Michael Sandel's famous Harvard course, "Justice," is being broadcast this year online.

Out of college , money spent / see no future , pay no rent / all the money's gone, nowhere to go. I wrote a little bit about hard times at Harvard in that review of How the University Works for Polygraph; now here's a whole piece in Vanity Fair on the subject. Via Infectious Greed.

Incensed, one member of the board of Harvard Management Company, the fund that manages Harvard’s endowment, told me, “This story is about leadership. It isn’t about money.” He may be right. At some point in the last five years, the men and women who run Harvard convinced themselves that the endowment would grow at double-digit rates forever. If Harvard were a publicly traded company, those people would have been fired by now.

“Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” remarked Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967. “And now they’re coming hat in hand, pleading to the faculty and students to bear the burden of cutbacks. It’s a scandal! It’s an absolute scandal, the way Harvard has handled this financial crisis.”

Monday night 2!

* 61 Essential Postmodern Reads: An Annotated List. (Absalom, Absalom!? Hamlet? Really?)

* Nature's right to exist comes to Shapleigh, Maine. Via MeFi.

* The Harvard Crimson reports that Henry Louis Gates was apparently arrested yesterday for trying to break into his own home. Post-racial America is awesome. (via SEK)

* Also from SEK: scientific proof Powerpoint sucks.

* Inside Blackwater, the corporation so evil they forgot to give it a non-evil name.

Sunday!

* Great Archie comics experiments of 1989-1990.

* This ruling of Sotomayor's, it must be said, was a little douchebaggy.

* "You almost get the sense guys like Thiessen are hoping for an attack so that they can blame Obama when it happens." Almost?

* Republicans who happily sat through three-and-a-half years of Bush vacations are outraged! that Obama took a night off.

* Tough times at Harvard U.

* Non-Whedon directors for the Buffy reboot. Wes Anderson snubbed again, though I bet Tarantino could do a good job with it.

Also from my Facebook newsfeed: Somebody told Harvard the canon's dead.