Jay Nordlinger has a good joke about Israel. (Scroll down to the end.)

I have been skeptical of the importance of the "Yellowcake Road" story. But if it is true that the White House has blown the cover of a covert CIA operative as a way to get revenge on a political opponent, that is a big deal. A very big, felonious deal. (Thanks to a Calpundit commenter for the link.)
Mark Kleiman and Tom Maguire (start here) have been all over the story, justifiably.
Maguire argues that the CIA (or certain factions therein) may have blown the cover of Ambassador Wilson's wife to advance its feud with the Administration - which would also be a big, felonious deal, albeit with repercussions not to the liking of the President's political opponents. To say the "jury is still out" is, literally, an understatement - it hasn't been convened. Yet.
What's that about the "coverup being worse than the crime?" If the story is true, then a story that, absent further action, would've been washed away with the blood of Uday and Qusay Hussein may have lead to felonious behavior from, depending on who is right, Administration officials in a Nixon-style counterattack or CIA officials for whom Federal law is a trifle when turf battles are at stake. Neither option is a good one.
I am no fan of Congressional investigations, but this situation is too important to be left to the journalists. (And given what Congress has done this year, even if the investigation doesn't lead to anything useful, it will at least keep them from doing more damage.)

In no particular order:
1) Kevin Drum is right about many things, but most notably about this one:

[E]ven if the specific evidence in the State of the Union speech was dubious, what was the general prewar assessment of Saddam's nuclear bomb program? Should George Bush have been talking about it at all?
So I pulled my copy of The Threatening Storm off the shelf and reread the section on nuclear weapons (pp. 173-175). It's unequivocal: writing in late 2002, Kenneth Pollack says there is a "consensus" that Iraq has an active nuclear program; it employs as many as 14,000 workers; experts "unanimously" agree that Iraq is working to enrich uranium; and Iraq might be able to build a bomb as early as 2004.
But unlike chemical and biological weapons, which might yet be found, a nuclear program is too big to hide. If we haven't found it by now, it just doesn't exist, and that means that something that was "unanimously" agreed upon in late 2002 has turned out to be flatly wrong.
By the end of January, with UN inspectors roaming freely around Iraq, the evidence for a nuclear program was dwindling fast. For some reason, though, Bush's advisors felt that chemical and biological weapons weren't enough for his State of the Union speech, so they seized on what little was left in order to keep the threat of nuclear bombs alive. That's bad enough, but even worse is how the collective intelligence agencies of the world misjudged what was happening in Iraq so badly. This isn't a small point of interpretation, it's a case of absolute certainty about a massive technical and industrial program that turned out to be complete fiction.
How did that happen?
(Emphasis added.)

Leaving out the obvious caveats about how it is still far too early to say that Iraq's nuclear program is a "complete fiction" and "if we haven't found it by now, it doesn't exist" (after all, the first round of inspectors didn't find Iraq's nuclear program until directed to it by defector Hussein Kamel, four years after inspections began), Kevin is absolutely right that the Niger "gotcha" game is a stand-in for the real issue of whether the world's intelligence services completely misread the situation. And if so, that scandal far outstrips any question of whether a particular claim should or should not have been in the State of the Union address. (For one, it clearly pre-dates the Bush administration, so the question of whether they improperly bullied the CIA is irrelevant.) And on the tactical level, this conflation - clearly being encouraged by some administration critics - will likely backfire, as the storm over the second question will likely dissipate once the US finds some store of chemical weapons - which (I think) is still likely - and also defusing the "Bush lied" storyline.
2) I still think that administration critics like Josh Marshall are semi-willfully blinding themselves to the main message of the Administration's arguments for the war. And because of that, I think they are overstating the importance of the Niger/uranium claim.
3) The "Bush lied" string is clearly based, in large part, on resentment over the way Republicans treated President Clinton and the 2000 election, and the according desire for revenge. Don't believe me? Ask Michael Tomasky, showing signs of Kool-Aid overdose. I found this piece strangely gripping:

