Month: May 2010

We have been given the impression that Elena Kagan was a beloved dean at Harvard Law School and that is certainly borne out by many witnesses. Check out this spontaneous celebration of Kagan by students after she missed out being named president of the university. But not all. Inevitably, some found her style  of management abrasive and her strong leadership rubbed some people the wrong way:

Law School Professor Mark V. Tushnet ’67 acknowledged that he had heard “that she would lose her temper,” but he added that Kagan led the school with a “firm hand” like a good manager. Kagan was “willing to fire people that needed to be fired,” Tushnet said.

Few faculty members interviewed for this article voiced displeasure with Kagan’s management style, but some staffers and administrators said that the former dean’s high-energy, ambitious agenda placed a strain on their working relationships. Former director of the Law School library Harry S. Martin III ’65 observed that some staff members working under Kagan “didn’t seem to get along with her, didn’t warm to her.”

In the “pursuit of excellence,” Kagan set the bar high for her colleagues and created “a culture of incredibly high expectations and high stakes,” according to former Registrar staff member Leslie Sutton-Smith. “It was not as much a collaborative effort as it was making sure everything was right before it got to Elena,” Sutton-Smith said. “You have to come to the table 150 percent prepared because she will find a hole in whatever your argument is.”

“As a result of that, she could be perceived as someone to be afraid of,” she added.

In pushing for change, Kagan often displayed an insensitivity to the opinions and feelings of others, according to Maura H. Kelley, a faculty assistant who worked at the Law School for over 25 years. “If you go against her, she doesn’t take very kindly to that,” said Kelley, who was familiar with staff assistants that worked under Kagan. “If she presents an idea, she wants everyone to accept it immediately without question, without debate, without input.” …

one professor, who requested to remain anonymous to maintain relations with the Law School, said that Kagan’s tense relations with staff provide clues to how she may conduct herself as a justice.

“The treatment of subordinates is definitely relevant to her values and our assessment of her as a progressive justice,” the professor said, adding that Kagan’s prowess as a “consensus builder” who would be able to sway Justice Anthony Kennedy, for example, is undermined by her temper, which the professor believes may hinder her ability to work well with others on the bench.

“Justice Kennedy would not like that,” the professor said.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/Getty.)

When honesty and not lies are celebrated; when love is placed before power; when the sexual fixation cedes to an understanding of what human relationships can truly be:

In a simple quote, via Burston, from Boaz Okun, Yedioth Ahronot's legal affairs commentator and former Israeli judge:

"The decision to shut up Professor Chomsky is a decision to shut down freedom in the state of Israel. I'm not speaking of the stupidity of supplying ammunition to those who claim that Israel is fascist rather, of our fear that we may actually be turning that way."

Reihan hopes:

Frum has taken the conservative intelligentsia to task for its blind adherence to movement orthodoxy, and he's called on the right to learn from the example of David Cameron's effort to modernize Britain's Conservative Party. But this is necessarily a slow-moving and organic process, one that arguably requires more gentle persuasion than outright confrontation. And indeed, it is possible that electoral success must come first. If large numbers of Republicans outside of the South and the Mountain West win seats in 2010, particularly suburban swing seats, there will be a built-in constituency for a more pragmatic brand of center-right politics. The Tea Party could pave the way for a more inclusive political movement that embraces the same fiscal conservatism while leaving aside more polarizing cultural messages, as seen in the Scott Brown campaign. This would parallel the evolution of the antiwar movement between 2003 to 2008, from a fringe movement that alienated moderates to a tendency that came to embrace a large majority of the public.

This could be wishful thinking on my part. Yet it does reflect the messy, awkward way real-world political movements rise and fall.

(Image by Peter Chin. More photos here.)

A nun is "automatically excommunicated" (and reassigned) because she was part of a medical ethics committee that concluded that a woman had to have an abortion or risk her own death. I always understood the life of the mother to be a reasonable excuse for such a thing, but apparently not:

"I am gravely concerned by the fact that an abortion was performed several months ago in a Catholic hospital in this diocese," Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted said in a statement sent to The Arizona Republic. "I am further concerned by the hospital's statement that the termination of a human life was necessary to treat the mother's underlying medical condition. An unborn child is not a disease. While medical professionals should certainly try to save a pregnant mother's life, the means by which they do it can never be by directly killing her unborn child. The end does not justify the means."

Olmsted added that if a Catholic "formally cooperates" in an abortion, he or she is automatically excommunicated.

Funny how quickly they can act if a woman is deemed to have in good conscience saved a life, and how slowly they move when a man rapes a child.

