John McCormack at the Weekly Standard has a splashy headline today: "Obama Now Selling Judgeships For Health Care Votes?" The story turns out to be that Obama is nominating Scott Matheson, Jr. to the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
I met Erich Segal in 1959, in a Harvard University graduate-school dorm. It was in Richards Hall, designed in the early ’50s by Walter Gropius, which Erich said only proved that “great men” could do desultory work. He was doing his graduate work in classics and comparative literature, and I in government. Of course, he knew more, much more, about my field than I did about his. In fact, he was rapacious in his pursuit of knowledge. And cheerfully intent about music and song. He was a man of traditional culture ...
I met Erich Segal in 1959, in a Harvard University graduate-school dorm. It was in Richards Hall, designed in the early fifties by Walter Gropius, which Erich said only proved that "great men" could do desultory work. He was a Ph.D. candidate in Classics, and I in Government. Of course, he knew more, much more about my field than I did about his. In fact, he was rapacious in his pursuit of knowledge. And cheerfully intent about music and song. He was a man of traditional culture ...
Add one more voice to the chorus calling upon Democrats to pass health care reform, even if it means having the House quickly pass the Senate bill and then amending it later.
It's the voice of Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker, champion of the public plan and frequent contributor to The Treatment. Writing alongside Georgetown Professor (and TNR alum) Daniel Hopkins in the Washington Post, he argues
Forget the question of whether a Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts spells the end of health reform. It doesn't--unless Democrats let it. The Senate has already passed a bill that is far from perfect but far better than nothing. If Democrats lose a Senate seat, the House should simply enact it in return for strong commitments from President Obama and Democratic leaders that they will fight to improve the bill in the future, including through the filibuster-proof budget process.
The real question is what message politicians and pundits will take out of the Massachusetts surprise. (As of this writing, we do not know whether that surprise will be a near-loss for Democrats or a GOP triumph.) Many argue it means Democrats should run from reform. But that would not just be disastrous for American health care. It would misread the results and ignore the lessons of history. Not passing health reform would guarantee that dire predictions about the Democrats' fate will come true.
This is an inside New York story that I read in the New York Post. But it's really an international story with serious ramifications. This is actually a postscript to the twelve Danish cartoons of four years ago, one of which was the image of a bomb in Muhammed's turban.
Yale’s Paul Kennedy knows a little something about global economic issues. So when he wrote about the high speed rail this week, I paid attention as I thought it would focus on the role of state of the art infrastructure in the transition to the next American economy.
Unfortunately, Kennedy didn’t really tell us anything new. The piece suffers from the typical globetrotter’s lament of travel inconveniences and dreamy “wouldn’t-it-be-great” aspirations. Kennedy also doesn’t acknowledge that this nation is poised to make a significant investment in high speed rail with the $8 billion from the recovery package and another $2.5 billion in the 2010 budget.
Continuing a tradition of mine, here is a shamelessly subjective list of the most noteworthy research which came out in the last year:
Putting a new spin on the idea of sticky wages, Lena Edlund, Joseph Engelberg, and Christopher A. Parsons point out that the earnings of high-end prostitutes don't fall as fast as the decline in the sex-worker's physical attractiveness.
William Nordhaus makes a mathematical argument for why it's impossible to ever accurately measure happiness.
Before there was Superfreakonomics, before there was even Freakonomics, there was Steve Levitt and John Donohue's (in)famous abortion paper claiming that a major cause of declining crime rates was the legalization of abortion. Reviewing follow-up research 10 years after Levitt and Donohue's original paper, Theodore Joyce finds little support for the abortion-crime link.
Yale's (and AIG's) Gary Gorton released a much-discussed paper on the nature of banking panics.
The always-interesting David Galenson surveyed art-history textbooks concluded that Alfred Stieglitz was considered by scholars to be the greatest photographer of the 20th century.
A pair of papers (one by Lawrence Christiano, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo and another by Gauti Eggertsson) provided strong evidence that fiscal policy can be particularly effective when interest rates are close to, or below, zero.
James Gardner, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Sun, now writes on culture for several publications.
To put the matter politely, presidential libraries tend not to inspire very good architecture. One generalization that can be made about the twelve libraries already in existence is that they tend to err on the side of dullness, like the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda and the Bush 41 Library in Texas. And when the architects reach for edginess, they come up with a tame composite of all the newest clichés of the moment; consider the brutalism of LBJ’s library or the drab curtainwalls in the building that honors Gerald Ford. The good side of that equation is that, as architectural typologies go, these libraries are rarely downright awful. Also, because they usually inhabit the outskirts of cities, they are able to expand horizontality over a fairly generous allotment of land.
