Entries associated with the tag "Eric Zorn":

I liked Sarah Palin's speech a lot. Eric Zorn allows that the speech was "well-wrought" and that "as an orator, as a presence on the stage, as a personality she was, let's be honest, OK." That sounds like very faint praise, but in context Zorn means she was far from being the embarrassment Democrats prayed she'd be.

I maintain she was way better than OK. I hear the defensive muttering and I dismiss it. The first words that come to mind are "gleefully, shamelessly unfair," and where convention oratory is concerned, there's no higher praise. Palin kicked Barack Obama's ass. Obama, not being in the hall, was in no position to kick back, but Palin showed how to do it. She painted a bright red circle around every one of his vulnerabilities.

She cleared the air. Now Obama knows and we know how the Republicans intend to mock him, belittle him, insinuate against him. The other candidates during the Democratic primary debates had sputtered that Obama was inexperienced. Palin said to America, he's a posturing ninny.

I'm happy to see that my Reader colleague Whet Moser had pretty much the same reaction.

I kept thinking as Palin rattled on, "Now we see what he's made of." Game on.

The president and provost of Northwestern University held a meeting Thursday afternoon with the dean and faculty of Medill. President Henry Bienen responded to the polite hand he got when he was introduced with the ominous “I’m glad you’re clapping now. Some of you may not be in a few minutes.”

Bienen and provost Daniel Linzer made it clear they stand behind Medill dean John Lavine, who Bienen said was appointed to bring the school “into the modern world” after a couple of academic audits three years ago prescribed major change. NU has committed millions of dollars to the process, said Bienen, and “something good is happening.” Bienen concluded by citing a famous book written by Albert Hirschman in 1970, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States.  There are three ways a worker can respond to unwelcome change, Hirschman said: he can buy into it, he can speak out and mediate, or he can leave. Faculty members familiar with the book felt that Bienen emphasized the third. “It’s a big world," Bienen said. "Find another university.”

Then Linzer commented on what Medill students have taken to calling Quotegate--allegations that last year Lavine made up a quote and claimed it came from a student praising a marketing class. Linzer appointed an ad hoc committee to look into the matter and two weeks ago announced that the committee had cleared the dean. At the faculty meeting, Linzer refused to say if the committee had actually turned in a report, let alone what criteria it had used and what evidence it had reviewed. Linzer’s reply was that the process confidential and he had no intention of saying a word more. “Once a decision has been made it has been made,” said the provost. “Then we move on.”

The faculty’s sense of aggrievement runs a lot deeper than Quotegate, which might not have amounted to much if so many professors didn’t already feel Lavine was running roughshod over them as he overhauled the curriculum. Professor Jack Doppelt asked Bienen one of the few questions; he wondered why it was necessary for Lavine to suspend faculty governance in order to revamp the curriculum. Doppelt called that a “toxic statement” from the administration to the faculty. Bienen replied that he didn’t think faculty governance had completely disappeared, but that at any rate Lavine was under orders to move with dispatch.

Bienen also said he was puzzled by why the Chicago press has been paying so much attention to Medill recently. He supposed it was a good thing, in that it shows that people care. It's really not such a good thing. It's possible that Quotegate has run its course--there’s probably no way of proving or disproving that Lavine was quoting someone, and Linzer made it clear that as far as NU concerned, the subject’s closed. But the provenance of a quote is one of those niggling details that do matter to journalists, and the failure of Lavine and his superiors to show they even understand that is a big reason why the press has been so relentless--consider these pieces by Eric Zorn --and so damning.

PS: Isn't Exit, Voice, and Loyalty a book that belongs on every newspaper person's desk?

Eric Zorn, writing smartly in Thursday's Tribune about Kevin Davis's new book, Defending the Damned: Inside Chicago's Cook County Public Defender's Office: "Idealists may be shocked at how much like a game criminal justice is to those entrusted to protect its principles at the horrific margins, and how much they really enjoy playing it."

Zorn was trying to explain how lawyers who defend the worst of the worst function, but it takes two sides to play a game, and the other team's the prosecution. The prosecution is supposed to be doing God's work on earth--separating evil from good and sending it packing. But a job that big might overwhelm someone who doesn't also approach it as a game: "I'll assume everyone's guilty and you assume everyone's innocent. Anything goes, and the jury picks the winner." I thought a little less of Jim Thompson in 1991, when he was leaving the office of governor, and the Sun-Times asked him about Gary Dotson, the convicted rapist cleared first by the supposed victim's recantation and then by DNA evidence. Said ex-prosecutor Thompson, who'd conducted a hearing on TV and reduced Dotson's sentence to time served (six years), "I still feel he did it."

Sometimes the game needs to be over.