Here, distilled into four paragraphs, is the liberal interpretation of the last 10 years.
After a long and in some ways well-earned stroll in the wilderness, Democrats finally elect one of their own to the presidency. He is a prodigiously talented man. He has flaws, to be sure, and some of them are important. But far more important is the way the rules of the game change upon his ascension. On election night, the nation's leading Republican goes on television and snorts that the victory is illegitimate; from that point on, a campaign is waged to destroy -- not tarnish or discredit or soften up, but destroy -- the new president and his wife. This campaign has no precedent in American political history. (Please spare us the Alexander-Hamilton-and-his-mistress parallel; the 1790s are not parallel to today's world, and Hamilton was attacked by one yellow journalist, not a network of operatives with tens of millions of dollars to spend.) Finally, he is caught in flagrante. Even then, the public asserts directly and repeatedly that it does not consider the offense a high crime or misdemeanor.
But no matter. Against the clear will of the people, impeachment proceeds. It fails, but the hounding, again mostly over pseudo-scandals (like a West Wing ransacking) that never happened but are endlessly hyped by a frivolous media, continues. And in its way, this technique succeeds: What was objectively a bountiful and comparatively humane period in American history -- prosperity, peace, low crime, reduced poverty, international goodwill; an era that should have demonstrated that Democrats knew how to run the country and left the GOP badly marginalized -- is successfully tarnished.
So the vice president seeks the presidency. He runs a soggy campaign, true. But again, it's beyond dispute that the majority of Americans who go to the polls intend for him to be the president. Yet he loses -- according to the rules, at least. But somehow the experience of the previous eight years has left us with the distinct feeling that, had the situation been reversed, other rules would have been found to ensure the same result. We are admonished to "get over it" by people we know would not have gotten over it if things had gone the other way.
The Republican takes over. For eight months, he convinces precious few who didn't vote for him that he's the man for the job. But then unprecedented tragedy occurs. Americans, the vast majority of liberals included, rally around their country; by and large we support War No. 1. We have serious reservations about War No. 2. But by now something more disturbing than a mere policy dispute has occurred. By now, simply asking questions, or refusing to accept the government's assertions at face value, is denounced as something tantamount to treason. We find this, um, troubling: Open debate and vigorous dissent, we were raised to believe, were once considered the quintessential American values. Now, they are taken as prima facie evidence of anti-Americanism. (We note also how ardently the other side seemed to believe in vigorous dissent when its members were the dissenters.) In Georgia, a man (and sitting senator) who sacrificed his body for his country is labeled unpatriotic. The president has it well within his power, by simply uttering a few morally forceful sentences, to put an end to this madness. But the demonization of the other side is what keeps him afloat politically, and he refuses to do so -- and, in the Georgia instance, goes so far as to implicitly play along.

Even if that description is 100% accurate (and I'm resisting the temptation to unload on the accusation of "asking questions=treason"), this is the best illustration of David Brooks' diagnosis of self-defeating rage. Ask the mischievous Mark Steyn:

They’ve let post-impeachment, post-chad-dangling bitterness unhinge them to the point where, given a choice between investigating the intelligence lapses that led to 9/11 and the intelligence lapses that led to a victorious war in Iraq, they stampede for the latter. Iraq was a brilliant campaign fought with minimal casualties, 11 September was a humiliating failure by government to fulfill its primary role of national defence. But Democrats who complained that Bush was too slow to act on doubtful intelligence re 9/11 now profess to be horrified that he was too quick to act on doubtful intelligence re Iraq. This is not a serious party.

Or ask the judicious John Judis, whose belief in an emerging Democratic majority does not blind him to the fact that Howard Dean's rage-based campaign is likely to end disastrously for the Democrats (ad viewing required):

Even if the United States remains bogged down in Iraq, and even if popular doubts about the invasion and occupation grow, Americans are still likely to credit Bush with trying to wage a vigorous war against terror. And they will consider voting for a Democratic candidate only if they believe he can do likewise. The Republicans will argue that an antiwar candidate like Dean who has no foreign policy experience is ill-equipped to protect the country from attack. And a lot of people will believe those charges. At the least, a candidate like Dean will have to spend a vital part of his campaign defending his credentials on homeland security and the war against terror rather than attacking Bush's economic program. Think of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis (who, unlike Dean, served in the armed forces) unsuccessfully defending his foreign policy credentials against Bush's father in 1988.
...To put it in regional terms: Dean, a culturally libertarian New Englander who opposed the war, could virtually forget about winning any Southern or border states. Southerners are willing to support a Southern Democrat like Clinton with whom they can identify, but they will not vote for a Dukakis or Dean. Dean would not simply get trounced in the South: His candidacy would allow Bush to take the entire South for granted and move all his resources into states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that the Democrats have to win. In the end, Dean would be lucky to hold on to Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, D.C., Maryland, Illinois, Minnesota, California, Oregon, and Washington.

