I'm delighted to announce that Judge Douglas Woodlock of Federal District Court in Boston has ruled in favor of 02138 in Facebook's attempt to win an emergency injunction against the magazine and force 02138 to take down documents from the ConnectU v. Facebook trial. The transcript of the judge's ruling will be released tomorrow, and since I'm in Mexico I don't have a complete sense of what happened in court. But I'm told that the judge agreed with our arguments that posting the documents helped show what our article, "Poking Facebook," was based upon, thus promoting greater public knowledge both about journalism and about Facebook.

Again, since my understanding of the decision is based largely on e-mails and quick phone calls, including one from the bow of a boat headed to the reefs of Cozumel, I should say that further and more specific details will emerge soon. I'll post 'em as soon as I've got 'em. (The post below, titled "Breaking News," was not actually written by yours truly.)

But here is the larger point: This is a victory for 02138, yes. I'm delighted and relieved that the judge decided as he did. But beyond that, this is a victory for the ability of the American press to do its job with some assurance of constitutional protections, even when a $15 billion company brings its legal guns to bear on you, forcing you into court 36 hours after notifying you of its discontent.

We're working on the next issue of 02138 now. I hope that there won't be anything in it that lands us in court again. But if there is, and if we believe that we were right to publish it, we'll fight it again.

Thank you for your interest and support.

Statement from 02138 President and Founder Bom Kim: Judge Douglas Woodlock ruled today in the Federal District Court in Boston to deny Facebook’s request to take down the source documents for the article “Poking Facebook” from the 02138 Web site. This is a victory not only for 02138, but also for the First Amendment. We felt we had an important responsibility to report the story and we hope that we were able to promote greater public understanding of the origins of a powerful and influential Web site. The judge concluded that the article was an example of “core journalism” and that the original documents posted on 02138mag.com increased transparency, offering readers unfiltered access to more information with which to evaluate the story.

I'm on vacation, but this is important: Facebook is trying to use legal pressure to stop 02138 magazine from disseminating information about Facebook's origins.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Facebook Inc. filed two legal motions aiming to force an independent magazine to take down from its Web site documents related to a suit over the social-networking site's origins.

Early yesterday, Facebook's lawyers notified 02138, an independent magazine geared at Harvard alumni, of two separate emergency motions seeking the removal of the documents from its online edition.

The documents are still available online here, but Facebook has a lot of lawyers. If you're interested, read these things now. We believe that we have a legal right to post them online and that you have a legal right to read them. Meantime, spread the word that a company which plans to collect and sell personal information about 50 million people doesn't want one magazine to conduct legitimate reporting about Facebook and its founder Mark Zuckerberg....

The review is a few days old now, but I've been meaning to comment on George Johnson's blistering and dismissive takedown of James Watson's book, "Avoid Boring People," in the Times book review.

Johnson ignores the chapter we excerpted in 02138, about the conduct and future of science at Harvard, which I thought was provocative and useful (and judging from the feedback we got, many of you did as well).

Instead, he seizes on a few, probably silly anecdotes and writes....

Imagine more than 300 pages of this. Gossiping at the Piping Rock Club on Long Island with a Neiman Marcus heiress. Sleeping over at Abby Rockefeller’s and admiring Daddy’s Derain. Motoring to a book party at Woods Hole, Mass., “with a pretty Radcliffe senior with short blond hair called Joshie Pashler, who also had something to celebrate in the recent discovery of her first RNA phage R17 mutant.” When you decide to call your third book about yourself “Avoid Boring People,” you’re kind of asking for it. What worked wonderfully in Watson’s earlier books has worn translucently thin.

Watson, Johnson says, has grown "boring."

I wonder, though, if it is really possible to give this book a fair read in the aftermath of Watson's foolish comments about race several weeks back. Would one have been so quick to dismiss his writing when he was still writing from a position of strength, rather than when he's cast himself into disgrace?

James Watson made a terrible mistake recently. It does not mean that his entire life, nor his current work, should be written off as the ramblings of an unhinged old man. Is it just a coincidence that Johnson has done exactly this?

The Globe reports that Ted Kennedy has sold a memoir to the Hachette Book Group for $8 million. Good for him—let's hope he tells an honest story. He could tell a fascinating one.

I have a small personal insight into this news. Back when I was writing my book about John Kennedy, I took a lot of heat from some people who thought it was a bad idea, including Caroline Kennedy. (Though you'd never be able to find her fingerprints on it—everything she did was through surrogates. A careful woman.)

But not Teddy. His representatives were, if not supportive, quietly cooperative throughout, and I got the feeling that the senator knew well that such books about his family helped to build its mythology and thus had a certain social and political value. Also, he obviously cared about John deeply, and I don't think he minded so much the idea that an admiring colleague would remember his nephew in a book.

