In case you weren’t lucky enough to have your talent featured on Bwog, there’s a new talent showcase in town. Auditions for Columbia’s Got Talent begin this Wednesday, from 8 to 10 in Wallach Lounge. They continue through Sunday, but you must register 24 hours prior to auditions. Registration and auditions schedule available here.

Bwog Daily Editor and Fervent Snazzy Attire Supporter Julia Mix Barrington stopped by the Spectator’s Blue Pencil Dinner last night.  The keynote speaker was Dean Baquet, former editor-in-chief of The Los Angeles Times, who currently works for The New York Times.

Dean Baquet | Image via huffingtonpost.com

The Blue Pencil Lecture — an evening of opportunities for the Spectator to dress up nice and fancy  — held last night in Low was quite a ritzy affair.  Walking into the lecture room, an energetic Spec photographer snapped a picture of me and my friends; alumni, some quite prominent indeed, abounded.  The keynote speaker, Dean Baquet, currently works as the Washington Bureau Chief at the New York Times and has previously served as that paper’s national editor and as the managing editor and editor of the Los Angeles Times.  He spoke about the future, and charm, of journalism as a craft.

Baquet repeatedly encouraged his audience — the majority of which seemed to be bloodthirsty recent graduates seeking to make names for themselves at major papers (in Q&A, they name dropped the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, New York Post, and the New York Times, to name a few) — about the joy involved in covering and creating news.  If you can steer away from careerism, Baquet said again and again, the job will bring you “loads of fun,” “adventure,” and “travel”: in short, you’ll “have a blast.” Read more…

Wondering what you have to do to be an early member of Phi Beta Kappa? Here’s what Bwog found out about our early nominees:

• Rajiv Agarwal, Philosophy, co-president of Columbia Global Justice
• Rudi Batzell, History, Undergraduate History Council chair, editor/reviver of the Undergraduate History Journal, former editor of Lucha’s El Participante, and anti-ROTC panelist.
• Mikaela Bradbury, Anthropology, observer of street vendors.
  
• Jennifer Brown, English
• Cindy Cai, Biology/Music, member of Kappa Phi Lambda, piano player
  
• Willy Chang, Physics, researcher of things Bwog doesn’t understand, born in 1984 (Bwog loves an older man…)
• Emily Clader, Mathematics/Philosophy, Bach Society alto
• Yasemin Erboy, Environmental Sciences, EcoRep, part of the Lamont-Doherty Observatory
  
  
• Amari Hammonds, Sociology, former Bwog and Spec writer, Vagina Monologuer, reality TV star. Read more…

Bwog freelancer Stephanie Quan isn’t a classical music buff, but she got interested in virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell when she heard about this experiment in a D.C. metro station. Eight months later, she snagged a phone interview with the Strad-playing celebrity, and quizzed him on childhood habits and favorite dead people.

Bwog: Hi.

 

Joshua Bell: Hi! This is Joshua Bell here.



Hi, this is Stephanie. Shall we start? I’ve got a lot of questions written down here.

I got answers. 

So you first began violin after your parents found you playing with rubberbands on your dresser. What inspired you to do that? 

Well I grew up with a lot of music around me. So I’m sure that I was stimulated by hearing my mother play the piano and my father, [he] loved music. [he] had a violin himself. Although he was sorta self-taught. But there was just a lot of music going around. All my cousins, my siblings played music. So I suppose hearing all that made me want to make music and my first sort of homemade instruments were those rubberbands on my dresser drawer. Then my parents got me a violin and it was just a very natural thing. It was like learning to speak, you know, playing music. I can’t even really remember not playing the violin. 

So I’ve actually had to try this myself… and it’s not easy! How does it exactly work? Where do the rubberbands go? 

Well I haven’t repeated the experiment myself in the last thirty years. I had a set of nine little dresser drawers and I used to string these rubberbands across from one to the next and open up the drawers to different lengths to get different pitches. Read more…