The prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters has announced eight new inductees, including historian Robert Caro, New Yorker humorist Calvin Trillin and poet Paul Muldoon. Founded in 1898, the academy is "an honor society of 250 architects, composers, artists, and writers," according to its web site, with new members voted in as "vacancies occur." The academy's goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in the arts. Last year, Mr. Trillin released a best-selling memoir about his late wife, Alice Trillin based on the New Yorker essay that "seemed to trip some kind of secret wire in urban romantics’ hearts," wrote the Observer's Lizzy Ratner. And Mr. Caro, he of The Power Broker fame, is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and wrote a multivolume series on Lyndon Johnson. More inductees, courtesy of the Associated Press, after the jump.  read more »

"It's a Princeton versus Yale thing."

Mr. Caro graduated Princeton in 1957; Moses finished Yale in 1909.

There is a certain kind of ultra-industrious Princetonian that does everything in a most thorough way and is totally obsessed with doing it right. Then there is the Yalie who loves to spread his feathers and bask in the limelight and Moses was extremely Yalie in that sort of way. I can just see Caro getting dressed up in his coat and tie to beaver this Yalie down to size.

Other Yalies: William F. Buckley Jr.; Cole Porter; George W. Bush; Jennifer Beals.

Mr. Tenner has a whole anatomy of the Ivies which you can find via his website. He, by the way, is Princeton '65.

But throughout the next hour, Mr. Caro kept making subtle suggestions about how that exhibit, "Robert Moses and the Making of the Modern City," came up short.

And to those who had found Mr. Caro's subtitle (Robert Moses and the Fall of New York) to be incongruous with the city's renaissance, he replied, "I meant that the city had fallen, not that it was fallen forever."

For several years now I am constantly being approached at parties by large gentlemen, usually of the real estate persuasion, but sometimes from government--they come up to me and say to me, 'Don't you think it's time for a new Robert Moses?' And because I don't want to argue with people at cocktail parties, I say to these people, 'No!' Which happily cuts the conversation short.

The overflow crowd jumped to its feet to give the guy a standing ovation.

Here and there in the Profiles there are broad hints that my associates and I were not always ultra refined in our actions. They say on occasion we quietly after hours smoothed the paths for our parkways. They insinuate that old trees were whisked away by ingenious stump pullers to allay the apprehensions of nervous environmentalists. [...]

As the city folk ride into the open country, we shall, I trust, be forgiven. The original railroad builders too were in a sense fuel merchants and chopped down some spindly woods to stoke their engines.

Timber!

Matt Schuerman chronicles a difference of opinion between historians Robert Caro and Kenneth Jackson over the legacy of Robert Moses.

And Joe Conason thinks that the president's State of the Union address was shop-worn and unrealistic.