For Chronicle of Higher Education subscribers only, I’m afraid, this follow-up to that New Yorker feature on the subject a few months ago (I’d look it up, but…well, you know):

Brown U. Acknowledges Its Founders’ Ties to Slavery but Stops Short of Apologizing
 
By MARTIN VAN DER WERF
 
Brown University issued an exhaustive documentation on Wednesday of its founders’ role in the slave trade, and recommended setting up a memorial on its campus in Providence, R.I., and establishing a center for the continuing study of slavery and justice.
Coming after three years of meetings, however, the report — by a 16-member Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice — may be more notable for what it doesn’t do: It falls short of offering an institutional apology, and while it discusses the issue of reparations at length, it makes no recommendation on whether to offer such payments to the descendants of slaves. Subscribers may continue.

James Wolcott writes:

Kenji Fujishima on Infamous, which he finds more texturey and inquisitive than last year’s Capote. I haven’t seen Infamous yet, only read Doug McGrath’s tart script, but this meditation and Armond White’s make me keen to go.

Earlier on Emdashes, another point of view on the new Capote movie.

But that doesn’t mean David Remnick’s not a good writer fella. Jon Friedman went to a panel on Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times” at KGB and found that Remnick (who was there too) was a sport and a brick and a peach and all kinds of other incongruous nouns, none of which he actually uses. Friedman also asked Remnick about his Bill Clinton Profile: “When I asked Remnick if he came away liking his subject, he said bluntly: ‘It’s not a date. It’s not my job as a reporter to like or dislike somebody.’ Clinton, he concluded, ‘is a force of nature.’ ”
I wonder if he felt that supernatural glow everyone I’ve ever met who’s met Clinton or even been in the same room as him has reported? A former colleague at PEN told me she didn’t know they were at the same event, and suddenly became conscious of an intense heat radiating toward her back. She turned around: Bill, as she lived and breathed. I once met Jesse Jackson, and had the same sense of a twinkly nimbus around a powerful, magnetic personality. Maybe Clinton is more twinkle than nimbus. I’m not sure.
By the way, doesn’t it bother you slightly that a “New York Times executive” told Friedman that reading the Clinton Profiile was “the single biggest commitment I made to ANYTHING since I married my husband”? That’s worrisome in anyone, much less a senior member of a newpaper staff, don’t you think? Even if she’s joking, it’s too weird.
Meanwhile, I just returned from the Art Directors Club dinner honoring various inductees into their hall of fame, including Art Spiegelman. I wrote down some things he said and will transcribe them, but meanwhile I must report that Francoise Mouly looked like a million Euros, and that’s even more than dollars, and didn’t the cute young Canadian advertising hotshots at my table gawp admiringly! Mouly was also funny and impressive and all, but holy brioches, that pale satin dress was the hornet’s coronet.
Finally, the martyred Spencer Morgan and associates at the Observer (which I can’t type without hearing young John from Michael Apted’s 7 Up: “I read the Observer AND the Times“) record memories from still more New Yorker Festival events, involving Robin Williams, Zadie Smith, Sasha Frere-Jones, and one of the original inspirations for Emdashes, the majestic Donald Antrim.

It’s Guy Maddin’s Top 10 Criterion DVDs.
In other news, David Remnick is speaking at Princeton, his alma mater, next Wednesday the 18th on campus.
Our friends at The Millions have two great posts about New Yorker news: one on that Joyce Carol Oates hubbub, and another on Matt Diffee and co.’s (including Newyorkette) new book, The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker. I’ve read it, and I can honestly say it’s pretty damn funny, especially the full-page questionnairs Diffee had the cartoonists fill out about themselves. Being cartoonists, they often veer outside the lines, and being jokesters, they often defy the question or just draw a silly picture instead.

Yes, the irony of having this right after (well, now before) Hitchens, and so on. Jordan Lite writes in the Daiy News:

Bartenders breathe easier when patrons aren’t allowed to light up, says a Scottish study that found a dramatic improvement in employees’ lung health within months of a smoking ban.
…
New York’s bartenders can vouch for the change.
“I feel better, much better,” said John Zhang, who’s manned the Algonquin Hotel’s bars for 15 years. “Right away, I could feel it.”