A final reason for why the "Bush lied" theme is mostly based on resentment and desire for revenge. Ronald Reagan made all sorts of weird economic claims (held in at least as much contempt by the professional economic set as Bush's claims) and other, shall we say, reality-challeneged statements. (I like the guy, but it's true.) While Democrats savaged him on all sorts of grounds, I don't recall them calling him a "liar" 250,000 times a day. That doesn't make it right to misuse/mangle/ignore facts, but you do get tired of seeing it called "unprecedented" on the NYT op-ed page twice a week when it's simply untrue. (A lie?)
After all, to quote Steyn again:

In 1998, when Bill Clinton launched mid-Monica cruise-missile attacks on Afghanistan and the Sudan, he hit a Khartoum aspirin factory and missed Osama bin Laden. The claims that the aspirin factory was producing nerve gas and was an al-Qa’eda front proved to be untrue. Does that mean Clinton lied to us?

4) Finally, the notorious site run by Al Gore's old roomate, the Daily Howler, has twice defended Bush against the charges of Niger-based lies (here and here; with links from Instapundit.).
After those posts, I will take their criticisms of George Bush and the media much more seriously.

Here's an interesting article on the looting of the Iraqi National Museum:

The most striking fact to emerge from discussions with those living or working around the museum is that, in the days before and during the looting, they saw the museum being turned into a major military defensive position by Iraqi forces.
In plain violation of the Hague Convention of 1954, Iraqi fighters occupied the museum complex and used it as a combat position for at least three days after museum staff had fled. Neighborhood residents corroborated the charges made by American forces that the Americans had come under attack from inside the museum grounds and that fighting in the area was heavy. Even as they criticized the Americans for not protecting their national treasures, Iraqi witnesses to the looting said that Saddam Hussein's forces had turned the museum into a small arsenal.
...U.S. forces have cited armed resistance from inside the complex as the main reason they could not seal off the museum and prevent the looting. In the end, they protected it only after they had defeated the last remnants of Saddam's forces in the area.
The looting began on Thursday, April 10, and lasted two days, as the battle between U.S. and Iraqi forces raged through the city.
..."Clearly there was a group of people who went through the museum filling in a list of things to steal," said U.S. Marine Corps Col. Matthew Bogdanos, who until late May led the 13-man U.S. team investigating the looting. "The person who looted that storage magazine knew just what he wanted. He could find it in the dark."
...The hugely exaggerated claims about the extent of the plunder diverted attention from the looting of ancient sites all over Iraq, a genuine cultural catastrophe, said archeologists. Unlike the museum objects, artifacts wrenched from the ground are impossible to identify or track and can easily be given phony provenances to disguise their origins. The market for Mesopotamian antiquities is likely to see a huge influx of supply over the next few years as fresh loot comes onto the market. "Anything that the U.S. military isn't sitting on is being destroyed," said Mr. Gibson. "The collectors who buy this stuff are going to be happy."

Which big-time blogger authored this piece in the Economist about the U.S.' budget deficit?
And as long as we're on the subject, check out this Paul Samuelson piece about future spending ahead:

Growing older will alert baby boomers to other inconvenient government policies that they may well try to alter. Consider:
• Nursing homes: By 2020 the 85-and-over population is expected to rise 54 percent to 6.8 million. Nursing home spending will explode. At present, the government covers only about 60 percent of the costs, mostly through Medicaid -- a program that requires that people become virtually impoverished before qualifying. Will there be a push for more generous coverage? Seems likely.
• Retirement savings: In 2001 workers had an estimated $2.3 trillion in individual retirement accounts and $2.1 trillion in 401(k)-type pensions. On withdrawal, most of this money faces ordinary tax rates. Will baby boomers clamor for preferential tax rates? Seems likely.
Who will pay for all this generosity? Our children, and their children. Under present policies, Social Security and Medicare spending will rise about 75 percent by 2030, projects the Congressional Budget Office. Our children will pay higher taxes, face higher budget deficits or receive fewer other government services. New retiree benefits or tax preferences increase the burden. There are questions of generational justice; high taxes or deficits may also hurt economic growth.
What we have needed -- and have not gotten -- is a rewriting of the generational compact, reflecting new social realities (longer life expectancies, more retirees, more private retirement savings). No president has addressed the issues candidly and risked the resulting unpopularity. We ought to be discussing how much people should pay for their retirement and what the public safety net should cover. But there's been no demand, especially among baby boomers, for candor.
The press amplifies the indifference. Somehow the mainstream press -- led by baby boomers -- regards new retirement benefits as "progressive" and dissociates them from higher future taxes or deficits. Coverage of the drug benefit has virtually ignored the issue of long-term costs. Experts at the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute have strongly criticized the congressional plans. Their views have received scant attention. Press skepticism focuses on the stinginess of the new benefit. Reflecting journalistic conformity, The Post and the New York Times both ran front-page stories on June 26 in which retirees complained that the yet-to-be-passed drug benefit was inadequate.

One of the items on my to-blog list was this piece by Ralph Wiley in which he calls Bill James a racist for pointing out that stolen bases are often overvalued relative to their actual worth. But the Baseball Crank has already set Wiley right in pleasing and efficient fashion.
UPDATE: Eric McErlain has done so, as well.

Thomas Boswell "gets" Moneyball more than most of his sportswriter comrades. But even he, along with many observers, misses the point to a degree.
In his generally solid review of the book and its ramifications, Boswell reduced the "Billy Beane method" to a list of a few factors. And his summary is technically accurate. But it misses the point, which Lewis and Beane take care to stress: that open-mindedness and the ability to search for and accept new evidence are more important than any given maxim.
And that is the best answer to questions like the one contained in an e-mail I received today from a friend:
"How many teams need to operate by those rules before the "overvaluing" stops? Once the A's, Red Sox, and Blue Jays are operating this way, can they all contend every year?"
As Rob Neyer says:

[T]he real key to Billy Beane's success, and also to his continued success (assuming that he continues to succeed): Billy's ahead of the curve. Let's assume, for a moment, that the A's draft philosophy works, and further that it's copied by a number of other teams. That's going to create a problem for those teams, because they'll all be competing for the same players, right?
And how do you solve that problem? By coming up with a new philosophy. And which organization is best-equipped to come up with a new philosophy?
I don't know. Maybe it's the A's, but the Red Sox are well-equipped, and so are the Blue Jays, and maybe the Indians and a few other teams. My point is that if the A's fall back to the pack, it won't be due to other baseball executives reading Moneyball, and it won't be due to other teams copying the A's philosophies. If the A's fall back to the pack, it will be due to a deficiency in management.

There is always more to learn. And the true lesson of Billy Beane's success, and of Moneyball, is that a willingness to learn and adapt will eventually trump a static list of rules.
Here are a couple of examples. The book describes how the A's used a system inspired by Wall Street's valuation of derivatives to calculate the defensive value of Johnny Damon as compared to Terence Long, and how while the difference was extreme by defensive standards, it was a) not as great as the difference in offensive value between extreme players and b) more efficient to make up the difference by adding more offense.
While a) is generally true, b) was a fact-specific conclusion. Another organization might take the moral of the story to be "always value offense over defense." In that case, they would likely overlook the occasional easy availability of an outstanding defensive center fielder who can't hit much. Someone like Chris Singleton, who now patrols center field for Billy Beane's Oakland A's. In that case, his defensive abilities were undervalued, and the A's took advantage of the inefficiency.
Here's another thought. As I've noted before, the biggest flaw in the book is the omission what the A's are doing with their pitcher development. Supposedly they haven't had a major surgery in their organization in years (though I haven't checked that assertion) - by contrast, the Yankees should've gotten a group discount on "Tommy John" surgeries over the last couple of years. Their program is based on a combination of avoiding high school pitchers, constant work with mechanics based on an institute run by Dr. James Andrews (the surgeon who does most major pitcher surgeries), pitch counts, and other things. It's still unclear if they've discovered the secret to pitcher development, but it's looking good.
What if they really have learned the secrets to avoiding pitcher injuries? Maybe in a few years the A's will decide they should shift to preferring high school pitchers - that way, you keep them in-house for longer and avoid the risk that college coaches will shred their arms. That will shock all those who have read Moneyball and taken from it the message "high school pitchers=bad." But the A's may be ahead of the curve again.

