Word: traube
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...Washington is a plate full of highly intelligent, artless, tactless, and harsh people,” says James S. Traub ’76, who wrote a 2003 cover story on Summers for the New York Times Magazine. “It is true that even there, diplomatic skills get you to the top. But it’s also a world of people who are really abrasive...
...Anecdotes are a powerful thing,” Traub explains. “They’re a lot more powerful than statistics are. There have been so many interactions, but the ones that become public, those are few. In talking to people at Harvard, it’s not hard to find someone who’s had a personal experience with Larry that they found bruising. So it’s not these exceptional moments where he decides to get on the soapbox or something. His whole intellectual method, which to him is simply designed to drive towards...
...this time showy restaurants and "lobster palaces" were opening to cater to the new rich. The better places kept luxurious "bachelor apartments" upstairs to which the wealthy man about town, whether married or single, could retire after dinner with his latest eye candy. "A new unashamed morality was brewing," Traub writes, "in the democratic and ungoverned climate of Times Square...
...might say that through history Times Square has been a cyclotron of social change, a place where sex and liquor and talent all spun around to produce some truly phosphorescent elements of the national disposition. That's the history that James Traub tells in The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (Random House; 313 pages). It's a shrewd and rollicking account of a place that rose to glory as a playground for all classes, skidded into a chaos of drugs and porn, and has come back as a family fun center. Traub...
...delicate social ecology couldn't last. Broadway declined. Hard drugs arose. Damon Runyon's Times Square became Ratso Rizzo's. In the 1970s, 42nd Street was overrun with porn shops, junkies and bus-station hustlers. Traub adroitly explains how a combination of municipal power and rising real estate values succeeded in driving out the rot. In a new world of tall towers and chain stores, the Disney company played both beauty and the beast--corporate pioneer in the once skanky wilderness but also chief symbol of the bland mass marketplace that the Square is today. It's not just...