This still doesn’t explain the awesome longevity of Algonquin colleague Hoy Wong, but it can’t have hurt, either.

Newcity Chicago‘s Ray Pride really doesn’t like the new Capote-in-Kansas movie, Infamous:

What a rotten, rotten movie, with the even more rotten fortune to follow the austere fictionalization of Truman Capote’s research of “In Cold Blood” that was Bennett Miller, Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s “Capote.” “Infamous” reeks of curdled cosmopolitanism, with the co-writer of “Bullets over Broadway” taking a succession of potshots at his protagonist. [Douglas] McGrath’s got a callous, jaded eye, a patrician disdain for the motley on display. This is a sustained sneer of a picture. (Call it “Bullets over Holcomb.”)
…
McGrath takes a page from the form of his biographical source, George Plimpton’s paragraphese, cut-and-paste style as a drama-sapping device, with “Reds”-like witnesses shot against a studio-setting skyline…. McGrath’s screenplay moves almost in lockstep with Futterman’s, hitting many of the same incidents, figures and notes. (The two films were produced almost simultaneously.) “Infamous” zips blithely forward as if performed by a road company where the theater manager is a secret sot.

Pride adds, referring to the harrumphs about Capote‘s depiction of William Shawn: “McGrath embroiders elsewhere, substituting the fiction of publisher Bennett Cerf accompanying Capote to the execution for Miller’s fiction of New Yorker editor William Shawn coming along to witness the deaths.”
 
And because sometimes I don’t have it in me to start a new post, a sort of related article: Peter Carlson in The Washington Post on the state of The Paris Review under semi-recently appointed editor (and mensch, in case anyone’s making lists) Philip Gourevitch. Wonder how long this story has been sitting around waiting for someone else’s missed deadline? I’m not certain I’d assign a piece on The Paris Review to someone who’d write that “Most literary mags have the life span of fruit flies, perhaps because most literary magazines are about as interesting as fruit flies,” but perhaps I’m too sensitive.

Here’s the brief story, by John Biggs:

If E. B. White and Joseph Mitchell had known that their essays would end up on metal platters spinning at 5,400 r.p.m., they would probably have asked for a bit more per word. Their writing — along with articles by hundreds of other contributors to The New Yorker — is now collected on one 3-by-5-inch portable hard drive.
The 80-gigabyte drive has Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s top-hatted symbol, engraved on the case. It connects to Macs or PC’s using a U.S.B. cable and contains 4,164 issues of The New Yorker, dating back to 1925. The drive has 20 gigabytes set aside for updates that will be available online.
The $299 device is available at www.thenewyorkerstore.com. Installation is simple: plug it in, allow it to install a special reader on your computer and then search or browse issues by author, date or content. Each article appears just as it did in decades past, and the archive includes all the advertisements, cover art and, of course, the cartoons.
You can even personalize your drive with two lines of text, creating an heirloom to be passed on from cyborg to cyborg, far into the future.

The actor who played both sides of the frame in Coffee and Cigarettes now follows Harvey Pekar in jumping the life-cartoon-life divide. From Reuters UK:

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Cate Blanchett is attached to star in “Cancer Vixen: A True Story,” based on an upcoming memoir of the same name by Marisa Acocella Marchetto, a cartoonist fashionista for Glamour and the New Yorker.
Marchetto’s autobiography, which has been generating buzz ahead of its release by Knopf on Tuesday, describes how she fell in love with a celebrity restaurateur and was planning their wedding when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and realised that she had let her health insurance lapse. Her friends — stylists, gossip columnists, designers — rallied around her as she wore killer shoes to chemo sessions and strove to get married on time.
Blanchett and her husband, Andrew Upton, are in talks to serve as producers of the Working Title Films project.
Blanchett stars with Brad Pitt in “Babel,” which opens October 27, and “The Good German,” which will be released December 8. She won an Academy Award last year for her supporting role as Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator.”

Here’s Newyorkette on Marchetto’s book.

Coll is quoted at length in Rachel Smolkin’s story in the American Journalism Review about, in the words of their dek, “how top editors decide whether to publish national security stories based on classified information.”