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Articles by Nicholas Von Hoffman
Beyond the Gender Issue, What’s The Deal At Harvard? (March 30, 2005)
Some of what Harvard President Larry Summers said about scientific and mathematical aptitudes was sensible enough. And some of it was the kind of bosh you can expect from an economist, as Mr. Summers is. Reflections on possible standard deviations in units of scientific intelligence between the sexes — should they exist, and should somebody be able to define them — is speculation, but even the president of Harvard should be allowed to speculate, whether or not he has much of a talent for it.
When America Got High and Never Came Down (Sep. 17, 1997)
Heard from any Army colonel stationed in Washington, as follows: “At last when my children ask ‘What did YOU do in the Vietnam War, Daddy?’ I will be able to reply proudly, ‘I defended the south parking lot against the hippies!’” — Herb Caen, San Francisco Chronicle, 10/26/97 The sports network ESPN made use of the anniversary in some of its promos, but for the most part the media and social science professoriate have chosen to skip the 30th anniversary of the Summer of Love.
Harvey the Ho of Wall Street (June 26, 2002)
Washingtonians have been diverted of late by a dumpy, bearded, middle-aged man running around on Pennsylvania Avenue wearing only white patent-leather, calf-length boots, a blue wig, a thong and two tassels attached to the silver rings in his nipples. The man’s name is Harvey Pitt, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, but you must not conclude on the basis of his apparent numerous conflicts of interest and his ex parte meetings with the securities industry that he is a ho.
A Bear Lurks (February 4, 2004)
In political circles, small as they are, the argument of late has been over whether or not 2004 is a déjà-vu-all-over-again of 1972. As political writers repeat past the point of tedium, Presidential campaigns are decided by the voters’ sense of economic well-being. Liberal or reactionary, they’ll vote for the incumbent if they’re feeling flush and kick him out if they’re not. It’s the economy, stupid — last time, this time, every time. That certainly was true in 1972.
The People’s Ball (April 2, 2008)
“I am running for President because I believe that to actually make change happen — to make this time different than all the rest — we need a leader who can finally move beyond the divisive politics of Washington and bring Democrats, Independents, and Republicans together to get things done. That's how we'll win this election, and that's how we'll change this country when I am President of the United States.” — Barack Obama He might have said “if” instead of “when” he is elected.
Good Soldier; Bad War (March 16, 2005)
My son has returned from the war. After a year in Iraq, he’s come back to his wife and the rest of us unharmed in body. I don’t know about his spirit. Soldiers must see and do things which may leave, if invisible, terrible scars. I hope that hasn’t happened to him. My son is a real soldier. He is not some general’s adjutant. He was not in Emerald City, as the Green Zone is sardonically called by some people.
Diversity-Worshippers Encouraging Separation (September 18, 2002)
by Nicholas von Hoffman Whatever it is these days, it’s connected with immigration. The West Nile virus is suspected of imperiling the future of any number of birds and mammals; milfoil, an immigrant grass from distant shores, is threatening to destroy our lakes as habitat for fish and frog.
1980-1989: The Decline and Fall of the New York Empire
Moscow on the Hudson: The Decline and Fall of the New York Empire January 2, 1990 “Overturn, overturn, overturn! is the maxim of New York. The very bones of our ancestors are not permitted to lie quiet a quarter of a century and one generation of men seem studious to remove all relics of those who precede them,” Philip Hone, an upper class mayor of New York, told his diary in 1845. He would have written the same thing had he been around in the 1980s.
1980-1989: The Awakening of Kool Moe Dee
The Awakening of Kool Moe Dee: A Brother Doin’ 90 Into the ’90s January 2, 1990 “I joke with my friends a lot and say I’m responsible for 50 per cent of the rap style that goes on now,” says Harlem-native Mohandas Dewese. Idle boast? Mohandas, a/k/a Kool Moe Dee, has the longest continuous career in hip-hop, has released hit records every year of the decade, and puts out platinum albums today — something no other artist in the genre can claim.
A Few Hundred Bucks Will Get Some Attention (Oct. 22, 2003)
Rest assured, nothing is going to be done about this, but the news is still worth some cogitation. The new figures are out, and they show that almost 44 million people are without health insurance. It’s what you might expect when health insurance for a family costs $9,000 a year and is expected to top the $10,000 mark next year.
The Ghost of Christmas Past (Dec. 29, 2004)
Here we are, back in the suicide season: It’s Christmas time. Half of us are thinking not of our fellow man and woman, but of pills and pistols; the other half goes shopping, partyies and tries to make the Christmas feast fit the picture they have of a fat, ho-ho-ho Santa in the living room, spreading presents under the tree after Mommy and Daddy in PJ’s have gotten the children to bed — but not before leaving, of course, some cookies for Santa and lettuce for his reindeer. Did it ever exist?