While Caroline Kennedy never acknowledged the letters I sent to her in which I explained the nature of my book—what it would be, what it wouldn't be—I spoke to a Ted Kennedy aide on several occasions, and those people were always perfectly civil and decent about the project. Before the book was officially published, I made sure to send copies to the senator in his Washington office.

So when people would say to me, "How do the Kennedys feel about your book?", I would respond, well, the Kennedys aren't a monolith; you can't speak of the family as if it has a collective brain. Most of the time, I got the feeling that that wasn't the answer people wanted to hear, but it was the true one.

All of which is a long way of suggesting some small insight into why Teddy might be writing his memoir now, other than the $8 million—because he believes in the power and merit of books, believes in the telling of history, rather than trying to squelch it.

I would also note something that the Globe does not pick up (shocker): Hachette Book Group is, of course, an arm of Hachette-Filipacchi Media, the publisher of George magazine. So there is an emotional connection involved that the Globe missed. Senator Kennedy's memory appears to be longer than those who write about him, which bodes well for his memoir.

InsideHigherEd reports that a Dartmouth trustee, Todd J. Zywicki, has given a speech in which he attacks the culture of higher education and, more specifically, Harvard.

Those who control the university today, they don’t believe in God and they don’t believe in country,” he continues. “The university is their cathedrals…their entire being. Both those who fund it and those who teach within it are tied up in the university.”

[Blogger: The university is their cathedrals?]

Commenting on campus culture as a whole, Zywicki told the audience, “We have the Spanish Inquisition, and you can ask Larry Summers whether or not the Spanish Inquisition lives on academic campuses today.”

The Spanish Inquisition? Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

I know I should take conservatives more seriously about such things, but they're so over-the-top and ill-informed. Problem is, they are enormously good about getting the message out on such things; their sense of grievance is powerful. But, my gosh, they sound so unhappy.

In any case...speaking of Larry Summers, anyone know how that book of his is coming along?

That's always been my impression, dating back to when I was an undergrad in New Haven and Harvard people who came to visit were always talking about how much more fun Yale was.

Now the Crimson seems to agree, editorializing that the tailgates at Yale were vastly better than in Cambridge—traditionally the case (it's also true of the parties), but apparently this year the reason was due to a mellow police presence at Yale.

In Cambridge last year, the Boston Police Department and Harvard administrators organized the strictest Harvard-Yale tailgate in recent memory. Regulations and checkpoints were everywhere. Every last detail was proactively enforced. Students were not allowed to bring any liquids into the event area, and students over 21 were required to receive a wrist band in order to be able to purchase beer and spiked hot chocolate (a policy repeated at Yale’s “student village” but not at the entire tailgate).

Harvard and Boston need to take a good look at the philosophy of tailgating in New Haven and realize that a more pragmatic approach can be more effective for all parties involved.

Hmmm. True enough, but the Crimson misses an important point: Undergraduate fun is not high on Harvard's list of priorities. What is important to the Harvard administration is staying on good terms with politicians and residents in Boston and, more specifically, Allston.

Why did Harvard crack down so much on fun at last year's Game?

So as to avoid irritating any constituency which might slow down its Allston plans.....

Kevin Jones, the Berkeley graduate student who made an illegal left turn at a red light and got David Halberstam killed, has pleaded nolo contendere to a charge of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter. He'll get a sentence of 30 days, probably reduced to 5-10 and community service.

On the one hand, I think this guy should be locked up because his idiotic driving got a great writer killed.

On the other hand, this is something that he's going to have to live with the rest of his life, and that is a pretty serious punishment. To be an aspiring journalist, and then be indirectly responsible for the death of one of the great journalists of the 20th century—that will not be easy for Mr. Jones.

It reminds me of that scene in "Saving Private Ryan," in which Tom Hanks is dying at the end after sacrificing himself to save Private Ryan, and as he's dying, he says to Ryan (I'm paraphrasing), "Make it worth it."

In other words, do something with your life that justifies this loss.

One hopes Mr. Jones is able to rise to this challenge.

Though it's too late (at night) for me to do much more than acknowledge this issue, I did want to mention the new study showing that Americans are reading less and that their test scores are in decline as a result.

Harry Potter, James Patterson and Oprah Winfrey’s book club aside, Americans — particularly young Americans — appear to be reading less for fun, and as that happens, their reading test scores are declining. At the same time, performance in other academic disciplines like math and science is dipping for students whose access to books is limited, and employers are rating workers deficient in basic writing skills.

It's not a surprise, of course. If I were a kid today, I'd be watching more movies, playing more video games, and so on than when I actually was a kid. How could one not? They are ubiquitous, and tempting. And of course the amount of time in kids' lives is finite. If you spend more time watching YouTube, it has to come at the expense of something.

