Shots in the Dark

Because if you lie about being a finalist to receive one, you have to resign as Yale’s football coach…

“I am extremely proud of my academic, athletic and coaching career. If there was confusion created, I take full responsibility. The timing of this inquiry has been difficult for everyone. At this point I believe it is in the best interest of my student-athletes and Yale University that I step down.”

There was confusion created!

Of course, it didn’t help that Tom Williams couldn’t beat Harvard….

Update: It turns out that WIlliams is a serial liar….

The 1% defend themselves in this infuriating Bloomberg article…

“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO [Jamie Dimon] told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”

Of course the criticisms of the 1% are over-broad and inaccurate sometimes; no protest movement is perfect.

But if the 1% are so successful, and it’s all the result of their own intelligence and hard work, they should be mature enough to overlook those flaws and consider the fundamental message of Occupy Wall Street: Income inequality in America is threatening the future of the country.

When you look at the numbers, that’s a very substantive and serious argument. You may not agree with it, but it’s a real issue, and it deserves to be listened to with respect.

Book of James, by We Are Augustines.

The song apparently was inspired by the brother of lead singer Bill McCarthy, a schizophrenic and drug addict who hanged himself in prison. McCarthy’s mother, who was also schizophrenic, died of a drug overdose. (This is recounted in the “Story” section of the band’s website.)

When McCarthy was nineteen years old his mother, after years of struggling with chemical dependency and psychic deterioration, ended her life by overdosing on painkillers and cocaine. Her body was discovered on a cot in a homeless shelter. Next to her was a business card from the local mortuary, her children’s names scrawled across the back.

Puts one’s problems into perspective, doesn’t it?

It’s a song called “Chapel Song,” by a Brooklyn band called We Are Augustines.

The video’s almost a parody (presumably unintentional) of Brooklyn hipsterdom, but hey, that’s what life here in the BK is really like…

A few days ago Beth Karas, a legal reporter for CNN, interviewed me for an article she was writing about Stephen Glass, the serial fabulist whose story was turned into the film Shattered Glass.

For several years Glass has been trying to convince the California bar association that it should accept him into its ranks, and the matter has progressed all the way to the California Supreme Court. (Here’s a nice summation by Jack Shafer of how the case has developed.)

Karas wanted to talk because Glass wrote for me when I was an editor at George, and I subsequently wrote this short essay about the experience.

To really understand why the story of Steve Glass still causes such pain, you have to know that making up facts was only part of what Glass did to his colleagues. We opened ourselves to him, and in turn he probed our minds, pinpointing our vulnerabilities, our vanities, our prejudices. He exploited the worst in us and betrayed the best. And then he just vanished — until now. Now he’s back, promoting a tale of fall and redemption.

Promoting a tale of fall and redemption…. Those words remain almost exactly true; Glass is now telling the court that the reason he made up dozens of articles is because he wanted to impress his parents, who disapproved of him going into journalism.

As Karas reports in her CNN piece,

“If [Glass' mother] was upset with you, she would stop speaking to you in the house, except for the most minute things,” he testified. During the freeze-outs, which could last weeks, she showered “over the top love” on his brother “so I could see what I was not getting.” His father would react in a manner Glass described as “rageful, stomping around, screaming and yelling.”

Glass’ parents declined to comment.

And because Glass was a nerd in school, things like this supposedly happened:

Classmates mocked him. During a health class focusing on the dangers of teenage pregnancy, the teacher “married” him to a classmate, and they were to jointly care for a doll. The girl was horrified, and she and her parents lobbied to have the marriage annulled.

Adam Penenberg, who first investigated Glass’s lies, is skeptical of Glass’ rehabilitation, and so am I.

(It’s important to note—I asked Karas to do this when quoting me, but she didn’t, how frustrating—that I haven’t seen Glass since 2003 or ‘04, and I have absolutely no firsthand knowledge of his life since that time. He had written me a letter to ask if he could apologize to me in person. It happened to coincide with the publication of his dreadful novel.)

But reading that anecdote about the girl in school, I have this unpleasant sense of deja vu. Her parents lobbied to have the marriage annulled? I call bullshit; what kind of parents would do that? Like all of Glass’ stories, it’s possible. But it has exactly the color of all those invented stories from Glass’ pre-rehabilitation days.

