Ron's View

[Jen Sorensen, from Slowpoke Comics*]

David Brooks appears alarmed by the treatment Mitt Romney is getting, so much so that Brooks devotes today’s NYT column to defending him:

Mitt Romney is a rich man, but is Mitt Romney’s character formed by his wealth? Is Romney a spoiled, cosseted character? Has he been corrupted by ease and luxury?

The notion is preposterous. All his life, Romney has been a worker and a grinder. He earned two degrees at Harvard simultaneously (in law and business). He built a business. He’s persevered year after year, amid defeat after defeat, to build a political career.

Romney’s salient quality is not wealth. It is, for better and worse, his tenacious drive — the sort of relentlessness that we associate with striving immigrants, not rich scions.

Gosh, who knew? Two Harvard degrees simultaneously! A worker and a grinder! And here I thought the problem was that Romney is a liar. Brooks never gets around to that. He’s too busy recounting the hardships endured by Mitt’s ancestors. “Where did this persistence come from?” Brooks asks. “It’s plausible to think that it came from his family history.” Brooks spends the remainder of the column reviewing that history.

Who gives a darn about Romney’s persistence, or his family history? How about his long-time willingness to say whatever he thinks needs saying to get elected, whether as senator, governor, or president? How about his campaign being based on slandering President Obama? (See for instance this account of Romney lies by your fellow columnist Paul Krugman, who asks, “is there anything at all in Romney’s stump speech that’s true?”)

That’s what disturbs me.

*The cartoon alludes to the 1983 Romney family vacation, which began with a drive to Canada for which Mitt put Irish setter Seamus in a crate and strapped the crate to the top of the station wagon. NYT columnist Gail Collins has referred to this incident throughout the primary season whenever writing about Romney.

You are probably familiar with some of the animations the Taiwanese news organization Next Media Animation (nma.tv) creates in which various news stories are re-enacted. I first learned about their work two years ago, thanks to their video that provided two interpretations of what happened in the post-Thanksgiving early morning hours when Tiger Woods drove his Cadillac Escalade into a tree. Did his then-wife Elin Nordegren use a golf club to free him, or did she find another use for the club? See the classic NMA video below for an answer.

Today I bring you their latest video, which you’ll find at the top. (Hat tip: Jim Fallows.) As they explain in the accompanying on-line article:

Funding for University of California schools has been slashed in recent years, and UC schools are looking to students to make up the difference. This means cutting spots reserved for California students in favor of out-of-state or international students, who pay full tuition.

The University of California, San Diego, for example, will be accepting 500 fewer in-state students this year. Some of these slots will be filled by students from China. The number of Chinese students at UCSD increased 12-fold from 2009 to 2011 to almost 200, while the number of Asian-American Californians enrolled fell 29 percent to 1,230. UC San Diego tuition is $13,234 for California residents and $22,878 for non-residents.

Although an American education is expensive, students return to China with a prestigious degree and a broadened outlook. American universities in turn get a welcome injection in funds, at the expense of tax-paying residents.

This approach to funding higher education has been a big issue here in Washington State as well. My own school, the University of Washington, has followed the same strategy in response to a 50% cut in state support over the last few years, increasing tuition steeply while recruiting more out-of-state and out-of-country students who pay higher tuition. We have also made an effort to maintain in-state freshman admissions at the same level, which of course can only be done by increasing enrollment overall.

Since tuition increases haven’t been enough to make up for state budget cuts, the university budget has been cut in part by shrinking the size of the faculty. Decreasing faculty size while increasing student enrollment is hardly an ideal recipe for maintaining educational quality.

But that’s another story. I don’t want to write a long post about public higher education. We do what we can. I just want to point to NMA’s take on the matter, which looks right to me.

I’m a huge fan of the Language Log blog and its co-founders, the linguists Mark Liberman at Penn and Geoff Pullum at Edinburgh. Pullum has spent two decades in fierce combat with the myth that Eskimos have twenty-three words (or is it two hundred? or two thousand?) for snow. (See his 1991 essay The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, which follows up on the 1986 work of Linda Martin.) I made brief reference to this in a post three Julys ago on linguistic fact checking, or the lack thereof.