A few days ago, some preliminary plans were unveiled for the George W. Bush Library, to be built on the campus of Southern Methodist University in University Park, near Dallas. (Click here for a slideshow of the library.) To judge from the renderings, this new project, which will also house the George W. Bush Policy Institute and the offices of the George W. Bush Foundation, is revealingly different from its immediate predecessor, the William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock. There is a hard-edged and unapologetic modernity to the Clinton Library, designed by Richard Olcott of the New York-based Polshek Partnership. Though some (including Clinton himself) have compared this long and rectangular structure to a double-wide trailer, with all its unsavory associations, the building still achieves a certain elegance, presence, and functionality.
It is surely not accidental that the new Bush Library is to be designed by Robert A. M. Stern, also of New York. Whether Stern is or is not conservative himself, the contextualism he represents has endeared him to people who incline towards a certain establishmentarian traditionalism. The dean of the Yale School of Architecture, he is one of the few living architects to earn the respect of his colleagues by working in an historicist, or as he would have it, “contextualist” idiom. In practice this means that—a few modernist buildings aside—he and his colleagues opt for a largely classical articulation of structure that usually results in a good deal of columns and red brick.
Let me be clear: I don't doubt for a moment that Barack Obama genuinely believes that he can calm the roils that trouble the
Obama's narrative is assumedly third world, maybe just by dint of his skin complexion. But, frankly, there weren't many dreams from his father in Dreams From My Father. In fact, there were at least as many from his hippie white mother. So here is a very contemporary person. The two lines, though, do connect in his chosen life as it is retold and projected into the future. Here, his prominence in the deeply left-wing "community organizing" universe meets the do-not-ask-questions rules of the
So, much as George Bush did not doubt, so President Obama does not doubt. He doesn't doubt himself and he doesn't doubt what he says. I made the comment the other day in another Spine with reference to Obama: narcissism is the most dangerous of sins...because it doesn't let the sinner recognize it in himself.
The OMB blog has an interesting item up about the effects of entering the labor market during a recession versus a tight labor market.
Liberal pundits, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and National Security Advisor James Jones are in agreement: General Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was wrong to give public voice to his views about the best way forward in that beleaguered country. Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman accused McChrystal of “a plain violation of the principle of civilian control.” Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson put it most bluntly: "The men with the stars on their shoulders … need to shut up and salute." Some are even drawing parallels between McChrystal and Douglas MacArthur. All these critics are wrong.
Yale's Ray Fair, well-known for his economic model predicting the outcome of presidential elections, has a new forecast out on the macroeconomic effects of large budget deficits -- and it's not pretty:
Paradise Found: Nature in America at the Time of Discovery
By Steve Nicholls
(University of Chicago Press, 524 pp., $30)
American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau
Edited by Bill McKibben
(Library of America, 1,047 pp., $40)
Defending The Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, And The Legacy Of Madison Grant
By Jonathan Peter Spiro
(University of Vermont Press, 462 pp., $39.95)
A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir
By Donald Worster
(Oxford University Press, 535 pp., $34.99)
A Reenchanted World: The Quest for A New Kinship With Nature
By James William Gibson
(Metropolitan Books, 306 pp., $27)
Eco Barons: The Dreamers, Schemers, and Millionaires Who Are Saving Our Planet
By Edward Humes
(Ecco Books, 367 pp., $25.99)
I.
In contemporary public discourse, concern for "the environment" is a mile wide and an inch deep. Even free-market fundamentalists strain to display their ecological credentials, while corporations that sell fossil fuels genuflect at the altar of sustainability. Everyone has discovered how nice it is to be green. Will popular sentiment translate into public policy? There is reason to be skeptical.
The wall-to-wall coverage this week focusing on the murder of Yale student Annie Le goes to show just how mad these Ivy League murders drive us. They create instant victims and villains, but almost never a mix of the two. However, this week, it was hard not to remember the case if James Van de Velde, the Yale lecturer accused of killing Yale senior Suzanne Jovin in December 1998. Once called “Richard Jewell with a Ph.D,” Van de Velde’s life was turned upside down that winter after being publicly named a suspect--the only to be named--despite a lack of any hard evidence. He had been the academic advisor to Jovin, and she had met with him on the day of her death. While he was never formally charged, the university responded by cancelling his classes that spring and not renewing his contract the following year--his reputation, academic career, and personal life were quickly ruined. In a 1999 New York Times Magazine piece, James Bennet chronicled his life as a suspect:
But layer by layer, his life has been whittled down. He has no job now and few prospects, just a growing pile of rejections. His casual friends and colleagues have dropped away, leaving a small, hard core of loyalists. He cannot, of course, date. His savings are dwindling, and his legal bills are rising. His upbringing, his career and his social life have been publicly fly-specked by journalists searching backward, through the darkest of lenses, for signs of a murderer in the making.