When It Comes to War…We’re All Profiteers (Dec. 5, 2001)
Guns or butter. Butter or guns. If you take both, you’ll run out of funds. For generations, the economic textbooks taught that a country had to choose between fighting well or living well. Yet for the last 100 years, the United States didn’t make that choice. Quite the contrary: The butter came along with the guns. Thus the adjurations by present-day officeholders and politicians to “sacrifice” must refer to matters immaterial. There are other kinds of sacrifice, of course.
The Wrong Kind of Growth (August 6, 2003)
Is it growth or is it cancer? Whichever it may be, we want it, and elected officials and their would-be replacements are out in force promising us plenty of it. They talk as though there were a sure-fire formula for growth, which they know but their dumb-bunny opponents don't. Really, nobody knows for sure. What works one time may not work another. Even diagnosing what the trouble may be demands vast knowledge, experience and a very good Ouija board.
A Matter of Degrees (Feb. 5, 1997)
The football season has ended with the usual quota of scandals and reports of violent criminal activities by thugs hired to play the game by various universities and National Football League owners. Some institutions — we dare not associate them with what is called “higher learning” — figure so often in these stories they should consider changing their nicknames. The Cornhuskers might want to be known henceforth as the University of Nebraska Molesters. How about the University of Florida Rapists?
The Specter of Inflation Haunts the Investor Class (March 14, 2001)
The rivets are rattling, steam is escaping from the boilers, and the arrows on the dials are jiggling while the warning lights blink and electric horns sound. An end-of-an-era craziness has been in the air for months. Tales of carelessness, stupidity, sloppiness and extravagance fill the papers. Money is leaking over the decks. It ain’t just the Clintons who’ve been doing strange cartwheels.
Leakage
Residual sewer gas from the Watergate explosion has leaked to the surface. John Dean has written a book the aims of which are first to make money and second to disprove Joseph Alsop’s contention that its author is a “bottom-dwelling slug.” The new material in Blind Ambition consists mostly of the part of John Dean’s story he was afraid to tell under oath, the palaver that he himself says his lawyer warned him to cut out of his Ervin Committee testimony because it’s too self-serving.
King Cohn
Roy Cohn was one of the most loathsome characters in American history, so why did he have so many influential friends? fb tw mail Print msg wa sms AP Images Roy Cohn (right) with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, during a committee hearing in Washington on April 26, 1954. Ad Policy Citizen Cohn By Nicholas von Hoffman Doubleday 483 pp. $19.95. The Autobiography of Roy Cohn, By Sidney Zion Lyle Stuart 284 pp. $18.95.
The Class of ’43 Is Puzzled
Everywhere else colleges call the alumni back for their twenty-fifth anniversary when they are ripe and ready for gift-giving. At Harvard they do the same, but they do it richly, in discreet decency, with ceremony and conviviality; they do it like one rich man borrowing money from another. They do it right because Harvard is doing it, and everywhere else is imitation and approximation.
Why the '70s in DC Were Really, Really Bad | Washingtonian
Forty years ago, it was disco and bell bottoms, the city was falling to pieces, hostesses from Spring Valley to Cleveland Park were putting joints in silver dishes on their coffee tables, the Country Gentlemen were playing bluegrass in Arlington, and people were discussing moving the capital to Kansas. It was an era without a definition, then or now. Washingtonians tend to measure history in myth-driven increments: the romance of Camelot, the fury of Watergate, the Reagan Revolution.
Why the '70s in DC Were Really, Really Bad
17th and I streets in 1978. Photograph by James K. W. Atherton/Washington Post/Getty Images. Forty years ago, it was disco and bell bottoms, the city was falling to pieces, hostesses from Spring Valley to Cleveland Park were putting joints in silver dishes on their coffee tables, the Country Gentlemen were playing bluegrass in Arlington, and people were discussing moving the capital to Kansas. It was an era without a definition, then or now.
LIFE MAGAZINE - THE SNARLING DEATH OF ROY M. COHN - 905W-000-035
THE SNARLING DEATH OF ROY M. COHN 207S-004-03A Four months before the end, a haggard Cohn posed willingly, just as heâd sought the spotlight with McCarthy 35 years earlier. A the time of his death on August 2, 1986, Roy Cohn was 59 and a generation had come to adulthood knowing of no senator named Joe McCarthy. But people born in the 1940s or earlier remember Cohn and his master performing on television.
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