#52

Because the truth is, we’re living in frontier country right now. We can take guesses at the future, but it’s hard to gauge the effects of a drug while you’re still taking it. What happens when a person who has archived her teens grows up? Will she regret her earlier decisions, or will she love the sturdy bridge she’s built to her younger self—not to mention the access to the past lives of friends, enemies, romantic partners? On a more pragmatic level, what does this do when you apply for a job or meet the person you’re going to marry? Will employers simply accept that everyone has a few videos of themselves trying to read the Bible while stoned? Will your kids watch those stoner Bible videos when they’re 16? Is there a point in the aging process when a person will want to pull back that curtain—or will the MySpace crowd maintain these flexible, cheerfully thick-skinned personae all the way into the nursing home?

Say Anything

#51

Brazil is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized images, which belongs to Gilliam alone. A meek, distinctly nonglamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what a victim is saying in a torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate of his bland niceness. This is the ne plus ultra of torture as an everyday activity. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film's many disturbing themes (still revealing their subtleties on a third and fourth viewing). The suggestion seems to be that a torturer need be no more sinister than your doctor. That's the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?

What Brazil Tell Us About Torture

#50

Ladies, Jamie Foxx is going to make you feel like you never felt before. He is going to work you over. He'll meet you in the bathroom of the club for a freaky episode. He will kiss you right below the navel, then rub you with oil on your ear. There'll be puddles in the bed by the time Foxx gets through with you. Girl, the rain is coming.

I know all this because Foxx says so—nearly verbatim—on his new album, Unpredictable, which descended upon record stores just before Christmas in a vaporous cloud of Spanish fly.

The Sexiest Sex Machine

#49

Yet if the yellowing of America signifies the rising self-consciousness of Asian-Americans, it also promises, paradoxically, to undermine their identity. For what becomes clear in browsing Eastern Standard Time is that many Asian cultural memes are arriving here directly from Asia, bypassing the Asian-American middleman altogether. Steadily, Asian-American culture is becoming Asian/American culture--defined less by the local experiences of immigrants and their offspring than by the churn of global capitalism and the transnational feedback loop of style and aesthetics.

Feng Shui America: The Asianization of popular culture.

#48

Written sex also has the distinction of being the only erotic art one can indulge in on public transport without fear of arrest. This is a truth well known by schoolgirls, who from the age of 13 onwards pass round dog-eared paperbacks, the good bits underlined for easy reference, as if they held the secret to life itself. Schoolboys, by contrast, are slaves to images, while we girls knew that in just a few years’ time we’d have our own three-dimensional versions of what the lads spent so much effort trying to catch a photographic glimpse of. Though some at least try the pictorial version of pornography: one girl at my school smuggled in a copy of Knave but the headmistress caught wind of her plan to unveil the illicit images to a paying audience in the first-floor toilets after last period. Those of us who didn’t get our 20p back learnt our lesson. Stick to the books.

Hot off the page

#47

There are two William Shakespeares. The first is the man born in Stratford, who never seemed to spell his name the same way twice, who was deeply interested in minor financial transactions and the accumulation of property, and who left his wife his second-best bed; the other is the man who left the world the greatest literary legacy ever known. A considerable body of scholarship, the work principally of enthusiastic and learned amateurs, seeks to establish that William Shakespeare in the first sense was not William Shakespeare in the second sense.

Truth vs. Theory

#46

If I were in the Darkness, playing drums (my instrument), I think I would have to be an addict of some kind — an alcoholic, probably. How else to anæsthetize the psyche-splitting agony of being funny and not funny at the same time? Of being in a parodic ha-ha hard-rock band who actually and seriously rock? Of being, as it were, simultaneously post-modern and pre-modern? With absurdity draped over every power chord, and a smirk in every lyric, still there’s headbanging in the front row. Perhaps it’s ha-ha headbanging — who can tell? Yep, bring down the booze curtain, lower the heavy velvet on this torment of sophistication.

