Shots in the Dark

I love this: a petition calling on Macy’s to stop selling its line of Donald Trump crap products has over half a million signatures. (Really the only question is why it doesn’t have more.)

The argument? That Trump’s birtherism is racist, and Macy’s shouldn’t be selling stuff branded by a racist. Both sides of that equation seem reasonable to me.

And that’s not to mention that, on Election Night, Trump basically called for armed rebellion against the reelection of a black president.

Here’s the petition. Really, you should sign it. He’s a terrible person.

“Harvard Square Upper Crust Shuttered.”

—Today’s Crimson.

Then I realized it was just an article about a pizza place.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, no affected place has been written about more than Staten Island, which was pounded by the storm. And there were some heartbreaking stories of lost lives there; the old woman who was found drowned in her rocking chair in her living room, with a water mark on the wall above her head; the two children torn from the arms of their mother as she tried to wade through surging flood waters. They were found the next day; they were buried in the same coffin.

Staten Island is still recovering, will take years to recover. And of course there are some things from which you never recover.

But one thing that I haven’t seen mentioned is that Staten Island is by far the most Republican part of New York City. (Why, I’m not sure.) It elects GOP congressmen, supports GOP presidential and senatorial candidates, and is fiercely proud of its independence from state and federal governments—which is to say, the very same institutions on which it is now deeply dependent. (It’s partly because of that stubborn independence that more people on Staten Island died from the storm than anywhere else; they wouldn’t evacuate.)

In other words, Staten Island votes for people who deny the reality of climate change.

Take its current representative, Republican congressman Michael Grimm. Nice, clean-cut looking fellow. But his record on climate change is abysmal. He wants to “be surer of global warming before we destroy jobs.” He voted to bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases. He wants more oil drilling and lower gas prices. He opposes any kind of cap-and-trade regulation.

(The New York Times has reported on financial irregularities in Grimm’s background, though he’s only just finished his first term; at a benefit in support of Grimm, Staten Island GOP political powerbroker Guy Molinari happily joked that he was going to burn a copy of the Times, but Grimms’ dog “shit all over the paper,” then urged the wise GOPers on hand not to let these “shit-ass newspapers tell you what to do.” Yeah, it’s like that.)

Now, it’s impossible to say that any one hurricane is “caused” by global warming. But we can say with some certainty that recent irregular weather patterns are a function of climate change, and that those very same irregular patterns threaten Staten Island and probably contributed to the deaths of some of Mr. Grimm’s constituents.

Grimm is hardly the only Republican politican in this position; I’m sure you could find more than a few in Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Georgia, Virginia, New Jersey—shoot, up until a year ago, Chris Christie said he was skeptical that human activity had anything to do with global warming. (He doesn’t think that anymore.)

But if Republican politicians are denying the realities of climate change and voting against measures to ameliorate or protect against the phenomenon, which means that their constituents are less concerned about storms than they should be; and these Republicans are also anti-government spending to protect against the consequences of climate change (hurricanes, flooding, rising sea levels, etc.); and people die as a result—isn’t it about time to start suggesting that they bear some responsibility for the deaths and tragedies that inevitably result?

On Sunday I went to see the Nets play at my new neighbor, the Barclays Center. Not a bad stadium, if you don’t mind paying $9.75 for four chicken fingers and a few fries and $9 for a draft Budweiser. (Given the long lines at the abundant food stalls, most people didn’t seem to.)

The Nets are, of course, new to Brooklyn, and so the team management was doing everything it could to pump up good spirit in the arena, especially as the game was a clunker, an 84-72 ho-hum over the mediocre Magic. So they trotted out the “Brooklynettes,” a group of female dancers. They had fans on the court for a shooting contest at halftime. They even played loud, fast music while the game was being played, which, call me old-fashioned, is just about the worst thing ever.

But one thing they did was quite nice: During timeouts, cameraguys would pan the seats and find kid fans, who would just go over the moon about being shown on the Jumbotron, dancing up and down and cheering and giving huge smiles. You couldn’t help but feel good about their excitement.

Except for the time when the camera found an adorable little boy sitting with his dad, but no other kids. When the boy saw himself and his father on the big screen, he jumped and waved and smiled—and nudged his dad to show him. They were famous! Then he nudged again, putting his hand on his father’s shoulder. But the father didn’t look up—he was bent over his cell phone, texting. And when he eventually raised his head, it was too late; the camera had moved on. He never got to see the cause of his son’s excitement.