A reader writes:

David Simon doesn't hate his viewers because they're not from here; he's just trying to capture a real side of New Orleans. We love tourism here, but hate tourists (I think this is probably true of most tourist spots). Like Wendell Pierce's character, most of us wouldn't be caught dead on Bourbon, and nothing irks us more than hearing a sports announcer call us New Or-Leens, or New Or-Lee-Uhns. And nothing makes us feel more superior than pointing it out. It's shallow and arrogant, but it's absolutely a New Orleans truth, and I think Simon's doing an awesome job portraying it.

We're all thrilled with the show right now. And this is not an easy audience to please; I don't know a single local who watched more than an episode or two of Hollywood's last attempt (FOX's atrocious "K-Ville") because it was so lazily researched and written. I spent most of a class the next day discussing its stupidity with my students. We couldn't follow the plot for all our cursing and laughter. This one we're talking about every Monday. Simon's obsession with getting his portrayal right is incredible.

Another writes:

I had a similar reaction to certain scenes in the first few episodes:  an idealization of New Orleans that deflated the show's narrative power; an indulgent, tinny self-righteousness in spots.  But don't sell Simon and his writers short.  Not yet.  They're playing long ball.

Those false notes are deliberate bait that draw you in.  And then the writers start to hit you with complications: the stereotypical gentrifying gay couple turn out not to be colonizers but native New Orleanians who know as much about their neighborhood as the authenticity-obsessed fool/truth-teller Davis McAlary;  just when you think the NOLAs are stoic saints, thugs shoot up the first post-flood Mardi Gras; tribalism threatens to divide the Mardi Gras Indians; questions of authenticity and progress – functional music in the parade bands, or the more abstract modern Jazz? – plague the musicians. 

This should be the show that a deeply thoughtful conservative like McWhorter prays for, one in which Negroes (yes, I mean Negroes because the terms bespeaks a situational culture and heritage rather than race or color) are depicted in all of their infinite hues and individual selves without any of the reductive linguistic, behavioral, or sartorial trappings of contemporary pop culture.  That in itself is a whopping triumph.  "American culture is incontestably mulatto," wrote the great essayist Albert Murray.  That's what this show is about.  My friend McWhorter should be ecstatic; instead he is cranky. 

I remember watching "The Wire" in its first season and thought it was pretty bad.  It struggled with similar false notes.  It patted itself on the back.  And then it developed into the most substantial television program that's ever been broadcast.  As jazz musicians from New Orleans like to say, goading one another on the bandstand, "Take your your time, now.  Take. Your. Time."

Rachael Brown turns over the latest episode. A longer behind-the-scenes video here. Balko compares the show to The Wire:

There was a lot of talk about how Simon wanted to “get New Orleans right” for this show. Seems to me that those efforts have so far come at the expense of likable, relatable characters. The Wire’s appeal came in the depth and appeal of its characters. The show was chock full of flawed heroes and sympathetic villains. More importantly, the characters felt organic. They never came off as punch-outs created to represent specific factions or demographics. (Save for the fifth season newsroom.) I think I’ve had a hard time embracing Treme thus far because few of the characters have that same authenticity. They feel perfunctory. (Though Wendell Pierce’s charm and acting chops bring Antoine Batiste to life, in spite of the character’s caricature-ishness).

George Packer worries:

The Obama Administration needs to come up with a fast-track plan for resettling the Iraqis who sacrificed the most for the U.S. and will be in greatest danger once we’re gone. The visa-application process will be inadequate to the need and the threat that will accompany American withdrawal. The U.S. government has no idea of the identities and whereabouts of all the Iraqis who work for Americans there, or of which ones feel so insecure that they will want to be resettled here. The List Project has just issued a report that calls attention to this brewing crisis. The report looks at previous cases of occupation armies leaving behind local allies in the wake of their exit (including the British in Basra a couple of years ago), and it’s not an encouraging picture.

Don't say he doesn't ever feel compassion or act on it.

Scott Adams daydreams:

Consider the odd concept of asking for autographs. My theory is that the attention of a famous person seems more valuable than the attention of an unknown because the famous person is himself the subject of much attention. It's as though the famous person is a magnifying glass, focusing the sun of attention on the recipient at the moment that the autograph is given. It's like regular attention but supercharged.

Douthat shifts his focus:

[T]he case for decentralization has grown much stronger over the last two years, and my vision of conservative reform has shifted accordingly. Keep in mind that Reihan Salam and I started working on “Grand New Party,” our reformist tome, all the way back in 2005 — a time when TARP, the auto bailout, the stimulus package and Obamacare all lay in the future, and the deficit problem seemed serious in the long run but manageable in the short term. I still stand by most of the policy ideas we floated then, and indeed I think that we were more interested in decentralization than some of our right-wing critics gave us credit for. But it’s fair to say that we would lay a different set of emphases if we were writing the same kind of book today, in the wake of two years of crisis and consolidation, than we did in the halcyon days of the housing bubble and Dow 14,000.

E.D. Kain is skeptical.