(Speaking of which, what a bizarre 10-day stretch that must have been in San Francisco in November 1978 — first, the Jonestown massacre (which involved a San Francisco cult and the murder of a San Francisco congressman), then the mayor gets murdered in city hall.)
White got only a seven-year sentence for the murders — in large part, many believed, because the jury thought that killing a gay man was basically not that big a deal. (There was also the famous “Twinkie defense” to contend with.)
The most interesting part of the first-person account is the series of videos from TV coverage of the Moscone-Milk murders. They’re all interesting, but these stand out to me:
— NBC national coverage of the murders. Notice how there is no mention of Milk being gay until the very end of the clip (which cuts off). It’s understandable that the focus was on Moscone — he was the mayor, after all — but if anything it’s Milk’s death and his status as gay martyr that is remembered more today. Listen to the pronunciation of “homosexual,” too. Another era.
— Then there’s this big of video from local TV of the gay pride parade that followed the White verdict. You’ll see Robin Tyler, who was the named plaintiff in the case that just legalized gay marriage in California. There’s also the odd tactic of giving almost two minutes of airtime to a guy straight out of central casting — a boxer named Mick Kowalski, for heaven’s sake, who goes on about how gays are the downfall of American civilization.
Kowalski on his two-year-old son, now being raised by his lesbian wife: “I’d rather have him have an attitude, be senile, stupid, and make trouble, like the real…I dunno.” Reporter: “Than what?” Kowalski: “Than be a sissy, you know?”
So my always-bet-on-the-Cajun-jockey horse-betting strategy seemed to have failed at the Belmont, where Kent Desormeaux had his Triple Crown dreams quashed by Big Brown. Sorry if I lost you money.
ESPN did this piece on Kent’s kid Jacob, who has a genetic disease that made him deaf at birth and will most likely leave him blind by his early 20s. But the piece doesn’t go into detail about the disease, Usher syndrome.
Usher is one of a handful of genetic disorders unusually common among Cajuns; the others are Tay-Sachs, Charcot-Marie-Tooth, and Friedreich’s ataxia. Since all Cajuns are descended at least in part from around 6,000 Acadian exiles from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, a few mutations about 10 generations ago and led to their bizarre frequency among Cajuns. Oddly, Tay-Sachs (usually thought of as a disease for Ashkenazi Jews) is also common among some French-speaking Quebecois communities, but Cajuns have the same mutation as the Jews, not the same as their Francophone cousins.
More about the Cajun diseases here and here and here and here (warning: music at that last link).
I probably shouldn’t be too pro-Yale here, considering I am about to enter the formal employ of Harvard, but bravo to my alma mater for expanding its undergraduate population by about 16 percent and adding two new residential colleges to its current twelve.
It’s one of the unfortunate realities of higher education that, while the number of Ivy-qualified applicants has soared, and the scale of economic resources to those universities has skyrocketed, the number of spots available in each year’s freshman class has remained largely constant. (Here, I’m using “Ivy” in the broad sense, including the Stanfords, MITs, Cal Techs, et cetera.)
I’m all for Yale having more money. (Its money manager, David Swensen is a longtime crabwalk.com fave.) But if its mission is the education of talented people — or, more broadly, the advancement of human knowledge — why not use some of that mad cash on giving more people access to a Yale education, instead of happily becoming an ever more exclusive club year after year?
There are a host of culprits for the institutional resistance to expand, but high on the list is the damnable U.S. News ranking of top schools that comes out each year. Among the mathematical factors those rankings ding schools for are acceptance rate, average SAT/ACT scores, and average spending per pupil. Each of those is negatively affected by expansion; schools interested in maximizing their U.S. News ranking are encouraged to stay small and exclusive. It’s another reason I give Yale credit for expanding — they’ll probably be penalized for it in the public arena.
Harvard, of course, has the only endowment larger than Yale’s, at around $40 billion, and while it certainly has expanded in myriad ways over the years, its undergraduate population has been essentially stable over the past few decades. (Starting a couple weeks from now, that endowment will be paying my salary, so I should probably keep quiet.) Its impressive (and still newish) president Drew Faust used her commencement speech last week to defend its epic scale, particularly from those who want to tax it.
Brad DeLong, himself a Harvard grad, had some interesting thoughts on the matter a few weeks ago. And I do have to endorse his concluding thoughts on “[t]he question of how Harvard should expand if indeed it should expand: it doesn’t seem to be nearly as good as the small liberal arts colleges or even its rivals Yale and Princeton at undergraduate education.”
Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