The frustrating thing about the study is that it's limited. Yes, fine (well, not fine), test scores are declining, and to the extent that test scores reflect deeper things, that is alarming. But what else do kids lose when they read less that can not be so easily measured? How is their development affected without the lessons and instruction and challenge of reading stories? What cultural legacy do they not acquire?

The New York Sun reports on a conference sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute which will allegedly show that American universities are growing more liberal.

"Universities are tilting to the left, and it starts at the student level and goes all the way through to the hiring level and even to the promotion level," the vice president and director of the National Research Initiative at AEI, Henry Olsen, said. "This is a real problem, not anecdote masquerading as fact."

(I like that, "it starts at the student level." And how exactly would universities be to blame for the politics of their incoming students more than, say, George W. Bush?)

This liberal bias is apparently wounding to conservatives who wish to become scholars.

"If my students show conservative bias, I steer them away from the academy," a professor of English at the University of Virginia, Paul Cantor, said. "They have no future — they will not get jobs. If they want to teach traditional works in a traditional matter, they have no future in an English department today."

(Professor Cantor is a visiting professor at Harvard, incidentally.)

I'm not quite sure I buy all this agita. Can anyone find a case of a conservative scholar being rejected for tenure because of his or her politics? How many conservatives even choose to go into academia? And if in the free market of ideas, most intellectuals are liberals, then how can a good-conscience conservative complain about that?

In his New Republic blog, Marty Peretz rips into J. Lorand Matory's motion regarding free speech on the Harvard campus.

(Imagine...if any humanists in FAS blogged, they could stick up for Matory! Or criticize him. Whichever.)

Peretz argues that Matory is really gunning for Larry Summers, and after Summers, Israel.

I know Matory's reputation, especially among his colleagues, one of whom dismissed him as "simply a crackpot."

He's also an obsessive. And one of the people with whom he is obsessed is Larry Summers. This obsession, one would think, had reached its satisfying fruition when a prior resolution introduced by Matory, a withdrawal of confidence from Summers as the president of Harvard, passed and resulted in the latter's resignation. There are four direct references (and at least two indirect allusions) to Summers in the Crimson piece. If it is aimed against anybody in particular the person in the cross-hairs is Summers. If anybody's right to "express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas" has been violated it has been Summers. First, in a resolution introduced by Matory himself and passed by the F.A.S. that directly made a certain view of things verboten and pushed Summers out of his job. Second, in the scandal perpetrated by the Board of Regents at the University of California by withdrawing an invitation for Summers to speak at one of its meetings.

But for Matory, it appears, that Summers's primal sin is defense of Israel....

There's more—and it doesn't get any nicer. But it appears that Marty Peretz (who, full disclosure, hired me as an intern long ago at TNR, and with whom I've had occasional contact since then) will not have to worry; Matory's motion was apparently roundly rejected.

Here is Professor J. Lorand Matory's motion to be voted on at tomorrow's faculty meeting:

2. Professor J. L. Matory will move:

That this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.

As much as I'm all for civil dialogue, I have to say that this motion feels, well, silly to me. People should "feel safe" to express their ideas? For God's sake. You are tenured professors at a university. If you do not feel "safe" expressing your ideas at Harvard, then you are too gentle a soul for this world.

What problem is this motion responding to? What grievance would it resolve? What practical impact would it have? (The only symbolic impact, if it were passed, would be to make the Harvard faculty look thin-skinned, out of touch, petulant and spoiled.) What possible enforcement mechanism could there be?

Even the idea of an enforcement mechanism is absurd.....

In fact, Professor Matory, who has never seemed afraid to speak out, nor suffered any visible consequences for doing so, is himself the best argument against this motion.

Norman Mailer has died of kidney failure.

It is a huge, irreplaceable loss.

When he was young, Mailer said, "fiction was everything. The novel, the big novel, the driving force. We all wanted to be Hemingway ... I don't think the same thing can be said anymore. I don't think my work has inspired any writer, not the way Hemingway inspired me."

I hope that isn't true; in fact, I know that isn't true, for, though I am not a novelist nor could I even approximate Mailer's stature as a writer, he was a huge inspiration to me.

On first reading "The Naked and the Dead," I found it a revelation, a testament to the combined powers of imagination, creativity, and reportage. I have urged more people than I could count to read it since, as a demonstration of what a novel can and ought to be.

And when I was in college and read "The Executioner's Song," I thought to myself, this is what journalism can do. Even though it's not entirely journalism.

He lived a life full of mistakes, inconsistences, irritants, arrogance, brilliance, wonder, and most of all, passion.

He lived a life.

In the Crimson, Harry Lewis argues that it's high time for Harvard to normalize relations with ROTC.

