In Apple’s sometimes-maddening fashion, you can’t embed it.) The word world really is a less interesting place without him.

I love the part where he says,

“Technology alone is not enough. It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields the result that makes our hearts sing.”

Who would have thought that it would be the head of a computer company, rather than a university president, who could so clearly and passionately make the case for the liberal arts? It was Jobs’ genius that he so intuitively understood that, as powerful as technology is, it only realizes its potential when infused with humanity.

Last night I got to meet Don Larsen, pitcher of the only perfect game in World Series history. He’s putting his uniform from that game up for auction, and Worth ran an item about it, and so we hosted a little cocktail party for some friends of the magazine to meet Larsen. It was pretty great.

At 83, Larsen is a tough old guy with a bone-crunching handshake. He still looks remarkably fit, though he’s got a bum leg and walks with a limp. Larsen is not all that fond of modern players; he’s skeptical of their work ethic. He never made much money in baseball—I think his highest salary was a notch above $20k a year—so he worked every off-season. One job was at a company which made the paper florists use to wrap flowers in; one of the guests last night was an elderly man who owned a flower shop on 8th Avenue. Larsen had sold him paper in the 1970s. They are good friends.

Now Larsen wants to help pay for his grandchildren’s college education, so he’s putting the uniform up for sale. It’s expected to go for somewhere between $500, 000 and $1 mlllion, maybe more. (It is a sad fact that, depending on how many grandkids Larsen has, that amount will just about cover it.)

I asked Corinne Larsen, Don’s wife of 55 years—she was a flight attendant for TWA, they met on a plane in 1957—if the money would change their lives. “Oh, not at all,” she said. Their house in Idaho is fully paid for; Don likes to fish; they travel as much as they want. So they don’t really need the money. But it’ll be good for the grandkids.

Larsen and I talked a bit about Carl Yastrzemski, whose title of the last Triple Crown winner was just negated by Detroit’s Miguel Cabrera. Larsen said that he’d pitched against Yaz and respected him. I told Larsen that I interviewed Yastrzemski down in Florida at the Red Sox spring training camp in Fort Meyers. Yaz was at a small athletic facility several miles out of town, coaching minor leaguers, standing behind a backstop while they took batting practice. (They looked so young! Teenagers, many of them.) Yastrzemski didn’t like to work with the pros; he felt they weren’t receptive to instruction.

There’s a sense of wonder every time a record is broken, but it’s tinged with sadness. One becomes attached to a record just as it was. It’s a part of your past, and belongs to you in a way, just as it belongs to the person who set the record. The breaking of records reminds one that nothing stays the same, which is both the imperative and the sorrow of life.

Congratulations go to Miguel Cabrera, and many thanks to Yastrzemski, whom I think we only appreciate more with the passage of time. But part of me hopes that Don Larsen’s record is never broken.

The Red Sox have fired Bobby Valentine after he led the team to its worst record in 50 years.

That was predictable—he did, after all, manage the Mets….

…and once in a while, they’re worth passing along—like this video created by a nonprofit Boston ad agency called Small Army about a boy who chooses a particularly moving way to support people with cancer. (Some nice footage of Boston, too.)