Brandon Hammer

After news broke that Eliot Spitzer had been caught paying for sex, the public displayed a seemingly inexhaustible fascination in the woman involved. Secret Diary of a Call Girl, Showtime’s new series, seeks to tap into this interest by taking viewers into the world of high-end prostitution.

While there is no shortage of innuendo or sexual references on network primetime, sex is a subject that seems to belong exclusively to cable. CBS’s new series Swingtown, though, is all about sex: adolescent sex, adult sex, monogamous sex, polyamorous sex, moral sex, immoral sex, safe sex, and unsafe sex.

Most of the early presidents are known for something big: Washington, the great general, was the man for whom the office of Chief Executive was designed. Jefferson was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the president who purchased the Louisiana Territory. Madison was the “father of the Constitution.” Monroe even had his own doctrine. But who the hell was John Adams?

Is there any point to the major requirement or is it just an unnecessary demand that prohibits students from taking important or interesting courses? The real blame for this situation belongs to the American education system as a whole, for it has made these worthless majors a fundamental expectation of higher education.

The global landscape today is much more rocky and uncertain than it seemed eight years ago. American forces remain stuck in Iraq, Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons and threaten the stability of the rest of the Middle East, genocide continues in Darfur, and China and India continue to grow rapidly. The way the presidential candidates propose to deal with these issues and the differences of their policies are therefore extremely important.

It goes without saying that political news and sports news should be very different. Nevertheless, if you watch CNN or MSNBC, chances are you’ll see political coverage that looks a lot like sports coverage, focusing on which candidates (or teams) are doing well this season and therefore have a chance to make it past the primaries (or to the playoffs) in order to become president (or World Champion).

David Horowitz wants to know who’s afraid of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. Though I’m a proud Jew who feels a very close connection with my Jewish community both at Columbia and at home, I think there are many reasons to be afraid of such an idea.

America’s prosperity in the ’50s and the revolution of the ’60s have each been the setting of countless television shows and movies.

If you watched CNN this past week, you most definitely heard about Don Imus' racially inappropriate comments, you likely heard about recent bombings in Iraq, and you probably listened to some news about the 2008 presidential campaign. What you probably did not hear is that the extremely tight and potentially revolutionary elections in France are less than a week away.

When I arrived on Columbia's campus at the end of August, I had no idea what to expect from the Core Curriculum. Sure, I had said in my application that it was one of the main reasons I felt drawn to the University. But I really did not know how it would feel to read a Lit Hum book every week or be asked to write "college level" essays.

Last year, it seemed quite obvious that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' nominees for best picture were all extremely politically charged, mostly with respect to American politics. Crash and Brokeback Mountain addressed issues of discrimination based on race and sexual preference, Munich and Good Night and Good Luck both used allegorical stories to examine and criticize the way we deal with the perceived threat of terrorism, and Capote discussed the justification, or lack thereof, for the death penalty.

The Super Bowl was an extremely exciting event for four years of my life. Because my mother was from that heart-breaking sports town of Buffalo, New York, I readily recall the great sense of excitement and hope before the four Super Bowls from 1991 and 1994.

We in the United States are not alone in dealing with problems stemming from immigration. France and other Western European nations, including Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands, are also attempting to figure out how to bring immigrants into their societies.

I have never understood why cynical Americans complain that companies are pushing the holiday season earlier and earlier by commercializing Christmas and Hanukkah. It is not as though Christmas songs and green and red Starbucks cups detract attention from an all-important sentiment that we are supposed to be feeling during early November.

When I received a call from my father telling me about Sen. John Kerry's "botched joke," as the media is now calling it, I was pretty annoyed at the Republicans. "Fuckers," I said to myself, "why do they always have to make a mountain out of a molehill? Honestly, it is pretty clear that he was just characteristically inarticulate and meant that Bush was stupid.

On Russia's southwest coast lies Georgia, a small, progressive democracy whose freedom is currently under attack. Following real democratic elections in 2004, Vladimir Putin, the president of Russia, failed to attain complete control over this small former Soviet Republic.

The American film industry has long attempted to curb racism and hatred through its motion pictures. From the 1947 Academy Award winner for best picture, Gentleman's Agreement (a film that denounced anti-Semitism in America), to this year's nominees, Crash and Brokeback Mountain, Hollywood has presented critiques of our society's discriminatory sentiments.