In what is consistently my favorite article of the year, the Times excerpts from the best commencement speeches. Here are my two favorites.

Cory A. Booker
MAYOR OF NEWARK
Yale University

“There was a group of kids that used to hang in the lobby of my building. … One in particular, he reminded me of my dad. He had that quick wit, that great swagger. …

One month into my time as mayor, I got another call for a shooting. It was on Court Street in our city, and I go down there and I do the same thing. I’m going to people, telling them about our plans, telling them that we had to pull together, that we were going to fight through this crime, that we were going to drive down the violence. I barely paid attention to the dead body on the sidewalk and another one being rolled into an ambulance.

After that night of being important, of being mayor of New Jersey’s biggest city, I went back to my home in the high-rises of Brick Towers. I sat there with my BlackBerry reviewing the incident reports of the day, and then it came to that shooting on Court Street. And I looked at that BlackBerry, and I saw the name of the murder victim. It was the kid from my lobby. It was the young man who was my father. It was this smart and charismatic young man who God had put in front of me every single day.

I looked at my BlackBerry praying that the name would somehow change, praying that it was a mistake or maybe not the same young man, but it was him. … How could we all crowd a funeral home for his death? Where were we for his life? God had put him right in front of my face, but I was charging off, to do important things. I could not see what was right in front of me.”

Jerry Brown
GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA
University of California, Berkeley

“I am not saying that the big issues are going to be settled easily, that greenhouse gases will soon be curbed or that inequality will be quickly reversed. But I do affirm, based on my experience, that people can exercise power wherever they are in society. Certainly not on every occasion but, at crucial moments, imaginative and bold people make a difference. … You have the intellect. Make sure you have the will.”

Excerpts from a New York Times article called “Why do I Teach?” by Gary Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame:

Overall, college education seems a matter of mastering a complex body of knowledge for a very short time only to rather soon forget everything except a few disjointed elements. [...]

In general, people retain the knowledge that they repeatedly use in their professions. But what we studied once and haven’t taken up again and again is mostly lost. [...]

I’ve concluded that the goal of most college courses should not be knowledge but engaging in certain intellectual exercises. [...]

The goal of the course is simply that they have had close encounters with some great writing. What’s the value of such encounters? They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. [...]

The fruits of college teaching should be measured not by tests but by the popularity of museums, classical concerts, art film houses, book discussion groups, and publications like Scientific American, the New York Review of Books, The Economist, and The Atlantic, to cite just a few. These are the places where our students reap the benefits of their education.

Africa Confidential turns its focus this week to Ibrahim Bah, who was a key financial conduit between the RUF and Charles Taylor during the Liberian and Sierra Leonean wars [the articles are gated]. Despite being under a UN travel ban and asset freeze, Bah travels in and out of Sierra Leone frequently and conducts business unencumbered in Freetown.  In 2008 he had a gold and diamond trading company based out of an office very close to a police station in Freetown. He is also involved in a mercenary firm that has tried unsuccessfully to engage in recent conflicts in Cote d’Ivoire and Libya. Sierra Leonean officials turn a blind eye to all of this.

The highlight of the Bah articles, however, is the connection between Bah and an Italian businessman named Vittorio Narciso Ruello. Bah appears to have screwed over Ruello repeatedly, taking hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy diamonds but never delivering the diamonds.

In a statement to the police, Bah claimed he was not defrauding Ruello but suffering from the ups and downs of an uncertain business.

The best part, though, is that Ruello paid Bah to make him a Sierra Leonean honorary consul to Guinea Bissau (a la The Ambassador). This is even more outrageous than the Central African Republic attempt as you can’t even be a Sierra Leonean citizen unless you are of “Negro African descent” (for more on this see here and here). Anyways, Bah didn’t come through; it didn’t work. So Ruello went to the Sierra Leonean police to complain of being cheated!