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Illustration by Tom Bachtell.
October 27, 2013
Accident Scene
The Red Sox, who had fallen behind the Cardinals in the first inning and again in the seventh, could have lost the third game of the World Series in routine fashion, but managed to do it spectacularly and historically, on a play and a call, in the ninth inning, not previously matched in the game. The rest of the action can thus be folded into summary—feeble but also staunch work by the veteran Sox starter Jake Peavy, who gave up four hits and two runs in the first inning, and pitched out of something worse, then escaped a further pickle, in the fourth, when he loaded the bases with no outs but wiggled free. The Bosox, who never led, came back two times from two-run deficits to tie things up, and there were breathtaking infield plays along the way: by the Cards’ second baseman, Matt Carpenter, and then his substitute, the rookie Kolten Wong; and once again by the Sox’ Dustin Pedroia. The pitching wasn’t up to previous levels—there were twelve hits by the Cards and blown saves by two Cardinal relievers, including by the eventual winner, Trevor Rosenthal. A line-drive double in the bottom of the ninth, whacked by pinch hitter Allen Craig on the first pitch from the previously impregnable Sox closer Koji Uehara, set up the last scene of the opera.
Continue Reading >>October 27, 2013
Backblogged: Our Five Favorite Sentences of the Week
“This is the new meaning of ‘Manhattanization’: turning a city into a playground for the wealthiest inhabitants, even as it forgets about the poorest.” From “How to Manhattanize a City,” by Elizabeth Greenspan.
“He might be a former law lecturer who wouldn’t know an Oracle database from a floppy disk, but his name is attached to this damn thing.” From “Playing the Obamacare Blame Game,” by John Cassidy.
“The voices that we would most like to hear—the voices that we most need to hear—are silent.” From “Slavery’s Shadow,” by Annette Gordon-Reed.
“There’s no point to a trimmed and well-groomed beard, which resembles exactly the sort of suburban lawn that often led to the growing of the beard in the first place.” From “From Beantown to Beardtown,” by Richard Brody.
“When a manager scurries out to argue a call, it seems like just another of baseball’s ritualistic wastes of time—sound and fury, signifying nothing.” From “The Value of Arguing and the Gift of an Overturned Call,” by Ian Crouch.
Photograph by Teun Voeten/Reporters/Redux.
October 26, 2013
Behind Twitter’s Eleven-Billion-Dollar Valuation
When Twitter, on Thursday, set a price range for its I.P.O. that valued the company at around eleven billion dollars, observers described it as a cautious move. Alexei Oreskovic and Gerry Shih, writing for Reuters, called it “modest.” At Bloomberg, Sarah Frier, Lee Spears, and Leslie Picker wrote that Twitter’s valuation was “as economical as its 140-character tweets.”
Journalists immediately started guessing at Twitter’s motivations. Was the company trying to avoid a debacle like the one Facebook experienced, when its shares plunged right after the I.P.O? Was it starting low and leaving room to boost the range once executives meet with investors on the company’s road show and gauge their interest?
Continue Reading >>October 25, 2013
The Koch Brothers in California?
It’s now established that a secretive political group linked to the billionaire conservative activists Charles and David Koch has agreed to pay a record fine for violating California’s laws requiring the disclosure of campaign donations. But much else about these dark-money maneuvers remains shrouded in the mystery that inspired the title “Covert Operations” for the story I wrote about the Koch brothers in 2010.
Continue Reading >>October 25, 2013
Big Papi Nation
Suspend my passport if you like: this once loyal citizen of Red Sox Nation hadn’t watched an inning all season, until Wednesday night. I kept hearing, of course, that they were an interesting and likeable bunch, in contrast with their recent predecessors. No more Bobby V. (though I somewhat enjoyed him, in the rubbernecking sense). No more Beckett. No more Youkilis. (I know this may be blasphemous, but the Greek God of Walks had long since stopped embodying discretion at the plate, and his beards were all menace, with none of the chuckle that his dainty batting stance might recommend—they lacked the klezmer charm of the current lot.) Even John Lackey, I gathered, had become a redemptive figure, absolved of the chicken and biscuits, and the double-fisted Bud Lights.