Substance abuse: The Darkness’s unblinking voyage into the preposterous

#45

The truth is that Joel was born at the wrong time. Were he a decade older, he might have wound up in the Brill Building crafting perfect little pop songs and gone down in history with Burt Bacharach, Carole King, and company. But Joel came of age in the post-Beatles era, when songwriters grew self-conscious about rock's aesthetic and social significance, and felt compelled to make statements. Alas, Joel is a leaden lyricist with nothing to say; the result is songs like the 1989 hit "We Didn't Start the Fire," a laundry list of historical events—"Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai"—that Joel tried to pass off as a panorama of postwar American life, or a portrait of baby boomer ennui, or something. Joel's self-seriousness has been painfully evident on his recent co-headlining tours with Elton John, who never lets artistic pretension stop him from donning a feather boa and throwing a party. Which Lite FM legend would you rather have over to dinner?

Billy Joel: Oh, the squandered genius!

#44

Charlotte’s experiences at the fictional Dupont University shed light on these questions, as the ambitious girl from backwater North Carolina is transformed by her sophisticated and salacious surroundings. Far from being the path to higher civilization and refinement of character, Dupont is a toxic impediment to the yearning for higher things, built on a dogmatic denial that higher civilization and refinement of character are even possible. Where, in a former age, the impressionable young student might have aspired to religious salvation or genuine wisdom, today’s typical college student lives more for entertainment, sensation, and release, all the while demanding and largely getting immediate gratification. The individual still seeks status and recognition. But the marks of distinction are all too often inebriation, “hooking up,” expertise at sarcasm (“sarc one,” “sarc two,” and “sarc three”), and insouciance toward matters intellectual and moral. As students learn about and fall into this new ethic, the university not only fails to stand in opposition, it accelerates the process. Dupont, that composite of Duke, Stanford, Yale, and the University of Michigan, corrupts the promising young Charlotte. For revealing this disturbing truth, the author has been reviled by those who are thereby revealed.

Love in the Age of Neuroscience

#43

It used to be said that the moral arc of a Washington career could be divided into four parts: idealism, pragmatism, ambition, and corruption. You arrive with a passion for a cause, determined to challenge the system. Then you learn to work for your cause within the system. Then rising in the system becomes your cause. Then finally you exploit the system—your connections in it, and your understanding of it—for personal profit.

Corrupt Intentions

#42

Above all, though, Heath and Potter are as dismissive of the modern Left's worldview as P.J. O'Rourke is. "You can't even organize a commune, much less an entire society, based upon the assumption that people will behave like saints," they tell us. "Consumerism…always seems to be a critique of what other people buy…. [The] so-called critique of consumerism is just thinly veiled snobbery or, worse, Puritanism." They sum up aptly the countercultural message of the film, American Beauty: "[It] is simply not possible to be a well-adjusted adult in our society…. The alternative [to perpetual adolescence] is to 'sell out,' to play by the rules, and thereby to become a neurotic, superficial conformist, incapable of experiencing true pleasure." To which they respond: "The greatest weakness of countercultural thinking has always been its inability to produce a coherent vision of a free society, much less a practical political program for changing the one we live in."

Rebels Without a Clue

#41

People always search for meaning. But in our confused and ever changing world we feel particularly perplexed when it comes to making sense of the problems that confront us. One of the most important ways in which an absence of meaning is experienced is the feeling that the individual is manipulated and influenced by hidden powerful forces - not just by spin-doctors, subliminal advertising, and the media, but also by powers that have no name. That is why we frequently attribute unexplained physical and psychological symptoms to unspecific forces caused by the food we eat, the water we drink, an extending variety of pollutants and substances transmitted by new technologies and other invisible processes. As a result, global warming is not simply a climatic phenomenon but an all-purpose evil that can account for a bewildering variety of destructive events.

On the hunt for a conspiracy theory

#40

Snobbery is as woven into the human fabric as the sexual and aggressive impulses it seeks to refine. It's no accident, then, that Rock Snobbery emerged just as young people started dressing in blue jeans and pretending that social class didn't matter. Adolescents simply found novel ways—ways more acceptable to their newly egalitarian pretenses—to marginally differentiate themselves from one another. Musical taste was one such method, and for a small but increasingly demented subset of the population (interestingly, almost exclusively boys), having good taste in, and encyclopedic knowledge about, rock music became an almost Ahab-like obsession.

The Rock Snob

#39

Judging by two memoirs last year by David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, the greatest challenge facing the New York memoir writer these days is getting used to a life that is relatively normal. Both authors have made careers of remembering the various ways that normalcy seemed exotic to them back when they were living hellish, if hilarious, lives in families that ranged from eccentric to criminally negligent. But now that their lives are closer to what they longed for, is it possible that normal is becoming the new hip?

My big fat hip wedding

#38

. It is possible that this particular corner of Dixie exists only in Larry's imagination. It consists of strip clubs, flea markets, rodeos, Bass Pro Shops, the Waffle House, NASCAR events, and Long John Silver's. Dressing for all of them, Larry mounts the stage in a sleeveless flannel shirt, jeans, and a ball cap adorned with a fishhook. "I used to be a lifeguard," he says, "until some blue kid got me fired." A dim bulb whose chief interests are sex and food, Larry is an anachronism in the New South. He and his comrades from the film Blue Collar Comedy Tour have revived the ancient art of rednecking, one of comedy's most venerable forms.

Larry the Cable Guy

#37

It's my girlfriend calling. I can tell it's my girlfriend, because it's the only girl I'm currently fucking whose real name is displayed on my cell phone when she calls.

My Cheating Art

#36

"This girl was beautiful. She was gorgeous. She was only 21 years old, and a trick had bought her a brand-new Pontiac Firebird," recalls 57-year-old, semiretired pimp Charleston Blue. "Then she handed the car over to me. Funny thing is, she was a renegade whore. She'd never been with a pimp."

Big Pimpin' FLA

#35

"Is it bad that I make snap judgments about girls based on what jeans they wear?" a male friend asked recently in an e-mail. "When I see a girl in Sevens, I dismiss her. If she's wearing Citizens, I'm skeptical, especially in recent months. If she's in Diesels, that's legit, as that's an enduring brand. But right now, I'm looking for girls in Hudsons." A girl in regular jeans was, apparently, off the map.

The Secret Language of Jeans

#34

At Cornell, the sex columnist describes herself as "tall and blonde," a lover of "stilettos and tequila." At the University of South Florida, she is "a short, sheltered girly-girl," who encourages "ladies" to "love thy boobies." That age-old burning question—how come guys love watching girls kiss each other?—is often the only mention of homosexuality. In an honorary survey of different ways people are "messed up in the head," Becca Worthington of James Madison discusses a couple wild fixations, like balloon licking and furniture porn, but is left "somewhere between wanting to laugh hysterically and vomit profusely" ("Will sex ever get back to the basics?" she pleads). Looking to prevent bodily sickness, more recent columns at the James Madison Breeze have stuck with perfectly inarguable topics, heralded by headlines like "Dating Stages Seem Unclear, Confusing" or "Relationships Not Flawless, Especially During College Years."

When Chloe Met Charlotte

#33

Before one can make decisions about the specific courses that comprise a liberal education, it is important to examine the foundations underlying it. Liberal education is an elitist enterprise. It is so on at least two fronts: Professors must be willing to teach, and the goal is not success in a job or profession, but rather obtaining critical distance from one's preconceptions and enriching oneself intellectually and culturally through a wide array of courses across the curriculum. Those unfamiliar with the debates in higher education may see little that is controversial in these statements, yet they would be attacked from the left and (at least implicitly) the right.

Reforming College

#32

The memo is notable for its anti-parent animus—it boldly deploys a Dr. Phil-style rhetoric—but even more for its anti-materialist message. "It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be," that inspired the prom's cancellation, Eichner and Hoagland explain. "It is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity's sake—in a word, financial decadence." Surprisingly, KMHS parents and students haven't kicked up much of a fuss. Maybe that's because they recognize the diatribe has useful lessons for cowed parents eager to regain the moral high ground with their debauched adolescents. And perhaps those coddled kids might like to rebel for real rather than barf in limos on the way to beach houses supplied by parents for after-prom fun.

Take Back the Prom

#31

College newspapers have gone digital, and with that we've lost something vital about college journalism: the privilege to write wretchedly, irresponsibly, and incoherently in relative privacy. "When you screw up now, it's Google-able," says Christopher Buckley, the editor of Forbes FYI and a veteran of the Yale Daily News. "In the old days, you just had to wait three days and no one would remember."

Confessions of a College Journalist

#30

As we drive, the old X-Files mantra comes to my mind: The truth is out there. Some of that truth is locked away, far, far out of public view, at Area 51 and Tonopah. And some of it's right out in the open, just a few miles down the road at Lawrence Livermore, where, in the middle of a placid suburb, lab coat-wearing men and women spend their lives devising world-wrecking machines.

