Jozef Imrich, name worthy of Kafka, has his finger on the pulse of any irony of interest and shares his findings to keep you in-the-know with the savviest trend setters and infomaniacs.
''I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center.''
-Kurt Vonnegut
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.
ZDNET – “This free privacy tool gave me answers. Data is gold, and some companies go to great lengths to collect it, store it, and sell it. But you can put an end to it. [Note – sort of]
There’s a service called Global Privacy Controlthat offers extensions and/or links to browsers and apps that support the cause. This service began in 2020 and was inspired by the California Consumer Privacy Act, which gives California residents the right to opt out of any business that would sell their data. Currently, GPC is available for:
Inside the Luke Sayers saga and the AFL’s day in court In court documents, Cate Sayers claims the AFL took only two weeks to clear her husband of making the social media post and any wrongdoing
AFL club presidents might still get away with things that footballers never would but even these non-paid so-called scions of society are now subjected to a higher set of standards in a world where Luke Sayers’ predecessor, John Elliott, would not have lasted a season.
When Sayers took over the Carlton presidency in 2021 he was still being forced to deal with the cultural damage and collateral schisms which had festered for two decades since Elliott was forced out after his club’s systematic salary cap cheating was exposed.
Former Carlton president Luke Sayers is being sued for defamation by his estranged wife, Cate.GETTY IMAGES
Elliott, who died in 2021, had his name stripped from a stand and was later banned by the Blues after alleging the club had paid hush money during his time to women who claimed they had been sexually assaulted by Carlton footballers. But even before all of that, Elliott was making highly offensive comments to women at AFL functions and on one occasion touched up the wife of another club’s chief executive, as I reported at the time. Even after that incident was exposed, there were raised eyebrows but little else.
Still, the now departed Jack, who for years also thought he was bigger than the smoking bans across football venues, was an outlier among his brethren – and it was very much a brethren back then.
It would be nice to say the same about Allan McAlister, the former Collingwood president who said shortly after the famous Nicky Winmar stand against racial vilification that the Magpies did not have an issue with Indigenous Australians “as long as they conduct themselves like white people ...”
“Conduct unbecoming” was not a thing back in 1993, but nor was another Collingwood president in Eddie McGuire sanctioned 20 years later when he made his infamous King Kong comment relating to Adam Goodes.
John Elliott when he ruled Carlton.ANGELA WYLIE
Even though the Collingwood board and his various media outlets took no action, McGuire did apologise and underwent a racial education process through the AFL. Which is more than can be said of then-Hawthorn president Jeff Kennett after his albeit significantly less damaging 2019 observation that security staff at Marvel Stadium were “new arrivals” who did not understand the game.
By then head office had a head of social inclusion on its executive team, but nothing much happened and the strongest pushback came from another club president in Brisbane’s Andrew Wellington, who expressed his dismay in writing to AFL chiefs.
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If only someone at Carlton had been prepared to self-regulate sooner after the lewd photograph – which exposed not only Sayers’ anatomy but ultimately his then shattering and now well and truly shattered marriage – appeared on social media 15 months ago for those fateful 13 minutes.
Sayers should have resigned immediately for the sake of his family, and in the knowledge that whatever his role in the scandal, his club needed to be distanced from it.
Instead, Sayers battled on, telling friends – in what can only be regarded as naivety combined with hubris – that he had done nothing wrong and therefore could survive the scandal. Not everyone on his board agreed, and those directors, too, should have pushed Sayers to do the right thing.
Because Sayers did not resign, the AFL felt compelled to investigate the Blues president on the basis he might be guilty of conduct unbecoming. AFL chief executive Andrew Dillon should not be pilloried for this, although you can’t help but feel his predecessor Gillon McLachlan, a champion of the negotiated outcome, would have convinced his mate Sayers that he had to immediately walk away. Certainly, then commission chairman Richard Goyder could have stepped in.
That way an integrity investigation could have been avoided, an investigation from which the findings and the entire process have now become a major embarrassment for the game’s head office, with Cate Sayers’ defamation case against her estranged husbandheaded for the Supreme Court.