The issue is not bringing an ROTC unit to Harvard. Units are merging today, not splitting. We should normalize Harvard’s relations with MIT ROTC. Harvard ought to pay its bills to MIT directly. It ought to bus our ROTC students as it buses our volleyball teams.

Lewis acknowledges, of course, the rationale for Harvard's ROTC ban—the military's discrimination against gays—but argues that Harvard's interaction with the military is more likely to erode that ban than its isolation from the military.

To quote Democratic Congressman Barney Frank ’61 (Massachusetts), speaking courageously some weeks ago on a related matter, “idealism that is empowered by pragmatism is the way in which we make progress.” We are part of American society and ROTC is sui generis, an exception to our rules about student activities.

This is a very tough issue, and Lewis is clearly trying to resolve it for all parties. And I agree that a greater connection between Harvard and the military would probably be good for Harvard, and might be good for the military.

But I wonder if it is not just Harvard hubris to suggest that the university's greater interaction with the military will do anything to change its discriminatory ways.

The current system is awkward, yes, and opens Harvard up to criticism from the right-wing and less ideological supporters of the military.

Still...if it were black people the military was shutting out...would we then say that it was acceptable for the military to recruit on campus?

Serious question.

So the question that follows is, What's the difference?

(Sadly, many African-Americans insist that there is a difference beyond the obvious one. They're wrong.)

The difference is that it's still more acceptable to discriminate against gays than it is against blacks.

And so I tend to come down on the side of saying, you know, awkward as the current situation is, it's the best of various bad solutions...

That's what Professor J. Lorand Matory thinks, and as a result, he's raising a motion at the next faculty meeting to "explicitly embrace free speech at Harvard," as the Crimson puts it.

[Matory] argued in [a] September op-ed that those who question Zionism and Israeli policy toward Palestine “tremble in fear” of the backlash that would result from voicing their opinions.

“My colleagues are urging me to bring forward a resolution [to the Faculty meeting] in support of free speech,” he said. “I want for us to be able to talk openly. If there is fear and pain, it should be expressed.”

Matory has, of course, been outspoken on Israeli-Palestinian issues, so the most vocal pro-Israel members of the faculty are skeptical about this motion. Alan Dershowitz challenges Matory to a duel (well, not really), and Ruth Wisse says...

“This is a bogus issue. There is an agenda here and free speech is not it.”

What would Walt & Mearsheimer say?

In the Wall Street Journal, Bob Rubin continues to strike the "oh, all right, if you insist" theme.

Mr. Rubin said he was reluctant to take the chairman's post but ultimately agreed to out of "concern for the company and concern for the people of the company and the importance of the company in the global economy."

He added that it wasn't the way either he or Sir Win Bischoff, who was named interim CEO, "would have chosen to spend our lives at this point."

This seems rather uncharitable, given that Citigroup has been paying Rubin approximately $20 million a year for the past eight years for the odious burden of taking the occasional meeting...

Until now, Mr. Rubin's job at Citigroup largely entailed attending -- and offering advice at -- weekly meetings of business heads, helping to orchestrate acquisitions and tapping his contacts to win business for the New York bank. "If you need somebody to call somebody and get the phone answered, Bob can do it," says a senior Citigroup executive, noting that Mr. Rubin enjoys "unencumbered access" to leaders and executives around the world.

Harvard-watchers might also wonder if criticisms about the Citigroup corporate board might also apply in some cases to the Harvard Corporation.

To critics, the composition of the 14-person board is part of the problem. Corporate-governance experts frown upon boards stocked with CEOs, arguing that such executives tend to defer to their fellow CEO's judgment and are less likely to exercise aggressive oversight. Citi's board is stacked with current and former chiefs, from Time Warner Inc. CEO Richard Parsons to Alcoa Inc.'s Alain Belda. Only Mr. Parsons, who ran a small New York bank until 1995, has a background in the financial-services industry.

And finally, it is interesting to see Rubin, who meticulously cultivates his reputation, taking a few hits.

It is Mr. Rubin, the highest profile member of the star-studded board, who has been a particular lightning rod for criticism. His murky responsibilities and lucrative pay package have fostered resentment. Last year, he collected a total of about $17.3 million in salary, bonus and stock awards, making him Citigroup's second-highest paid executive after Mr. Prince, according to the company's proxy statement. To some past and current Citigroup executives, and to investors, the pay seems excessive.

"I and others should hold Rubin partially responsible" for Citigroup's struggles, says Douglas Kass, who runs Seabreeze Partners Management Inc., a hedge fund that doesn't have a position in Citigroup stock.

There was a time when journalists would have been terrified to use words like "murky responsibilities" when discussing Rubin, lest the find their access quickly cut off....