The word has its champions. "Wonderfully expressive," says one Web site devoted to language. "A wonderful word," says another. But these champions are wrong. "Kerfuffle," a currently fashionable word from Scotland once so uncommon that into the 60s there was no agreement on how to spell it, looks and sounds like one of those big, harmless animals on Sesame Street, not like what it actually signifies -- a commotion.

Unlike words that come into style because they pinpoint something, "kerfuffle" calls attention to itself instead of its meaning. It's a writer's word, not a reader's, much more useful for making a poem than an argument. And these days there's no avoiding it.

Chicago Tribune editorial, June 4: "But not everyone's convinced. Take the kerfuffle over an acclaimed children's book published last year that began with a passage about a rattlesnake that bit a dog named Roy on a body part guaranteed to draw giggles from 10-year-olds. (Hint: scrotum.)"

Tribune's Amy Dickinson, April 23: "Ten-year-olds are still learning how to communicate with each other. It can be quite confusing, and is a process of trial and error. This sort of kerfuffle is how they learn."

Tribune editorial, March 23: "Imagine the kerfuffle in Gov. Rod Blagojevich's inner sanctum when Wednesday's Peoria Journal Star landed like a depth charge."

Tribune editorial, February 23: "Strangely, amid all this kerfuffle, the Republican presidential hopeful most likely to say something explosive by accident, former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, did not get in any trouble."

Tribune's Clarence Page, February 7: "On a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being a minor annoyance and 10 being a complete outrage, the kerfuffle over Sen. Joseph Biden's use of 'clean' and 'articulate' to describe Senate colleague and fellow presidential hopeful Barack Obama ranks about a 2 -- although with many black Americans it is a very strong 2."

Tribune's Eric Zorn, January 9: "The famous kerfuffle when then-candidate Bill Clinton said that he'd tried marijuana but didn't inhale began on March 29, 1992 -- nearly 15 months later in the election cycle than this story has hit the national media."

And this is from just one paper, the Tribune, this year. A Google search of "Imagine the kerfuffle" turned up virtually a thousand citations. The horror!

Colleague Jerome Ludwig, who brought the matter to my attention, wonders: "Maybe it's just one of those words that's overused at the moment; like frisson was a while back." Give a president a hammer and every problem looks like a nail. Give the press a new word and every passing spat becomes an excuse for it, or every shiver of emotion.

I want to add my two cents to Eric Zorn’s dissection of the Curie High principal flap in Tuesday’s Tribune. Zorn wishes school reform advocate Julie Woestehoff weren’t defending Curie’s Latino-dominated local school council by  maintaining there’s a “legitimate” case to be made for its decision to boot Curie's popular black principal, Jerryelyn Jones. If so, what is it? asks Zorn, who’s concerned that reformers, by lining up with the LCS, “are merely enabling the backlash likely to occur if the case against Jones later proves to be as weak and as mean as it looks today.” (Here's coverage and another commentary on the LCS's action.)

Woestehoff’s concern -- and Zorn’s too, it seems -- is that Mayor Daley and schools chief Arne Duncan want to exploit public indignation over the “crisis at Curie” by gutting the system that lets LSCs hire and fire principals. But to Zorn the present rules look like a “road map for the pursuit of personal vendettas” and could use some tinkering. That’s why he’d rather see Woestehoff and other movement leaders distance themselves from the Curie LSC and promote a compromise that lets LSCs go on firing principals but makes it harder to do.

If there’s no good defense for the Curie LSC, Woestehoff shouldn’t pretend there is one. But that doesn’t mean she should be trying to compromise. The one reasonable response to many a dicey situation that no one ever seems to speak up for, not even top-flight newspaper columnists, is --  nothing. I think nothing might be a good idea here. In the name of preserving powers that other LSCs know what to do with, let Curie suffer and learn from its LSC’s mistakes. That’s democracy in action. When the public votes its fears and biases and elects an incompetent government, no one says it’s time to give the public a little less authority. Well, yes, actually some people do say that, but the rest of us don’t listen.

Debra Pickett resigned from the Sun-Times Monday afternoon, minutes after being asked to do a story she thought was preposterous.

“I laughed,” says Pickett, recalling her response when features editor Christine Ledbetter called with the assignment to breast-feed her infant son in public places and write about it. "I have to say I didn't take it terribly seriously." She'd seen other Sun-Times stories begin with an "outrageous premise" then get negotiated into something not beneath the dignity of adults. Some other day, she and Ledbetter might have begun negotiating. But not this time. Pickett, who was due to return from maternity leave February 26, tells me, “I said, ‘Well, there’s probably a conversation I need to have with Don Hayner before I can talk to you further about this assignment.'” Hayner’s the managing editor. Pickett had been trying to reach him all day. "I felt the ground had shifted a little bit under my feet while I was gone," she says, and she wanted Hayner to tell her where she stood. Her resignation was already a possibility, perhaps even a likelihood. The breast-feeding assignment shifted the ground a little more. She called her husband, an Amtrak executive who was on a train between Washington and Philadelphia, and they talked. Then she reached Hayner. She didn't ask where she stood. She quit.

