Lede Poisoning

Mostly for job-related reasons, I’ve subscribed to some Crimson RSS feeds. Right now the paper is running a lot of retrospective pieces, as befits commencement season. But goddamn, I know they’re probably understaffed and all, but couldn’t they have avoided all the lookalike ledes?

• While an undergraduate at Princeton University, when Caroline M. Elkins informed her parents that she would be majoring in African history, they were “a bit horrified.” [btw that sentence is ungrammatical] A professorship at Harvard and a Pulitzer later, the Elkins are probably glad their daughter did not major in economics. [#]
• When they published their working paper “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” in March, the authors anticipated criticism. But even Kennedy School of Government Academic Dean Stephen M. Walt and University of Chicago professor John J. Mearsheimer could not have predicted the transatlantic storm that their paper unleashed. [#]
• When he chose to write his senior thesis on the Zimbabwean government’s manipulation of the media, Amar C. Bakshi ’06 never thought he’d be a target of the repressive regime himself. [#]
• When Elizabeth Cary Agassiz helped found the “Harvard Annex”—the predecessor to Radcliffe — in 1879, it is unlikely that she could have imagined a day when — down the street — women would outnumber men in caps and gowns in the Yard. [#]

All from yesterday’s edition, catblogs. One suspects less a lazy editor or a house style than a clasically namby-pamby–liberal conception of history, shared among the whole Crimson hive: to wit, history is 100% contingency, accident, unexpected consequences, anything could happen, rags to riches, Horatio Alger, hoist on own petard, blog blog blog. When I stabbed myself in the eye with a fork, I never imagined I would soon develop X-ray vision in the other one. Park/driveway, drive/parkway. Expect the unexpected. No deep structure — not even Ungerian loose linkages within a semantic whole. Karl Marx is spinning in his grave, which is conveniently located next to Brian Eno’s. Also I think Jim Cramer might be tearing up a little.

In other news news, David Zhou utterly ignores the whole Born Confused angle. Fucker. And in related pun news, we’re now down to “‘Mehta’-Morphosis.” Ick. Let’s just hope the scandal never mehtastasizes any further.