Facebook flap: Research teams at Morgan Stanley and other Facebook underwriters cut earnings projections after updated regulatory filings on May 9 showed Zuck & Co. struggling to make money on mobile—and those adjusted projections put Ma & Pa Facebook Fan at a disadvantage. How's that? The less-rosy projections, which Reuters reports Facebook urged on its investment bankers, were distributed to the big pools of money, but not to retail investors.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street's self-regulator, says the issue bears scrutiny, and the state of Massachusetts has subpoenaed Morgan Stanley. Henry Blodget is mad.

But it appears that rules that forbid underwriters from "marketing" IPOs by widely publishing research in the weeks before an offering will give Facebook's bankers cover. Likewise, for all the hand-wringing Nasdaq's executives have done over Friday's botched opening, the exchange's plan to return $13 million to investors feels like so many small potatoes.

After all, Facebook fell to $31 yesterday, down 18 percent from its offering price, wiping out billions in market value.

Said what, when?: “Our focus is on the quality of their risk disclosure,” said SEC chairwoman Mary Schapiro at Senate Banking Committee hearings yesterday. Ms. Schapiro's remarks indicated that the agency will focus on JPMorgan's Value at Risk calculations, according to Bloomberg.

No fee for you: Investors such as the Harvard University endowment and Abu Dhabi are building in-house operations for real estate investment, in hopes of side-stepping fees charged by so-called pooled funds.

Patch-y feeling: Starboard Value, the activist investor waging a proxy battle for seats on AOL's board, said that Patch, the company's hyper-local news service, should be sold in part or whole, or closed outright. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has promised to make Patch profitable by next year.

Cards checked: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is preparing new rules for prepaid debit cards, which have become a growing source of income for banks in recent years. "The people who use prepaid cards are, in many instances, the most vulnerable among us,” Richard Cordray, the consumer bureau’s director, said in a statement.

Domino effect: European banks have taken preparatory measures for a Greek collapse, but remain vulnerable to likely deposit-flight and rising defaults in Portgual, Italy and Spain in the event that Greek leaves the eurozone.

Timber!: The Ontario Securities Commission filed a fraud suit against Sino-Forest, the Chinese timber company that lost much of its $6 billion market value on the Toronto stock exchange after Muddy Waters Research published a report indicating that the company had overstated resources.

“We finally took the plunge!” The eager first-time homeowner, Gavin Parks, told The Observer. The mergers and acquisitions consultant was referring to his recent $1.6 million purchase at 61 Jane Street, but he may well have been referring to the other recent plunge he and wife, Elizabeth, took—their June nuptials. Indeed, the two-bedroom, two-bathroom ninth-floor co-op apartment is a perfect newlywed nest. Big enough for a baby if one comes soon but not dauntingly spacious if the stork takes a while to deliver.

The seller is former Vassar College president Frances Daly Fergusson. Ms. Fergusson, who could not be reached for comment, served as president of the college for 20 years, resigning in 2006. But don’t worry, the 65-year-old is nowhere near retiring—the former college president continues to serve on the boards of countless charities and corporations, including the Board of Overseers of Harvard University, the New York Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities (CLCU), Pfizer, and is a director of HSBC Bank North America.

Dr. Fergusson (the former Vassar president has a PhD in art history from Harvard) lived in the Jane Street apartment for 21 years. The red-brick apartment house—one of the largest in the West Village—has a common roof garden and a garage. “This rare to find home is located in a prime west village [sic] 24-hour doorman building,” according to the listing with Douglas Elliman. The “sunny and bright” apartment has “open protected views looking south and east."

Though the listing boasts, “the apartment is in move-in condition.” Mr. Parks confided that the couple, “plan on doing a little work on the bathroom and kitchen” before moving in in the spring. Until then, Mr. and Mrs. Parks will remain in the Upper East Side apartment they currently rent. Why the dramatic shift of neighborhood? “My sister lives right nearby in the West Village at 302 West 12^th, another nice West Village building. And we wanted to be close to her and we like her neighborhood.”

The couple have been looking to buy for about six months--since their summer wedding--and are thrilled to have found this apartment idyllically located “on a tree lined cobblestone street.”

