Chas Carey

Transitioning from flying off the handle to attempting a reasoned argument—or at least shedding light on an issue—in about 800 to 900 words certainly made me think long and hard about what it was I wanted to write about.

When does entertainment become art? Is it not only artists but their audiences that must suffer to reach cultural watermarks?

Columnist Chas Carey finds it’s not so easy to create a political candidate without resorting to political tricks.

I’d like to speak about the more general issue of anonymous speech, both online and off. Change most effectively comes at a personal level. You can certainly wave your hand and dismiss the hateful things posted on anonymous Web sites or scribbled on bathroom walls as nothing you should worry about, but would you be so cavalier if it were you being accused of splurging on hookers and blow?

Studying the politics of today sometimes requires the sort of distance critics apply to Shakespeare’s works. But we would be terribly remiss if we forgot that Shakespeare, like us, was caught up in the affairs of his time as well.

(Congratulations/condolences)! Your candidate, (name of candidate), (may/may not) have (won/lost) on Super Tuesday, but it’s really your devotion to (his/her) cause of (your favorite form of “change,” i.e., “change we can believe in,” “change to experience we can count on,” or “loose change” for Ron Paul) that’s heartening to the democratic process in this country.

In 1942, Samuel Beckett fled Paris with his future wife just hours ahead of a Gestapo raid on their apartment. They traveled by foot across the French countryside, eventually hiding in the tiny village of Roussillon near Avignon.

If you’re a liberal arts student, chances are you should probably stop reading this column and get back to writing the papers that should, by all rights, be the bread, butter, and unrelenting curse of your education thus far.

In China, where information does not come freely or easily, the banana crop suffered from a supposed “Panama virus” outbreak this past spring.

As Michael Tomasky of The Guardian said yesterday, even Republicans are playing the capable game against the Bush administration, aiming for “a conservativism that is competent and comparatively honest.”

I can get you a candidate that fits that bill: Richard Nixon.

We sat watching Errol Morris, the documentary filmmaker behind The Thin Blue Line and The Fog Of War, discussing his upcoming film at the New Yorker Festival this past weekend.

The newscaster hounded the girl under the camera light. "Don't you think this is an issue of free speech?" he said, drawing out the last syllable like a playground taunt.

Lawrence Wright's excellent book The Looming Tower won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction this past Monday, a fact that was overshadowed by the worst shooting in American history and, closer to home, the traumatic rape and torture of a Graduate School of Journalism student in her own apartment.

Walking to class a few days back, I saw a group out on Low Steps, proclaiming it to be "Jesus Week." I looked a little closer, and saw a sign proclaiming that "Jesus wept" and encouraging people to write up things they were sorry for and so forth. I went away feeling a little sad, especially since the event was sponsored by the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an amalgam of different Christian denominations on campus. I think Lent is a little more than "Jesus Week," some outward tearing of garments for your own salvation.

I'm going to make history on this page. I'm going to print here, in the Columbia Daily Spectator, what the New York Times quakes to even consider committing to movable type. It'll be scandalous. These are the words that go unheard in a vast majority of all our news publications.

The two brothers who watched my chess game looked like they were born about five years apart, the same gap in age between me and my opponent, my brother. I hadn't played chess in about a year, and my brother capitalized on my every mistake.

I found myself dodging and feinting as he snatched my powerful pieces away from me, blunder by blunder.

Unlike many single people, I enjoy Valentine's Day.

People say politics make them sick. Last December, I found myself bent double in a Schapiro bathroom, cursing the irony of that figure of speech-I was probably the first in a long line of political junkies following this marathon 2008 presidential race to actually start throwing up.

Welcome back, campers. Hope you've enjoyed your time away because this session at Camp Columbia's going to be the best one yet-although we're still having trouble getting the canoes up to the lake on the sixth floor of Lerner and...

...Wait, this isn't summer camp? Is that why those numbers at the top of my transcript are so low? I thought I just sucked at relay races.