August 5, 2013
Only a few days ago, the big news in the world of newspapers was that the Boston Globe had been sold to John Henry, the owner of the Boston Red Sox, for seventy million dollars. Now comes word that the Washington Post has also been sold, in this case to Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who paid two hundred and fifty million dollars for it. Two of the East Coast’s most prominent newspapers have been sold within days of each other. (It’s worth noting that Bezos bought the newspaper himself; it won’t be owned by Amazon. And Bezos purchased the Post, and not the Washington Post Company; he won’t be the owner of the Company’s many businesses, including Slate, Foreign Policy, and Kaplan, the test-prep company.)
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August 5, 2013
It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who, in chronicling his own ruinous interaction with the hot lights of American fame, famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” So here it goes. On Monday afternoon, Major League Baseball announced that it has suspended Alex Rodriguez for the remainder of the current season and all of the next one—a total of two hundred and eleven games. On Monday night, though, Rodriguez is expected to be in uniform for the Yankees in Chicago, against the White Sox, and his manager has said that he will be “penciled in” to play his first game of the year.
Before we get to more about A-Rod, there is the issue of the twelve other players whose suspensions were announced on Monday, as part of the league’s investigation into the shuttered Biogenesis clinic in Florida, from which its founder, Anthony Bosch, allegedly provided performance-enhancing drugs to athletes. Threatened with legal action by M.L.B. lawyers, Bosch opted earlier this year to coöperate with the league’s investigation. Each of the other suspended players, including the Tigers shortstop Jhonny Peralta, the Rangers outfielder Nelson Cruz, and the Yankees catcher Francisco Cervelli, has declined his right to appeal and accepted a fifty-game ban, which is the standard punishment for a first offense in baseball’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program. (Last month, the Brewers outfielder Ryan Braun accepted a sixty-five-game suspension for his connection to Biogenesis, with the fifteen extra games added at the discretion of M.L.B. commissioner Bud Selig—a decision that was not disputed by the players’ union.) By taking the suspensions immediately, players will be eligible to return for some of the playoffs, should their teams make it that far.
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August 5, 2013
For anybody interested in the great financial crisis and its aftermath, there were three bits of news worthy of inspection last week. Taken together, the message they sent was depressing and somewhat alarming. Five years after the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, it’s back to business as usual on Wall Street—or, at least, parts of it.
First a quick word about Fabrice (Fabulous Fab) Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs trader, who was found liable of helping his former bosses at Goldman put together a rigged mortgage deal. Juries composed of ordinary people who don’t have any financial training aren’t necessarily the best judges of complicated shenanigans carried out on Wall Street. Often, though, they get things right, and that’s what happened here. Brushing aside Tourre’s defense that he did nothing wrong, the jury found him liable on six of seven counts of securities fraud, and they also made clear that the bigger culprit was Goldman.
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August 5, 2013
The Washington Post announced Monday afternoon that Jeff Bezos, the C.E.O. of Amazon.com, is buying the newspaper.
In October, 2011, the Boston Globe published an article on the dysfunction that had plagued the Boston Red Sox during their historic late-season collapse: among the memorable details, the paper wrote that star pitchers had taken to drinking beer and eating fried chicken in the clubhouse instead of cheering on their teammates from the dugout, and that the manager, Terry Francona, had been inattentive to players, perhaps owing to his recent divorce or his use of painkillers to recover from surgery.
The article relied mostly on unnamed sources, and the statements about Francona, who left the team after the season, were especially contentious. Rumors began circulating that the team’s top executives had anonymously smeared their former employee. Not so, argued the Red Sox’s principal owner, John Henry, who said on a radio talk show, “It’s reprehensible that it was written about in the first place.”
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August 5, 2013
Listen to the podcast of “Too Much Infotech,” Hendrik Hertzberg’s Comment on Anthony Weiner’s all-digital sex scandal.
Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
August 4, 2013
Russia has helped Edward Snowden, the American whistleblower, escape prosecution in America. Russia’s own whistleblower, Alexey Navalny, who had exposed the corruption of Russia’s rich and powerful, was prosecuted and sentenced to five years. Though the charges against him involve supposed embezzlement, they appear to be a crude fabrication; the real reason is the government’s desire to get rid of a defiant activist.
It sounds like a paraphrase of an old Soviet joke: an American boasts to a Russian, “I can stand next to the White House and shout, ‘Down with Kennedy!’ That’s how free my country is.” The Russian responds, “And I can stand right in the Red Square and shout, ‘Down with Kennedy!’ That’s how free my country is.”
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August 3, 2013
“It’s like Jay Z asked Pandora to produce the record and then left for a meeting.” From “This Charming Man,” Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the new Jay Z album, “Magna Carta Holy Grail.”
“What was remarkable, and rather brilliant, about the Pope’s statements was that they appeared to change everything without actually changing anything.” From “Who Am I to Judge? Francis Redefines the Papacy,” by Alexander Stille.
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August 2, 2013
Fabrice Tourre, the former Goldman Sachs Group trader who, on Thursday, was found liable for misleading investors in a 2007 deal, told the Wall Street Journal before the verdict, “I was a big team player. If there was something wrong with this transaction, wouldn’t people have told me?”
If Tourre believed that he’d be shielded from legal responsibility by communicating with his bosses at Goldman about the deal, the verdict proved him wrong. The penalty, to be determined by the presiding judge, Katherine B. Forrest, will likely involve financial penalties as well as a potential bar from working in the securities industry.
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August 2, 2013
It was a little after 11:30 P.M. when the first heart-piercing screech of incoming artillery crashed near the home where I was staying in the rebel-held city of Saraqeb, in the northern Syrian province of Idlib, in May. It was quickly followed by a second, then a third. Each seemed louder and closer than the last, amplified in a night that was black because of the lack of electricity in the neighborhood (it only comes for a few hours a day, if at all) and otherwise nearly silent, owing to the exodus of many families after a purported chemical-weapons attack on the city a few weeks earlier. When the fourth shell exploded, quite nearby, at 11.40 P.M., my hostess, Em Ibrahim, let out a shriek and, flashlight in hand, briskly ushered me and her fourteen-year-old niece Lama out of the darkened living room toward the basement.
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August 2, 2013
Congress has closed for a five-week vacation, leaving the rest of us to figure out what happened in the several days of yelling about bills that no one was willing to pass, and to ask whether there is anything left of the Republican Party. The best approach might be to put together a diagram of who hates whom in the G.O.P., except that the drawing would get too messy; you’d need an Etch A Sketch and, like Mitt Romney, after a while you’d just want to shake it.
To start simply: John McCain hates Rand Paul, so much that he suggested, to The New Republic’s Isaac Chotiner, that he might prefer Hillary Clinton for President. Chris Christie hates Rand Paul, so much so that he said he was not interested in having a beer with him. Rand Paul seems to hate Chris Christie, since he called him the King of Bacon and mocked him to an audience in Tennessee by saying, “Gimme, gimme, gimme—give me all my Sandy money now.” But then Christie had compared Paul to Charles Lindbergh—for his isolationism, not the aviation. What was strange about the Paul-Christie spat was that Charles Krauthammer and other observers spoke of it solemnly, as though it was the intellectual engagement on the future of foreign policy that the G.O.P. had been longing for. Really what we were talking about was Christie saying that libertarians like Paul ought to come to Jersey and sit across from a 9/11 widow before saying that the N.S.A. shouldn’t collect all the information it wants to.
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