A small thing, yes. And who knows, maybe this is a great dad who just happened to get caught at an unfortunate moment. But to me, it was a microcosm of issues raised by our infatuation with and possible addiction to electronic devices and electronic communication; often we get so wrapped up in them that we neglect the reality, the authentic human interaction, sitting right next to us.

But there may be some good news on this front: The Times reports that, for the first time, text messaging in the United States has declined.

In the third quarter of this year, cellphone owners sent an average of 678 texts a month, down from 696 texts a month in the previous quarter.

The consultant who figured this out thinks that the drop is due to the rise of Internet-based messaging services—in other words, increased competition for your text-like communication.

But I am more optimistic: My hope is that the novelty of texting has worn off, and people are actually choosing more thoughtful means of communication. (678 texts is still a lot, though: how many trivial thoughts can one share in a month?)

I’m not so Luddite that I think texting is entirely terrible; there are perfectly good reasons to text—sometimes.

But I remember that little boy and I keep thinking about what else we could be doing that might be just a little more important when we’re actually just texting.

He’s a shrink!

The Times reports:

Yale University said Thursday that Peter Salovey, a celebrated scholar of psychology who has been its provost for the past four years, would be its new president.

Yale can’t be very happy that the Times played this story on roughly page A72….

Salovey sounds like quite a skilled and likeable guy; he also developed the concept of emotional intelligence, which was—how can I say this—so pertinent to a certain recent Harvard president…

Salovey doesn’t sound like he’s going to generate a lot of headlines, but he seems plenty promising in other ways; the following comment on the rise of MOOCs (something Yale doesn’t get a lot of credit for, but was pretty early on) is about as interesting a vision for them as anything I’ve read elsewhere.

“I think the excitement about MOOCs” — massive online open courses — “is fine,” Dr. Salovey said, “but it’s really only one part of what online tools can provide, and it may in the end not be the most important part.”

“I love that,” he said. “It’s freedom — freedom to interact with students in a different way.”

I love that too; it sounds like a great way of using online teaching to impart foundational information, and then use class time to hash it out. I imagine that’d be a pretty good class. (It helps too that Yale professors have traditionally taught more and smaller courses than their Cambridge counterparts—though some say that’s changing.)

The Yale Daily News reports that Salovey has been a big promoter of the Yale in Singapore campus, and also this:

During one of his search committee interviews, Salovey said [sic] he was asked to describe his vision for the University.

“I answered with four phrases,” he told the crowd gathered in the Hall of Graduate Studies Thursday afternoon. “A more unified Yale, a more innovative Yale, a more accessible Yale and a more excellent Yale.

Good buzzwords! He clearly has the political chops (and emotional intelligence) for the job. But what do they really mean?

The Boston Globe reports that Logan Airport was overwhelmed with private jets on Election Day as fatcat donors arrived for Mitt Romney’s Election Night party…..

Having stayed up to watch the President-reelect’s acceptance speech—Mr. President, you couldn’t have pushed that up half an hour?—I am exhausted, probably too exhausted to say anything particularly insightful. (Not that it would automatically be otherwise if I were well-rested.)

But I’m also delighted. Looking at a map of the country, I am hard pressed to see how things could have gone much better. It’s not just that Obama won, but that he won in some places he wasn’t expected to—Virginia, for example, and probably Florida. That drives the pro-‘bama message home. And he won in states that were thought to be possibly up for grabs—New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, Colorado and Nevada. And he was competitive in states where he wasn’t expected to be: North Carolina, for example.

It will be hard for the Republicans—though not impossible!—to not get the message. (Already you hear some Republicans talking about how the party does better when it runs a more purist, more conservative candidate. Oh, bullshit.) The party must become more centrist, more inclusive, more tolerant, if it is not to become irrelevant. Trying to turn back the clock on women’s rights…preaching bigotry against gays….encouraging Latinos to deport themselves…this is a losing game. And isn’t the fact that this strategy did not pay off for the GOP deeply reassuring?

So, yes, I’m encouraging the Republicans to become more like the Democrats. What ideological differences will be left for them? Well, differences about the role of government and what drives the economy. Is that enough for a political party to recapture a majority? I’m not sure—but it can’t be a worse approach than that of the current GOP.

Considering the election results, I’m struck by just how much there was at stake. For social purposes, it felt important to me that our first black president was reelected; that his election not be seen as some sort of anti-GWB fluke. Then there was the preservation of Obamacare, which strikes me as profoundly important. I expect that in some years we will wonder what all the fuss against it was about, anyway. The Supreme Court. Civil rights for gays and women. A more welcoming approach to Latinos and, I hope, an end to the harsh and racist laws now in existence or being proposed in some conservative states. A progressive attitude towards the enviornment, and a recognition of the need to fight climate change.

