Shots In The Dark

Here's the text of an e-mail I just received:

Welcome to Waspdate!

Waspdate is a new daily email newsletter that chronicles the drama, melodrama and tragicomedy of the dating scene among NYC’s young elite and their wannabes. Each installment will feature a story about life and love in Gotham submitted by you, our dear readers, and dissected, bisected and vivisected by our crack staff of love experts–hopeless romantics, spurned lovers, and meth-addled swingers.

Dating in New York can be like a taxi ride in midtown at rush-hour–you try to get where you’re going by fits and starts, much of the time you’re stopped dead in the middle of traffic, and then you finally speed up only to swerve suddenly and kill a pedestrian. Waspdate is here to help you avoid oncoming traffic, teaching, or at least amusing, by example. In short, we're resurrecting Dear Abbey and slapping on a Barbour coat and a pair of Manolos.

But, you say, "I’m not white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant." And, that’s OK. Your ancestors may not have been on the Mayflower, you may not have even one pair of whale pants to your name, you may not know a single Muffy or Biff, you might actually have to work to make money, and if we told you to meet at us at "the club", let's be honest, you probably wouldn't know where to go. But, it doesn't matter. These days, being a WASP is a state of mind.

So, if you believe that your rightful place is on top, whether earned or inherited, that you will get there because you are who you are, and you're looking for that special someone, or—gasp—have found him or her, we want your stories. All names and otherwise telling information will be changed to protect the innocent, and guilty alike. Waspdate will leave the trash talk for the squash court, thank you very much.

Forward this on to your friends, so they will pass it on to their friends. Send it to your boyfriend, so he’ll send it to his boyfriend. And, we can get this fete started.

To submit stories, send an email to submissions@waspdate.com.
To subscribe, send an email to waspdate@waspdate.com with JOIN in the subject line.
To unsubscribe, send an email to waspdate@waspdate.com with UNSUBSCRIBE in the subject line.

LAUNCHES 12.12.06

Two things.

One, whether or not it's true that "being a WASP is a state of mind," a real WASP would never publicly disclose details of a date.

And two, I can't imagine why anyone would send this to me.....

She's done endless publicity for a book that no one seems to be buying. Here, she chats with Texas Monthly editor Evan Smith (an old friend of mine), and really, her ego is just out of control.

When Smith asks her about Judith Miller, she says that Smith is goading her into a "catfight," and that men love catfights because they always think that the women will be kissing at the end. (Apparently that's a Seinfeld joke.)

Maureen Dowd and Judith Miller kissing is an image that I did not want in my head. Stuck...in my head. I think it's safe to say that the only people who might thusly fantasize are a small group of octogenarians who subscribe to the New York Review of Books and believe that Alger Hiss was innocent.

Later in the interview, Dowd discusses TimesSelect, the newspaper's pay-per-view service for online material. " I feel like Rapunzel behind a wall, you know, up in a castle," Dowd says.

Let's just consider the implications of that self-description for a moment, shall we?






Smith next asks Dowd why she was the sole TimesSelect columnist who did not post an autobiographical video of herself.

Dowd replies, "It just seems a little narcissistic to make a bio video of you, video of yourself. I feel like people reading the column already know."

Hmmm. It's narcissistic to make a biographical introduction of yourself, because you feel that everyone already knows your bio.

Interesting.

Later, Dowd draws extensive analogies between the White House and the Star War movies.

I've long thought that MoDo is the most overrated newspaper columnist in the United States (hell, let's say the world). She's refreshing on the Times Op-Ed page because a) she's the only woman, and brings a different writing style and set of concerns, and b) everyone else is so frigging serious all the time.

But I'm convinced if you took any non-Times writer with a respectable amount of wit and cleverness, and some interest in politics, and dropped them down on that prime NYT real estate, that writer would generate the same level of enthusiasm.

Reading the Times op-ed page is usually like eating your vegetables. Not fun, but good for you. Reading Dowd is like eating dessert first.

Which is fine. There's nothing wrong with a little dessert, as long as you take it in moderation and don't confuse it with anything substantive.