Have a nice day.

Spying on the government

#29

The major question for Snowe and other liberal senators actually is not respect for judicial precedents. The major question is abortion. They want to know whether Alito would vote to overturn Roe. But by the absurd unwritten rules of these increasingly stylized episodes, they are not allowed to ask him and he is not allowed to answer. So the nominee does a fan dance, tantalizing the audience by revealing little bits of his thinking but denying us a complete view. And senators pretend, maybe even to themselves, that they really care about precedents and privacy in the abstract.

What Abortion Debate?

#28

Liberals have allowed themselves, in America, to become too snobby, sanctimonious, and pretentiously elite. I mean, liberals have got to wake up and stop hunkering in these sophisticated metropolitan ghettos that they’re in, and come to the realization that they must address the general audience in the way that the great Hollywood studio system did. Masterpieces came out of Hollywood. My God, they’re things that last, like Gone With the Wind — I’m talking not necessarily about the racial things in it, which are very sensitive, but I’m talking about the performances and the music and the costumes. There’s an emotional link with the general audience in that. So what I’m saying is, get out of the ghetto and decide, what do you favor? Do you just want to go around with a little badge saying, "I’m sophisticated, and those people are such rubes, those far-right people"? You want to do that? Okay, destroy the American arts, because that’s what you’re doing.

Art demon

#27

Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic has some hugely entertaining song and dance numbers (Yes, she sings, too. Can she cook?) and a moderately amusing (maybe too facetious) framing device. Off-stage, she excoriates her manager (the criminally underused Bob Odenkirk) for allowing the wrong kind of mineral water into her dressing room. But that's not the genius part: It's the detail with which she describes the taste of the offending water. Her jokes don't have much sting. Their beauty is that they're mindbenders. "You're a star," she whispers to her reflection in her dressing-room mirror. "And I'm a star-fucker."

Silver Showers

#26

There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA - 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.

Today, the blue-collar jobs that once attracted male high school graduates are drying up. More boys are dropping out of high school and out of college. And as the gender gap widens, concern about the educational aspirations of young men appears to be gaining traction, albeit cautiously.

But even as evidence of a problem - a crisis, some say - mounts, "there's a complacency about this topic," McCorkell says.

College gender gap widens: 57% are women

#25

Indeed, the mystique of admissions, the huge space it occupies in the middle-class psyche, is owed to a tacit belief that it is above the ordinary bargaining that drives human affairs. Applying to college is perhaps the only moment in a modern American life when it is possible to believe that one's fate is decided by one's genuine worth as a person. When the anonymous admissions officer scans your carefully assembled dossier, he is not supposed to be assessing your bank balance, your Mayflower lineage, or even your ability to do well on a test; he is supposed to be measuring you. It is no accident that "merit," now the key concept in college admissions, was once a theological term. Christ's imputed merit was what allowed the believer to get into heaven; the high school senior's personal merit is what gets him into the Ivy League.

Rigging the Admissions Game

#24

Each meal these days is a test of whether family members have anything to say to one another, Kaufmann says, and the answer is usually no: one French family out of two watches television during meals. This may be just as well since table talk carries the risk of opening a Pandora's box of hidden resentments. Usually, Kaufmann says, the lid is left just ajar.


The French table: Theater of the absurd?

#23

Has the white working class abandoned the Democratic Party? No. White voters in the bottom third of the income distribution have actually become more reliably Democratic in presidential elections over the past half-century, while middle and upper-income white voters have trended Republican. Low-income whites have become less Democratic in their partisan identifications, but at a slower rate than more affluent whites--and that trend is entirely confined to the South, where Democratic identification was artificially inflated by the one-party system of the Jim Crow era--itself a holdover from the legacy of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

What's the Matter With 'What's the Matter With Kansas?'

#22

American higher education is civic education. While we Americans may disagree about the nature of our values, most of us see our schools as vehicles for inculcating them. No one in the culture wars thinks of himself as working for a foreign power. But the aim of any liberal education worthy of the name is to transport students out of the world they live in, making them less certain about what is valuable in life. It does not seek to overcome alienation, it tries to induce it. Genuine liberal education is, of necessity, an un-American activity.