Broker Harriet Norris, who kindly insisted that The Observer refer to her as Harriet rather than Ms. Norris—“I’m really not that old! I know I have a Victorian name but please call me Harriet!”—said of the transaction, for which she had the listing, “I was fortunate enough to have the pleasure of working with such people on both sides--the buyers and the seller. I represented both and it was really just a pleasure working with them.”

It looks like this urban fairytale ends happily ever after after all--renovations excluded, of course.

cmalle@observer.com

Video and full text of her speech is available at Harvard Magazine's site.

A SIGH OF relief from Harvard Yard: A year into her tenure as the university’s first female president, Drew Gilpin Faust has published a widely and justly praised scholarly history, This Republic of Suffering (Knopf, $27.95). Eloquent and imaginative, Ms. Faust’s book takes a grim topic—how America coped with the massive death toll from the Civil War—and makes it fresh and exciting. O.K., maybe it’s a touch morbid, but certainly not dry or plodding. And she’s a team player, too. When she gets around to discussing Civil War writers, Ms. Faust quotes an array of Harvard professors past and present: Helen Vendler on Walt Whitman; Daniel Aaron on Herman Melville; Louis Menand on Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. She also quotes the late Richard Marius (who ran Harvard’s expository writing program for 20 years) on James Russell Lowell’s 400-line ode to lost Harvard classmates, which Lowell recited in its entirety at an alumni reunion just a few months after the surrender at Appomattox. “On a hot summer day in Cambridge,” Marius wrote, “this wretched poem must have been only slightly less painful than battle itself.”

JAMES WOOD, HARVARD’S Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism, is not cited by Ms. Faust—but the Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk) last week gave us a taste of his forthcoming book, How Fiction Works, which Farrar Straus and Giroux will publish in July. The 4,000-word excerpt takes up the issue of characterization, with special attention to E.M. Forster’s familiar distinction between “flat” and “round” characters. Along the way he gives brief, perceptive readings of Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin. Mr. Wood is in a mellow, open-armed mood: “The truth is,” he writes, “that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as ‘a novelistic character.’ There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.” But he does eventually declare a preference—“My own taste tends towards the sketchier fictional personage, whose lacunae and omissions tease us, provoke us to wade in their deep shallows”—and Miss Brodie and Professor Pnin turn out to be particular favorites.

Newly minted Harvard president Drew Faust issued a statement this morning in which she praised Ms. Rowling for getting kids to read.

"Perhaps no one in our time has done more than J. K. Rowling to inspire young people to experience the excitement and the sheer joy of reading," she is quoted as saying in the announcement.

The word from the college, meanwhile, is that some Harvard students are not exactly thrilled at the news, and disappointed that the university chose someone involved in the production of fairy tales rather a world leader or politician.

"[Faust] thinks this is a game?" one student complained. "It's a damn election year! You can't get someone at all related to that shit?"

The dozen students gathered around him cheered. “I’m a forester, I’m a lumberjack! And I’m okay,” Mr. Childs said. His family owns the one-room Yale Outdoors Cabin, with fireplace, in Bethany, CT.

“That’s Star Childs, he’s a legend—he’s just always here,” said Yale School of Forestry student Joe Orefice. According to Mr. Orefice, this was the first time the “northern New England” hammering game had been played during the epic Yale-Harvard tailgate.

“The object is to hit somebody else’s nail in before yours get sunk. The person with the last nail standing wins.” Very Ivy League!

Meanwhile, in the Yale Bowl’s Class of 1954 Field, Harvard was already ruining their rival’s season. Yale hasn’t gone undefeated since the Eisenhower administration.

Harvard won 37-6. But no one cares about The Game anyway: Ivy League students come to drink spiked cider and wear bad clothing.

Take scarf-wearing Harvard grad Steven Ujifusa, who is working on a book on the naval designer William Francis Gibbs; he shared his pipe tobacco with a scarf-wearing Yale grad.

And there was gray-haired Frederick Kroll, who graduated from Yale last year (“I decided to go back to college at a late date!”), in yellow-red-green plaid pants. This is what he said: “I graduated American studies and African studies. I have a degree in environmental toxicology also. I’m also an elector contractor, and I’m a real estate agent. Want to buy a house?” Also: “I specialize in theatrical lighting.”