Eli and Edythe Broad, the donors who gave $100 million to help Harvard and MIT start the Broad Institute for genomic research, have given another $100 million.

Granted, it's a joint project and the gift is split between the two universities. Nonetheless, this gift is a feather in Larry Summers' cap, and he's earned the right to crow about it.....

I love my new G5 iMac, and so does Walt Mossberg.

It's taken 20 years, but finally the marketplace has fully begun to realize the superiority of Apple computers and the Mac operating system.

Okay, granted, they're still at four percent market share. But things are looking up!

The White House tried to pay off American journalists to promote foreign coverage. So it should come as no surprise to us that it has been planting ghostwritten articles in the Iraqi press.

Apparently they really do believe in exporting American-style democracy overseas....

As predicted yesterday, Hillary Clinton took a new stance on the Iraq war, um, yesterday. She's calling for troop pull-outs from Iraq starting in 2006, depending on the outcome of Iraqi elections on December 15th.

The Times, showing that it still doesn't know how to use the Internet for online journalism, doesn't bother to link to Clinton's statement, so I will. It's here.

Here's Hillary's nut graf:

I do not believe that we should allow this to be an open-ended commitment without limits or end. Nor do I believe that we can or should pull out of Iraq immediately. I believe we are at a critical point with the December 15th elections that should, if successful, allow us to start bringing home our troops in the coming year, while leaving behind a smaller contingent in safer areas with greater intelligence and quick strike capabilities. This will advance our interests, help fight terrorism and protect the interests of the Iraqi people.

But to my mind, there's a crucial step missing. What exactly are the elections going to change that makes it plausible for us to start withdrawing troops? Will they somehow make the U.S.-trained Iraqi army more viable? Seems unlikely.

Mrs. Clinton spends the vast majority of her letter Bush-bashing. But near the end, she does return to her own prescription.

If these elections succeed, we should be able to start drawing down our troops, but we should also plan to continue to help secure the country and the region with a smaller footprint on an as-needed basis. I call on the President...for such a plan....

Two points: What is success? And why call on the president for a plan? Why not come up with your own?

Sooner or later, Senator Clinton will have to, if she expects to lead the country.

Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff, who is Canadian, has announced that he's going to run for the Canadian Parliament as a member of the Liberal Party. I'd vote for him. The head of the Kennedy School's Carr Center for Human Rights, Ignatieff's a thoughtful, serious and passionate guy. (I interviewed him for Harvard Rules, and he spoke on the record, a quality I always admire and encourage in a future politician.) He's intensely devoted to the cause of human rights, and has spent years trying to make the world a better place. Good for Michael to take this leap, and good luck to him. He's an example of Harvard and the Kennedy School at their best.

Readers of this blog can now read "The Great Harvard Drug Scandal" online here. But buy the magazine anyway, okay? Those guys work hard for the money.

That's the title of John Wolfson's piece in Boston Magazine, which I just received in the mail. The powerful story tells of Larry Summer's attempt to seize control of a $125 million grant to fight AIDS in Africa received by Phyllis Kanki, a researcher at the School of Public Health.

Here's the nut graf:

"That set up a struggle that stretched over the first half of 2004, delaying crucial AIDS work for five months. Though this battle would get far less publicity than other Summers skirmishes—the odd fight he picked with the Afro-American studies profesor Cornel West, for example, or the contrvoersy he ignited with comments suggesting that genetics might explain the paucity of women in science—its ramifications would be infinitely more severe. The casualties would not be limited to the ego of a star academic or the march of social progress. The unversity denies it adamantly, but well-informed critics say the victims this time would be hundreds of impoverished, AIDS-stricken Africans who died waiting for Harvard to deliver the life-extending treatment it had been given public money to provide." (Emphasis added.)

The mind reels.

As it does from the rationale provided by Harvard spokesman B.D. Colen, which—well, you'll just have to read it for yourself. Let's just say that Colen's response is cynical, cavalier, and, frankly, cruel. (Or, if you're feeling gentle, it's just deeply ignorant.) It's on page 116 of Wolfson's story.