Two Sunday nights ago, I was reading some of the next day’s NYT online when I clicked on the Monday book review and stumbled on the astonishing opening by Emma Brockes to her review of Alan Hollinghurst’s latest novel:

“The Stranger’s Child,” Alan Hollinghurst’s fifth novel, opens on a scene in Harrow and Wealdstone, a suburb north of London chosen by the author to represent the middle ground, that is the space between the upper and lower orders — or rather, this being England in 1913, between the orders of lower upper middle and upper upper middle.

As Eskimos do with snow, the English see gradations of social inadequacy invisible to the rest of the world; Mr. Hollinghurst separates them with a very sharp knife.

Wow! Eskimos have not just a multitude of snow words, but also gradations of snow perceptiveness invisible to the rest of the world.

The thing about those words is, any language has every bit as large a snow vocabulary as the Eskimos. Slippery snow. Grainy snow. Powdery snow. Oh, those aren’t words? Okay, how about slippery-snow, grainy-snow, powdery-snow? The oft-repeated claim is inane. But read Pullum for that.

Speaking of which, I wasted no time sending the latest example of Eskimo snow inanity on to Professor Pullum. A day later, in his characteristic style, he pounced.

If Emma Brockes were one of the sharper knives in the journalistic cutlery drawer she might have avoided becoming the 4,285th writer since the 21st century began who has used in print some variant of the original snowclone. (I didn’t count to get that figure of 4,285, I just chose a number at random. Why the hell not? People make up the number of words for snow found in Eskimoan languages that they know absolutely nothing about. I might as well just make stuff up like everybody else.)

I notice that Brockes’ version of the familiar Eskimological claim deals in visual cognition rather than linguistics (though the two are closely intertwined). The usual citation of a surprisingly large (and randomly chosen) number of snow words is absent; instead she actually claims to know about Arctic nomads’ perceptions of gradations that non-Eskimos cannot see. Where does she get this fascinating fact about perceiving the imperceptible?

Apparently, from credulous acceptance of an urban myth that goes back to the writings of an amateur linguist, Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Pullum goes on at length, all worth reading, concluding with a blast at the NYT.

A casual unsupported assertion about Inuit people perceiving distinctions to the rest of us are blind? That won’t cause any trouble at the New York Times (which has published several different figures for the number of snow words in “Eskimo”, and has ignored the letters of correction that have been sent). Don’t worry about it: it’s only language and cognition we’re talking about — just make stuff up.

I’ll say this, though. We Pacific Northwesterners perceive gradations of gray invisible to the rest of you. Dark? Rain? Give us more, so we can make our perceptive skills still more powerful.

Police in Chapel Hill, November 13, 2011

[Katelyn Ferral, kferral@newsobserver.com]

I got home from Chicago Monday night and woke up Tuesday to the news of Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City police clearing out Zuccotti Park of Occupy Wall Streeters. Then I read a reference to Chapel Hill and stumbled on the photo above, accompanying an article in Raleigh’s News & Observer about Chapel Hill police clearing Occupy Chapel Hill protesters from a vacant car dealership on Sunday afternoon. I’m tempted to say the photo speaks for itself and leave it at that. But in case more needs to be said — really, is this what it has come to? Has the militarization of our country reached the point where small-town police forces operate like domestic armies? Are there not more benign ways to clear unarmed people from a space, assuming there’s good reason to clear them?

From News & Observer reporters Katelyn Ferral and Mark Schultz we learn that

Officers brandishing guns and semi-automatic rifles rushed the building at about 4:30 p.m. They pointed weapons at those standing outside, and ordered them to put their faces on the ground. They surrounded the building and cleared out those who were inside.

About 13 people, including a New & Observer staff writer covering the demonstration, were forced to the ground and hand-cuffed.

Those who had been outside of the building at the time of the arrests – including N&O staffer Katelyn Ferral – were detained and then let go after their pictures were taken. Eight people inside the building were cuffed and put on a Chapel Hill Transit bus to be taken to the police station to be charged with misdemeanor breaking and entering.

“Along with facilitating citizens’ ability to exercise their constitutional rights, it is also a critical responsibility of all levels of government in a free society to respond when rights of others are being impinged upon,” Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt said in a statement issued Sunday night.