Meanwhile, Harvard’s Black Students Association seemed to be having a better time than everyone else. About one hundred people danced to the anthem “Crank That (Soulja Boy)," by the 17-year-old rapper Soulja Boy Tell 'Em.

Malcom A. Glenn was just elected to head Harvard's newspaper, which makes him “the first black president of The Crimson in more than a half-century,” according to a release today.

But two Deliverance-looking men looked on at the dancing from the back of their pick-up truck, which had a Confederate flag decal. It isn’t clear how they got there, or which football team they were rooting for.

According to David Moldawer, the St. Martin’s editor who works most closely with the student editors, Let’s Go’s five-year contract with St. Martin’s was up this year, but the two decided “a few months ago” to go their separate ways. Mr. Moldawer described the move as "a change in our publishing strategy and how we see the travel book market.”

Mr. Moldawer would not elaborate on how St. Martin’s strategy has changed. But he did acknowledge that the travel guide industry has been hurt by the Internet because travelers can now get free, user-generated advice online instead of paying for an expert’s opinion.

The news comes six years after a report commissioned by St. Martin’s concluded that Let’s Go suffered from “numerous editorial weaknesses” and was “out of step” with the rest of the travel guide market. According to the Harvard Crimson, the report recommended Let’s Go shutter, rethink itself, and relaunch under a new name: “It is extremely difficult to change an image of a brand which has lost its stature as a leading brand, especially when the re-positioning is not supported by heavy marketing and advertising dollars,” the report said

According to Harvard senior Ines Pacheco, just days into her tenure as Let’s Go's Publishing Director, she and other members of the staff have been discussing alternatives for going forward after the St. Martin’s contract runs out.

“Let’s Go is not going anywhere.” Ms. Pacheco said. “We’re exploring all the usual channels. We’ll probably talk to some publishers; we’re exploring self-publishing. We’re looking at everything.”

Ms. Pacheco said the possibility of an online-only Let’s Go has not been ruled out.

Eliot Spitzer wanted to borrow millions of dollars and spend it on pet projects for legislators.

Bill Thompson said some landlords got tax breaks from the city they didn't deserve.

The city may open a jail in Brooklyn and double its population within five years.

Andrew Cuomo issued a legal order requiring medical labs to get written consent before performing certain genetic testing.

Eliot Spitzer's budget director, Paul Francis and Assemblyman Richard Brodsky of Westchester had a lively exchange about school funding.

State lawmakers delayed releasing a list of member items.

The Daily News combed through the state budget and found some pork.

Instead of $7,000, Con Ed is now offering $9,000 to businesses affected by the blackout.

Newsday's editorial board supports the proposed $2 tax on cigarettes in Nassau, Suffolk and six other counties.

New Paltz Mayor Jason West's runningmate is out of the race. [corrected]

New Jersey's pension fund for teachers has some accounting issues.

John Edwards is gaining on Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire.

"The same hardheadedness he displayed at Harvard permeates his prescriptions, which tilt away from the pie-in-the-sky toward the modest and achievable," writes TNR's Martin Peretz of the book written by his one-time Harvard student, Chuck Schumer [subscription].

And Keith Richards says he snorted his father's ashes. UPDATE: Richards said he was joking.

-- Azi Paybarah

If the number seemed exhausting to the Harvard Law School professor, it may not be George W. Bush that’s to blame.

“Keeping up with Hillary’s machine is not easy,” he said.

Mr. Tribe’s former research assistant, Barack Obama, is now the leading contender against Senator Clinton for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2008, and Mr. Tribe is working furiously on behalf of his favorite alumnus.

“Although I know and admire Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and have worked with both of them and would be happy to support each of them if they won the nomination,” Mr. Tribe said, “ … I’ve never been as enthusiastic about a politician as I am about Barack.”

And so, on March 20, Mr. Tribe will finally get to co-host a party for more than 150 guests, at the Cambridge home of his law-school colleague David Wilkins, that was originally scheduled for this past weekend—before what the tabloids have dubbed the Battle of Selma.

Several of Mr. Obama’s former professors are expected to welcome their prodigal son back to Cambridge for the event, an intimate, $2,300-a-head affair.

“He was not just another extremely bright student,” Mr. Tribe said. “He made a really major impact when he was here. He was charismatic, he was thoughtful, he was mature.”

