Culture Briefs

Ivy only

“Following Elena Kagan’s nomination, a few people are waking up to a rather startling reality: In what is supposed to be a new era of American openness, egalitarianism, and diversity, Harvard and Yale grads are dominant. If Kagan is confirmed, every single member of the Supreme Court will have attended Harvard or Yale. But thats not all. Harvard Law grad Barack Obama beat Yale grad Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination and then became president. Yale grad George W. Bush beat Yale grad John Kerry and Harvard grad Al Gore. Yale grad Bill Clinton beat Yale grad George H.W. Bush. In fact, you have to go back a full generation, to Eureka Colleges finest, Ronald Reagan, for Americas last non-Ivy president. …

“This is not a good development. Speaking of the Supreme Court, [Jonathan] Turley writes … ’When you exclude all but two of the nations 160 law schools as sources for justices, it not only reduces the number of outstanding candidates but guarantees a certain insularity in training and influences on the court. … Moreover, there is no objective basis for favoring these two schools. Annual rankings from law schools on publication or reputation or student scores show relatively small differences in the top 20 law schools.’”

— David French, writing on “Why Harvard and Yale are Dominant,” on May 13 at the National Review blog Phi Beta Cons

Hefner Superstar

“Most every man in the known world has at least glimpsed a Playboy centerfold, and thereupon has vowed to go out and get himself something similar in a real live girl, or perused the luscious goods until the magazine has fallen into tatters, or run to confess his pollution to unsympathetic religious personnel, or cried ’Death to America’ and placed his hope in the eternal succor of 72 virgins, each of whom is the spitting image of the whorish temptress in the picture.

“Hugh Hefner, the inventor of Playboy, has sold his idea of what sex should be with the winning fervor of a true believer, and while not exactly everyone has bought into it, he has enticed multitudes into his fold with the promise of as much pleasure as a body can manage in a lifetime. …

“Hefner himself is the Great Emancipator and the most influential figure that American popular culture has produced; no actor or movie director or singer or athlete has moved the life of our time as potently as he. Indeed, one is hard pressed to name more than three or four figures from the more serious precincts of our modern public life who have had an effect of comparable magnitude.”

— Algis Valiunas, writing on “The Playboy and His Western World,” in the May issue of Commentary

Love for ’Pops’

“Clear, balanced, accurate, fast-flowing, and musically informed though it is, [Terry Teachout’s Louis Armstrong biography] ’Pops’ is based on secondary sources. … In a sheaf of raves dismayingly short on new ideas, the only significant objection to Teachout’s bookcraft I’ve found, by David Schiff in The Nation, is there to finesse a bigger and uglier issue: what to do when the definitive biography of an African-American hero is written by a vocal neoconservative whose signature outlets are Commentary and The Wall Street Journal. … Many left-leaning critics are fans of Armstrong’s late music — Gene Santoro and Bob Blumenthal, to name just two, might have written excellent bios. But Teachout got there first with something to prove.

“Emphasizing Armstrong’s positivity is fine — ’keep ya head up,’ as Tupac put it. But when Teachout intones that Armstrong ’returned love for hatred and sought salvation in work,’ he sure does sound like a white polemicist with dibs on the black role model of his dreams. So hypersensitive to identity politics that he even spars with sometime conservative Stanley Crouch, Teachout writes sparingly about African-American artists, especially for someone who once supported himself as a jazz bassist.”

— Robert Christgau, writing on “Pops as Pop,” on May 14 at Barnes & Noble Review