“This weekend a group of protesters broke into and entered a privately owned building in downtown Chapel Hill. … The Town has an obligation to the property owners, and the Town will enforce those rights …”

Okay, go ahead. Enforce those rights. But with semi-automatic rifles?

The LA Times picked up the story Tuesday, with a link I might otherwise have missed to the statements of Chapel Hill’s mayor and police chief at a news conference Monday. Police Chief Chris Blue explained that the tactics used were “based on the known risks associated with anarchist groups.”

Those darn hippie anarchists. Meanwhile, the News & Observer requested an apology for the police behavior.

The News & Observer is seeking a public apology from the Town of Chapel Hill after one of its reporters was detained with protesters Sunday afternoon.

“She wasn’t doing anything illegal,” said John Drescher, N&O executive editor. “She was doing her job, and she identified herself as doing her job.”

Staff writer Katelyn Ferral arrived at the former Yates Motor Co. building at 419 W. Franklin St. about 4:30 p.m. to report on the occupation of the building.

Ferral was on the scene for approximately 15 minutes, interviewing people inside and walking around the site, when she heard demonstrators say police were gathering down the block.

When police approached the building, they ordered everyone to get on the ground, but they allowed Ferral to continue to shoot photographs. After a few more minutes they told Ferral to get on the ground as well.

Ferral told them she was a member of the media. She was wearing her press photo badge around her neck.

She remained face-down on the ground for about 15 minutes before she was cuffed with plastic zip ties and told to sit in a line with about 12 other people who had been detained.

After about 30 minutes police took her picture, took down her name, address, date of birth and drivers license number.

Ferral asked why she was being detained and was told that she was not on the bus with those charged with breaking and entering because she wasn’t inside the building.

Police told Ferral she would be arrested if she was caught on the premises again, Ferral said.

After she was released, Ferral was not allowed to take additional photographs and was told to go across the street.

During a press conference Monday, Police Chief Chris Blue said officers detained everyone that was either in the building or at the entrance. Ferral was treated like anyone else who was outside the front of the building, he said.

Meanwhile, back in New York … I was dumbfounded as I listened on Tuesday morning to the news of Zuccotti Park’s clearing at the matter of fact way NPR’s reporters gave the news. Is it really possible to talk about Mayor Bloomberg ordering the NYC police to empty the park without noting that Bloomberg is himself number 12 in Forbes’ list of the 400 richest people in America? Look, Bloomberg has done many good things with his money. (As a mathematician and one-time member of the Institute for Advanced Study, I’m especially fond of this.) But, I’ll say it again. He’s the 12th richest person in the US. He’s worth $20 billion, give or take. He bought himself the mayoralty of New York. In his eighth year as mayor, when faced with term limits, he had the law changed and bought himself a third term.

Maybe Bloomberg was a better choice than the alternatives. That’s not my point. My point is, this is no ordinary mayor. I don’t understand how his actions with respect to Occupy Wall Street can be described without reference to his wealth and its source. I don’t know how to take a news report seriously that doesn’t provide this context. I don’t know how to take NPR seriously. Any regular reader of Gail Collins knows that whenever she mentions Mitt Romney in her NYT columns, she provides a reminder that he drove the family to Canada on vacation with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car. I take her motivation to be that you can’t understand anything about Romney without knowing this. Surely a similar rule should apply to Bloomberg. No story should be written about his actions, especially those related to Occupy Wall Street, without a reminder that he’s the twelfth richest person in America, and yes, that he made his fortune on Wall Street.

Fonthill Castle, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

[From the Mercer and Fonthill Museums website]

Another Sunday, another Vows column in the NYT. I’m addicted to them, as I have discussed before. One of the pleasures of reading them is letting the suspense build as I wonder whether this is the week the paper has chosen an ordinary couple as its newlyweds. Please, please, just a regular couple. Sometimes that hope is dashed the moment I see the couple’s names. Last week, for instance, the bride’s name — Allison Pataki — gave it all away. Yes, that Pataki, the daughter of the former governor of New York.

But this week looked promising, as I read about two physicists, a young American woman who went to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy as a Yale undergraduate and met a Parisian who was then a postdoc at Brown. She’s now a postdoc at Harvard, studying neutrinos, he’s still at Brown, studying dark matter, and last Sunday they were married on the grounds of Fonthill Castle, pictured above.

