A curious writer, Daphne Merkin. She repeatedly gets into trouble by writing high-profile journalism white-washing besmirched family and friends. Back in ’09, she wrote a notorious New York Times column down-playing her brother’s involvement in the Bernard Madoff scheme and up-playing the responsibility of people dumb enough to invest with said brother and his partner in crime Bernie.
Times readers who realized the connection [between Merkin and her brother] protested that the newspaper had given Ezra Merkin’s sister a platform to make what they saw as a veiled defense of his conduct without coming clean about the depth of his involvement.
Since her piece was written, her brother has been successfully sued for hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in payback to people he and Madoff destroyed. Tragically, Merkin has had to sell his entire Rothko collection. And he continues to be sued for hundreds of millions of dollars more, so he has to be eyeing his other collections.
Now Daphne Merkin has done it again, for her friend Woody Allen. Her New York magazine article attacking those who have attacked Allen’s behavior is as hopelessly corrupted by personal interest as was her piece about Madoff.
UD has got to tip her hat to Merkin, however. How the hell does she keep doing it? Ian Buruma had to resign. Merkin’s no doubt putting finishing touches on her 10,000-word profile of unfairly maligned Harvey Weinstein.
… which he proudly lists on his web page, but neither that long-ago spoof award nor many bright red flags since then have attracted the attention of serious scientists to his methods (Fold six retractions into seven retractions; mix briskly.).
Now, as the Cornell paper reports, things are on the boil for Professor Wansink. Once Cornell has concluded its review of his research, it will call a … Wansink Conference, announcing its results.
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Mix all thirteen retractions together and… voila!
Retraite Forcé avec Urgence.
When everybody’s got a gun, every day is a massacre. Cuz we all have problems to solve, and guns solve problems. That’s why everybody’s got a gun.
Now, women have kind of been a holdout, in that although they own pretty much as many guns as men, they have seemed reluctant to use them to kill everyone.
But just down the road from UD‘s own Port Deposit, Maryland, where her grandfather owned a department store, a woman took out her … whatever … AR-15? … and blew everyone away today.
Thursday’s incident was the third mass shooting in the past 24 hours.
Hail hail Estonia!
We will not stand for anything that’s crooked or unfair
We’re strictly on the up and up so everyone beware
If anyone’s caught taking graft and we don’t get our share
We stand them up against the wall and pop goes the weasel!
The witty commenters at Deadspin do it again, as Louisiana State University finally dumps professional girlfriend beater, Drake Davis.
But of course it won’t be Baylor that gives him a scholarship, much as that self-righteous institution adores violent men. It’ll be East Central Southern Mississippi All Praise To Our Savior Junior College.
In the span of a few weeks, my university announced completing a new $2 million giant scoreboard for the basketball arena replacing four small but perfectly functioning scoreboards, finished a new $6 million “academic center” ostensibly to provide athletes (but no non-athletes) a luxurious place to study but importantly also to host game day alcohol-driven hospitality for gung-ho athletic boosters, many of whom probably have no idea where the school library is. It also paid Howard University $350,000 so it could beat them (barely) in football, enhancing the probability of becoming “bowl eligible,” giving it the right to play, at some meaningful additional cost, some other second tier team in some obscure location in early January before perhaps 10,000 fans. Simultaneously, students were sweltering in the largest classroom building on campus because the undoubtedly ancient air conditioning decided to temporarily die.
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Sing it, brother.
Football, all for Football
All I am and have and ever hope to be
Football, all for Football
All I am and have and ever hope to be
All of my ambitions, hopes and plans
I surrender these into your hands
All of my ambitions, hopes and plans
I surrender these into your hands
For it’s only in my team that I am free
For it’s only in my team that I am free
Football, all for Football
All I am and have and ever hope to be
Football, all for Football
All I am and have and ever hope to be
The Redskins – UD‘s local team, I guess – go the way of most football lately (university and professional); and UD finds it refreshing that Deadspin‘s writer just says it: “the generally bad experience of attending a live NFL game.”
