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.
But going public doesn’t fully explain the transformation that Goldman has undergone during the past couple of decades. 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. Larry McCarthy, Mitt Romney, and Restore Our Future Super PAC. Editor’s note appended.
Mitt Romney, in his struggle to wrap up the 2012 Republican nomination for the Presidency, has presented himself as an outsider. During an exchange with Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House, at a recent Republican debate, Romney declared that “to get this country out of the mess it’s in” Americans need leaders “from outside Washington, outside K Street.” One television ad by Romney supporters makes the same argument against Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, calling him “the ultimate Washington insider” while showing his face in front of an image of the Capitol dome. Romney, unlike the remaining Republican candidates, has served no time in Washington. Yet he’s relying on a media offensive managed by operatives who have long been at the heart of Washington’s Republican attack machine. McCarthy is known for his ability to distill a complicated subject into a simple, potent, and usually negative symbol.
“You thought that was fair?” 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. In fact, I told him Saturday morning on TV: 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. And the American Jobs Act went nowhere. Good Presidential speeches don’t get results. 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.