Every Vows column comes with at least one outrageously silly line. This week’s was spoken by a colleague at Brown:

They are both cutting-edge physicists. They are so smart that, really, they can talk about things together that few people would even understand. I say that’s perfect.

We also learned that the “couple exchanged rings made of titanium (their favorite element),” the bridegroom’s sister “designed an invitation inspired by the freewheeling trajectory of subatomic particles in ‘bubble chamber’ experiments,” and the bride “left most of the planning of her wedding to her more humanities-minded mother, Rebecca Bushnell, the dean of the school of arts and sciences and an English professor at the University of Pennsylvania.”

The mother’s being Dean of A&S at Penn gave a hint that this might in fact not be all that ordinary a couple. But the punchline came when we learned that during the reception, updates were being given of the Jets-Patriots football game. It was explained that these updates were

meant particularly for Ms. Bushnell’s stepmother, Betty Wold Johnson, who is known as Granny to the bride and who is the 91-year-old mother of Woody Johnson, the Jets’ owner.

Some ordinary couple! The bride’s step-grandmother is a member of the Johnson & Johnson family, her step-uncle the wealthy owner of the Jets. And wasn’t it his daughters, the bride’s step-cousins, whom the NYT featured just three days ago in a big spread? Why yes it was!

Sigh.

What can be more painful than having to read super-hacks* Thomas Friedman and David Brooks? How do they continue to be columnists at the country’s leading newspaper? Worse, how do the silly books they write become bestsellers? (Just two days ago, Friedman’s latest piffle entered the NYT bestseller list at #2. If it has to be that high, couldn’t it at least have done some good up there and taken the #1 spot away from the evil piece of —- whose name I won’t utter?)

Of course, no one has to read their columns, and so I don’t. But fortunately, the New Yorker’s Ric Hertzberg and the Center for Economic Policy and Research’s Dean Baker have been on the case, writing separate posts today on our two hacks’ latest columns.

On Sunday, Friedman was babbling yet again on the need for the two parties to compromise and strike a bargain. Hertzberg is so infuriated he can hardly contain himself. After stating that the column “damn near ruined my Sunday, Hertzberg goes through it in detail. I can’t do justice to Hertzberg’s analysis with a summary, excerpt, or “money quote.” It’s worth reading in full. Nonetheless, let me include a bit from near the end.

On the one hand, the Republicans are lunatics dedicated above all to destroying the Obama Presidency.

On the other hand, Obama didn’t endorse all the provisions of the Simpson-Bowles report.

See? They’re equally bad.

Which is another way of saying that they’re equally good. Which means that if they could just reason together in good faith, with a readiness to compromise their ideological preferences for the sake of the common good, all would be well.

Except that, as Friedman can’t help implicitly acknowledging, they’re not equally bad and equally good—not remotely. One side rationally understands (and fears) the consequences of inaction and is demonstrably willing to compromise. The other side irrationally dismisses (and might even welcome) those consequences and is demonstratively unwilling to compromise.

We don’t know whether, someday, “history” will hold Obama most responsible for what happens. What we do know—and on this point the “we” is everybody—is that, next year, voters will hold Obama most responsible. And we know that even among voters who think that Obama and the Republican leadership are both responsible but Obama less so, many will vote against him because he will be on the ballot everywhere. “The Republican leadership,” an abstraction both faceless and hydra-headed, won’t be.

The true, underlying, and presumably unconscious logic of Friedman’s analysis is that compromise between a side that is insane and unwilling to compromise and a side that is sane and willing to compromise is in fact impossible just now and will continue to be impossible for some time to come. For Obama, a Grand Bargain, which is to say a Grand Compromise, is not currently an option. His real choice is between a Grand Surrender and a Grand Fight.

I know which of the two I want him to choose. I hope Tom Friedman would have him make the same choice.

As for Brooks’ column today, Dean Baker (hat tip, Paul Krugman) gets to the heart of the matter regarding Brooks’ reasoning in his opening:

David Brooks is really upset, we may have a lost decade because he is sitting there being right, standing in the middle, and the two extremes who control public debate won’t agree with him. How do we know Brooks is right? Well, he is in the middle between the two extremes he just told you about, how could he not be right?