Several Harvard Law School faculty members who got to know Mr. Obama before he graduated in 1991 have spent the last 20 years eagerly watching his star rise. The Presidential campaign has become a culmination of the old New England bastion’s affection for a favorite son.

And at this early date in the campaign, their favors are about more than Mr. Obama’s image, as they and their cohort scramble to meet the maximum donations to his war chest before a March 31 deadline, when all agree that the viability of his candidacy will really be determined.

His closest friends are reaching out to prominent alumni to get them to donate money and join the pro-Obama group of Harvard Law School graduates they are forming. Their stated goal is to create a base of fund-raisers, policy advisors, and—should the need arise—sharp-eyed poll-watchers well versed in the law.

“Barack is not the product of any political machine—he’s not a traditional establishment candidate by any means—so he doesn’t necessarily have those networks to draw on,” said Andrew Schapiro, one of the nascent effort’s masterminds. “But Harvard Law School is a pre-existing network that is in many ways an establishment structure, and one that can provide a lot of enthusiasm and assistance for his candidacy.”

Working the Ivy network has become an important part of Presidential campaign politics in recent years. The first time that Bill Clinton ran for office, he was buoyed by support from a similar group of more than 200 alumni of Yale Law School, including the school’s then dean, Guido Calabresi, First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, and dining-guide moguls Tim and Nina Zagat.

Mr. Obama’s fellow graduates, like Mr. Clinton’s, aren’t just at corporate law firms, but big shots in the worlds of business, entertainment, finance, education and, obviously, politics. Still, it’s a tight field to beat Hillary Clinton, who has connections with many deep-pocketed donors, especially along the East Coast. But so far, Mr. Obama seems to be making inroads with the donor class closest to his age bracket: hedge-fund, private-equity and venture-capital investors in their 30’s and 40’s.

Mr. Obama’s closest circle of law-school friends has also produced some of his most committed fund-raisers. Citigroup executive Michael Froman and hedge-fund manager Brian Mathis, both Harvard Law School friends, are chairs of the March 9 gala being held at the Grand Hyatt. A Harvard Law Review colleague, law professor Jonathan Molot, hosted 180 people for a fund-raising event at his home in Washington, D.C., last week. At it, Mr. Obama surveyed the crowd. “Geez, I feel like I’m at a law-school reunion,” he joked.

Last month, classmate Julius Genachowski, a private-equity advisor based in Washington, D.C., arranged a meeting between Mr. Obama and about 50 new-media and technology executives at an office in midtown. It was co-hosted by former AOL chief executive Jonathan Miller and technology venture-capitalist Deven Parekh.

“I’ve gotten e-mails from people I haven’t talked to in 15 years [saying], ‘Hey, I hear you’re still friends with Barack—what can I do?’” said Thomas Perrelli, a Washington lawyer and managing editor of the law review under Mr. Obama.

Several law-school friends have emerged as informal advisors as well. Cassandra Butts, a domestic-policy expert at the Center for American Progress, met Mr. Obama in the financial-aid office in their first days on campus. She helped Mr. Obama establish his Senate office, and she has been advising his campaign on policy and outreach to Harvard Law School alumni. Mr. Genachowski, who worked for the F.C.C. and for IAC/InterActiveCorp, chairs an advisory committee on technology and the Internet.

Many of them talk with or e-mail the Senator and his staff on a weekly basis, and the conversations can range from the personal (car seats) to the practical (advice on where to find a chief technology officer for the Web site). Some spend several hours a day working the phones to garner contributions.

“Candidates tend to get forced into living in a bubble. It’s difficult to receive direct and candid feedback,” said one former classmate and close advisor. “So I and some others have really tried to be that kind of resource to him … to give it to him straight, no chaser—not what Maureen Dowd and other reporters or pundits are saying, but what the people who are really supporting him, be it with their votes or financially, are thinking and saying.”

“Certain of Obama’s classmates from Harvard and Columbia have been important supporters in many ways—not just financially but strategically,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for the campaign. “They’re important members of the circle of people who are important in the campaign.”

Mr. Schapiro, a lawyer based in New York and Chicago, as well as Mr. Genachowski and two other Harvard Law School friends from Los Angeles, Crystal Nix Hines and Nancy McCullough, all traveled to Springfield, Ill., in February to attend Mr. Obama’s announcement of his Presidential campaign. They huddled in the front row.

