intellectual-creativity

When I first started writing in high school, words came easily. I’d be on a San Francisco bus, watching the light sear through the blurred plexiglass, and feel compelled to jot musings in the notes app of my phone; or I’d wake up in the middle of the night, sweating and enlivened, and spew my thoughts onto paper as if spurred by some extraterrestrial force. Back then, writing was an independent endeavor. It was something I engaged in when I felt moved to, or when I thought that translating my emotions into a journal might bring about clarity regarding a trivial aspect of my then-life.

CUCR, I first want to acknowledge that you had every right to invite Mike Cernovich and Tommy Robinson to campus. In the op-ed you published following the controversy over your wryly named “Free Speech Month,” you correctly pointed out that although “there are [painful] costs to speech” you should nevertheless be able to invite whomever you please to the University. I agree—as does, to its credit, the Columbia administration. My argument, then, is not that you can’t invite such speakers to campus but that you shouldn’t. Your provocations and your desire to be inflammatory is making a mockery of conservatism and doing a disservice to those of us who care deeply about political dialogue and the open exchange of ideas.

There are geniuses among us.

This weekend, I went to see Divergent. Having not read the book or reviews, I wasn't sure what to expect. But within the first half hour—when a male character mockingly shouts at Shailene Woodley to take her top off—my brain was screaming "rape culture." By the end of the movie, I had formed early arguments on three sides: This movie was very cool because it went against rape culture, this movie was not cool because it was another example of a young adult heroine afraid of her own sexuality (I do hope Bella Swan is doing well ), and the anti-rape culture message was cool, but in terms of story and character development, could have been woven in more elegantly.

I was thinking about an old Kanye West tweet the other day. It was the denouement of one of his weirdly aggressive Twitter rants, and really only notable because it was, in fact, a famous George Bernard Shaw quote: "If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas." At Columbia, the Shaw quote might provoke responses from students that run the gamut from, "Why would Columbia students even be exchanging Apple products? They already have all of Mac's products anyway," to, "I eat intellectual exchange for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, unless I'm too hungover to care. Amen, Mr. Shaw. Amen."

In case Columbia has somehow left you lacking in the Having Your Dreams Crushed By Your Intellectual Heroes department, here's a nugget from politics wonk/sports nerd/stats guru Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight blog: The Columbia football team is about to participate in the Worst College Football Game of the year.

Two of our columnists got together to talk about Herman Cain's lecture today, the nature of events at Columbia, and what it means (if anything) for campus-wide discussion. Take a look: