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It’s like a gift within a gift that just keeps on giving, the matryoshka doll of the theater if you will. [title of show], or [tos] for short, is a musical about two average Joes writing a musical.

One of the final JellyNYC McCarren Park Pool shows, last Sunday was an exciting day with a four band line-up:Tall Firs, King Khan & the Shrines, Deerhunter, and the Black Lips.

Fans of The Office currently experiencing post-season withdrawal should not turn to other similar shows. Instead they should check out the new 2-minute webisodes available on NBC.com every Thursday, involving some characters from the beloved Scranton Branch.

On Sunday, May 18, the fundamentalist “Nichiren Shoshu”—or The True Sect of Nichiren—Buddhist Temple will be holding a 1 p.m. meeting at Miller Theatre. As a member of Columbia’s Buddhism for Global Peace club, I am concerned about this event and will be in front of Miller Theatre in protest.

I think it would be worthwhile to discover other ways to sustain this schoolwide unification, so that we can still be happy and unified during the parts of the year where we don’t have random elements like the sun to bring us all together. To do this, though, we need to find something that we can all coalesce around. Finding that “something” should be one of our goals for the coming academic year.

No faculty can complain about such evidence of superlative student IQ. But what about our EQ—emotional quotient? Certainly there have been few attempts to measure emotional intelligence because it lacks the precision of a grade point average or SAT score.

Admittedly, I joined Spectator freshman year for the opportunity to help manage an autonomous company, rather than because of an interest in newspapers. The publisher at the time ran me through her long list of day-to-day responsibilities and concluded, “That’s what I can think of off of the top of my head, but the most exciting stuff is ad hoc.” I was impressed.

This is a strange time—and Columbia, a strange place—to be practicing print journalism. “Consolidation” and “do more with less” have become grudging newsroom mantras, while papers have struggled mightily to establish a robust presence on the Web. Student newspapers may be better insulated against this sort of flux than their professional counterparts, but not entirely, and not forever.

As journalists, we figured, we should try and see as much as we could firsthand.
Working at the paper wasn’t always easy. I would sometimes come home from 2875 Broadway frustrated and exhausted. There were moments that broke my heart and mistakes that I ache to go back and fix, coffee dates I shouldn’t have forgotten about and friends I should have called back. In the end though, I can’t imagine college any other way, and I don’t want to.

There is beauty in learning how to look at the world in a different way, which is what we are told will happen to us in college. Unlike some of the seniors graduating in a few weeks, I did not have a political awakening, undergo a religious conversion, or reinvent myself at Barnard—but I started “seeing” particles and waves in every beam of light, and even dark matter and dark energy. Once I learned about them, there was no going back.

“My train is the 1 train!” To most at Columbia this observation might seem mundane. I, however, found it particularly striking only because during my last nine months as a student at the University, my train has not been the 1, but the B and C trains.

I worry every time I write this column. Will people find it relevant? Do LGBT experiences matter to the people reading it? Is it going to be typecast as the “gay column”? I especially worry about the value of critiquing institutions like marriage, a ritual unlikely to change dramatically in the near future.

As administrators choose Dean McGee’s successor, it is imperative that they find a replacement who understands GS’ institutional mission so that the school remains attractive to future nontraditional students.

A week after the 40th anniversary of the 1968 protests, two alumni involved in those events contribute their thoughts on the evolution of student activism.

Student activism is an art form that signals an urgent, heartfelt need to communicate the empathy felt about an issue at hand. That is what I believe I took part in back in 1968, and it is what I see in the student activists today.

A real debate happens when people talk freely about the conflict, attend stimulating events, and discuss them. It is only if we engage in such open, honest, and inclusive debate that there can be a chance for the Palestinians and Israelis to live in peace.

So if you ever wonder why so many of those “rich” international students are always striving to graduate in three years or just earlier than the rest of the class, it may not be the mere fact that we tend to be overachievers by nature. We might have been forced to become this way.

It is past time for the University not only to forgive but also to embrace those who took a stand 40 years ago—a stand against Columbia’s ties to a military think tank that did research for the Vietnam War effort and a stand against the University’s land grab in Morningside Park.

Here we are, at the other side of the first year—all these decisions have become part of us. How do you picture yourself now? How do you judge yourself, look at yourself, trust yourself? I bet your answers aren’t the same as they were eight months ago.

The changes made to this year’s FaCU process are welcome ones, but the hurdles that remain are ill-conceived. Come what may, the councils should let students draw their own conclusions from the deliberations, rather than try to manage public perceptions. Transparency should be a tool rather than a threat to student leaders, who, if they are making fair decisions, should have no objection to unqualified public scrutiny.

For the last eight years, Columbia has witnessed a contentious debate between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students, filled with emotion and anger. LionPAC would like to present an opportunity for Columbians to heal the division we have suffered over the Middle East conflict.

When President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was invited to campus in September, we were greeted with weeks of protest and discussion. Yet two weeks ago, we welcomed a speaker who is much worse than a Holocaust denier—a man who has been partly responsible for more than one holocaust. That man is Henry Kissinger.

Spectator wound up being more than just an outlet for my bizarre fascination with grammar. It was in the space around the words that I met some of my favorite people at Columbia.

But it seems almost insane to attempt to distill four years of college—more than a few all-nighters, far too much overachieving, and countless cups of coffee—into one, brief column for the opinion section of the Spectator’s final week of production, the last of my undergraduate career.