I mean, UD figured she was weird when, having scored a coveted ticket to a Redskins game a few years ago from a friend of a friend, and having even gotten good seats, she sat next to her comatose husband and did two New York Times acrostics. In the blurry pit down there, anonymous, heavy-suited men staggered en masse a few feet forward and a few feet back for what felt like hours. All around her in the stands, people acted like jerks — they were just as bored as Les UDs, but they were also drunk. Life felt tedious and hardly worth living.
And you think it’s bad in the NFL! University football games, with very few exceptions, are really emptying out.
Four, five, six, beatings won’t do. They’ll suspend you while you’re working your way through the legal system, sure, but that’s it. None of this Me Too nonsense at LSU; a man’s a man, and a football player’s a tackler.
So wide receiver Drake Davis was just arrested for multiply beating his girlfriend (an LSU student) while out on bail for having beaten his girlfriend, and I think he’s up to six arrests at this point but whatever the number he’s clearly well under the number of beatings that would trigger any serious punishment from LSU football.
A word of advice for Davis: See if you can keep it around fifteen. Fifteen is perilously close to seventeen, and I’m thinking seventeen is the absolute limit for LSU.
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Local commentators are wiping their brows and wringing their hands over Davis and certain others on the team.
The presence of three LSU Tigers in the toils of the law raises obvious questions about the team’s cultural values.
Pretty hoitsy toitsy phrase you got there, fella… Cultural Values… Are you uncertain if they have them, or are you wondering what they are?
UD thinks she can distill them down to something very very simple:
Louisiana State University will recruit absolutely anyone who can play football. It does not give a shit if its players beat up its students.
And now a post at total odds with this one.
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My friend Barney Carroll has died, at 78,
his final view, from his apartment’s
picture windows, the glorious Carmel Valley.
He sent me a picture, last week, of what he saw.
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Allen Frances, a fellow warrior against
corruption in medicine, wrote Barney’s obit.
Barney’s scientific contribution to psychiatric research was to introduce neuroendocrine techniques. He independently discovered the value of the dexamethasone suppression test (DST) as a biomarker of melancholia — the classic, biologically driven subtype of depression. This was the first, and remains one of very few, biomarkers in psychiatry. Barney’s 1981 paper on the DST was among the most highly cited papers in psychiatry. Its impact was immediate, with many replications and extensions.
Another of Barney’s enduring contributions was to educate colleagues in the discipline of proper clinical decision making. He clarified the Bayesian principle that context counts — that is, prior conditional probabilities greatly influence the utility of any clinical feature or laboratory test in making a diagnosis. Throughout medicine, biomarkers and clinical diagnostic features perform with much greater utility in high risk groups than in general populations.
Barney and Allen had both chaired Duke University’s psychiatry department, and they shared an anger at (to quote the subtitle of one of Allen’s books) “Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life.” Both certainly know and knew that, as David Bowie wrote toward the end of his life, “On the whole, this whole world is run by brutes for the common and the stupid.” So they weren’t terribly optimistic that their protest could do much. Once it’s all come down to late-night comedy, it’s a bit late in the day.
But if, as Barney explained to me in a recent email, you’re a hopelessly inner-directed person, you can’t live with yourself if you don’t make a serious daily effort toward de-brutalization. Barney saw in Donald Trump late-stage outer-directedness, and regretted that “I won’t be around to see how it finally plays out with the orange man in the white house.” But he was fundamentally stoic – and typically observant – about the process of dying.
I am watching with detachment as I move along the path to allostatic collapse… What’s allostatic collapse? It’s just a fancy term for the end state of chronic deterioration that comes with terminal illness. We begin to fail piece by piece but we may hang on for years in a new state of compensated but pathologic equilibrium until even that cannot be sustained. Related constructs are chronic life stress and aging before supervening disease appears. My point of collapse is shaping up to be respiratory failure.
I had many questions to ask Barney about allostasis. Can’t ask them now. But he already, in his final sign-off, told me the most important thing.
Be well and be happy.
Nils Lofgren reminisces. Wee UD lived, for a time, next door to that house and to Lofgren. He and UD‘s older sister went to high school together.
UD‘s friends the Josephs now live in the house. They expanded and modernized it like crazy. Lofgren would find it totally unrecognizable.
