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A treat today. We’ll not include anything about the people in DC who are busy ruining our country.
The secret life of a Manhattan doorman was in Business Insider.
The smells are the thing I don’t forget. Harsh cleaners, dead bodies, the results of four a.m. bodega runs, cluttered apartments filled with rotting paper. I can recall each smell distinctively; they are unique to that time and place. It also works in reverse: if I stumble upon one of the smells, it takes me back to being a naïve seventeen-year-old, working in the hot New York City summer—the buzz of air conditioners working in the night, straining power grids. The city was asleep and I was awake. I was a doorman.
Through the best Catholic invention of all time—nepotism—my uncle gave me a summertime job. While most of the youth of America struggled to find any money-making position, I was going to make $660 for my forty hours a week, after taxes. Union rules—god bless union rules—added time-and-a-half for overtime and double time-and-a-half for holidays. I covered vacations—most of the doormen and porters in the building had at least three weeks paid—so I would work whenever I was needed and, as a result, worked the crappy shifts. The swing shifts—literally working any time of day or night—and the midnight-to-eight a.m. shift became my summer.
That first summer, I dedicated myself to finding some kind of spiritual awakening. I decided to read the entire Kurt Vonnegut canon. It was not in order, but during lunch breaks and slow times at the door I would peel back the pages and plunge in. …
A reviewer in Telegraph, UK provides an overview of the latest JFK books. He gives a nod to one – written by UVA’s Larry Sabato.
“Telling the truth can be a scary thing sometimes.” So says Jim Garrison, the New Orleans district attorney, in Oliver Stone’s JFK. In the film, Garrison, played by Kevin Costner, is the archetypal underdog, a hero who sacrifices everything in search of truth. In real life, he was a paranoid fantasist, a publicity hound and a crooked DA. Truth can be scary, but it’s never as frightening as the power of a good lie.
I had occasion to recall Garrison a few weeks ago when a box of books was delivered to my door. That box was physical proof of the desire by publishers to cash in on the 50th anniversary of John F Kennedy’s assassination on November 22 1963. It contained 12 books, …
… The obsession with Kennedy has inspired an insatiable need to know. That’s demonstrated by Those Few Precious Days (Simon & Schuster), by Christopher Andersen, a wonderful book for voyeurs. It examines, in painful detail, the last year of John and Jackie’s marriage. Andersen’s account of the death of their son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, on April 9 1963, after 39 hours of life, made me feel like an intruder at a stranger’s deathbed. Apparently Jackie hoped that Patrick would cure Jack of his addiction to other women. Obsession forces open windows that should remain shut.
Larry Sabato examines that obsession in The Kennedy Half Century (Bloomsbury). Of all the JFK books, this one will endure. It’s certainly the most original. Sabato examines how the Kennedy legacy has been manipulated, marketed and abused in the 50 years since Dallas. In the process, he reveals a great deal about Kennedy, but even more about the generations of Americans whose lives have been shaped by his death. It’s nice to see that while small men debate the minute detail of Dallas, a genuine scholar has the vision to recognise an issue that really matters: the grip that Kennedy continues to exert on us all.
As Sabato shows, Kennedy’s assassination was so painful because the myth was so perfect. …
David Bernstein in Volokh goes after one of the most pernicious of the assassination myths – that JFK was done in by right wing “hate” in Dallas. The NY Times and WaPo were retailing this over the anniversary.
This is really amazing to me. The New York Times and the Washington Post each manages to publish a piece on the Kennedy assassination, by two different authors, focusing on what they see as the right-wing extremist environment in Dallas in 1963, and while never saying so directly, implicitly blaming Kennedy’s assassination on that environment. [UPDATE: The Washingtonian magazine is more explicit: “The city of hate had, in fact, killed the President.”]
Look, guys. Lee Harvey Oswald murdered JFK. Oswald was a Communist. Not a small c, “all we are saying is give peace a chance and let’s support Negro civil rights” kind of Communist, but someone so committed to the cause (and so blind to the nature of the USSR) that he actually went to live in the Soviet Union. And when that didn’t work out, Oswald became a great admirer of Castro. He apparently would have gone to live in Cuba before the assassination if the Cubans would have had him. Before assassinating Kennedy, Oswald tried to kill a retired right-wing general. As near as we can tell, he targeted Kennedy in revenge for Kennedy’s anti-Castro actions. …
PJ Media lists 6 reasons why the media/left keep the JFK assassination story moving.
