#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

#15

Of course, the sense of menace had been ignited by genuine disorder and violence: Looting, ranging from base thievery to foraging for the necessities of life, did occur after the storm passed over New Orleans. However, the (limited) reality of crimes in no way exonerates “reports” on the total breakdown of law and order—not because these reports were “exaggerated,” but for a much more radical reason. Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patient’s wife is really sleeping around with other men, the patient ‘s jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homologous way, even if rich Jews in early 1930s Germany “really” had exploited German workers, seduced their daughters and dominated the popular press, the Nazis ’ anti-Semitism would still have been an emphatically “untrue,” pathological ideological condition. Why? Because the causes of all social antagonisms were projected onto the “Jew”—an object of perverted love-hatred, a spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust.

Reality and fantasy in New Orleans