And as for his family—well, look, I concede that something has to happen for a guy to turn out so f’ed up. Without question, Stephen is a very psychologically complicated guy. Maybe his parents did mess with his head. But still…his parents aren’t talking. I’d feel better if they were.

Ultimately, though, I go back to some Harvard book-learning on this one. As Donald Fleming, one of the members of my oral examination committee in graduate school, discussed with me, lawyers’ bar associations are simply guilds—trade organizations whose purpose is to elevate the profession (and its salaries), and protect consumers, by imposing some quality control. Some people get to be lawyers, some don’t.

If the California Bar Association can’t exclude someone who’s lied in public, in print, hundreds of times, who could it exclude?

In his article linked to above, Adam Penenberg makes a joke about Glass wanting to join one of the few professions as distrusted as journalism is. I’m not so cynical; the lawyers I know actually take this stuff pretty seriously. (An old friend of mine, for example, traveled from New York to Washington to dig up police records of an old traffic ticket he’d received for riding a motorcycle without a license so that he could file an accurate application for the bar. Of course, the DC police had lost the record.)

I don’t wish Stephen Glass harm; I hope his protestations of rehabilitation are true. But I don’t feel obligated to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I don’t see why the California bar should take a similar leap of faith.

I didn’t agree with Christopher Hitchens half the time, but who cares? He set a standard for learning, eloquence and rigor, and he was a gifted writer. What a loss. For the journalism community in particular, this is a tough one—everybody knew Christopher Hitchens, and there just aren’t many, if any, left like him.

I was glad to read in the New York Times yesterday that bookstores are enjoying a resurgence of business this Christmas, somewhat diminishing bookseller anxiety about the impact of e-books.

...the initial weeks of Christmas shopping, a boom time for the book business, have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders, the chain that went out of business this year.

I’m not surprised. I don’t have a lot of experience with e-books—the only electronic book I’ve read was Ron Susskind’s The Confidence Men (notes on Larry Summers forthcoming)—and it just isn’t the kind of pleasing sensual experience that a physical book provides.

Besides, who wants to give an e-book for Christmas?

That said, I do still worry about the future of bookstores, partly because of a purchase I made the other day. I went to the Union Square Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy of Peter Englund’s new history of the First World War, The Beauty and the Sorrow.

I was disappointed to find that the book, with its $35 cover price, wasn’t discounted. Pretty hefty for a book.

So I pulled out my iPhone and opened the Amazon app. It asked me to scan the book’s bar code, which was easy enough to do, and up popped Amazon’s price: $23.10.

I one-touch ordered it (free shipping, a couple bucks tax)–voila!

I ordered the book Monday; it arrived in the mail yesterday (Tuesday). Saved about $13.

How can Barnes and Noble compete with that?

That’s what was happening in the row in front of me at Lincoln Center last night.

Smarter minds than me can unpack the semiotics of that moment; I just like the way the phrase rolls off the tongue.

“If guys can have groupies and be celebrated for it, I plan on doing the exact same thing. My most proud groupie moment was picking up a guy from Harvard. We hung out all night* and then I dropped him off at a truck stop and he took a $300 cab ride back to Harvard.”

—Ke$ha, in the 12/22 issue of Rolling Stone

Scholars of academia and decoders of Harvard will note that Ke$ha doesn’t say why picking up a Harvard guy was her “most proud” groupie moment, but perhaps we can interpret it as a sign of the recurring power of the American ideal of self-improvement. Hey, I may not have gone to Harvard, but I spent the night with someone who did!

Harvard men will be pleased to hear that dropping the H-bomb still works.

* And linguists will note Ke$sha’s use of “hung out,” which here replaces “hooked up,” which itself (kind of) replaced “had sex.” Perhaps a new book, Steve Pinker?

…for Albert Pujols? Even the Angels must know that Pujols, whose batting prowess is already declining, isn’t going to be worth $25 million a year in five more years. So is this just a bad deal…or is Pujols just a loss-leader, an attempt to lock up the LA market while the Dodgers are in chaos?