Luke Sayers was cleared by an AFL investigation led by the league’s integrity unit.ELKE MEITZEL
Sayers went within weeks anyway. It has been reported that Carlton also investigated Sayers and his role in the photograph scandal through its then compliance boss turned club director Chris Townshend. Carlton bosses say this never happened. It seems there was little communication between Sayers and his board during that tumultuous period.
In fact, Townshend, a barrister, was a middle man between the club and the AFL’s integrity unit and ultimately convinced Sayers the issue had become a major distraction for the Blues and he should step down. But the timing was poor, coming so soon after Sayers was cleared by the AFL, and smacked of a deal.
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It is true that the scandal damaged Carlton and saw some brief board unrest, but it was quickly settled when Rob Priestley prevailed as Sayers’ successor.
Carlton have significantly bigger on-field issues. For the club’s angry and frustrated supporters, coach Michael Voss is the targetand Sayers is a distant memory. Not so for head office, which began the ill-fated investigation with the best intentions but is now feeling the heat.
This is the last thing that Dillon – who is facing a number of challenges among his executive team – needs right now, and it looks disastrous for the game’s new media executive Sharon McCrohan. Never has the competition’s key spin doctor faced so much public scrutiny and been so publicly targeted by the media.
McCrohan, a surprise appointment at the end of last season, raised eyebrows because of her close links with Sayers for whom she initially worked during the PwC tax scandal. At least one club executive warned Dillon that McCrohan could pose a problem.
Not only is her style, sometimes prone to confrontation, at odds with her predecessor Brian Walsh, but McCrohan is powerless to help with this scandal despite her impressive CV and years of experience, because of her previous role. Her leading role in the saga is making some of the game’s governors uncomfortable. McCrohan’s supporters insist that she worked for Sayers as a favour over the photograph scandal and on a pro bono basis.
Luke and Cate Sayers in 2023.GETTY IMAGES
Whether you accept the explanation that its integrity and legal lieutenants had no reason to disbelieve Sayers’ version of events, which came in the form of a statutory declaration, it certainly appears that some of his claims were untested.
That the AFL believes Sayers did not post the photograph – which was linked to a female executive of a Carlton sponsor – is beyond dispute. What Cate Sayers alleges is that the league colluded with Carlton and Luke to exonerate him.
But AFL scandals over the years have been punctuated by a “blame the woman” scenario.
For Dillon, McCrohan, her predecessor Walsh and the AFL’s investigators, the best outcome now is for Sayers v Sayers to move to the Family Court where no subpoenaed AFL conversations would see the light of day. The AFL wishes Luke Sayers would reach a settlement with his former wife, but by all reports he has attempted as much, to no avail.
Compared with the sins of some presidents who have gone before him, Sayers’ deeply personal photograph was a titillating story – humiliating for him and his family and potentially embarrassing for just one other party. That it has moved into the corridors of power at Docklands can only be seen as an own goal for the AFL.
With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like “When Bad Things Happen to Good People,” he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Friday in Canton, Mass. He was 88.
His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.
Several of Rabbi Kushner’s 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. One reviewer called his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” a “useful spiritual survival manual.”
Rabbi Kushner wrote “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushners’ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly.
The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Schocken Books. It catapulted to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.
“It was my very first inkling of how much suffering was out there, all over the world, that religion was not coping with,” he told The Times in 1996.
His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: “It becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we don’t hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.”
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
“I don’t know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we don’t understand are at work. I cannot believe that God ‘sends’ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I don’t believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
“‘What did I do to deserve this?’ is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, ‘If this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?’”
He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. “And chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless,” he wrote, “because by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in God’s goodness.”
Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushner’s thesis more dialectically: “diminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being — to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.”
“In effect,” he wrote, “we need to join Him in rooting for good — our job is to help cheer Him up.”
Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love.