But really, you should read the entire article. Unfortunately, it's not (yet?) online, so you might have to buy the magazine. It's worth the $4.

On the Huffington Post, Nora Ephron has a wickedly smart analysis of Bob Woodward, whom she calls the "dumb blonde of Washington."

Most of her post isn't so nasty, but it is, in its way, quite devastating.

(And not just because she agrees with me that the reason Woodward trashed Patrick Fitzgerald in public was to pressure Fitzgerald into cooperating with him.)

You know, if I were a newspaper editor—or, say, editor of a national magazine devoted to cuture and politics—I might just think about signing up Nora Ephron as a columnist. She covers the same turf as Maureen Dowd, and to my mind, she's a better writer....

Mediaweek reports that Anderson Cooper's ratings are down 19% from Aaron Brown's last week on-air.

What I find truly remarkable is that the show's only averaging about 568,000 viewers. By TV standards, you can't get much smaller. I'll bet the Robyn Bird Show doesn't do much worse (and I don't even know what channel it's on any more).

I understand that in promoting Cooper ad nauseum, CNN is just trying to figure out how to stop the bleeding. I've got an idea. Journalism? I'd like to see CNN focus more on the news and stories it's reporting, rather than the people who are doing the reporting....

In Slate, my friend Will Saletan outlines Joseph Ratzinger's 30-year campaign against gays. The gist of Will's piece is that Ratzinger has long been obsessed with purging homosexuality from, not just the church, but society at large.

I'm not Catholic (though half of my extended family is)...but if I were, I'd be struggling with the idea that the man elevated to my church's highest position appears to be a bigot.

While driving yesterday, I heard The Atlantic's James Fallows discuss his cover story, "Why Iraq Has No Army." I always find Fallows smart, thoughtful, and politically hard to pin down, which I mean as a compliment. His piece is really a must-read for Democrats and others who oppose the war—and it poses a dilemma for Democratic aspirants to the presidency.

It's a good thing that the Democrats are finally showing signs of life. But ultimately, Hillary Clinton et al are going to have to do more than say that the was has been botched, or that it was a mistake from the get-go. (Tough for Hillary to say, since she voted in favor of it.) Regardless of whether the war was a mistake, it happened, and it's happening. Democrats are going to have to say what they would do now.

And that seems an impossible question. As Fallows writes: "The crucial need to improve security and order in Iraq puts the United States in an impossible position. It can't honorably leave Iraq—as opposed to simply evacuating Saigon-style—so long as its military must provide most of the manpower, weaponry, intelligence systems, and strategies being used against the insurgency. But it can't sensibly stay when the very presence of its troops is a worsening irritant to the Iraqi public and a rallying point for nationalist opponents—to say nothing of the growing pressure in the United States for withdrawal."

It's a terrific article.

Here's the letter former U.S. senator Timothy Wirth wrote to Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton.... Click on the letter to enlarge it.

In the same issue of Boston magazine, John Sedgwick conducts a fascinating interview with former Boston University president John Silber.

As usual with Silber, some of his remarks sound extremely sensible, and some of them sound borderline nutty.

Silber's bottom line: "Summers has done nothing to be ashamed of, and that's why he shouldn't apologize. Once he apologizes, then you wonder whether he's done something naughty."

In its December issue, Boston magazine will be publishing an investigation into the Harvard AIDS scandal, in which tens of millions of dollars in AIDS relief was held back while Mass Hall attempted to seize control of a federal grant won by the School of Public Health. As reported earlier by the Boston Globe, dozens of HIV-infected Africans died as a result.

Even before its issue has hit the stands, Boston has published documents related to the scandal on its website.

If you have a high tolerance for bureaucratic doublespeak, I encourage you to read them. Or wait till the article comes out, then read the documents.

To my mind, this is the most important and disturbing story of Larry Summers' tenure at Harvard, because it was a matter of life and death, and death won.

In the Globe, Marcella Bombardieri reports on a letter critical of Larry Summers circulating through some Harvard offices.