I also look at some of the Republicans who were beaten last night—Richard Mourdock, Todd Akins, Linda McMahon, Allen West—and I think that this is a very important sign in terms of what kind of country we want to have. Do we want to elect politicians who preach division and ignorance? Do we want to reward secretive billionaires who pump money into our political system without attribution or integrity? Or do we want to elect calmer, more rational minds who might actually be able to help solve some of the country’s problems? After last night, it seems like the latter is true.

I’m also delighted that this is a major political setback for Paul Ryan, a pseudo-intellectual of the most dangerous type—an ideologue convinced of his own rightness because everybody around him keeps telling him how smart he is, evidence to the contrary. Not only will he not be vice-president, but he couldn’t even help Romney carry his home state of Wisconsin. Fantastic. Everything that weakens Paul Ryan’s political power is good for the country.

As for Romney—I can’t say that I feel sorry for him. Let’s be honest: He is a man so cravenly ambitious that he would take any position, abandon any principle, if he thought it would win him votes. He ran an intellectually dishonest campaign—I won’t tell you what loopholes I’ll cut! Tax returns? What tax returns? health care reform like the kind I passed? Terrible. I’ll kill it!—in which he discarded his centrism, rejected his landmark achievement, then returned to his centrism when he thought it would help. Like an Etch-a-Sketch, as his closest advisor once said, and for a time, I feared that Romney would get away with it; that America’s Twitter-short attention span would cause voters to forget not only how far we had come since the fall of 2008, but how much Romney had changed, and changed again, in just the past year.

It’s fascinating to think of what Romney will do now, because when he’s not running for jobs that elevate himself, he really doesn’t have a record of public service. (And no, contributing to the Mormon Church doesn’t count, nor does the Olympics, because giving money to a cultish religion or helping organize a sporting event just isn’t public service. It just isn’t.) In what political wilderness can Mitt Romney actually do anything useful?

As for the president, I have been a bigger supporter of him than those Democrats who had drifted away. Yes, he wasn’t perfect. Yes, he couldn’t live up to the rhetoric of his 2008 campaign. But then, let’s be honest: This last wasn’t his fault. He faced a political opposition which made a point of refusing to work with the president on anything; which was willing to hurt the country in order to improve its chances of returning to power. You can not say that Obama didn’t try to work with the GOP; you can say that the GOP had no interest in working with him.

And let’s look at the record. For all the flaws in his handling of the financial crisis, Obama supported the right moves on a macro scale—easing of monetary policy and a stimulus package. Nobody liked the bank bailouts, but in retrospect they were probably the right thing to do and the government will likely actually make some money off them. The auto bailout worked. Period.

So on the biggest crisis facing the nation, Obama did reasonably well—a B+, I’d give him. And that’s just the start. He got us out of Iraq and is moving towards the same thing in Afghanistan. A huge expense in personal and financial terms that the country just couldn’t afford. He made the decision to try to kill Bin Laden, which was by no means a slam dunk, and it worked. He cut taxes for the middle class. He ended “don’t ask, don’t tell.” He came out in favor of gay marriage. He supported equal pay for women. He preserved the balance of the Supreme Court. He could have been better on environmental stuff, but he was unquestionably better than a Republican president would have been, and it is very difficult to be an environmental purist in economic hard times. (I mean, Romney attacked him for the price of gas, for chrissake, as if the president has anything to do with the price of gas.) He supported the Dream Act and instituted a path to citizenship for millions of Latinos. He passed health care reform. He signed Dodd-Frank. He created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. He helped oust dictators in Egypt and Libya. He ended profiteering in the federal student loan program. And so on, and so on—there’s much more.

How could anyone deny that this is a record of profound achievement—especially when facing a bitter and polarized Congress, half of which will not work with him and a decent percentage of that half which does not like him because of the color of his skin?

Obama has worked his butt off for his country amidst remarkable and unique circumstances for a president. (Having his citizenship called into question, being attacked as a Muslim, being hung in effigy, and so on and so on.) Mitt Romney has worked his butt off to become a very rich man. How could Romney be rewarded for that with the highest office in the world? How could Obama not be rewarded for all that he has done with a chance to continue his work and cement his legacy?

Let me put it in a more personal way. Every morning I pick up my son from his crib when he starts to rustle and cry. I carry him to the window and raise the shade, and together we look from our window on the 23rd floor onto the human vista below. We see the streets of Brooklyn, teeming with people of every color and creed. We look out onto Manhattan, a locus of the tolerance and diversity that are among the best qualities of this great country. Looking out across New York Harbor, we see the Statue of Liberty holding her torch high, and beyond that the powerful presence of Ellis Island and its immigration museum. Every morning I am thrilled and moved by the America I see in front of me.

