Archive for 2023

“DIE” — AS THEY FIRST ACRONYMED IT BEFORE REALIZING IT WAS TOO ON THE NOSE — IS ANOTHER WORD FOR DESTROYING MERIT:  Former DEI director lays down reality on DEI.

And hiring, advancing, etc. for any reason other than merit is the death of competency, and ultimately civilization.

OPEN THREAD: Saturday night’s alright for blogging.

I’LL TAKE A HEADLINE YOU WON’T SEE IN THE NEW YORK TIMES FOR $1,000, ALEX: What is, “Palestinian terrorists bomb own hospital, lie and blame Israel.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE:

More like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a U.S. government-funded facility for producing deadly infections.

NOBODY’S FOOL: Richard Russo’s Deplorable Storytelling. Steven Malanga discusses the career and the latest novel of Richard Russo.

Among the many whose stories have increasingly been ignored by what now passes for serious fiction are America’s working classes, who have progressively struggled to find a place in the twenty-first-century economy and social order.

One happy exception is the novelist Richard Russo, who started out trying to establish a career as a professor/novelist but discovered that what really interested readers were his stories about growing up with an often-absent father in a declining upstate New York manufacturing community filled with struggling but memorable characters whom some might call “deplorables.” Russo, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls, the tale of a New England mill town and its down-on-their-luck residents, has now returned with his tenth novel, Somebody’s Fool. It’s the third book in a trilogy about upstate New York’s fictional North Bath, a town that first appeared in Russo’s touching comic novel Nobody’s Fool, whose main character, the irascible yet still somehow lovable Donald “Sully” Sullivan, bears striking resemblance to the father Russo says came in and out of his life.

Read the whole thing — and Russo’s novel. If you haven’t read the earlier North Bath books, start with Nobody’s Fool, which made a great movie, too, starring Paul Newman as Sully. Another of Russo’s novels, Straight Man, a lampooning of campus culture, has been turned into “Lucky Hank,” an AMC series now on streaming platforms.

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Hundreds Disrupt Classes, March Through Harvard Law School, Kennedy School in Support of Palestine.

As Dean of the College Rakesh Khurana walked to his office in Harvard Yard, students not involved with the protest stopped him and requested a selfie. After Khurana posed in the selfie, the protesters entering the Yard began to shout at him.

“Dean Rakesh, we call on you to use your privilege. We call on you to use your position to free Palestine,” one protester said with a megaphone.

Apparently, courses on the dangers of magical thinking are not taught at Harvard.

Oh, and speaking of Harvard and “privilege:”

HOW IT STARTED: In 1922, The New York Times published its first article about Adolf Hitler. The reporter, Cyril Brown, was aware of his subject’s anti-Jewish animus but he wasn’t buying it.

‘Several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded,’ Brown wrote, ‘and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers.’ Two years later, the Times published another news item on the future architect of the Holocaust: ‘Hitler Tamed by Prison.’ The Austrian activist, the piece said, ‘looked a much sadder and wiser man,’ and ‘his behavior during his imprisonment convinced the authorities that [he] was no longer to be feared.’

How it’s going: NY Times defends rehiring Gaza journalist who praised Hitler: He’s ‘maintained high journalistic standards.’ Palestinian freelancer Soliman Hijjy contributed to the Times’ widely-panned coverage of the Gaza hospital explosion.