College Makeover: Un-American activities

#21

Except the story line isn't much of a saga at all -- it's downright boring. So far it goes like this: Kelly hides in the closet after the husband of the woman he's freaking comes home; Kelly argues with said husband, who is a pastor, and who, it is revealed, has a gay lover (?); talk of being gay ensues; Kelly phones his own wife at home and is shocked to hear a man answer the phone; Kelly races home (getting pulled over by a cop along the way [the same cop who ... oh, never mind]), berates his woman, does the do with her, then finds a used condom in his bed; Kelly rants about the condom: "Oh my God, a rubber! Rubber! Rubber!" his voice crescendoing skyward.

Predicting the further installments of R. Kelly's "Trapped in the Closet"

#20

Along the way Simmons has become sports' moral arbiter. He speaks with the authority of a particularly thoughtful bartender. He inveighs against "sports bigamy"—embracing two rival teams—with no exception even if one marries a fan of a rival team (which, Simmons speculates, is bound to be a loveless marriage anyway). To be admitted to Simmons' universe, you must have a stunningly high level of sports literacy. It is not enough to be familiar with the current players. It is imperative to know—and these are actual examples from recent columns—the starters from the 1984-85 St. John's basketball team, the major and minor figures on the professional wrestling circuit, and the cast of the film The Bad News Bears. But the payoff is an intimate bond with the reader, whether in the frequent "mailbag" feature or the diatribes that he often prints in full. There is not a sports columnist on the planet generous enough, or perhaps secure enough, to share his platform like this.

Bill Simmons: Bard of the Red Sox

#19

I don’t like the English. One at a time, I don’t mind them. I’ve loved some of them. It’s their collective persona I can’t warm to: the lumpen and louty, coarse, unsubtle, beady-eyed, beefy-bummed herd of England.

I hate England

#18

But how about a graduate degree in journalism, which is the subject of Bollinger's task force and this piece? The ASNE survey found that only 10 percent of newsroom employees hold J-school graduate degrees, and I defy any member of the professoriate to identify a journalist's credentials by the quality of his work. When I read the résumé line "Master's Degree in Journalism, University of California at Berkeley," all it tells me is that the holder had an interest in journalism and spent the money to prove it. In fact, a J-school degree means so little to me that I don't hold it against its holder. In the 17 years that I hired and fired, none of the J-school graduates who worked for me did better work than the many English majors I've employed. I'd rather hire somebody who wrote a brilliant senior thesis on Chaucer than a J-school M.A. who's mastered the art of computer-assisted reporting. If you can crack Chaucer, you've got a chance at decoding city hall. If you're a computer-assisted reporting wizard, maybe you can reformat my hard drive.

Can J-School Be Saved?: Professional advice for Columbia University.

#17

The first question to ask the new nominee to the Supreme Court is: "Will you be an honest judge?" This is not a question that is normally asked, straight up, to a Supreme Court nominee. But we are asking about something a little more subtle than "would you take a bribe to throw a case?"

In the year 2000 the Supreme Court of the United States stopped the recount of the Florida vote and threw the election to George Bush. This is old news. But judging from the Roberts' hearings and the punditry, the issues have been forgotten. They've faded into the fog. Ignoring the fact that the man with fewer votes got to be president, what is most notable about the decision was that Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Rehnquist and Sandra Day O'Conner did not vote according to what they believed the law to be. They voted for Bush because they wanted a Republican president. We can say that because they have a track record and their votes in Bush v. Gore went against their own established principles. If Gore had been ahead and he asked them to stop the recount, on the very same grounds, it is a virtual certainty that those same five judges would have voted the other way.

The justices violated a judicial principle that is even more profound and runs even deeper than the Constitution itself, that the law will be applied fairly.

Here Comes the Judge -- Beyond Roe v. Wade

#16

Despite the futility of the whole episode, my fondest memories of college are times like these, where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded. Clearly, I never spent as much time or work on any authorized art project, or any poli sci paper, as I spent on this one act of vandalism.

It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves. And with all due respect to John Stuart Mill, maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I've learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it's how important playing is to creativity and happiness. My job is essentially to come up with 365 ideas a year.If you ever want to find out just how uninteresting you really are, get a job where the quality and frequency of your thoughts determine your livelihood. I've found that the only way I can keep writing every day, year after year, is to let my mind wander into new territories. To do that, I've had to cultivate a kind of mental playfulness.

SOME THOUGHTS ON THE REAL WORLD BY ONE WHO GLIMPSED IT AND FLED