By Una LaMarche 6/18 6:29pm

Mother Superior

badkid_lukemcgarry

Baby, I’m Amazed: Why Is My Kid Such a Genius All the Time?

I have, for better or worse, the opposite of a stage mother. It’s not that my parents didn’t think I was secretly brilliant as a child—thanks to the educational Disney cartoon Ben and Me, I could recite the Declaration of Independence before I was out of diapers—it’s just they just didn’t seem to care what I became when I grew up, so long as I voted Democrat and understood that my “life partner” was not obligated to have a Y-chromosome.

I only noticed their indifference because my best friend growing up in Chelsea was a child actor who was tragically let go after the Roseanne pilot, reportedly for having a beef with Sara Gilbert. Since I often accompanied him to his auditions, I actually had a few agents approach me to slap my mug on Shrinky Dinks boxes and the like, offers at which my mom just rolled her eyes. This was circa 1983, but I’m sure she’d roll them much harder right now, 30 years later, if she knew that I recently sent photos of her grandson to a Gap casting call.

I KNOW. I swore I’d never be that parent, the one who gazes beatifically at her toddler bashing a rock against a white picket fence and thinks, catalog model! But it’s legitimately hard to not view your kid as exceptional in every way; in my experience, procreating is like donning a pair of person-specific permanent beer goggles.  Read More

By Patrick Clark 9/18/12 7:52am

Romney’s Remarks on ’47 Percent’ Made at Private Equity Head’s Home; Studying the Power of Einhorn: Roundup

Footage of Mitt Romney’s remarks about the 47 percent voters who don’t pay taxes or depend on government assistance—”I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives”—was taken in the Florida home of Marc Leder, co-CEO of private equity firm Sun Capital Partners, said David Corn, the reporter who published video clips at Mother Jones. Mr. Leder, a part-owner in the Philadelphia 76ers, is as TPM points out, also known for his bacchanals: “At the Bridgehampton home that Leder rented for a whopping $500,000 a month, guests cavorted nude in a pool and performed sex acts, while scantily clad Russian women danced on platforms,” The New York Post reported last year. Read More

By Patrick Clark 8/31/12 5:22pm

red in the face

harvard

A Harvard Student Writes In on Cheating Scandal

After we posted on the cheating scandal embroiling Harvard University yesterday, a student implicated in the investigation wrote in to offer another side of the story.

If you haven’t been following, the university said yesterday that nearly half of the 279 students in an undergraduate course—later identified by the Harvard Crimson as Government 1310: Introduction to Congress—were being investigated for academic dishonesty on a take-home final exam.

According to press reports, the inquiry was opened after a teaching fellow, or TF for short, noticed that students collaborated on the exam despite instructions that such collaboration was prohibited, and that some students used “same long, identical strings of words.”

But our source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that while collaboration may have been expressly forbidden*, it was widely practiced by students and even teaching fellows. Read More

By Daniel D'Addario 2/29/12 8:45am

pop music

Lady Gaga (Getty Images)

Lady Gaga to Livestream Harvard Address

Michael Jackson spoke before the Oxford Union in 2001, and now Lady Gaga is to rip off another pop star by speaking at Harvard. Kidding! Her speech is to address bullying and self-confidence in the launch of her nonprofit Born This Way Foundation before a crowd that’s set to include Secretary of Health and Human Read More