Rational Irrationality: Why is Goldman Sachs so Goldmanesque? One popular theory, which I heard the Times columnist Joe Nocera expounding on the radio yesterday, is that it all goes back to 1999, when the firm issued stock to the public. As an old-school Wall Street partnership, this story goes, Goldman valued its reputation too highly to get involved in some of the shenanigans that it has gotten mixed up in recently, and it could also afford to take the long view. Once it became a public company, however, it came under pressure to raise its earnings every quarter. And this encouraged it to put short-term profits before anything else, including the best interests of its clients.
Obviously, there’s something to this theory. Whenever a Wall Street firm like Goldman has a couple of disappointing quarters, its stock price suffers, and there are calls for changes in leadership, especially if its rivals are doing well. Thanks to its Vampire Squid business model, Goldman has rarely found itself in such a position. One obvious difference is size. The Book Bench: Cinderfellas: The Long-Lost Fairy Tales. Bavarian fairy tales going viral? Last week, the Guardian reported that five hundred unknown fairy tales, languishing for over a century in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Germany, have come to light.
The news sent a flutter through the world of fairy-tale enthusiasts, their interest further piqued by the detail that the tales—which had been compiled in the mid-nineteenth century by an antiquarian named Franz Xaver von Schönwerth—had been kept under lock and key. How astonishing then to discover that many of those “five hundred new tales” are already in print and on the shelves at Widener Library at Harvard (where I teach literature, folklore and mythology) and at Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley. Schönwerth—a man whom the Grimm brothers praised for his “fine ear” and accuracy as a collector—published three volumes of folk customs and legends in the mid-nineteenth century, but the books soon began gathering dust on library shelves. An Existential Threat Within Israel Endangers Its Democracy. Democracy is never fully achieved. At best, it’s an ambition, a state of becoming.
In America, it took generations for blacks, women, and gays and lesbians to win the rights of citizenship—rights that, in many instances, remain incomplete. (Various contenders for the Presidency are now competing to scale back such rights.) The twenty-first century began with a fraudulent Presidential election. To revisit the Arab Spring, one year later, is to celebrate popular awakening but also to acknowledge the distance between the ecstasy of rebellion and the realization of democratic institutions. There is another state in the region that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming. The political corrosion begins, of course, with the occupation of the Palestinian territories—the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children—that has lasted for forty-five years. Herzl envisioned a pluralist Zionism in which rabbis would enjoy “no privileged voice in the state.”
Larry McCarthy, Mitt Romney, and Restore Our Future Super PAC. McCarthy has a relatively modest life style, given his success. He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, in a pleasant white Colonial with an American flag out front, and enjoys watching his daughters’ sports teams and taking walks with his two Bernese mountain dogs. Tall and thin, he wears glasses and a baseball cap, and has a patchy gray beard; he has described himself as Steven Spielberg’s doppelgänger. He reads the sports pages before he gets to the news, and, when pressed by the Hotline to describe his “happy place,” he answered, “Reliving once again Steve McQueen’s motorcycle jumps over the Nazis’ barbed-wire fence in ‘The Great Escape.’ ” This year is likely to be McCarthy’s most profitable yet. It is predicted that total spending on television advertising in the Presidential race will reach two billion dollars.
In 1974, after the Watergate scandal, campaign-finance laws were dramatically reformed. Between 1974 and 1986, the number of PACs nearly quadrupled, to some four thousand. Hendrik Hertzberg: Seconding Ezra Klein. Given that I am a onetime White House speechwriter, you might imagine that I would be displeased with Ezra Klein’s Political Scene essay in the March 19th New Yorker. Au contraire. Taking off on the work of the Texas A. & M. scholar George Edwards, Ezra has some tart things to say about Presidential speeches, including: Tough stuff. But I couldn’t agree more with the argument of Ezra’s piece. With Professor Edwards’s help, Ezra explodes a lot of myths, including but not limited to the common beliefs that F.D.R.’s fireside chats were crucial to the success of the New Deal and that Reagan’s prowess as a Great Communicator got him reëlected and boosted the popularity of conservative policy proposals.
Last August, President Obama delivered a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress touting his American Jobs Act. In the days following the speech, Obama’s approval rating was essentially unchanged—according to a Gallup poll, it actually dropped a percentage point. Quentin Rowan, a.k.a. Q. R. Markham, Plagiarism Addict.
Spy novels embrace clichés—the double agent, the bomb-rigged briefcase—and “Assassin of Secrets,” published last fall, made a virtue of this tendency, piling one trope onto another to create a story that rang with wry knowingness. The book is set in the midst of the Cold War. The protagonist is Jonathan Chase, a suave secret agent with a background in martial arts—part James Bond, part Jason Bourne. In the first chapter, Chase meets Frankie Farmer, a sexy former field agent who presents him with “personalized matching luggage” loaded with surveillance gear. They head back to her place, where Chase eyes the water bed while Farmer slips into something more comfortable: Then he saw her . . . a small light dim but growing to illuminate her as she stood naked but for a thin, translucent nightdress; her hair undone and falling to her waist—hair and the thin material moving and blowing as though caught in a silent zephyr.
Chase caught hold of her, pulled her close. Q.