The author of the letter is former Colorado senator Tim Wirth, a Harvard alum; he graduated from the college in 1961 and received a master's degree from the school of education in 1965.

In the letter, which is addressed to Corporation senior fellow Jamie Houghton, Wirth praises a public attack on intelligent design delivered by Cornell president Hunter Rawlings. Harvard's president should have the same public profile, Wirth says. "Unhappily, I fear that President Summers is so damaged that a Harvard statement and position might be lost, or might be reported only along with a further recitation of his woes."

(Which is, I think, an accurate prediction.)

Wirth doesn't explicitly call for Summers' resignation, but he clearly implies that Summers' exit would be the best way for Harvard to retake the leadership status that "the world...has come to expect."

John Longbrake, Summers' spokesman, dodges the larger issue by saying that Summers has spoken out against intelligent design, "as recently as November 12 at a large gathering in New York City." A speech [presumably] at the Harvard Club was not exactly what Wirth had in mind.

An irony of this situation is that the Harvard Corporation chose Larry Summers precisely for the role Wirth envisions of the Harvard president. But some of Summers' public statements on matters of public debate have been so hamhanded that he is now effectively gagged.

Wirth is a former senator, so it will be hard for Mass Hall to discredit him. (It would if it could.) The question is now, will other alums follow Wirth's lead? And what kind of impact will Wirth's letter and similar sentiments have on Harvard fundraising?
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* Thanks to the poster below who reminded me of Bombardieri's piece.

The day after Thanksgiving, I happened to need to pay a visit to Ikea, the Swedish furniture store. A bit of a nightmare, but not as bad as it could have been.

Yesterday, though, I visited Times Square with my brother-in-law and six-year-old nephew. (He happens to be my only nephew, and so I happily call him my favorite nephew in the world...but lately, he has wised up, and points out, "I'm your only nephew!")

The three of us braved the Toys-R-Us store in Times Square, an experience I won't willingly repeat. The store was packed with clutching, grabbing, consuming Americans; one couldn't move without bumping into someone happily snapping up a DVD of The Incredibles, picking up a handheld Nintendo device, or checking out the new Xbox. There's actually an in-store Ferris wheel there. Naturally, you had to buy tickets. And naturally, there was an hour wait, which meant that you'd have to shop for an hour before it was your turn to ride.

I get a little nauseous in such situations, so I left quickly.

It was the second time I'd become somewhat alarmed about the way we Americans approach Christmas. On Thanksgiving night, I watched The Polar Express with my nephew and my two nieces, who, coincidentally, happen to be my two favorite nieces in the world. For those of you lacking children or favorite nieces and nephews, it's an animated film about a little boy who doesn't believe in Santa Claus. On Christmas Eve, he boards a train to the North Pole and visits the huge metropolis where Santa and the elves manufacture Christmas presents.

It's kind of a weird film. The largely-deserted North Pole turns out to be an unintentionally scary place, filled with ominous conveyor belts and pneumatic tubes and tunnels and trapdoors. It looks like a Soviety city that's been hit by a neutron bomb—an impression that is only slightly lessened by a huge midnight rally at which all the elves cheer the imminent appearance of Santa Claus, who is first seen as a monstrous shadow.

(At which point I turned to my mother and whispered, "Do you think Robert Zemeckis [the director] is familiar with the work of Leni Riefenstahl?")

Our little boy protagonist is finally convinced that Santa exists when the Great Man chooses him to receive the first present of Christmas.

What kind of message does this send to children? There's not a hint of spirituality in the film.

Well, let me take that back. There is spirituality, just not as one would normally think of it in a Christmas context. Nothing about Jesus, or being thankful, or family, or helping others.

Instead, the material has been elevated to the level of the spiritual. The act of receiving a gift has been transformed into a quasi-religious ritual. Santa Claus is a combination of Jesus and Hitler.

In Dickens' A Christmas Carol, we learn that there is no greater gift than the present. In The Polar Express, we learn that there is no greater gift than a present.

In Dickens, we learn that the greatest joy is giving. In The Polar Express, the greatest joy, the ultimate satisfaction, is receiving.