I've started and stopped a few posts on the "Bush lied"/"Uranium/Niger" story and keep either getting sidetracked or bogged down in trying to link all the worthy items being written on the subject (from all sides). I've decided to link to this Daniel Drezner item and say "Indeed." (Very eloquent, if I may say so myself.)
OK, I can't resist linking to this David Brooks piece from a few weeks ago about the Democrats' creeping insanity:

Fury rarely wins elections. Rage rarely appeals to suburban moderates. And there is a mountain of evidence that the Democrats are now racing away from swing voters, who do not hate George Bush, and who, despite their qualms about the economy and certain policies, do not feel that the republic is being raped by vile and illegitimate marauders. The Democrats, indeed, look like they're turning into a domestic version of the Palestinians--a group so enraged at their perceived oppressors, and so caught up in their own victimization, that they behave in ways that are patently not in their self-interest, and that are almost guaranteed to perpetuate their suffering.
When you talk to Democratic strategists, you find they do have rationalizations for the current aggressive thrust. In 2003, it's necessary to soften Bush up with harsh attacks, some say. In 2004, we'll put on a happier face. Others argue that Democrats tried to appeal to moderate voters in 2002 and it didn't work. The key to victory in 2004 is riling up the liberal base. Still others say that with all the advantages Bush has--incumbency, victory in Iraq, the huge fundraising lead--Democrats simply have to roll the dice and behave radically.
But all of these explanations have a post-facto ring. Democratic strategists are trying to put a rational gloss on what is a visceral, unplanned, and emotional state of mind. Democrats may or may not be behaving intelligently, but they are behaving sincerely. Their statements are not the product of some Dick Morris-style strategic plan. This stuff wasn't focus-grouped. The Democrats are letting their inner selves out for a romp.

I don't know how I missed this, but Robert Birnbaum recently did a fascinating and wide-ranging interview with Michael Lewis.
Some excerpts from Lewis:

This guy Billy Beane is a born Wall Street trader. I have seen this. I worked at Salomon Brothers; I worked on Wall Street. If Billy Beane has been at Salomon Brothers he would be a managing partner. He is excellent at walking into a jungle, seeing the opportunities and seeing the threats, and adapting accordingly. He has wonderful antennae. He knows what you want and he is going to give it to you.
...I've had two interesting institutional responses outside of baseball. One is from the NFL. I gave speech in New York a week before last and someone from the Commissioner's office came and he said this thing is spreading in the NFL. Bill Parcells is giving it out to the Dallas Cowboy's organization. Some guy I never heard of who is the GM of the New York Giants is handing it out to his scouts. I thought, "That's extraordinary." Because the NFL is actually well run. The guy was saying, "The descriptions that you have in the book of the discussions between the scouts and the GM, that was something that died in the NFL thirty years ago. We have become more rigorous the way we think about amateur players and baseball is way behind. The spirit of enterprise is clearly alive in the NFL. People are still looking for a way to get an edge.” The other interesting institutional response has been from Wall Street. The lead investment strategist for Credit Suisse/First Boston, the investment bank, devoted his whole research report a week or two ago to this book. The gist of it was if you want to know how to manage money the Oakland A's are a good example—if you want to look at allocation of resources and how you think about it.
UPDATE: Here is a radio interview with Michael Lewis from NPR. (Hat tip to Mindles H. Dreck.)
MORE UPDATES: The New Yorker has finally put its profile of Bill James online. It describes, among other things, the desire of Theo Epstein and John Henry
to assemble a front office staffed by people who “get it” (shorthand, essentially, for those who can remember the moment they first read a Baseball Abstract).

