December 2011
1 post
Nikolai Rostov and Idleness
The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labor - idleness - was a condition of the first man’s blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the...
July 2011
11 posts
“Page 270 of Superclass. “[At Davos], Another of the most interesting and...”
– Also Klaus Schwab and Philippe Bourguignon
We “know” that there are two kinds of Etonian, Oppidan (those pedigreed lads who pay their own way) and Colleger (scholarship students, whose endowment carries over from King Henry’s original desire that the place be devoted to the education of the poor). That may seem like a laugh now, when the fees including “extras” come to about £30,000 a year (at current exchange rates about what it costs me...
On the face of it, there is nothing overwhelmingly stirring about Sen. Obama. There is a cerebral quality to him, and an air of detachment. He has eloquence, but within bounds. After nearly two years on the trail, the audience can pretty much anticipate and recite his lines. The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition...
“One insider has another guess—that the conversation had to do with Obama’s...”
“Obama was the most prominent minority student on a campus shaken by racial...”
“He then and now is very hard to pin down,” said Kenneth Mack, a classmate and...”
Before the presidency
BARACK OBAMA: All my life, I have been stitching together a family, through stories or memories or friends or ideas. Michelle has had a very different background—very stable, two-parent family, mother at home, brother and dog, living in the same house all their lives. We represent two strands of family life in this country—the strand that is very stable and solid, and then the strand that is...
Playing Bridge
So argumentative were students that Charnes, a senior law review editor, recalls a heated discussion one morning over whether it was elitist to bring editors bagels and muffins.
Higgins recalls Obama walking in during another argument.
He summoned one editor to a meeting and began climbing the stairs to his cramped second-floor office. The editor made no move to follow and kept arguing. Obama...
Traveling together
I change the subject to a politician who is more congenial, his old school friend from Eton, Boris Johnson, who is now mayor of London. Johnson stayed with Abhisit in Thailand, in their year off between school and university, and the two have remained close. I ask whether they had both always harboured political ambitions. Abhisit says: “I had expected Boris to go into politics but he’s a...
Reinvention
“The striking thing about Larry,” said Ms. Romer, who has known him since her days as a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “is that to the degree there were rough edges, they are not there now.”
Yet sometimes Mr. Summers cannot seem to help himself, and he winds up with a reminder that while he may be the professor, Mr. Obama is the department chairman. During one...
Not a Prime Minister
“Mr. Ignatieff’s friend Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, described him as ‘a genuinely introspective individual’ … Mr. Wieseltier added: ‘When I would see Michael, he and I would stroll arm in arm around Covent Garden singing — poorly, of course — some of the great quintet in the first act of ‘Così Fan Tutte.’ There was in...
January 2011
1 post
The Thief
5. The Villa San Martino at Arcore The “king of bricks” [Berlusconi] needed an appropriately regal home, and so while Berlusconi was building Milano 2, he was also busy buying and fixing up a new house for himself. It was the Villa San Martino at Arcore, a grand eighteenth-century villa built on the foundations of a Renaissance-era convent. These princely surroundings—a villa with 145 rooms,...
April 2010
5 posts
On Invisibility
Eisman had his first exchanges with them, and what struck him immediately—and struck Danny and Vinny, too—was the caliber of their employees. “You know how when you walk into a post office you realize that there is such a difference between a government employee and other people,” said Vinny. “The ratings agency people were all like government employees.”...
On Creating Doctrine
Petraeus was sent to head the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth. He left with a mandate to shake things up, and the assignment in his case was to be temporary, but it is a command that epitomizes the word “mundane.” It runs all of the army’s combat-training centers and schools, and is responsible for crafting army doctrine. It was an important job, but has often represented a career dead...
On Being Idiotproof
EIKE BATISTA: You know, when I came back down to Brazil [after university, at the age of 22], I learned that the gold rush was going on in the Amazon basin, lots of pick-and-shovel mines like in the old Wild West in the United States, California and Alaska. And initially I started a trading company to buy the gold and sell it. In this process which took a year and a half I bought and sold $16...
On Competence
When Galvin was given command of the 24th Infantry Division, at Fort Stewart, in 1981, he loaded his belongings into a trailer at Fort Monroe, in Hampton, Virginia, hitched it to his car, and drove down to the base, outside Savannah. He was met at the gate by his new aide, a whippet-thin, apple-cheeked, fair-haired young man who looked no older than 18. Petraeus took the wheel and drove Galvin to...