Baker focuses on Brooks’ criticism of the Obama stimulus plan as just another example of Democrats’ desire to increase government spending, doing the arithmetic to demonstrate that the stimulus was destined to be too small from the get go. This leads to the following comment.

So how is anything about stimulus disproved because a stimulus that could have been expected to create maybe 3 million jobs was not adequate in a downturn where we needed 10 million jobs? There are no tricks here, this is all arithmetic and it is all right there in black and white.

But, Brooks does not want to be bothered by arithmetic. He wants his readers to support his plans for tax reform, for cutting Social Security and Medicare. In other words he wants his readers’ support for doing all the the things that David Brooks always wanted to do, but he now says that we absolutely have to do because of an economic crisis caused by the incompetence of the people who always wanted to do these things.

Hacks. Just hacks.

*You might wish to review Alex Pareene’s list in Salon last November of the 30 leading hacks among political commentators. I mentioned it in a post at the time, giving special attention once again to Friedman and Brooks.

John Maynard Keynes, wrong again

[UPI]

I’ve been enjoying the columns of the NYT’s newest columnist, their erstwhile restaurant critic Frank Bruni. It was with great disappointment, then, that I found he had joined the “blame both sides” bandwagon in his column last Sunday.

Taking off from the prayer rally in Houston the day before at which Governor Perry spoke, Bruni writes that

it presented a spectacle that — let’s be honest — most of us in the news media don’t really get. Seeking relief from the country’s woes through a louder, more ardent appeal to God strikes us as too much hope invested in too magical a solution. It suspends disbelief and defies rigorous reason.

But if we stick with this honesty thing, don’t we also have to admit that to varying degrees and with varying stakes, there’s magical thinking in secular life, and that it springs from a similar yearning for easy, all-encompassing answers? Didn’t the debt-ceiling showdown show us that?

That battle was defined largely by the unshakable, grandiose convictions of low-taxes, small-government puritans in the House, for whom Cut, Cap and Balance wasn’t so much a three-pronged wager as a holy trinity, promising salvation. While it’s inarguable that government has a tropism toward waste, and while tax increases should indeed be preceded by an inquiry into other options, the adamancy of the puritans’ position flew in the face of what many economists say, and it brooked no dissent. It felt more like theology than science.

Okay, I’m with him so far. But here’s the passage where I lost him.

Faith-based is right. We all have our religions, all of which exert a special pull — and draw special fervor — when apprehension runs high and confusion deep, as they do now. And if yours isn’t a balanced-budget amendment and a government as lean as Christian Bale in one of his extreme-acting roles, it might well be a big fat binge of Keynesian stimulus spending. Liberals think magically, too, becoming so attached to a certain approach that they wind up advocating it less as option than as panacea.

Huh? We’re now comparing a belief in Keynesian stimulus spending with the faith-based madness of drastic budget cuts, continuation of Bush tax cuts, and protection of military spending? What if the approach the liberals are attached to just happens to be correct? What if all evidence points to the original stimulus being inadequate, as unemployment remains high and demand low. What if we are repeating the history of the depression despite having the means and the knowledge to avoid it?

I stopped reading the column at that point. Now, returning to it, I see that Bruni concludes with a call for “a full range of extant remedies, a tireless search for new ones and the nimbleness and open-mindedness to evaluate progress dispassionately and adapt our strategy accordingly. Faith and prayer just won’t cut it. In fact, they’ll get in the way.”

Yes, sure. But Frank, why are you dismissing one of the extant remedies? What is the point of your seeming even-handedness? A dispassionate evaluation of our progress should lead Obama to the realization that he screwed up in 2009 with his too-small stimulus. The adaptation he needs to make is to fight like hell for a new stimulus package to get the country moving again. Instead, he and David Pfouffe have made the political calculation that they should cave, setting re-election rather than economic growth as their priority.

One side is wrong here, not both, and Obama has joined that side. Or at least he is trying to, even as they run farther to the right. Pathetic.

Unagi in cucumber sheaths

[Ramsay de Give for The New York Times]

When I opened the NYT this morning, I turned straight to Ben Brantley’s review of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Had Bono and the Edge salvaged the show since Julie Taymor’s dismissal or was it still a hopeless mess?