The literature about Bill James often describes how the narrator or subject describes how he opened the book and was forever transformed - just like a medieval conversion narrative.
Finally (I think), sometime sabermetric ally Thomas Boswell has a decent summary of Moneyball. More to come.

Yes, another Moneyball post.
Rob Neyer's most recent column focuses on Larry Dierker's new book. The book, and Neyer's interview with Dierker, contain some fascinating - and distressing - revelations:

In his book, Dierker writes about the usefulness of OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage), and he even includes a matrix listing the various run-scoring probabilities, depending on the number of baserunners and outs.
Where did Dierker come by this information?
"When I was broadcasting," Dierker remembers, "there was a guy named Steve Mann who came down here to work in our baseball operations department, and he was deeply involved in what the club was doing. I made friends with Steve, and we spent many a night having a beer and talking about the game -- about which strategies were antiquated, and which ones were still applicable. I also read a lot of the Bill James stuff, and so I learned what people who didn't have a personal investment in the game had to say about it."
This is, for most baseball players, revolutionary stuff. And Dierker knew it.
"When I became the manager, I kind of knew what were the smart things to do. But I also knew that if I did all of them, it would be at the expense of my credibility with the players. With that in mind, I just had to use my instincts to both win the game and keep the whole team in the spirit of pulling together. I didn't want to come off as an egghead guy who was just looking at numbers and ignoring people, and sometimes those considerations ran into each other."
"For example, Brad Ausmus felt like we should walk the eighth hitter most of the time, with the pitcher coming up next. As an ex-pitcher, I'd rather have the pitcher leading off the next inning. So Brad and I had different opinions a lot of the time. The eighth hitter would come up, he'd look into the dugout for the sign, I wouldn't do anything, and I could see that he wasn't real happy about it. I remember once, we retired the eighth hitter 10 or 15 times in a row. And then Kelly Stinnett reached out and slapped an outside pitch for an RBI single, and Ausmus was really mad."
That sort of thing has to wear on a manager -- especially on a team that's run by veterans like Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio -- and so it did. Fans often think that a manager shouldn't care what the players think, but managing's just not that simple.
"Whenever I was in a flip-a-coin sort of situation," Dierker says, "I'd usually make the move that I thought the players wanted me to make, because it really doesn't make that much difference, one way or the other. And you have to consider what the players are going to think."

These factors help explain why, as part of Billy Beane's quest to impose reason on his organization, the Athletcs' front office felt that it had to concentrate as much power as possible in the general manager's office, including over matters of game management that had traditionally been within the manager's purview. According to Beane's predecessor, Sandy Alderson (quoted on p.61 of Moneyball), the hapless Art Howe was hired specifically because he would be a figurehead.
But it stands to reason that Beane wouldn't mind having a manager like Dierker, who would commit to the sabermetric program out of intellectual conviction rather than career preservation. So who would be the best candidate?
As readers of Moneyball know:

Reason, even science, was what Billy Beane was intent on bringing to baseball. He used many unreasonable means - anger, passion, even physical intimidation - to do it.

Not to mention liberal uses of each variation of the word "f$%#."
The perfect managerial match for Billy Beane would share his intellect and volatility. He would not be afraid to cause controversy in his commitment to doing what he felt was the right move (in baseball terms: to tell his detractors and the media to go f$#% themselves). And a connection to the Mets wouldn't hurt.
Bobby Valentine, would you like to move to Oakland?
Think of it like Chazz Palmienteri berating Kevin Spacey at the end of The Usual Suspects: A man who could run Todd Hundley (and other unproductive veterans) out of town! A man who can use the word "sabermetrics" on national television! A man who can tell the New York media that batting order really doesn't matter!
At the very least, the sequel to Moneyball would virtually write itself.
Seriously, I think that Valentine's intellect and fearlessness would be an ideal combination for an organization committed to analytical principles. And I think that Billy Beane would respect the viewpoints of someone like Valentine even in disagreements, which would not be the case for an establishment cipher like Art Howe.
It could happen. Right?