Pacifier firmly in mouth but eyes bright, my son looks out, fascinated by all this energy and history and activity and newness. “It’s a happy morning in Brooklyn,” I say to him every day, and hold him as tight as he will let me.

Today it is a very happy morning in Brooklyn.

State and National Polls Align in Favor of the President

—Today’s Times.

Obama and Romney Deadlocked, Polls Show

—Today’s Journal.

The Times and the Washington Post both weighed in yesterday and today with long pieces about the rapid growth of MOOCs, or Massive Online Open Courses—basically, Internet-based education.

The Times frames the issue thusly:

While the vast potential of free online courses has excited theoretical interest for decades, in the past few months hundreds of thousands of motivated students around the world who lack access to elite universities have been embracing them as a path toward sophisticated skills and high-paying jobs, without paying tuition or collecting a college degree. And in what some see as a threat to traditional institutions, several of these courses now come with an informal credential (though that, in most cases, will not be free).

Harvard is not mentioned in this article whatsoever; the piece focuses on Stanford, which hopes to monetize its courses by collecting data on the students and selling it. Creepy Stanford.

Though it mentions Harvard only in passing, the Post article raises the issues posed by MOOCs better than the Times does:

The courses pose questions for top universities: Are they diluting or enhancing brands built on generations of selectivity? Are they undercutting a time-tested financial model that relies on students willing to pay a high price for a degree from a prestigious institution? Or are they accelerating the onset of a democratized, globalized version of higher education?

...“Students and families that are being asked to pony up $150,000 or $200,000 for a credential are going to start asking, ‘What’s the value of this thing?’ ” said Richard A. DeMillo, director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech, which is part of the Coursera venture.

That, I think, is the crux of the issue. While it’s all well and good to celebrate the democratizing and knowledge-spreading virtues of MOOCs, they will invariably diminish the powerful, central role of an on-campus experience. I think about what college will cost for my son in 17 years—$100, 000 annually? $125, 000? It’s absurd. And meanwhile, college presidents are becoming millionaires, professors spend more time profiteering than teaching, and college tuitions and fees rise annually higher than the rate of inflation.

Which of course begs this question, cited in WashPo:

Burck Smith, chief executive of StraighterLine, which sells low-price online courses, contends that MOOCs are overhyped. He said universities that give their product away are likely to face challenges similar to those newspapers confronted when they launched open-access Web sites.

“Free content has never really been a successful business model,” Smith said.

I see a similar evolution in the world of wealth management, where several start-ups are are now offering Internet-based financial advising at fees that are considerably less than those charged by traditional financial advisors. The old guard pooh-poohs this and says that high net worth folks will always want face time, not Face Time. I’m not so sure. And similarly, university professors might think that the top students will always want to be on campus, physically interacting with peers. I wouldn’t take this for granted either.

The real question, it seems to me, is how good these online courses are, and whether students learn as much from them as they would by being in a physical classroom. It’s hard for me to imagine that they’ll get as much out of it; the immersion just won’t be as deep. (Although, with the advent of computers and cell phones in the classroom, the immersive quality of that experience has been diminished, so the gap might not be as large as one would think.)

None of these issues are a reason to stop offering MOOCs, of course. As some posters on this blog have pointed out, MOOCs are a great way to spread knowledge around the world and reinvigorate what universities should be about, rather than the knowledge-industrial centers they have become. That’s undoubtedly true. But the ultimate result of MOOCs might not just be a democratization of education, but a shallowing, for lack of a better word, of education. We’ll see.

…oh…wait…

The Times reports that South Korea’s Everland Zoo has a young male elephant that can speak several words of Korean (which is more than I can say).

“We asked native Korean speakers to write down what they heard and they understood him,” said Angela S. Stoeger, a biologist at the University of Vienna and one of the study’s authors. “We also compared his imitative vocalizations with that of other elephants, and it was very different.”

The animal actually learned to generate the words by putting his trunk in his mouth, which is pretty amazing. He has another elephant to socialize with, and speaks elephant (that’s a technical term) with her; but with his human handlers, he speaks in Korean. Which is very cool.

The fact that he can say the words, though, doesn’t establish that he knows what they mean.

It is not clear, however, how much Koshik understands, or whether he is capable of learning more. While he seems to know the meaning of “sit,” for instance, he does not expect his trainers to sit when he says the word himself.

Intriguing.