You can read Ben’s thoughts yourself and find out. Turning to the weekly dining section, I found myself captivated by a different review, that of famed New York Sushi restaurant Masa by Sam Sifton. Sifton is a fine writer. Even though I’m never going to eat at Masa, when his subject is one of New York’s great restaurants, I pay attention.

Frank Bruni, Sifton’s predecessor, had given Masa the highest and rarest of ratings — four stars — a year after its 2004 opening. Over the course of the past year, Sifton visited and re-visited Masa before deciding to award it three stars. Sifton loves the food, writing of spending his time there “in a fog of pleasure, sitting dumbfounded on the shores of excess.” However, he finds the service wanting.

But extraordinary food alone does not an extraordinary restaurant make. The experience of eating at Masa can clash, sometimes greatly, with the grace, simplicity and excellence of the cuisine on display.

One night I entered the 26-seat restaurant five minutes before my reservation time, arriving before my three guests. The room was empty, save for servers and one occupied table in the dining room. The woman at the restaurant’s front checked my (fake) name off a short list of reservations on a piece of paper on a block of wood in front of her. She took my briefcase and placed it in a closet.

Then: “You may wait outside,” she said. “When you return with your guests, please have your cellphone turned off or on silent.”

[snip]

There are other wrinkles in Masa’s fine silk. At the sushi bar it is not uncommon for the prepared dishes served at the start of a meal, which are brought to the bar by servers, to be placed before customers with no explanation whatsoever. In the dining room it is possible for the same lapse to occur with the arrival of the sushi. It is unsettling, given the luxury of the food, and the question of its cost.

Some will take issue with the fact that Masa serves an enormous amount of bluefin tuna, a fish that some say hovers on the brink of collapse as a species. (The reason is presumably simple: its taste.) Others will cavil at the manner in which Mr. Takayama caters to some guests in the restaurant while ignoring others, in seemingly direct proportion to the amount of money they are spending.

[snip]

Finally, meals at the restaurant end with a clank: you are given a dessert and it throws a switch. Everyone turns away and you will have little contact with the staff until you find someone to give you the bill. Guests stare at one another awkwardly: What do we do now?

Read the full review. And check out the accompanying slide show.

My favorite source of sentences of the week has been the NYT’s weekly Vows column, which is so good at glorifying the mundane. (See this post for example.) Yesterday, the glorifying was being performed on the NYT sports pages, where Richard Sandomir and Ken Belson’s puff piece on hedge fund manager and potential Mets buyer David Einhorn appeared. Sandomir is usually a hard-nosed writer on the business of sports and sports broadcasting. Yesterday he adopted a breezier, less critical style.

The background, as you may know, is that Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon has become ensnared in the Bernie Madoff scandal. He is being sued for a billion dollars by Irving Picard, the trustee for the victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and has been under pressure to sell some of his stake in the Mets to prepare for a settlement. (See Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article for details.) Einhorn has stepped in and offered to buy one-third of the team for $200 million.

What’s my choice for sentence of the week? It’s hard. Here, have a look at this passage from yesterday’s Sandomir-Benson article and see what you think.

Einhorn’s father, Stephen, a banker who specializes in mergers, and his mother, Nancy, a bookkeeper, have been active in the arts and charities. Through the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, they donate to educational, religious, medical, youth service and antibigotry causes; the trust also provided money to produce “The Bully Project,” a documentary.

Stephen Einhorn, who spent six years on the board of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, paid to overhaul its Web site so customers could pick the seats they want. “They make sure their dollars are being used well,” said Annie Jansen Jurczyk, the theater’s development director.

She added, “It puts them in a different category of donor, and they do it without any fanfare.”

David Einhorn, whose grandfather had Parkinson’s disease, is on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and the Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty.

“He’s modestly and quietly trying to make a difference in the world, with the simple thread of trying to help people get along, whether it’s in Jerusalem or downtown New York,” said Mary Gordon, the president of Roots of Empathy, a charity that tries to imbue children with kindness and acceptance of others.

Einhorn, who was a co-founder of the hedge fund known as Greenlight Capital when he was 27 and who declined to speak for this article, quickly built a reputation as a thoughtful and astute investor.

Tom Zucosky, the chief executive of Discovery Capital Management, remembers interviewing Einhorn in the late 1990s when his company invested in Greenlight. Einhorn’s presentations, he said, were lucid and inventive and the hallmarks of a rising star.