I've been very remiss in not pointing out the many excellent pieces on Moneyball published over the last couple of months. For a good reference, go to Mariners Musings and scroll down to the appropriate right-hand list of links. The lucky Mariners fan has also transcribed interviews with Michael Lewis and Billy Beane conducted by Will Carroll on Baseball Prospectus Radio.
Also check out this interview with Michael Lewis on Baseball Primer, which contains some nuggets I hadn't seen elsewhere. Slate had a fabulous discussion between Rob Neyer and James Suroweicki about the book; the three parts are here, here and here. They also featured a great interview of Bill James by Suroweicki. Finally, check out this article by Matt Welch.
UPDATE: I forgot a few things - most notably, this recent review in the Weekly Standard:

[Lewis'] most recent book, "Moneyball," is the best business book Lewis has written. It may be the best business book anyone has written.
(Emphasis in original.)

And I had meant to discuss this excerpt from the book about fact-checkers, but Matt Welch beat me to it. Daniel Okrent, a writer for Sports Illustrated, had read the first Bill James Baseball Abstract:

“I was absolutely dumbstruck,” he said. “I couldn’t believe that a) this guy existed and b) that he hadn’t been discovered.”
Okrent flew to Lawrence [Kansas] to make sure James indeed existed, then wrote a piece about him for Sports Illustrated. It was killed: James’ arrival on the national sporting scene was delayed by a year, after the Sports Illustrated fact-checker spiked the piece. “She went through it line by line,” recalled Okrent, “saying ‘everyone knows this isn’t true. Everyone knows that Nolan Ryan attracted a bigger crowd when he pitched, that Gene Tenace was a bad hitter, that…’” Conventional opinions about baseball players and baseball strategies had acquired the authority of fact, and the Sports Illustrated fact-checking department was not going to let evidence to the contrary see print. The following year an editor who had been unable to shake Okrent’s piece from his mind, asked Okrent to retry again. He did, and the piece was published, and Bill James was introduced to a wider audience. The year after that, 1982, a New York publisher, Ballantine Books, brought out the Baseball Abstract, and made it a national best-seller.
This story has additional resonance in light of the Jayson Blair scandals.

Thanks in part to the Pedro-induced hand injuries to Soriano and Jeter, the first two hitters in the Yankees' lineup tonight are Enrique Wilson and Todd Zeile, neither of whom has any business being in the first nine batters to come to the plate in a baseball game. I know the importance of the batting order is very overrated, but this is a bit much.

People … operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence –as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.

- E-mail from Red Sox owner John Henry, quoted in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (pp. 90-91)

