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Alumni WritersOctober 3, 2008The Mailer-Buckley ConnectionThe late Norman Mailer ’43, a prolific and pugnacious author, apparently wrote a lot of letters to go with his many published works—some 50,000 letters archived by Michael Lennon, according to The New Yorker, which ran a selection in its October 6 issue under the title “In the Ring: Grappling with the twentieth century.” Among those missives readers might find amusing are exchanges with political foil (and Yalie) William F. Buckley Jr. (April 20, 1965: “I think you are going finally to displace me as the most hated man in American life.…To be the second most hated man in the picture will probably prove to be a little like working behind a mule for years…”). Mailer subsequently sent Buckley a financial contribution for National Review, while begging that it be kept “in the secret crypts,” lest he have to explain “my complex motives for giving a gift to a magazine for which I feel no affection and to an editor with whom on ninety of a hundred points I must rush to disagree. They would not understand that good writing is good writing…” (January 1966). Mailer also wrote a letter to the editor of Playboy (December 21, 1962), objecting to its characterization of his political leanings: “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.” September 12, 2008Tall TalesIn her first book, Arianne Cohen ’03—a onetime Harvard Magazine Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow—offered fix-it tips for “the repair-impaired.” Cohen’s second book—The Tall Book: A Celebration of Life on High, with a December 2008 release date—promises “a fascinating and informative look into the world of tall people.” In a recent New York Times op-ed, Cohen gives us a taste. Writing on the occasion of the death of Sandy Allen—height: 7 feet, 7 1/4 inches—Cohen (who herself is 6 feet, 3 inches tall) recalls the admiration she felt for Allen as a child, “from my vantage point as the tallest little girl in Delmar, N.Y.,” and the sadness and anger she felt when, as an adult, she interviewed Allen and learned that the world had essentially treated her as a circus freak:
Read Cohen’s columns from her days as an undergraduate (Sleeping Smarter, A Woman’s Studies, Love Nesting 101), as well as her 2004 Letter from Phnom Penh, in the Harvard Magazine archives. August 28, 2008Politicking as Crimson-Hued Blood SportAs a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s government department, Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D. ’72, was a nuanced writer. His dissertation, “Prior Restraint, Prior Punishment, and Political Dissent: A Moral and Legal Evaluation,” carefully explored the issues associated with “the question of the extent to which we can legitimately demand that the liberal state tolerate internal political activism.” His argument—with special thanks to his advisers, professors Michael Walzer and Arthur Sutherland, and further thanks to legal scholars Paul Freund and Laurence Tribe—came at a fraught time in the nation’s history, just after the confrontations of the civil-rights era, the street demonstrations and violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968, and the turmoil associated with protest against the Vietnam War. Having examined court opinions in a variety of situations, Corsi found little support for limits on association (mandating disclosure of group membership, for example), for investigations of political activists, or for any but the most careful uses of injunctions and temporary restraining orders—and no usage consistent with political freedom for preventive detention as “either the exception or the rule.” Corsi could imagine extreme circumstances where state intervention would be possible, but he stressed the responsibilities of public officials to keep avenues of dissent open, and of dissidents to avoid abusing rights, lest on either side those rights be fatally compromised at moments of crisis. “Rights of dissent have always been incredibly fragile,” Corsi concluded. “We can write words numbering in the hundreds of thousands defining these rights and establishing rules for their maintenance. However, their continuance will always ultimately rest upon the restraint and respect of political activists and government authorities alike.” Somehow, in the years since, Corsi has segued from political science to a different kind of political art, and has found different purposes for his prolific writings—and a much different tone for them. As author of Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry, he led the 2004 attempt to destroy the character and reputation of the Democratic presidential candidate. His current bestseller, the slyly titled The Obama Nation, aiming at Barack Obama, J.D. ’91, the 2008 Democratic nominee, furthers Corsi’s reputation of aiming for the jugular with an axe. Though much of the effect of such publications is as grist for the most partisan radio talk shows, they prompt debate more broadly as well, given their political significance. And so it was that Hendrik Hertzberg ’65 took on Corsi in “Attack-Dog Days,” his lead “Comment” in the September 1 issue of The New Yorker. Hertzberg, profiled in the January-February 2003 issue of this magazine, commands a sharp pen himself. “The Obama Nation,” he writes, “erects a superstructure of innuendo, guilt by (often nonexistent) association, baseless speculation, and sinister-sounding but irrelevant digression. The result is an example of what used to be known, in the glory days of ideologically driven totalitarianism, as the Big Lie—in this case, a fabricated, alternate-universe Barack Obama, who, we are told or invited to infer, is a corrupt, enraged, anti-American, drug-dealing, anti-Israel, pseudo-Christian radical leftist, black militant, plagiarist, and liar, trained as a Muslim and mentored by a menagerie of Marxists, Communists, crypto-Communists, and terrorists.” Putting Corsi’s recent work in context, Hertzberg writes:
At all levels of debate, high and low, the campaign ahead appears headed for rough talk and tactics, with Harvard participants across the spectrum. August 19, 2008Campaigning by Text MessageThe cell phone—and, more specifically, the text message—is the next frontier for political campaigning and communication, Garrett M. Graff ’03, a former Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at Harvard Magazine, wrote in a New York Times op-ed last week. The Obama campaign’s promise to announce a vice-presidential choice first via text message means those who submit their mobile numbers will be the first to know. It also means the campaign will have their mobile numbers for other purposes, such as sending a reminder to vote on election day. Graff, an editor at Washingtonian magazine and former Webmaster for Howard Dean, is the author of The First Campaign: Globalization, the Web, and the Race for the White House. He goes beyond the simple observation that as landlines fall out of favor, text messages are the way of the future, to offer some modern technological history: the medium has already been used to galvanize support for political movements in the Philippines, Spain, and Myanmar. After reading the op-ed, you can hear Graff discuss the same topic in a podcast. July 25, 2008All Eyes on ChinaT minus two weeks to the Olympics Games’ opening ceremonies in China. Amid the media throng, several Crimson correspondents offer insightful reports. James Fallows ’70 is blogging for the Atlantic about traffic, air quality, and everything else. Today, he reports, this notice, at once humorous and unsettling, was posted in his Beijing apartment building: “PSB [Public Security Bureau] personnel may conduct surprised [sic] inspection of our property without notification to examine your passport documents including checking your luggage and personal belongings, etc.” More >> July 25, 2008A Familiar Tale, Told With StyleThose in search of summer beach reading might pick up The Romantics, a new novel by Galt Niederhoffer ’97. According to Janet Maslin of the New York Times, Niederhoffer succeeds at breathing new life into an all-too-familiar scenario: the story unfolds at a wedding in which the maid of honor, the bride’s college roommate, has a “history” with the groom. In the novel, Maslin finds overtones of “well-wrought cynicism.” She appreciates the heroine’s “sharp eye” for the “tribal habits” of the bride’s WASPy family, and particularly likes the depiction of the mother of the bride:
This week’s New Yorker discusses the novel in a downright catty tone, though the account dwells more on the proceedings at a book party for Niederhoffer in New York than on the book itself. Author Rebecca Mead notes the similarities between the heroine, “clever, ill-at-ease, Brooklyn-dwelling Laura Rosen,” and Niederhoffer herself, “the clever, ill-at-ease daughter of the eccentric investor Victor Niederhoffer [’64].” Harvard Magazine mentioned Ms. Niederhoffer’s first novel, A Taxonomy of Barnacles, in the May-June 2006 Off the Shelf. May 28, 2008In China, Slowly Reassembling LivesAmong those dispatching from China in the wake of this month’s devastating earthquake is Geoffrey Fowler ’00, formerly a Ledecky Undergraduate Fellow at this magazine, now a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. His latest story chronicles a family’s return to their hometown, where little is left standing, after living in a refugee center for two weeks. This May 21 article is also worth reading; it tells the stories of people who survived up to a week after the earthquake before being rescued. One is Shen Peiyun, a 52-year-old toll collector who spent more than six days buried in rubble and drank his own urine to survive. Shen told Fowler he went to stand under a doorframe when the earthquake began, having picked up this survival tip from the disaster-themed television shows he was fond of watching. Read Fowler’s “Undergraduate” columns from the Harvard Magazine archives here: May 14, 2008The Harvard Hedge Fund?A blog post by Matthew Yglesias ’03 has sparked quite a lively debate about whether Harvard deserves its tax-exempt status. This is all a response to a bill being debated in the Massachusetts legislature to tax college endowments exceeding $1 billion. Yglesias, a blogger for TheAtlantic.com, starts by quoting another blogger’s comparison of Harvard’s endowment to “a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University.” Comments from site visitors draw in a cornucopia of related issues: tuition, financial aid, admissions policies, the general role of elite universities in society. You can even add your two cents if you scroll down to the bottom of the page. April 15, 2008Are Immigration Authorities’ Efforts to Curb Gangs Backfiring?In this month’s Atlantic, Matthew Quirk ’03, a staff writer at the magazine, explains how deportation of Latino gang members by U.S. immigration authorities may actually make the gangs stronger. Read the story here. April 4, 2008Lessons from an Old Man in a Black Bathing SuitThis week’s New Yorker has a meditation on longevity by Michael Kinsley ’72, J.D. ’78. Kinsley wonders why society confers respect, and even bragging rights, on those who live to be very old, “as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck.” Read the piece—teasingly titled “Mine Is Longer Than Yours”—here. |
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