The idea for the breast-feeding story came from editor-in-chief Michael Cooke, who says it was simply an idea -- a paper could no more assign such a story than it could assign a reporter to pose nude for an art class. And just as it wasn't the story, per se, that drove her off, Pickett insists, it also wasn't a desire “to stay home and be a full-time mom to my baby.” It was simply this: “When it’s time to grow up and move on it’s time to grow up and move on.” In journalism, she observes, “people’s stars rise and fall.” Hers had gone up -- she “trembles on the cusp of stardom,” I wrote in 2002, when she'd been at the Sun-Times two years, her profiles of interesting people she met for lunch were making the Sunday paper worth reading, and her column had begun appearing Friday’s on page two. And then it started to head down. While Pickett was on leave the column, which she continued to write once a week, was moved back to the Lifestyles pages. "It's not where I wanted to be professionally," she says.

"She was a young, single Chicagoan," says Ledbetter. "That was the mantra for the column. She morphed into what she morphed into. If she chose to write about her boyfriend and her baby, those are Lifestyles topics." 

Pickett doesn't disagree. “As a columnist you get locked into a persona," she says. "There were a lot of serious things I was interested in that I wanted to write about which weren’t in line with the mission of the paper and my role at the paper. I’ve developed a strong interest in Africa and the AIDS crisis there. The dilemma was that for every column about that there were three columns about the boyfriend. That’s what people expected.”

She says the paper encouraged her boyfriend columns, which led to husband columns and baby columns -- three of her last four columns mentioned her son (whom, by the way, she does nurse in public places). “That’s what my unique signature was,” she says. “That’s what people came to expect and associate me with. That was fine, a lot of fun, but it’s not necessarily who you want to be your entire adult life.” By the measure of what it covers and with whom, the Sun-Times is a small paper. There’s not much opportunity for personal reinvention. “The Sun-Times has a great staff writing about politics,” Pickett remarks, perhaps wistfully; an assignment to go forth and breast-feed is a pretty blunt way of being told your services won't be required for that coverage. She says she wants to finish a novel she’s working on and supposes she’ll freelance. “I’ll certainly make some calls and have some lunches and conversations. This is very much a happy thing for me.”

"Sometimes she drew laughter. Sometimes she drew blood," says Cooke, recalling the lunching stories. "An editor can't ask for more than that."

UPDATE: Eric Zorn does a good job of thinking about Debra Pickett on his Tribune blog. Link here.

UPDATE: Wow! Blogger Tom Roeser has more to say about Pickett than you'd think any one person could, no matter how keen a cultural observer. "Bravo Pickett," he writes. "For the first time I find her interesting, not as a narcissistic marketing sell but for herself." Link here.  

I’ve been following with interest the renewed debate on the meaning of Christmas (it breaks out ever year about this time). This past week after The Nativity Story was turned away from Daley Plaza, old-schooler Dennis Byrne wrote bitterly in the Tribune that it was a good thing, for who knows what would show up next? “Covens of Wicca….piles of dead chickens left scattered about by careless adherents of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye . . . the Inquisition. . .”    

 The next day Eric Zorn , who knows you can find anything online, wrote sagely in the same paper about the way early Christians actually piggybacked on age-old rites of the solstice, such as the Romans’ Saturnalia, the Persians’ festival of Sacaea, the ancient Babylonians’ 12-day blowout when Marduk, their patron deity, conquered Tiamat, the monster of chaos who was making the nights too long.    

Meanwhile, Neil Steinberg, who’s Jewish, was saying in the Sun-Times that the champions of putting Christ back in Christmas wouldn’t seem so creepy if they weren’t the “very same people who try all year long to make this nation even more of a one-faith theocracy than it already is.”  

Good solid arguments all around. But this Christmas has taken a troubling -- I almost want to say blasphemous -- turn. If Christmas isn’t about Christ any more then it’s about Saint Nicholas, and I’m seeing signs that we’re taking Santa Claus out of Christmas too.    

I date the first signs of disrespect back to 1994 and the hit movie The Santa Clause, which begins with Santa falling to his death. This was billed as a family film and a comedy. This year I look with amazement at the Home Depot commercial in which Santa appears as a bitter, washed-up old fat man. Mrs. Claus: “Oh, you’re home early.” Santa: “What’s the point. Everyone’s giving all those great gifts from Home Depot this year.”  He slumps into his easy chair. “Oh, where’s the remote!”

Any volunteers for a new holiday icon? Maybe the UPS delivery man.