I’ve spent more time worrying about what to write in this column than the 50-plus pages of academic writing I have to do in the next two weeks.

I am (finally) graduating, which means that from now on I will be acting responsibly in bars in a different section of town, and that this is the last appearance of my column and horrible column photo—so it is time to clean up this mess.

Students have long complained about the University's meal plans, and with good reason. At the end of each year, students are reduced to swinging by the dining hall whenever they can in hopes of getting their money's worth. If the Columbia and Barnard Dining Services make their meal plans less rigid, no student will feel pressured to run to John Jay for only an apple or a drink.

Education about self-protective strategies is important, but an environment that fosters communication and dialogue about the reasons why so many people commit acts of sexual violence on our campus and in our society is needed.

Does the progressive escapism that we call a Columbia degree give someone the right to avoid all dissenting opinions? No. And this is where my fellow conservatives and I have succeeded.

Storytelling is a tool like any other, useless in isolation, relying on other material to serve its purpose. One needs a story to tell. Thus, we must be two things at once—as described in the text of my first Lit Hum assignment, each of us must be “both a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.”

Students often have difficulty deciding where to enter calculus and language sequences, or whether to skip introductory courses with whose material they are already familiar. The University’s departments should offer online placement tests so students are better equipped to make these decisions.

Hillel’s official policy supports a Jewish and democratic state in Israel. That policy encompasses the range of opinion among Jewish students concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, as the policy calls for the unconditional support of the existence of the state of Israel, not the specific policies of the government of Israel.

Spec made me push my own boundaries of what defines wisdom. I learned more outside the classroom than in it during my time at Spec.

While The Spec often falls short of our expectations—both as a staff and as a readership—in terms of breadth, professionalism, and overall quality, the Spec is consistently one of the better college newspapers out there. For anyone who cares about what’s happening on campus and in the neighborhood just outside the gates, the paper fulfills an essential public service.

Writing criticism for the Spectator is a bit of a masturbatory enterprise (I know this because I write criticism for the Spectator). But though it may be masturbatory, it’s not irrelevant.

One of the greatest thrills for a journalist is the feeling of being in the inner circle, of knowing things that no one else does—at least not yet. Even if you don’t make it to the top of a newspaper like the Spectator, all reporters work to develop contacts who can tell you secrets.

The state must take my rights, and take everyone’s rights. seriously. The state cannot respect my right to avoid torture if it tortures others, even if the others are terrorists.

This week, Palestinian students and others at Columbia will be mourning al-Nakba—the Arabic word used for the catastrophe suffered by Palestinians in 1948, when more than 700,000 were driven from their homes. Organizers invited both Hillel and one of its subgroups, the Progressive Jewish Alliance, to endorse.

This past week, Barnard College students received the exciting news that Mayor Michael Bloomberg will be delivering the keynote address at Barnard’s Commencement on May 20. Though some might be surprised by the mayor’s selection, Bloomberg is a fine choice of whom Barnard is rightly proud.

I originally had intended this column to be a list of specific reforms that, if implemented, would benefit students at Columbia. Before I could write it, however, I was preempted by the announcement that Lerner 6 will be used to host a consolidated student advising center. I do have one large reform to suggest, however, one aimed at solving multiple problems simultaneously.

After spending decades in the shadow of spring 1968, when weeklong student demonstrations brought Columbia to a standstill, the University is moving into another era of its history. The passage of the protests’ fortieth anniversary should remind Columbia of the hard lessons it learned—chief among them, the need to guard against divisions strong enough to tear the campus apart. But the anniversary should bring an element of closure to a sequence of events whose legacy is fiercely contested even today.

This column should at least partly be a celebration of the past few years of my life. Above all, I got to do it at one of the greatest schools in the greatest city in the world. I still don’t know what I want to be in life, mostly because the door is overwhelmingly open now to anything I can make of it.

Letters

Many of the people who work at Spectator hope to work for real newspapers someday. This is less true of people who write for the Arts & Entertainment section, which is sort of like the college newspaper of the college newspaper.

Beginning tonight, many on campus are observing the 40th anniversary of the now-legendary week of protests against the Columbia administration. Whereas the more nuanced of the scheduled gatherings aim to provide valuable historical perspective, events commemorating the protesters might succumb to the assumption that 1968 had only positive effects on balance. Those in attendance should work to appreciate the complexity of the historical consequences of spring 1968.

Upon my arrival at Columbia, I could have easily made the decision to isolate myself from the Catholic community on campus. Instead, I became involved because I wanted to share a significant part of my life as a devout Catholic with other students who felt just as strongly about their faith as I did.

I publish this open letter with the sincere hope that it will lead to meaningful dialogue. Over the past nearly four years, the institution that you head, and the business of which I am president, have been locked in battle.

One of the dangers of looking back so lovingly on my time at Columbia is that I may isolate the efforts into particular outbursts or spectacles of energy, when in fact these movements were developed with enduring care and patience by many people over long periods of time.

While Bacchanal’s April 21 spring concert has been hailed by many students as an improvement over those of previous years, the event’s small crowd and haphazard ticketing methods testify to disorganization and poor advertising on the part of its planners. Bacchanal should redouble its efforts to generate excitement and spirit among the student population through more ambitious and better publicized programming beyond the annual concert.

Op-Art