Striver
He knows that he is driven, and openly admits that it goes back to his own father, a retired Dutch sea captain who had shepherded convoys of merchant vessels across the Atlantic in the most dangerous years of World War II: “His comment to me periodically was ‘Results, boy, results.’” Heather O’Dell, a childhood friend who knew the Petraeus family well, remembers, “There used to be something Dave...
November 2009
2 posts
The Miraculous Mandarins
Blogger Steve Waldman on his invitation to the U.S. Treasury:
I thought there were certain tricks, rhetorical techniques employed, that I enjoyed. In response to a several difficult questions, one official enthused that what the interlocutor had brought up was an important concern, something he really cared about, but then quickly went on to assert that, in his judgment, it was unlikely to be the...
Jack and Lem
[Obviously] John Kennedy’s sexual interests were in women. We don’t need much evidence of that, the evidence is all over the place. But his strongest emotional attachments were to men — and principally, to Lem. We don’t have a word for that, right? Somebody who prefers the opposite gender for sexuality, and the same gender for deep, emotional attachments.
We don’t really have a word for that. I...
October 2009
3 posts
On The Campaigner
Gore Vidal on Jack Kennedy:
On his own, he went to Jack and said, “It’s in the papers that you’re working behind the scenes to support Teddy. You can’t do that. You’re making an awful lot of trouble for yourself. You’re going to be accused of nepotism and worse for backing a boy who isn’t considered first-rate.” Teddy had been caught cheating at Harvard – and all the things that Republicans like...
“I remember when he was putting together his cabinet, he said (imitating JFK’s...”
– Gore Vidal on Jack Kennedy
“Atlantic: What is Ted Kennedy’s real legacy?
Gore Vidal: It’s nothing. But I...”
– Gore Vidal Interview
September 2009
1 post
On Distance
Angela Merkel likes to govern by telephone. When she wants to consult with her counterparts in other countries, the German chancellor usually reaches for the secure-line handset that sits on her desk. Her preferred way of giving instructions to her staff is by sending text messages on her cell phone. At times, particularly when sensitive issues are involved and she wants to demonstrate her power,...
August 2009
7 posts
“Orwell once marveled that people can have the most interesting experiences and...”
– Vanities, Michael Lewis
“In a long and varied life, Victor Niederhoffer, a rich Wall Street speculator...”
– Vanities, by Michael Lewis
“Veronica lived in Milan and Silvio in Rome, where he engaged in a dizzying life...”
– Michael Wolff on Silvio Berlusconi | vanityfair.com
“With the city of Delhi completely sealed to private commercial development, a...”
– Rana Dasgupta, Capital Gains, Granta
“This increasingly democratic structure of English commerce is very unpopular in...”
– Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street, 1873
“With the blossoming of Quadrangle during the boom years, Rattner had achieved...”
– Exit the Czar, or, On Human Ugliness.
“Can David Cameron Redefine Britain’s Tory Party?”—Christoher Caldwell
There is a long Tory tradition of moderate, liberal, sensible chaps becoming prime minister. In fact, there is a long tradition of public-school “toffs” using the party as a vehicle for running the country. At one point in the premiership of the Eton-educated Harold Macmillan, seven members of the cabinet...
April 2009
4 posts
“Nehru…found it increasingly hard to read the Chinese. The giant neighbors...”
– Edward Luce, In Spite of the Gods, p. 262
A Fine Sort of Happiness!
As Frederic had no rational grounds for his woes and couldn’t claim to be suffering from any disability, Martinon failed to understand why he was complaining about life. He himself went off to Law School every morning, then took a stroll round the Luxembourg Gardens, spent the evening in a cafe over a small cup of coffee, and with his fifteen hundred francs a year and his loving little...
“Satyavarman was religiously inclined. Awakened to the emptiness of everything,...”
– Dandin, What Ten Young Men Did, Clay Sanskrit Library.
Feigning a desire to benefit the Bodhisattva, Mara then said:… Wealth is the principal basis of the three pursuits. When that is destroyed, how can morality survive? If one destroys morality by crushing wealth how can one not take up a place in hell? Your attachment to giving has destroyed the root of morality, making you sin…. The Bodhi-sattva understood that the Evil One was clearly...