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Rabbi Kushner in 2012 in the sanctuary of Temple Israel in Natick, Mass., outside Boston. He led the congregation for 24 years while writing many of his books. Credit...Art Illman/Metro West Daily News, via Associated Press
Harold Samuel Kushner was born on April 3, 1935, to Julius and Sarah (Hartman) Kushner in the East New York section of Brooklyn. His mother was a homemaker. His father owned Playmore Publishing, which sold toys and children’s books, especially Bible stories, from a shop at Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street that he hoped his son would take over. Harold felt he lacked his father’s business sense.
“The only thing worse than competing with my father and failing would be competing with him and outdoing him,” he said.“Going into the rabbinate was not a way of saying, ‘I’m rejecting what you’re doing.’ I’m affirming it.”
He was raised in Brooklyn (the family moved to the Crown Heights section when he started elementary school), where he was a passionate Brooklyn Dodgers fan. After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in 1955 and a master’s there in 1960.
He had planned to major in psychology but switched to literature after studying under Prof. Mark Van Doren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. On a lark, but armed with a solid religious upbringing, he enrolled in an evening program at the Jewish Theological Seminary. By his junior year at Columbia he had decided to become a rabbi.
After Columbia, he enrolled full-time at the seminary where he was ordained, graduated in 1960 and received his doctorate in 1972. He studied later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
He volunteered for two years in the Army’s Chaplain Corps at Fort Sill, Okla., where he became a first lieutenant. Returning to New York after his discharge, he served for four years as an assistant rabbi at Temple Israel in Great Neck, N.Y., on Long Island.
Rabbi Kushner married Suzette Estrada in 1960 and moved to Massachusetts, where he became rabbi of Temple Israel in Natick, a suburb of Boston, in 1966. He served as the congregational rabbi there for 24 years and remained a member of the congregation until he moved into a senior living residence in Canton in 2017.
His wife died in 2022. His brother, Paul, a rabbi in Bellmore and Merrick on Long Island, died in 2019. In addition to his daughter, he is survived by two grandchildren.
Among Rabbi Kushner’s other books are “How Good Do We Have to Be? A New Understanding of Guilt and Forgiveness” (1997), “Living a Life That Matters” (2001) and “The Lord Is My Shepherd: Healing Wisdom of the 23rd Psalm” (2003).
He also collaborated with the novelist Chaim Potok in editing “Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary,” the official commentary of Conservative Jewish congregations, which was published by the Rabbinical Assembly and the Jewish Publication Society in 2001.
Rabbi Kushner often said he was amazed at the breadth of his readership across theological lines. In 1999, he was named clergyman of the year by the organization Religion in American Life. In 2007, the Jewish Book Council gave him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
In his books, other writings and on-air commentary, often as a radio and television talk show guest, he became a font of aphorisms embraced by clergy of all denominations. Among them were: “Forgiveness is a favor we do for ourselves, not a favor we do to the other party,” and, “If we hold our friends to a standard of perfection, or if they do that to us, we will end up far lonelier than we want to be.”
“People who pray for miracles usually don’t get miracles, any more than children who pray for bicycles, good grades, or good boyfriends get them as a result of praying,” he wrote. “But people who pray for courage, for strength to bear the unbearable, for the grace to remember what they have left instead of what they have lost, very often find their prayer answered.”
He explained that his book “When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough” was intended to be “an examination of the question of why successful people don’t feel more satisfied with their lives.”
“Drawing on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes, it suggests that people need to feel that their lives make a difference to the world,” he wrote. “We are not afraid of dying so much as of not having lived.”
A correction was made on
May 1, 2023
:
An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the name of the company that published “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” It is Schocken Books, not Shocken Books.
A correction was made on
May 2, 2023
:
An earlier version of this obituary misstated when Rabbi Kushner died. It was Friday, April 28 — not Thursday, April 27.
When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know atcorrections@nytimes.com.Learn more
Sam Roberts, an obituaries reporter, was previously The Times’s urban affairs correspondent and is the host of “The New York Times Close Up,” a weekly news and interview program on CUNY-