“One of the great things about this campaign is that it’s allowed a bunch of us to reconnect,” said Ms. Nix Hines, a television writer who will be organizing a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama in the spring.

He’s Not Haughty, He’s My Brother!

Because so many of the law school’s graduates enter politics, it’s not uncommon to hear alumni talk about the classmate they knew would be governor of South Carolina, or professors reminisce about the student they expected would be President.

In fact, however, the White House has been attained only once by a graduate of Harvard Law School, with the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

And while the political careers of Harvard Law graduates are always a going concern in Cambridge, Mr. Obama’s Presidential race presents its own enticements.

Many of Clinton’s Ivy supporters some were appointed to important positions in the administration, including Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. (Mr. Clinton withdrew the nomination of his law-school friend Lani Guinier after an uproar over some of her articles on voting rights.)

Mr. Wilkins, the co-host of the March 20 fund-raiser, said that he always sends a small check to every student of his running for office, but that only with Mr. Obama and Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick has he felt inspired to assume more responsibility.

Of course, Mr. Obama isn’t the only Harvard Law School alum to announce his candidacy this year. Republican candidate Mitt Romney graduated in 1975 (half a dozen students in the law school are working in his Boston campaign office), and now-withdrawn Democratic candidate Mark Warner, who sought advice from professors at the law school in the spring of last year, graduated in 1980.

But Mr. Obama’s supporters say that it’s not just the arguably liberal politics of the school that make the Illinois Senator the focus of their efforts instead of Mr. Romney. Mr. Obama’s connection to the school today is deeper.

“It’s a testament to the kind of people that we admit to law school,” said Mr. Wilkins, the professor hosting the March 20 fund-raiser. “There is something special about Barack and his connection to the law school …. It’s a lot easier for our students to imagine themselves as Barack, because, not so long ago, he was like them.”

“There’s a mystique about him,” said Michael Negron, a third-year student who is on the steering committee of a just-formed group of Harvard Law students supporting Mr. Obama.

On its newly launched Web site, the students often refer to the Senator in reverential terms. “Harvard Law School was an important part of Barack Obama’s life, so we’re going to make sure it’s an important part of his campaign for President,” reads one section. Another adds: “He may be a Harvard lawyer, but Barack does not have a haughty New England background.”

That very defensiveness, however, seems to point up something about how Mr. Obama’s Harvard pedigree is being integrated into his life story. After a weekend in Selma, Ala., in which he had to compete with a white woman with a degree from Yale Law School for credibility among black voters, it’s worth asking whether Mr. Obama, the first black candidate for President not to have started his political career in the civil-rights movement, gains from his attachment to an establishment bastion like Harvard. Does Harvard do as much for Mr. Obama’s candidacy as his candidacy does for Harvard?

Arguably, Mr. Obama settled that question quite nicely in Selma.

“It’s because they marched that we elected councilmen, Congressmen,” he told the crowd gathered at the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church during his trip to Selma. “It is because they marched that we have Artur Davis and Keith Ellison. It is because they marched that I got the kind of education I got, a law degree, a seat in the Illinois Senate and ultimately in the United States Senate.”

(Incidentally, it was Mr. Davis, a friend of Mr. Obama’s from Harvard Law, who invited him to Selma.)

In fact, the dazzling scholastic careers of candidates like Mr. Obama are becoming a big part of their personal narratives. Early newspaper reports breathlessly chronicled his rise to the presidency of Harvard’s über-prestigious law review, dissecting his leadership style for signs of the kind of chief executive he might be. Professors have talked admiringly of his willingness to turn down federal clerkships and corporate law jobs in order to return to Chicago and work for community organizations—indications of how he resisted allowing the law school to corrupt his personal ideals. His election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review landed him coverage in The New York Times and his first book deal.

While working on the law review provides a student with plenty of opportunities to make enemies, Mr. Obama seems to have made some very good friends. That credibility is what they offer when they call prospective donors. They talk about meeting him on the basketball court, as well as the assistance he offered them with law-review articles.

“You’re taking about people who have known him for 18, 19 years. There’s a history there,” said Ms. Nix Hines, who spends “a couple hours a day” talking with people who are on the fence, telling them “what I know about Barack.”