Shots in the Dark

But I’m in Mexico, where I’ve been diving the past few days. Back shortly-thanks for your patience. Lots to catch up on!

The Libya-loving firm has retroactively registered as a lobbyist, according to the Globe—and Harvard prof Robert Putnam, whom the firm took on a trip to Libya, isn’t very happy about it.

Putnam, author of “Making Democracy Work,’’ said he was never told that public relations was a goal of the visitors program. In fact, he said, he questioned Monitor officials before traveling to Libya about whether such visits could be used to bring legitimacy to Khadafy.

He said he was reassured that was not the aim of the program.

When in fact that was exactly the aim of the program.

Which means that either Putnam is lying now, or Monitor was lying then. (One is inclined to believe the latter; you take a credibility hit when you lobby for dictators.)

The fallout from the scandal continues to damage Kennedy School prof Joseph Nye, about whom the Globe says this:

In a previous interview, Nye told the Globe that he had considered Monitor’s activities in Libya aboveboard, adding that the firm asked him not to disclose how much he was paid for his trips there.

The words “aboveboard” and “asked him not to disclose” sit uncomfortably within one sentence.

In the Crimson, Harry Lewis follows up on what the Globe called his quest for “truthfulness.”

“It does seem to me that with all the Harvard connections that are in these news stories about Monitor, it’s time for the University to say something about it,” Lewis wrote. “It’s awkward and embarrassing for the University to act as though it hadn’t noticed or doesn’t care.”

Drew Faust may be right that it would be problematic for her to act as “scolder in chief,” as she told Lewis at the recent faculty meeting. But there’s no question that this scandal continues to embarrass and taint the university, and her absence from any comment upon it is conspicuous.

But some of them were.

Good for you, humanity.

Here’s Harvard’s Greg Mankiw, in today’s Times, writing on the economy:

AFTER more than a quarter-century as a professional economist, I have a confession to make: There is a lot I don’t know about the economy. Indeed, the area of economics where I have devoted most of my energy and attention — the ups and downs of the business cycle — is where I find myself most often confronting important questions without obvious answers.

(With all due respect to Harvard Mag, for which I do have a lot of respect, I think Mankiw would have been a more interesting cover choice than Andrew Sullivan, if only because so much has already been written about Andrew. Mankiw is one of the most influential voices in an influential community: economics bloggers. The Harvard Mag piece makes a big deal about Andrew’s defection from the Atlantic to the Daily Beast—I wish it had pushed Andrew more about this decision, which seems like it could only have been financial, not that there’s anything wrong with that—but Forbes reports that the Atlantic’s online traffic hasn’t dropped since Andrew’s departure. If true, that is curious.)

And here’s Drew Faust delivering the Jefferson Lecture at the White House the day after Osama bin Laden was killed. The title: “Telling War Stories: Reflections of a Civil War Historian.”

About 15 pilot whales are stranded in shallow waters in the Florida Keys.

Wouldn’t it be a nice bit of symbolism and generally positive statement about the future of the world if we started the week by killing bin Laden and ended it by saving the whales?

Whites and blacks in this country have very different experiences with strokes. More blacks have strokes than whites, because of obesity and diabetes issues; they have them younger than whites do; and they die from them more often.

But when African-Americans have strokes, they don’t have to die from them as much as they do.

A new study in the journal Stroke (it’s both a perfect name and a not-so-good name) shows that one of the reasons blacks who have strokes die more often than whites who have strokes is because, generally speaking, when whites have a stroke, they call 911; when blacks have strokes, they call a friend.

According to the Washington Post,

Seventy-five percent [of African-American stroke survivors interviewed] said they called someone else first instead of 911 when they realized something was wrong.

The resulting lost time can be fatal.

Why is this so? The study found that it was partially due to medical ignorance regarding the symptoms of a stroke; just one-third of the stroke patients surveyed recognized their symptoms. Some of those who did believed that “no medical intervention could help them.” Others felt that they would only call 911 if their symptoms were severe.

Why would that be?

…respondents also spoke of fear that ambulances might not find their way to a particular neighborhood quickly enough, embarrassment if an ambulance showed up and concern about the cost of emergency services…

When of course the cost of not dialing 911 is so much greater, in so many ways.

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* Part of a new and ongoing series. No, just kidding—this just caught my eye. (Must be from having studied the history of medicine at Harvard.)

The Times reports that MLB’s drug-testing program, so vaunted by the absurdly mendacious Bud Selig, is ludicrously weak.

“It’s not surprising, really. Aliens have been coming to Asia for decades, but now they sense a change. This is where the progressive countries are, so they are coming here much more often now.”

—Debhanom Muangman, a 75-year-old Harvard-educated physician and one of Thailand’s leading UFO investigators, quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal.

I’ll be interviewed on Emily Rooney’s WGBH show in four minutes.