Since the disappearance of Annie Le, the biology PhD student who was found strangled and stuffed into a utility closet, the Yale students have been telling each other and the press how unsafe they feel. Added campus police are newly visible, in dayglo-green jackets, astride bicycles, on the quads and streets. Yes, of course the university needed to respond to the anxiety of students and parents: rule number one in a crisis, if you're in charge...

N’est-ce pas parce que nous cultivons la brume? — Rimbaud It’s tempting to try to sort out the good Derrida from the bad but the longer I try the more it all seems bad. Of course, it’s easy to separate the early, middle and late in the hopes of quarantining his earlier and seemingly more lucid works from the deluge which followed, but once the lines have been drawn it is clear that most of his annoying tics were present from the very ...

Part 1: The Arms Race (*metaphor stolen from Henry Em) Before I left Seoul I had planned to write a follow-up portrait of my experience with the education system there. If first grade was about the training of protocol and relationships between people in the system, second grade, for me, was about the training of academic anxiety. In my first-grade post I was able to watch the jockeying for status and alliance as well as the expression of acad...

Precisely at the moment when “French” has become a synonym for wickedness, all things French seem to be doing very well in the realm of popular culture, from Madeleine Peyroux to the Oscars, to speak nothing of fashion and food, which never entirely fall out of touch with the Hexagon. The success of Ratatouille in particular reflects the complexities of contemporary Franco-American cultural relations.

Recently I flipped on the TV and found myself watching the last number of a Celine Dion special, in which the blade-faced Quebecoise swished around in a disconcertingly short skirt before a camera set a few feet below the level of the stage. Watching the show, I reflected that what is so offensive about her is not simply that she's bad but rather that a vast number of stupid people think she's good.

I went into the city the other day — you wouldn’t believe how disgusting it was. Every office, every bar, there was a clump of people standing outside smoking and no room to go around them. On such a gray day you could hardly tell if you were inside or out. Throw in packs of taxis and all the delivery trucks and it felt like there was twice as much carbon as oxygen.

I'm just back from California and here's what I saw.

The last week of classes—time of regrets and relief. I tried to steer my last session toward a gentle landing, but there’s always a bit of a bump as it’s suddenly over. Now I can no longer say “… which we’ll make sure to talk about later” or “Good point, can we hold that for a while?” As usual, I ended the class thinking that I’d talked too much (it gets easier as the years go on—much easier, in fact, than listening) and that I’d left things ...

Originally the medium of film was expected to have scientific potential, as photography had with Muybridge's motion studies. Michael Apted's 7 UP series is one of the few films I know of which has tried to realize that potential. It is an epic documentary, like Shoah or The Sorrow and The Pity. Apted's series follows the lives of a disparate group of British schoolchildren as they grow up, returning to interview them every 7 years. The lat...

No one seems to question what investment bankers do, to pick an example. What do people imagine when they imagine the labor of a Wall Street suit? Talking on the phone a lot, wearing a little headset? Tracking stock prices and talking about portfolios and ratios and indices? As long as there’s money being made and money to be made doing it, no one worries too much about what the work entails, day in and day out, or whether it’s really work. N...

For those who haven’t followed the story, a quick recap of some recent events at Duke University. On the night of March 13, the historically party-hardy and super-elite men’s lacrosse team hired two, uhm, dancers for their Monday night party. One of the women was, uhm, allegedly raped at the party. The accusation is not of “date rape,” but of a beating, choking, and violent rape by three of the players in the bathroom of the house they were re...

Driving home from a trip to Long Island the other day, I couldn’t help but remark once again that Long Island is a depressing place, or more precisely, the place depresses me in a way I find difficult to explain. There are many places I’ve been or passed through that seem broken down and faded, like old boxes of crackers gathering dust on a forgotten shelf of a convenience store. But that’s not what’s depressing about t...

It wasn't till she moved back East, S L Kim wrote last week, that she felt any cultural pressure to subscribe to The New Yorker. And it wasn't till she got to grad school, M Massino wrote, that she decided to like NASCAR despite its politics. Both pieces were about the experience of cultural class, about the way that choices in taste and consumption express--or force one to associate with--a set of values, ideas, or people that may not be all ...

Ours has been a New Yorker-free household. Neither my husband nor I grew up in homes where the magazine was read; we didn’t come into film consciousness reading Pauline Kael, nor dream of life in NYC reading “Talk of the Town.” So the fact that we finally filled out one of those little subscription cards and actually put it in the mail this summer is not just a matter of course, it’s a noteworthy event.

Right now many of us are watching to see who will be chosen to fill the vacancy on the supreme court left by Sandra Day O’Connor. But another pressing question comes to (my) mind: who will fill Mark Martin’s place in the No. 6 car next year if Jamie McMurray isn’t switching from Ganassi to Roush until 2007? In recent months the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing has dominated my media intake. I’ve found mys...

Last week, I left for my long-awaited vacation and the journey was a minor disaster. The first leg of my transcontinental flight was delayed by almost two hours, such that I was worried about missing my connecting flight in Chicago. When I got to O’Hare with about 40 minutes to spare, I thought with relief that the hard part was over. After almost 3 hours of waiting, they let the passengers off the plane so we could stretch our legs. ...

More thoughts on responsibility, this time at the personal level. A friend of mine wrote last week to ask about the tension in my entry about Lance Armstrong between my attraction to a Nietzschean take on the real and my critique of the Calvinist version of it, which tends to look a lot like social Darwinism. I had written: The stupid blindness of such a system is... that it assigns moral value to material success, rendering things like socia...

I spent the holiday weekend in the Berkshires with my mom. The visit included a trip to the Clark Art Museum in Williamstown, MA, where the current special exhibition is of Jacques-Louis David, court painter to Napoleon, among other things. It was a lovely show, but the place was crowded, and I found myself inordinately irritated by one group of particularly loud museum-goers. There were two couples--white, middle-aged (late 40s, early 50s),...

In reading the list of “wars on” (drugs, terror, pedophelia) in E Hayot’s recent post about the shift from “wars against” to “wars on,” I thought, “but what about the war on poverty?” Does its rhetoric follow a similar logic of metonymic contamination whereby a social problem is given profilable human features? The phrase comes from Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 State of the Union, where he...