Seriously. In the White House. As President Obama was speaking at a meeting with credit card industry leaders.
As The New York Times put it: “Americans may be struggling to pay their credit card debt. But for Larry Summers, President Obama’s chief economic adviser, the issue is apparently a snooze.
For the record, we have never seen President Levin fall asleep on the job.
(Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Christopher Buckley ’75, the speaker at next month’s Class Day, has a lengthy excerpt from his upcoming book, “Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir,” included in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine.
Buckley writes that his book is “an account of becoming an orphan,” after the death of both of his parents in an 11 month span. Buckley spends a considerable amount of space describing his relationship with his father, famed conservative and former News chairman William F. Buckley ’50, who died Feb. 27, 2008 at 82. (Read the News’ obituary here, and coverage of his memorial service here.)
“Recently, I was driving behind a belchy city bus and suddenly found myself thinking, not for the first time, about whether Pup is in heaven,” Buckley, the co-founder of the Yale Daily News Magazine, writes in the excerpt. “He spent so much of his life on his knees in church, so much of his life doing the right thing by so many people, a thousand acts of generosity. I hesitate to put it this way, but I’m dying of curiosity: how did it turn out, Pup? Were you right, after all? Is there a heaven? Is Mum there with you? Grumbling, almost certainly, about the ‘inedible food,’ and saying, ‘Bill, you’ve got to speak to that absurd St. Peter creature about getting Christopher in — I mean, it’s all too ridiculous for words.’ ”
(Photo: The Collection of Christopher Buckley, via The New York Times)
Maybe you’ve wondered: How much would it cost to bring in a former Harvard president to give a big-time guest lecture in SSS 114?
Now we have an answer: $10,000, according to financial records released by the White House earlier this month.
Former Harvard President and Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who is now President Barack Obama’s chief economic adviser, collected more than $2.7 million in speaking fees from investment banking firms (including $35,000 from Merrill Lynch and $135,000 from Goldman Sachs), universities and other organizations since leaving Harvard, according to the White House documents.
And one of these universities was Yale, where Summers presented two talks as part of the Arthur M. Okun Lecture Series in April 2008 for the comparatively small honorarium of $10,000. (You can watch them here and here.)
Former First Daughter Barbara Bush ’04 is said to be engaged to marry fellow Eli Jay Blount ’05 (above) this summer at the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, the Web site StyleList.com reported Tuesday.
“Barbara and Jay are getting married this summer in Kennebunkport,” the Web site quoted a source as saying. “It’s very quiet, but their friends know.”
A spokesman for former President George W. Bush ’68 did not immediately respond to a request for comment, the Web site said.
(Photo by Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images)