Last night Yivo Institute on W. 16th Street hosted a talk by the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson on “Jews and Money.” How excited I was to hand over my $15. The center dedicated to the study of Yiddish-speaking Jews was bringing in a heavyweight prof, a biographer of Rothschilds and Warburgs, to anatomize the culture Read More
The Jack Sprat Law
Mayor Michael Bloomberg is backing a powerful piece of legislation that will do wonders for the health of New York restaurant patrons: banning all but tiny amounts of trans fat from the city’s 20,000 restaurants.
The proposed law echoes the Mayor’s smoking ban, enacted four years ago. That law Read More
One great thing about blogging is it reveals a writer’s true nature, flaws and all. (Like my flakiness; I try and ground myself but there it is; I think in Kabbala they would say I am too much in my chochma). The latest evidence of this is Marty Peretz’s pro-Israel blog, the Spine. Peretz is Read More
To judge from What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at Penn State, seems to be one of those strange academics who actually enjoys the undergraduates. While teaching William Dean Howells’ The Rise of Silas Lapham, for instance, he gets at the issue of social capital without help from Karl Marx Read More
Forget the baseball rivalry: The real Boston–New York dispute is over bragging rights to Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). As a composer, performer, writer and teacher, Bernstein made an indelible impression in this city as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958-1969 and laureate conductor thereafter. He kept an apartment at the Dakota, lodged his Read More
Forget the baseball rivalry: The real Boston–New York dispute is over bragging rights to Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990). As a composer, performer, writer and teacher, Bernstein made an indelible impression in this city as music director of the New York Philharmonic from 1958-1969 and laureate conductor thereafter. He kept an apartment at the Dakota, lodged his Read More
At the Core Club launch party for 02138–the magazine dedicated to the unity of the Harvard experience–attendees fell neatly into separate categories. Magazine staffers walked around wearing square pins affixed to their lapels, with their names and “02138″ engraved on them. Their flacks hovered, making sure that Bill O’Reilly was ushered in with the appropriate Read More
TEDDY: I woke up last Sunday in a dorm room in Harvard’s Dunster House, logged into facebook.com and noticed a recently published photo album entitled, “Austen and Tito’s Wedding!!! Location: East Hampton.” It wasn’t the first album of this nature I’d encountered. I contemplated waking up my lady friend, who is Harvard class of Read More
Yesterday, The New Republic introduced its readers to The Open University, its “first-of-its-kind blog, featuring America’s top academics on today’s top stories.” As promised, there are lots of big-name professor types–the University of Chicago’s Cass Sunstein, Harvard’s Steven Pinker–and they’ve already taken on such weighty topics as “ideological amplification” and the demise of the Read More
A good exposé is irresistible, especially if it reveals the ugly side of something pretty and bursts some bubbles in the process. See The Devil Wears Prada, in which the glitzy world of fashion journalism is stripped of its glamour, or VH1’s Behind the Music, in which rock stars get the blues just like Read More