Continue Reading >>October 25, 2013
Get Angela’s Number: The Indiscreet Charm of the N.S.A.
It has become painfully clear that what the National Security Agency lacks, above all, is discretion. That probably occurred to President Obama on Wednesday, when he got on the line with Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, who was calling with what was apparently unmitigated anger to ask why the N.S.A. was monitoring her cell phone. Obama told her that it isn’t, or won’t—a “wasn’t” seems to have been missing—but Merkel’s government had seen enough, in N.S.A. documents obtained by the German news magazine Der Spiegel, to know what it thought. (According to Reuters, one listed her mobile phone number.) Obama had a similar call with France’s François Hollande, and may have about thirty-three more, based on the latest Guardian report on the number of heads of state whose phones it tracked. But the N.S.A.’s wildly indiscreet character had already come well into the light in the first documents leaked, this summer, by Edward Snowden, about its mass, often indiscriminate collection of American telephone and Web communications. The Agency moves broadly and clumsily; it’s greedy in a way that is unhealthy; it tells itself that rules can mean what it wants them to mean; it is a poor judge of people; it has no real discernment—and that, for a spy agency, may be the worst part of all.
Continue Reading >>October 25, 2013
A Spirited Series, Now Tied
Good game last night, a certificate of the high-end excitement we demand in October. The imposing starters—sour-faced Boston veteran John Lackey and the Cardinals’ tall, twenty-two-year-old righty Michael Wacha—scooted us through a quick five innings, with most of the fans’ attention, I think, going to Wacha’s fastball, which comes out of his hand like an escaping barn swallow and slips, barely noticed, into the upper level of the strike zone. With a Sox runner aboard in the sixth, he chose a change-up, to David Ortiz, however, who deposited the ball just over the sill of the Green Monster, in left, for a shocking, reversing 2–1 Boston lead.
Continue Reading >>October 25, 2013
The True Obamacare Test
On a road trip through Ohio a few weeks ago, I stopped at a gas-station market, where a bulletin board outside the restrooms was covered with flyers. Somebody was selling black-and-white piglets; a pumpkin patch was offering hayrides. And there were several handmade leaflets fund-raising for people who couldn’t afford their medical costs. Two of them I particularly remember: one seeking help for a four-year-old who required dental surgery and whose family couldn’t afford the anesthesia, and another for a smiling older couple; the husband had ocular melanoma and could no longer see.
There are three things to recognize about the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and all the criticism of it: First, the Web-site glitches really are a problem. Second, the hearings that Republicans in Congress insist on holding are no way to fix them. Third, when it comes to evaluating the worth of Obamacare we may not remember the Web-site hiccups all that well. What we will remember, and what ultimately matters, is whether, in the next year, the A.C.A. fulfills its promise: to provide affordable health insurance to people who did not have it through an employer, could not afford it on their own, were denied it on the basis of preëxisting conditions, paid more for it than they should have because they were, say, women of child-bearing age, or could no longer get by because their insurance benefits had been capped. In short, people like those on the flyers, who were trying to scrape together the money from neighbors or from passing strangers to pay for health care that they desperately needed.
Continue Reading >>October 24, 2013
Political Scene: Obamacare’s Rough Road
The government shutdown is behind us, but the Republicans, it seems, still can’t let Obamacare live. “Now, they’re focussing on the problems with the rollout,” Ryan Lizza says. “They’re not really talking—at least in Congress—about defunding Obamacare, although there’s still a little bit of talk about delaying the individual mandate. … What is the point of that oversight? Is it to fix it? To expose how the exchanges can get up and running in a better way?” Lizza joins Amy Davidson, John Cassidy, and host Dorothy Wickenden on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about the health-care law and the political battles on the horizon.
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