A bunch of nasty stuff goes on among groups of elites that everybody knows about but can’t do anything about because it’s hidden. Only when someone – a reporter, a whistleblower – blows their cover does anything happen. And even then, nothing really happens. I mean, there’s a reason they’re called elites; there’s a reason people resent elites.
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Two examples, starting with the more recent:
1. A very high-ranking cancer researcher at Sloan Kettering has for years and years failed to report his financial conflicts of interest. He just don’t do it, folks, and everyone has let him get away with it even though it’s an enormous no-no. (Best headline: “Top Cancer Expert Forgot to Mention $3.5M Industry Ties.”)
Ethicists say that outside relationships with companies can shape the way studies are designed and medications are prescribed to patients, allowing bias to influence medical practice. Reporting those ties allows the public, other scientists and doctors to evaluate the research and weigh potential conflicts.
This guy was chief medical officer.
Jeffrey S. Flier, who was dean of the Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016, said medical leaders should be held to a higher standard.
“The higher you are in the organizational structure, the more important it is that you fulfill those obligations,” he said. “You’re not just another faculty, you’re also a faculty to whom other people look up and your reputation is tied to the institution’s reputation.”
Like wink wink if he doesn’t do it we sure don’t have to do it. It’s a win-win situation and we all make lots of money. Look how much more he’s making than his paltry $1.5 million (in 2016; figure it’s significantly more now) salary! What a role model!
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In statements to industry analysts and the American Association for Cancer Research, Dr. Baselga praised two drug trials that many of his peers considered failures, without mentioning that the trials’ sponsor, Roche, had paid him millions of dollars.
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How much more?
Look, I’m too grossed out by the final paragraphs of the NYT article, which list his takings – I mean haha some of his takings because for sure he’s still hiding a hell of a lot even from the nosy NYT guys. Read them yourself.
My favorite part of these stories is always the boards these people sit on. Money for Nothing is the title of the best-known book about board-sitting, and this guy hauled in hundreds of thousands by doing absolutely nothing.
In an editorial, the NYT says: “Ban paid appointments to outside boards… [When] appointments come with payments that meet or exceed a doctor’s existing salary, the process is almost certain to be corrupted, and public trust is sure to be undermined.”
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A letter-writer at the Times poses a really naive question:
[H]e received a salary in 2016 (the most recent data available) of more than $1.5 million from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he is the chief medical officer. This is a princely sum, which, given the work he does, no one should begrudge him.
But it appears he also earns uncounted millions more in consulting fees, director’s fees and ownership interests from businesses directly involved in the areas of his expertise, and he is criticized for not fully disclosing this in his professional writings evaluating the products of some of the companies that pay him large sums.
But I would ask another question: Why isn’t $1.5 million enough?
Recall the classic porn film – Never Enough.
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The main point UD‘s making in this post, however, is that the scheme doesn’t work unless this guy lives in a closed world of fellow privileged who all agree to keep their traps shut in order to protect their privileges. The scheme works for years – the guy is about to turn sixty – until maybe some grotesque bad fortune falls out of the sky and an outsider squawks.
The guy resigned immediately.
But don’t worry about him. He’ll be fine.
2. The now-notorious letter sent secretly (or so its authors thought) to NYU, threatening to do whatever angry groups of elites do if you come down too hard on someone in their group, has generated plenty of anger and plenty of thoughtful writing about the same subject: How groups of powerful people (here professors) protect bad actors among them. As with the Sloan Kettering guy’s nondisclosure, what went down was routinely corrupt behavior until someone decided to intervene.
But again, as with the cancer researcher, the result of the exposure is embarrassment and some docked salary. A lawsuit or two. Things are a bit bumpy, and they’ll stay a bit bumpy for awhile, and then these groups will reconstitute themselves.
[T]he commonality of all of these people is the entitlement. Do as I say, not as I do. We see this so often in the exemptions politicians create for themselves, and the same can be said for highly profitable executives and physicians, whose organizations exempt them from scrutiny as long as the profitability is in their favor. Do you really believe CBS didn’t run a cost-benefit analysis on retaining or removing Les Moonves?
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It’s just as Kurt Vonnegut said in Slaughterhouse Five:
Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.