Growing up Orthodox in America almost invariably involves living in a cocoon. Absorbing the knowledge and folkways of an Orthodox-based lifestyle requires constant immersion and reinforcement, which results in a degree of separation from the rest of the world. To take the most obvious example, most self-professed Orthodox Jews would not dream of sending their children to anything other than 12+ years of Orthodox day school. And the necessity of living in the vicinity of such a school, along with synagogues, kosher food supplies, etc. creates an environment where kids grow up primarily (though rarely solely) associating with other Orthodox Jews.
For all but the most fanatically oriented segment of Jewry, the cocoon must be left at some point; few people can or wish to earn a living wholly within the cocoon. When is the “right” time to do so? For many Orthodox Jews graduating high school and considering where to attend college, this question is paramount. And there typically is no shortage of people volunteering for the conservative role of conscience, whispering messages of fear and caution.
21st century America, where a self-professed Orthodox Jew can come within a few hanging chads of the Vice-Presidency, has in many respects never been an easier place to be Orthodox. Yet as the larger society has grown more accepting of difference, Orthodoxy-style, the sense of fear over the prospects of preserving an Orthodox way of life (on both the individual and communal levels) has only grown for many people.
(Of course, the two factors are linked, and the link deserves its own discussion. And that discussion - for which the term “magisterial” should have been invented - has already been written by Dr. Haym Soloveitchik. Go and study. End of digression.)
With regard to the question of college and cocoons, some segments of American Orthodoxy have been discussing a pamphlet that has been widely circulated via the Internet. It is a well-written, well-reasoned journal of fear. It comes down squarely on the side of maintaining the cocoon through college. The piece is a worthy contribution to the discussion, though not nearly as important as its authors believe.
As an aside, the authors are imprecise in their initial definitions. While the pamphlet refers to “secular college,” the authors clearly don’t mean that term literally, as they approve of commuting to colleges other than parochial ones and living at home; the piece isn’t solely a brief for Yeshiva University. Thinking of the question as “cocoon v. non-cocoon” rather than “secular v. parochial college” makes the pamphlet more comprehensible, and the authors clearly assume that their readers will understand the distinction. But I thought I’d explain it for my readers who aren’t already familiar with the discussion.
I’m not going to further discuss the larger theological issues raised by the pamphlet or how certain details glossed lightly (at best) in the pamphlet can make all the difference in the Orthodox student’s college experience, nor will I base a critique on my own anecdotal experiences, for reasons that will be clear by the end of this post. (Full disclosure: I graduated Columbia College in 1995, and as for how it affected my religiosity, literally only God knows - though I’m sure that hasn’t stopped people’s speculations, to which they are welcome.) Rather, I’m going to focus on a few specific aspects of the authors’ arguments.
Despite an explicit disavowal of scientific rigor, the pamphlet’s authors clearly make several empirical assumptions. First, they assume that the experience they describe is paradigmatic and reflects the experience of at least a substantial number of Orthodox students on such campuses. Second, they assume that the intellectual and social temptations they describe accurately describes the causation of the deteriorating observance of such students. Third, they assume that those temptations are either unique in fact or effect.
The third assumption is most notably reflected when the authors argue that “The challenges facing Orthodox students in secular universities are wide–ranging, complex, and far more ominous than anything they might later encounter in the professional or business world.”
I will refrain from making a cheap comment about how that assessment of the professional or business world was made by two Ph.D students who (by their count) have spent a total of 22 semesters on campus. It is actually a very serious point, which contributes to the other two assumptions as well.
The authors know the stories of the students who succumb in the fashion they describe. It is very likely that the following students’ experiences don’t make the same impact:
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy and observance was tenuous at best before college attendance, and who violates most of the 613 mitzvot before the end of freshman orientation;
- the student who attends YU or commuter college and rebels or otherwise becomes disillusioned, which may be held in abeyance during college but not for long afterwards;
- the student who samples the forbidden fruits during college but returns to a full-fledged identification with Orthodoxy afterwards (whether for social or other reasons), and most importantly;
- the student whose connection to Orthodoxy does not suffer in college (regardless of the choice) but does suffer attrition afterwards, due to the pressures of the “professional or business world.”
It is natural for those whose lives are spent in the context of campus to focus on college as the most formative experience of a student’s life. It is the focus of their own experiences, and it makes up the sample of their observed students’ experiences. (It also makes sense that high school teachers would have an exaggerated sense of the impact of college; they may be acutely aware of what happens to their alumni immediately after graduation, but how often is that leavened by a longer-term context? And it is also natural for high school teachers to attribute a sharp, sudden deterioration in a student’s observance to the outside temptations of college, rather than a pre-existing weakness of commitment.) And it is natural to over-generalize from one’s own experience. (If “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God,” as set forth in Proverbs 9:10, the second part of wisdom is not giving excessive credence to what you see.) The result is that the authors’ perspective is very limited; the lack of context creates an exaggerated assessment of the relative risks. Even if the authors’ description of the risks to Orthodox students is 100% valid, the relevant question is “Compared to what?” This is a purely subjective statement, but I think many Orthodox-raised people in the “professional or business world” (including ones who left the cocoon for college) would disagree that the risks in that world are easier to handle than the ones on the college campus.
And despite the disavowal of scientific rigor noted above, the authors clearly assume that the experience they describe is widespread. Yet without further context, it is impossible to know if that assumption is correct – all we have are dueling anecdotal, subjective experiences, formed in a limited context and prone to distortion.
A good study will be far more valuable to the discussion than a thousand screeds. It shouldn’t be impossible to do. Without that kind of evidence, though, discussions such as the pamphlet are of limited utility at best.