Armin Rosen

In March, Turkmenistan’s education ministry will host a delegation of professors from the Harriman Institute, SIPAS’s center for Eurasian studies. This trip could epitomize the academy’s ability to improve the world rather than passively study it—it should not represent its unforgivable moral deafness.

At their worst, blogs are like ishikoro: evidence of the alienating vastness of an incredibly strange and incredibly young online frontier. At their best, blogs are the exact opposite—a reminder that we can, as Boxer puts it, “inhabit the source of power and hope.”

On Nov. 12, 70 members of faculty signed a “Statement of Concern” alleging that “President Bollinger has failed to make a vigorous defense of the core principles on which the university is founded, especially academic freedom.” I wonder how many considered the ironic and, at times, unbelievable fact that the same University President Lee Bollinger helps pay Hamid Dabashi’s salary.

For the past 10 days, everyone has called this a “hunger strike.” But let’s not get carried away: the 1981 protest among accused Irish Republicans at Maze Prison, during which 10 people (including an elected member of Parliament) starved themselves to death in a failed attempt at improving their living conditions—that was a hunger strike.

Over the past weeks, writers on this page have decried the conflation of fascism and Islam and have written in opposition to David Horowitz’s upcoming Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. But they are guilty of a pretty egregious conflation themselves, one that prevents them from examining a potentially important idea solely on its merits: the conflation of the phrase “Islamo-fascism” with the objectively despicable individual who is speaking at our University this coming Friday.

The CMJ Music Marathon is a grueling test of physical and mental endurance. With hundreds of bands playing at scores of venues in far-flung corners of the city (apparently the Gowanus Canal is an indie hotspot), the festival’s 12 daily hours of music are physical punishment for even the most dedicated fan. And with most bands failing to move beyond the formulaic power-pop and dance rock that’s dominated the indie scene for the last few years, it takes a strong mind indeed not to despair at hearing virtually the same thing over and over again.

It’s a wonder that MEALAC professor Joseph Massad isn’t a hoax perpetrated by conservative activist David Horowitz. No doubt Horowitz excites over academics who so perfectly epitomize everything wrong with the academy, and whose published works read like dossiers from Campus Watch.

In the 1930s, the Columbia administration participated in what could be described as the coddling of the Nazi regime.

Don’t look now, but there’s a revolt afoot. It arguably doesn’t matter whether Nadia abu al-Haj, author of the controversial and theory-bloated Facts on the Ground (the curious can find almost the entire book on Amazon Reader), is granted a lifetime post at this University.

It unfolded like a terrifying set-piece, and each new item of information seemed more trite and intuitive than the next: the killer had been a student. He had been a social outcast, homicidally contemptuous of the society that he felt had cast him out. The guns used had been purchased legally.

dward Said and his four-decade-long association with our University should be familiar to every Columbian. So, did Yale professor Paul Bracken, SEAS '71, suffer a bout of temporary amnesia on March 29 at Thursday night's panel discussion on the implications of Iran's developing nuclear program? It's unlikely-professors in the Yale School of Management and members of the Council on Foreign Relations tend not to spontaneously lapse into paroxysms of textbook orientalism, unless, of course, they're doing it to prove a point.

It's not that I think I'm too good for GS. Please-so long as we're all sitting in the same lecture halls, taking the same exams, and fighting with the same pseudo-fascist administration over things like housing and financial aid, it's the height of arrogance to assume any hierarchy among Columbia's undergraduate schools.

When director Philip Haas began filming the first-ever American dramatic feature on the Iraq war, he initially wanted his gritty, pessimistic portrayal of a nation mired in social and sectarian complexities to be a "partisan movie." One year later, Haas says The Situation has played well with people from across the political spectrum, as a year of violence and mismanagement has made a film which could have once spoken to the polarity of the American public remarkable for its inability to polarize.

Proponents of electric automobiles understand that there are few things more painful than the death of a good idea. More painful still is when that idea dies quietly and without controversy. An incredibly good idea died this past week. Information to this effect was buried deep in a Spectator news article, but the end of Boredatbutler.

In his Devil's Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce made the commonsensical observation that satire simply does not work if its audience lacks proper appreciation for it. More insightful an observation was his reason why this might be: "All humor," Bierce wrote, is at its core "tolerant and sympathetic"-in Bierce's opinion, to view humor as ever being condescending or genuinely malicious is to misunderstand it.

Chances are you have never heard of The Glaciers. And chances are that if you hadn't started reading this piece, you never would have. The band, which combines elements of alternative country, folk, and art rock, does not expect to make it big. "Very few bands that we know make a living off of their music," says Glaciers co-founder Ian Stynes. That a band with so few commercial prospects can do just that is a demonstration of the forces that are reshaping and democratizing music.

Celebrity and reality have always occupied and will always occupy separate spheres. Refer to the famous scene in Sunset Boulevard in which Gloria Swanson's washed-up silent movie actress makes the delusional insistence that she was "always big-it was the pictures that got small.

We're told from a young age that, regardless of the problem, violence is not the solution. It isn't until we reach a slightly older age that we realize that this is a crock of bull.

In the decidedly non-intellectual canon of MTV prime time programming, one show stands out as not only the absolute nadir of human intellectual development, but as the possible nadir of human development in general. With its juvenile preoccupation with vomit, midget nudity, non-lethal weaponry, potentially lethal animals, shit eating, animal sex, and perverted practical jokes involving one-or in some cases, several­-of these elements, Jackass is idiotic in a world where a Laguna Beach bitch-fit or a fast-cutting MTV News update passes for profound; stupid even in juxtaposition with the likes of Parental Control and I Want a Famous Face. Jackass is the comedic equivalent of a particularly creepy Facebook stalker: desperate, aggressively shameless, and willing to do almost anything.

Bob Dylan's concert at Harry Grove Stadium in Frederick, Md., opened with an unusual and sometimes incomprehensible rearrangement of "Maggie's Farm." I didn't know it at the time, but the show had reached its high point.