And in the United States, this "holiday season," as we have dubbed it, the greatest joy is buying...which was not unlike President Bush's advice to the nation after 9/11: Go shopping.

Doesn't the United States mean more than this? Isn't there some way to retake Christmas from the materialistic orgy of our vapid capitalist culture? Or are we really nothing more than what we buy?

In the Globe, Allan Helms reviews Harvard's Secret Court: The Savage 1920 Purge of Campus Homosexuals, by William Wright.

It's a fascinating story, involving a secret tribunal that expelled a number of Harvard students for suspected gay activity. But Helms suggests that the telling of it is deeply flawed, including a number of factual mistakes, unattributed quotations, and occasional dips into fictionalization.

(The Crimson review said much the same.)

Concludes Helms, "Wright has been so ill served by his editor that perhaps it's time for a new purge."

A couple of points here.

First, Wright shouldn't need an editor to point out factual mistakes or to tell him that interspersing fact and fiction in a work of history is a bad idea.

But second, as is more and more true in publishing, Wright probably didn't have much of an editor. Well, let me rephrase; Wright's editor probably didn't do much actual editing. His publisher, St. Martin's Press, is known as a commercial house (as opposed to one with a highbrown reputation).

(St. Martin's publishes the paperback of American Son, so I don't say that as a slight; nothing wrong with being commercial.)

But I'll bet that St. Martin's was concerned that the publication earlier this year of Harvard Rules and Ross Douthat's Privilege had tapped out the market for books about Harvard, and consequently made a decision not to put a lot of resources into Wright's publication. That, and the fact that it's aimed at a very specific niche—gay people interested in Harvard—probably meant that Wright didn't receive a lot of editorial attention.

And since publishers don't pay for fact-checkers, Wright would have had to hire someone himself. (I did, for both of my books, and I consider it money well-spent.) It sounds like Wright chose not to.

I don't say this as a criticism of Wright; it's tough to write a book about a small subject and have the resources to do it just as you'd like to. At some point, you have to perform a cost-benefit analysis: If I have to spend $2500 on fact-checking, and that's, say, five percent of my advance after taxes and a 15% agent's commission, and the fact-checker catches ten small mistakes...is it worth the money?

Rather, I'm suggesting that some of the perceived failings of Wright's book may reveal telling changes in the publishing business. It's not easy to sell a book about a small chapter of Harvard history....

What are we to make of Samuel Alito's membership in a group called Concerned Alumni of Princeton?

Here's what the Times has to say about CAP:

"The group had been founded in 1972, the year that Judge Alito graduated, by alumni upset that Princeton had recently begun admitting women. It published a magazine, Prospect, which persistently accused the administration of taking a permissive approach to student life, of promoting birth control and paying for abortions, and of diluting the explicitly Christian character of the school."

CAP also protested the number of minority students at Princeton, relative to the number of alumni children.

Again, from the Times: "A brochure for Princeton alumni warned, 'The unannounced goal of the administration, now achieved, of a student population of approximately 40 percent women and minorities will largely vitiate the alumni body of the future.'"

A couple of thoughts.

It's hard not to see such sentiments as racist. There doesn't appear to be any argument why a student body of 40 percent women and minorities would be wrong for Princeton. (In fact, it's hard to imagine such an argument that wouldn't be racist and sexist.) But the implication that such a student body composition is, on its face, a bad thing reeks of racism.

It may also be possible to throw anti-Semitism into the mix. That phrase, "diluting the explicitly Christian character of the school," is alarming. But to be fair, it's possible to imagine an argument in behalf of a Christian tradition that isn't anti-Semitic, and the Times doesn't delve into this aspect of the story.

This article does remind one of how nasty the Reagan conservatives of the 1980s really were. Such extreme sentiments were hardly rare, and they were fueled by the Reagan administration. That's one reason why Alito listed his membership in CAP in a 1985 appplication for promotion when he was working in the Reagan administration.

Yes, this happened a long time ago. But Alito's membership in the group is relevant to his judicial philosophy, and senators should question him about it during his confirmation hearings.