What’s become of him over the last decade? He has spent much time vehemently defending his innocence, publishing op-eds calling for a renewed seriousness in the investigations, and writing letters (as recently as last year) urging authorities to test the DNA evidence found at the crime scene (a palm print on a Fresca can, skin underneath the victims fingernails), which have either not been tested, or have not matched his DNA. Since 2007, the case has been in the hands of four retired state detectives and is ongoing. One of the detectives reportedly said, “What was done to Van de Velde should not have been done even to a guilty man.” The team has recently claimed that “no person is a suspect in the crime, and everyone is a suspect,” and they are reportedly not in contact with Van de Velde. With the 2008 release of a composite of a man seen fleeing the area after the crime, it seems Van de Velde is finally out from under the thumb of (at least official) suspicion.
He's tall, trim, with shaved head, a confident demeanor, wearing a dark turtleneck, kind 'a funny and Yale Law School. Cool. Co-o-o-l. Or maybe even wow!
He's Van Jones, and he resigned on Saturday as what the White House called its "czar" for the environment. There are actually many czars at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in this administration, and I wonder why the historical resonance of the word doesn't just give the Obama crowd the creeps. Unless, of course, they want to govern like czars ... and czarinas.
To be sure, Mr. Jones did not have an option even though Valerie Jarrett was his admiring pal. But my admired pal Rahm and his partner David Axelrod must have known from the get-go that Jones would have to move on. If they had seen a serious vetting of the professional agitator he wouldn't have been allowed to cross the threshold of the presidential palace.
Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City
By Anthony Flint
(Random House, 256 pp., $27)
For urbanists and others, the battle between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs was the great titanic struggle of the twentieth century. Like the bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, their conflict has magnified significance, as the two figures have become symbols. Jacobs is the secular saint of street life, representing a humane approach to urban planning grounded in the messy interactions of the neighborhood. Moses is the icon of infrastructure established by power, the physical reconstruction of cities with great bridges and wide expressways and tall apartment buildings. The actual projects that fueled their acrimony may now be curiosities of urban history, but the ideological conflict embodied by Jacobs and Moses continues to rage in every growing city in the world. The growth of Shanghai may be described as Moses on steroids, whereas the land-use restrictions in Mumbai honor a central element of Jacobs’s legacy.
A proposed tax on sugary drinks has gotten some good press of late, but here's a new paper that casts doubt on its obesity fighting abilities for children and adolescents.
The UK's top financial regulator, Adair Turner, has suggested a tax on all financial transactions around the world. The purpose of this tax, he argues, would be to prevent the return of "business as usual" for the banking sector: "If you want to stop excessive pay in a swollen financial sector you have to reduce the size of that sector or apply special taxes to its pre-remuneration profit."
One Monday last December, a stranger presented himself at the office of Sanford Ungar, the president of Goucher College, located in a suburb of Baltimore. He introduced himself as Charlie Ebersol, a television producer. A handsome, affable, and royally confident young man--he was sometimes pictured in the gossip pages with his girlfriend, the tennis star Maria Sharapova--Ebersol explained his visit by saying he was doing research for a new prime-time show on NBC. Beyond that, he was cryptic, Ungar recalls. "He said, 'We're going to come back tomorrow and tell you about somebody who works here who's done some very, very bad things.'" The meeting, Ungar says, left him totally baffled. Ebersol remembers the encounter somewhat differently. "Literally five minutes into my going into conversation," Ebersol told me, "he said, 'Are you talking about Leopold Munyakazi?'"
This year, Nouriel Roubini, the economist known to the general public as Dr. Doom, Prophet of the Financial Apocalypse, spent the early hours of Mardi Gras on the floor of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. It was only 11 a.m., but the party was rollicking. Traders careened around the floor, hooting and honking, dressed as dragons and devils and convicts. Rock music roared overhead, and no one seemed to care that, by the bye, the market had tanked.
Back in October, not long after Lehman Brothers collapsed and triggered a meltdown on Wall Street, one of the hottest e-mail forwards making the rounds among finance types was a letter by Andrew Lahde, a hedge-fund manager who had posted eye-popping 866 percent returns in 2008 by betting on increases in U.S. subprime mortgage defaults.