1. Camelot. The brief Kennedy years represent for many in the media their own golden moment. JFK was their royalty, their idol, their ideal, their handsome and rich young war hero. Jackie Kennedy was their queen.
And then it was all cut short, like a Shakespearean tragedy or fairy tale. The mythic Camelot fell to lust. The American Camelot fell to an assassin. For those of us who grew up after JFK, it’s all so much history. I grew up around Dallas and heard about the assassination any time I visited anywhere else as a child, and later on I visited the SixthFloorMuseum. It’s haunting but it’s history. For many in that generation, which was mostly born after World War II and then ended up losing Vietnam, JFK provides a meaningful anchor point, or at least a point that they have infused with meaning. Don’t bring up his womanizing or how the Kennedy patriarch behaved toward the Nazis. None of that has any place in the myth.
2. It provides them a chance to bash handy villains they already hate: Dallas, Texas, and the South.
Megan McArdle on how the great disruption has come to auto dealers.
At the turn of the millennium, when I was in business school, the auto dealership business model seemed ripe for disruption. Dell Inc. was already doing a bang-up business building computers to order. It seemed only a matter of time before General Motors Co. did the same, and we could buy our cars easily over the Internet rather than having to haggle with a dealer.
Ah, the optimism of youth! Ten years later, auto dealers are still very much with us. It turns out that building and selling cars is a bit more complicated than doing the same with computers. Oh, and auto dealers are extremely well connected in Congress and especially in state legislatures; they are often among the richest people in a legislator’s district, which has translated, over the years, into protective franchise laws that make it very hard for automakers to prune their dealer networks.
And yet, the dream of low, no-haggle pricing seems to be moving closer. The Internet didn’t get rid of the dealers, but it forced them to become much more competitive. Pricing is much more transparent, thanks to a wealth of Web-based information, and because dealers are now advertising. Lower your price a bit, and you’ll poach customers who in the old days might not have thought to check a dealer an hour and a half away when they had to make inquiries by phone. But they’ll happily drive that far to save a few hundred dollars. …
In Slate we learn anacondas are living in the Everglades.
On a muggy day about 10 years ago in the Florida Everglades, Jack Shealy was riding his bike along a dirt road leading into the Trail Lakes Campground, where he has worked for decades. Like any good gladesman, Shealy has a substantial portion of his brain wired to recognize snakes in places where the rest of us would see only leaves and shadows. He skidded to a stop at the sight of a serpentine form stretched out in the sun.
This particular snake was not especially large—only about a meter in length. Yet the color was something different. Greenish brown with dark, oval spots. This was not a snake that belonged in the Everglades. Shealy did something that comes naturally to the family. (His nephew Jack M. Shealy recently became notorious for jumping into the water to wrestle an invasive Burmese python.) He jumped off of the bike and captured the angry snake by hand.
TrailLakes Campground just happened to have a herpetologist on staff. Rick Scholle, who runs the campground’s roadside zoo, examined the snake and realized that he was looking at a juvenile green anaconda. A nonvenomous constrictor native to South America, the green anaconda is the biggest, heaviest species of snake in the world. It definitely does not belong in the Florida Everglades. …
The Boston Globe provides another example of porkers in college administrations.
When BrandeisUniversity president Jehuda Reinharz stepped down three years ago, he moved back into his old faculty office.
But unlike most history professors, Reinharz does not teach any classes, supervise graduate students, or attend departmental meetings. He did not bother posing for the department photo. The chairwoman for Near Eastern and Judaic Studies said she did not even know whether he was officially a member of her department.
Yet Reinharz remains one of the highest paid people on campus.
He received more than $600,000 in salary and benefits in 2011, second only to the new Brandeis president, according to the school’s most recent public tax returns. And that’s on top of the $800,000 Reinharz earned in his new job as president of the Mandel Foundation, a longtime Brandeis benefactor.
“There is puzzlement from faculty about why he gets paid at all” by Brandeis, said Gordon Fellman, a sociology professor at Brandeis. “His term as president ended.”
Like Reinharz, many other college presidents across the country are negotiating huge exit packages when they step down, which critics say is emblematic of schools’ unrestrained spending on everything from administrative salaries to elaborate new buildings that drive up the cost of higher education. Schools and public records say:
Lawrence S. Bacow, president emeritus of Tufts, received $1.7 million in 2011 for “end of service compensation.” …