The Doree Chronicles

Andrew Ross Sorkin:

I must say that one of the frustrating parts of researching my book came when I finally got to ask the question of Wall Street chief executives and board members that you just raised: Do you have any remorse? Are you sorry? The answer, almost unequivocally, was no. (Or they just didn’t answer.) They see themselves as just one part of a larger problem, with many constituencies to blame.

Many of the most senior members of management on Wall Street now consider themselves “survivors,” as if they were cancer survivors or something. That’s the word they use. While many of them are self-aware enough to politely nod at the notion that they received help and were part of the problem, they seem reluctant to acknowledge they were “rescued” or “saved.” There are probably a few exceptions, so I shouldn’t paint them all with the same brush, but on the whole, that was the takeaway.

I recognize that that answer will only increase public outrage. But it is true.

Yes, Justice Kennedy’s staff insisted on seeing the article written in the Dalton school newspaper before it was published, and yes, First Amendment blah blah blah, but how come nobody is wondering how a Supreme Court Justice ended up giving a talk to high school students in the first place?

meltzer:

Coming to grips with the existence of “Hung Like a Five-Year Old” t-shirts.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to come to grips with them.

save the date

meltzer:

I just got Elizabeth to commit to throwing a 90210 party with me on 9/02/10.

I might go as Andrea Zuckerman? Thank God I have ten months to decide.

I call Brenda! BRENDAAAAAAA!!!!!

meltzer:

Sometimes I like to fantasize that someone hires me to create Marisa magazine or, while we’re firmly in fantasy territory, Sassy 2.0 and I start putting together my dream team of writers and editors. (Does anyone else do this?) I think Joon would get the back page.

Please create Marisa magazine.

This is the kind of political analysis I am interested in reading:

I don’t think [Bill Thompson]’s the RIGHT kind of douchebag. Ed Koch was also a douchebag, but he was a douchebag in the right way. Giuliani transcends douchebaggery and shoots up to a level of dickslappery for which a word has not yet been invented, but he also had something that made for effective governance (not that I’m endorsing what he did, but he was able to push it through). I don’t get any sense from Thompson that he’d be able to utilize his own internal doucebagness to make things happen.

The few remaining Jews of Yemen have mostly been resettled in Monsey, N.Y., with a few going to Israel. They had been living pre-modern lives:

Raida became the last redoubt of Yemeni Jews, who continued to lead a simple life there alongside Muslims.

Ancient stone homes dot the town. Electricity is erratic; oil lamps are common. Water arrives via truck. Most homes lack a TV or a refrigerator. The cell phone is the only common modern device. Some families receive financial aid from Hasidic Jewish groups in Brooklyn and London, which has enabled them to buy cars.

Typically, the Jewish men are blacksmiths, shoe repairmen or carpenters. They sometimes barter, trading milk and cow dung for grass to feed their livestock. In public, the men stand out for their long side curls, customarily worn by observant Jewish men. Jewish women, who often marry by 16, rarely leave home. When they do, like Muslim women, only their eyes are exposed.

For fun, children play with pebbles and chase family chickens around the house. At Jewish religious schools, they sit at wooden tables to study Torah and Hebrew. They aren’t taught subjects like science, or to read and write in Arabic, Yemen’s official language.

Also, one of the women—I guess when she was trying to leave the country, though the article doesn’t say—tried to board the plane with a live chicken.

Secret Mission Rescues Yemen’s Jews [WSJ]

From Sunday’s Book Review:

To the Editor:

Andrew Hacker’s letter (Oct. 18) asks for the progenitor of the term “WASP.” He says that he first heard it at a Princeton faculty party and that he first used it in an article in 1957.

I could not persuade my son, Tad Friend, in his book “Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor” (reviewed Sept. 27) to date the term back to at least 1952, when I first heard it. It was used upon me then by a Jewish girlfriend from Queens College, who socialized with young writers at Columbia University, who used it too. I therefore suggest that the term may not have a single progenitor, and that it may have arisen in such circles as a critique of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It was probably a simple term of cultural derogation — although Professor Hacker’s inquiry may yet find an individual claimant.

THEODORE FRIEND
Villanova, Pa.

Could the Jewish girlfriend of Tad Friend’s father’s who “socialized with young writers from Columbia University” please come forward?

(Best letter ever, obviously.)