The
Curse of Slate
Last Friday, April 18, was a
good-news, bad-news kind of day for Dean Buntrock. The good news was that he
and his wife were No. 1 on the Slate 60 Quarterly Update. That is, as of the end of March,
they had donated more money to charity in 1997 than any other Americans that we
could find out about: $26 million, to be exact, to St. Olaf College in
Minnesota. But no good deed goes unpunished. That same day, a stockholder
rebellion more or less forced Buntrock to offer to step aside as head of WMX
Corp. (formerly known as Waste Management Inc.), a company he founded and has
run for decades. We trust he takes comfort in the thought that his
beneficiaries appreciate him even if his stockholders don't.
Meanwhile, friends of Lewis and Dorothy Cullman, No. 3 on the list with a $10
million gift to Yale and another $10 million to the New York Public Library,
were quick to note that they did not recognize Lewis Cullman in our alleged
photograph of the generous couple. We did have a photograph of the Cullmans,
posing with the president of the library, Paul LeClerc. We then made the
classic error of cropping out the wrong man. We hope nobody saw Dorothy Cullman
with the library president and thought: "Poor Mr. Cullman. This is the thanks
he gets for his $10 million." In any event, through the magic of Internet
technology (i.e., the ability to erase your mistakes), we have restored Dorothy
to the arms of her husband. Our apologies to all three.
Fray of
Hope
Slate's Fraymistress, Pavia
Rosati, has been on leave the past few weeks and will be out of "The Fray" for a few more weeks.
During her absence, two of our earliest and most energetic "Fraygrants" have
been filling in. CoHost Nedfagan is the handle of Ned Fagan, and CoHost IrvSnod
is also known as Irving Snodgrass. Both of them lead rich nonvirtual lives in
faraway locales, so we appreciate their involvement in and dedication to
Slate's community bulletin board. If you haven't yet entered the Fray, please
give it a try. You must register in order to post a message (it's easy and
free), but you can "lurk"--i.e., read what other people are saying--without
registering.
--Michael Kinsley