March 2009
5 posts
Gymrats in the White House
Despite it all, Mr. Geithner, who arrives at the Treasury around 5:30 each morning and exercises in the department gym before starting work, has not appeared daunted. Seemingly relaxed and unflappable, he has appeared time and again at public events alongside President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden. Last week, he testified about Mr. Obama’s tax proposals before three Congressional...
The Journalist as a Historical Instrument
I do not feel myself to be, nor will I ever succeed in feeling like, a cold recorder of what I see and hear. On every professional experience I leave shreds of my heart and soul; and I participate in what I see or hear as though the matter concerned me personally and were one on which I ought to take a stand (in fact I always take one, based on a specific moral choice). So I did not go to these...
"On the contrary he needs the absence of the...
And why do they all speak of a ‘military genius’?…The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or absent-minded men. Bagration was the best, Napoleon himself admitted that. And of Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied face on the field of Austerlitz. Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs...
“When you try to live a more balanced life, traditional businessmen think that...”
– David Thomson, Chairman of Thomson-Reuters, a solid, quiet company. I have some sympathy for this view, but it likely would not work unless one had inherited one’s fortune, as Thomson did.
One of the saddest days of my life was when my grandson – and he’s a particularly brilliant grandson – went to college. He was good at mathematics. And after he had been at college for a year or two I asked him what he wanted to do when he grew up. He said, “I want to be a financial engineer.” My heart sank. Why was he going to waste his life on this profession? A year or so ago, my daughter had...
February 2009
9 posts
Hélène and Elena: Undressing Society
[What surprised Pierre was that] his wife had succeeded in acquiring a reputation “d’un femme charmante, aussi spirituelle que belle” [a charming woman, as witty as she is beautiful]…To be received in the countess Buzukhov’s salon was considered a diploma in intelligence; young men read books before Hélène’s soirees so as to have something to talk about in her...
Different Games; Different Rules
“No disrespect to Paul Krugman,” [Rahm] Emanuel went on, “but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?” (Franken’s victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.) “Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated...
“When Pierre left and all the members of the family came together, they began to...”
– Tolstoy, War and Peace, II. Part Two, XV.
Rastignac on Park Avenue
[Boris wished to] arrange the best position for himself, in particular the position of adjutant to an important person, which seemed to him particularly attractive in the army. “It’s all right for Rostov, whose father sends him ten thousand roubles at a time, to talk about how he doesn’t want to bow to anybody or be anybody’s lackey; but I, who have nothing except my own...
Tolstoy on Arianna Huffington
Prince Vassily did not think out his plans. Still less did he think of doing people harm in order to profit from it. He was simply a man of the world, who succeeded in the world and made a habit of that success. According to his circumstances and his intimacy with people, he constantly formed various plans and schemes which he himself was not quite aware of, but which constituted all the interest...
The Sleepover, or The Importance of the Couch
I change the subject to a politician who is more congenial, his old school friend from Eton, Boris Johnson, who is now mayor of London. Johnson stayed with Abhisit in Thailand, in their year off between school and university, and the two have remained close. I ask whether they had both always harboured political ambitions. Abhisit says: “I had expected Boris to go into politics but he’s a...
On Chinese Use of Metaphor
1. Deng Xiaoping once used a simple comparison to describe the folly of Vietnam in taking on China. When he was asked how long China could fight Vietnam, he said that we should take a large rock and a small hard stone and continue rubbing them together. Over time, the small stone will disappear.
—Kishore Mahbubani, The New Asian Hemisphere, p. 184
2. In 1999 or 2000, I gave a talk to the...
The Literary Hero
Anthony Eden was to Britons in the 1930s what John F. Kennedy was to Americans in the early 1960s: a handsome, glamorous war hero who seemed the embodiment of hope and idealism in a troubled time….Eden’s political rise was efortless. From the start of his parliamentary career, he was seen as a future prime minister…. Yet notwithstanding his appeal to the public and to a number of...
The Underdog
Thought to be richer than the Royal family, the Duke of Devonshire and his family lived in semifeudal splendor, traveling in private trains to and from their enormous estates throughout the country….This, then was the world that Macmillan entered when, in April 1920, he married Lady Dorothy Cavendish at St. Margaret’s in Westminster…It was a world to which he quickly grew...
January 2009
8 posts
“Terry could sell shit to the zoo…He’s the best salesman in the world.”
– Paul Begala on his longtime friend Terry McAuliffe, a.k.a. “the greatest fundraiser in the world,” according to Al Gore.