Plus ca Change

CJ Gunther for The New York Times
The operators of the Out of Town News, which opened in 1955, say the business is no longer profitable and they will leave when their lease expires.

Another institution of my youth goes under:

Boston Globe: Out of Town News, Harvard Square landmark, may close

NYTimes: A New Sign of Change at the Gates of Harvard

McCain Adviser Resigns, Votes For Obama

Obamacon Charles Fried

This is a big one in Republican intellectual circles. Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan's Solicitor General, former Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, current Harvard Law Professor and, until this week, McCain adviser, resigned from the campaign and announced that he has voted for Obama by absentee ballot.

Why? Palin is not qualified to be President.

New Republic: Reagan Appointee and (Recent) McCain Adviser Charles Fried Supports Obama

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

The Art of Diagnosis

wikipedia: Claude Monet

What do you see in this painting?

The Boston Globe reports on medical students being offered art classes to improve their observational and diagnostic skills.

Monet? Gauguin? Using art to make better doctors
New courses improve powers of observation

Basketball News

Nothing Imus-related here. Really!

Harvard hires a new men's basketball coach, less than two weeks after the Boston Globe reported that Harvard has no black coaches for their 41 varsity sports. The new hire: Tommy Amaker, the former Duke All-American and coach of Seton Hall and Michigan. Yes, he's black. Good for them.

LSU has hired Pokey Chatman's replacement: It is Van Chancellor, the former Olympic, Houston Comets of the WNBA, and Ole Miss coach. Chancellor has announced that he will keep Bob Starkey, the white male assistant who took over after Chatman left, and would consider keeping the other female assistants including Carla Berry, the coach who blew the whistle on Chatman.

My sister predicted to me a month ago that Pokey Chatman's replacement would be a white male, and that a lot of the southern schools with coaching vacancies would hire white males. On this one she was right. But Texas hired Gail Goestenkors (away from Duke) and Duke offered their job to former Duke player Joanne Boyle (who turned down the job and is staying at Cal.) It will be interesting to see what happens at Kentucky, where longtime Pat Summit assistant Micki DeMoss unexpectedly resigned after four years. She put Kentucky on the women's basketball map; hope she enjoys retirement.

Racism Lives, USA, 2007

Shaquanda Cotton (from Free Shaquanda Cotton website)

Miami, Florida: Tennis player Serena Williams is racially abused by a white male spectator who tells her to "hit the ball into the net like any nigger would".

Paris, Texas: A 15-year-old black girl, Shaquanda Cotton, has been in jail for over a year of a seven year jail term for pushing a hall monitor at her high school in 2005. (The hall monitor was not injured; it was her first offense.) Three months earlier, the same judge sentenced a 14-year-old white girl convicted of arson for burning down her family's house to probation.

Georgia: The Georgia State Senate has dropped the bill that would have freed 19-year-old black man Genarlow Wilson, who will now rot in jail for another eight years for conduct that is now only a misdemeanor under Georgia law.

It's not just the South, either:

Cambridge, Massachusetts: Vaunted Harvard University has 41 varsity sports and not one black coach. This is not surprising given that the AD and his 13 senior administrators are also not black. The AD has hired coaches for 12 sports since he was hired in 2001; all his hires are white.