Zucosky said that Einhorn could read deeply into balance sheets to understand what makes companies — and teams — tick. “If you’re a hedge fund manager, you understand how to manage risk,” Zucosky said, and added: “He’s not stupid. He’s not going to flush his money down the toilet.”

My favorites are the quotes rather than the Sandomir-Benson writing itself. But they chose the quotes, so I want them to share in the credit. There are some gems. I think I have to go with this: “He’s modestly and quietly trying to make a difference in the world, with the simple thread of trying to help people get along, whether it’s in Jerusalem or downtown New York.” What would the world do without New York hedge fund managers? They aren’t just smart. And wealthy. They are generous and modest beyond compare.

As for the smartness of hedge fund managers, that would appear to be a given. And here I thought mathematicians are the smartest people in the world. I suppose the fact that we make so little money is proof that we aren’t, whereas the fact that hedge fund managers make so much is proof that they are. (Then there’s the example of Jim Simons.) I love the observation that “If you’re a hedge fund manager, you understand how to manage risk. He’s not stupid. He’s not going to flush his money down the toilet.” I’m guessing there are a few exceptions to this assertion.

Like many a native New Yorker, I grew up with the idea that Washington State was frontier territory. Maybe back then it was. However, after moving here thirty years ago, I quickly adjusted, and quickly tired of some of the odd ideas people in the northeast had about us. Such as imagining that we’re next to the Canadian Rockies. Or Alaska.

As Seattle and the state have grown, as Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco have joined Boeing and Weyerhaueser in putting us in the nation’s business news, I had the notion that maybe we were a little better understood.

Until this morning, when I read Catherine Lutz’s review in today’s NYT of Janny Scott’s just-published biography A Singular Woman:
The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. In the second paragraph, I learned that

Ann Dunham … followed her peripatetic parents — a mother in banking and a father in furniture sales — through several states, to an island off Washington State, and finally on to Hawaii, where she met two husbands and got her B.A. and eventually her Ph.D. in anthropology.

Mention of “an island off Washington State” brought me to a stop. For a moment I was puzzled about whether islands “off” Washington are part of Washington. Would we say that Nantucket is off Massachusetts or Catalina is off California or the Keys are off Florida? That seemed odd. Maybe Nantucket is off the Massachusetts coast, and so on. But the larger puzzle was that I couldn’t think of any islands off the Washington coast. Sure, there must be the odd speck or two, but no one visits or lives on them. There are lots of islands within Puget Sound and the adjacent protected salt water inlets of the state. Bainbridge Island. Vashon Island. Whidbey Island. The San Juan Islands. Some are Seattle suburbs. Others are closer to Canada. But they are all some distance from the Pacific, not what one would call “off Washington State.”

Which of these islands, I wondered, did Ann Dunham live on? I suppose I must have read about it before, but I couldn’t remember. i went to the computer, looked her up, and my jaw dropped. Mercer Island! You see, the thing is, Mercer Island is not off the coast. Mercer Island is not in the state’s interior saltwater by-ways. Mercer Island is in freshwater Lake Washington, the lake that runs north-south along the eastern edge of Seattle, with such cities and suburbs as Bellevue, Kirkland, Medina (Bill Gates’ home), and Redmond to the east. (On the map above, you can see Lake Washington between Seattle and Bellevue, with Mercer Island the pink blob in the southern end of the lake.)

Two bridges cross the lake. One is just a stone’s throw or two from our house. (Okay, maybe three or four, and maybe with Aaron Rodgers doing the throwing.) The other is the I-90 bridge. Interstate 90 starts on the south edge of downtown, by Safeco Field, and ends 3000 miles later a little past Fenway Park in Boston. A long trip. But its first stop heading east out of Seattle is Mercer Island, just three miles away.

What this means is that Mercer Island is closer to downtown Seattle than any other suburb, and closer to downtown than most Seattle neighborhoods. In what universe, or what terminology, does that put Ann Dunham on “an island off Washington State”? Please, Professor Lutz, look at a map!

Note: I was so flabbergasted this morning that I wrote a letter to the NYT editor. I’ll spare you its text. This is essentially an expanded version.