Hopeful signs…
… that Spring might be on its way. Seen as I was walking back from lunch in College yesterday.
Quote of the Day
”The physicist I.I. Rabi and General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower became friends after Eisenhower was appointed president of Columbia University soon after the end of WW2. When introduced to Rabi, Eisenhower said, “I am always very happy to see one of the employees of the university,” to which Rabi replied, “Mr. President, the faculty are not the employees of the university. They are the university.”
Quoted in J. S. Rigden, Rabi: Scientist and Citizen, Harvard University Press, 2000.
Not any more, though. The ‘management’ of Columbia caved in to Trump. And I guess its professors no longer feel they embody the Genius loci of the institution.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bob Dylan | Like a Rolling Stone | Newcastle | 1966
Long Read of the Day
Bafflement with Bezos
This latest edition of Tina Brown’s diary is another gem — triggered this time by zillionaire Jeff Bezos’s emasculation of the Washington Post, the newspaper he once claimed to be rescuing.
Yet he appears to have checked out of the Post some time after his libido was liberated by his pneumatic new paramour Lauren Sánchez. And that personal transition coincided with an acceleration in wealth that saw his net worth rise from $28 billion in 2013 to $222 billion today. You might think a fortune that stratospheric would make it easy to say no to paying out $75 million to make and market a Roman tribute to Melania. Or not feel the need to curry favor with Trump by precipitously ending the Post’s 36-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, just 11 days before the 2024 election, a decision that instantly lost the paper 250,000 hard-won subscribers. Entertaining War Sec Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, two days before the Post apocalypse, and saying nothing about Hegseth’s Pravda-like restrictions on Pentagon press coverage, was not a great look either. The purpose of having f##k you money is to say f##k you, but it seems the purpose of f##k you money is to have more f##k you money.
What’s baffling is that Bezos really was a tech visionary, and, in fact, so many of that first generation or two of tech bros were. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page transformed forever the way we tap into the riches of the world’s information and learning. Elon Musk made environmentally-friendly electric cars that were fast and beautiful and promised us that his rockets would take us to Mars. Even Travis Kalanick, the rapacious CEO and co-inventor of Uber, invented a way for us to never be stranded. But as all the nerdy dreamers bulked up into heedless plutocrats, it was like watching a chart of the Descent of Man—their muscles bulged to comic-book proportions, their aspirations coarsened, they hid out in their luxury, Blue Zone caves. I think most of them had set out with a genuine belief that tech could make the world a better place, but they wound up instead wanting just to better their OWN place.
Spot on. Great wealth is a powerful aphrodisiac. It deludes you (and many around you) into thinking you’re a genius. And it buys you impunity from the consequences of your actions.
Books, etc.
You may remember that I read (and enjoyed) this book a while back, which meant that I found this review of it in The Asian Review of Books interesting. It occurred to me that it might make useful reading for anyone who is curious about the book.
## My commonplace booklet
The blast radius of Jeffrey Epstein
Turns out it’s much wider than we’d imagined. It may yet see off Keir Starmer, even though he had nothing to do with the paedophile, but had foolishly allowed his consigliere Morgan McSweeney to push him into appointing Peter Mandelson as UK ambassador to the US.
I remember being shocked when the first release of documents revealed that the famed economist Larry Summers, who I thought was a real grown-up (as portrayed in The Social Network), had been seeking advice from Epstein about an extra-marital affair. But now I find that even a hero of mine, Noam Chomsky, had been lured into the vicious circle round Epstein and exploited as a reputation-launderer. Truly, there seems to be no end to this.
Fintan O’Toole, the brilliant Irish Times columnist, has been writing perceptively about all this. It’s behind a paywall, alas, but I think it’s worth quoting some of it from yesterday’s edition of the paper.
One of the foundational acts of the Roman empire was the construction of the Cloaca Maxima, the great sewer that carried off the city’s effluent and made its glories possible. The Romans thought of it as sacred and gave it its own presiding deity, Cloacina.
The Epstein archive is the Cloaca Maxima of the contemporary American empire, a vast sewage system that underlies and enables the triumph of gilded misogyny. Epstein is its sacred monster, the presiding deity of the cult of rapacity to whom men of privilege sent up their supplications: let us prey.
Unlike the benign Cloacina, Epstein’s cult demanded human sacrifice, preferably that of young virgins. (“He likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Donald Trump smirked in 2002.) The scale of the demand was vast: the US department of justice estimated that Epstein sexually abused more than a thousand girls.
Those girls were, in this system, fungible assets, their value interchangeable with that of the dollar. They functioned as currency in an elite gift economy, passed around as tokens of status – to be granted the right to use their bodies was to be in with an ultimate in-crowd, a charmed circle of mutual enrichment and reciprocal advancement…
He also sees in many of the released emails (many of which complain about the #metoo movement) a coherent and concerted reaction by elite men against the feminist revolt of the 1960s and 1970s.
This was a movement defined in a much earlier generation by Rebecca West: “I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
LATER Valeria Chomsky, Noam’s wife, issued a statement revealing that her husband, now 97, is “confronting significant health challenges” after suffering a devastating stroke in June 2023 and is currently under 24/7 medical care and unable to speak.
When we were introduced to Epstein, he presented himself as a philanthropist of science and a financial expert. By presenting himself this way, Epstein gained Noam’s attention, and they began corresponding. Unknowingly, we opened a door to a Trojan horse.
Epstein began to encircle Noam, sending gifts and creating opportunities for interesting discussions in areas Noam has been working on extensively. We regret that we did not perceive this as a strategy to ensnare us and to try to undermine the causes Noam stands for.
We had lunch, at Epstein’s ranch, once, in connection with a professional event; we attended dinners at his townhouse in Manhattan and stayed a few times in an apartment he offered when we visited New York City. We also visited Epstein’s Paris apartment one afternoon for the occasion of a work trip. In all cases, these visits were related to Noam’s professional commitments. We never went to his island or knew about anything that happened there.
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