Last night, Pullitzer Prize-winner Jennifer Egan sat down with The New Yorker fiction editor Willing Davidson in the swanky penthouse of Columbia’s very own International Affairs Building. Luscious lecturehopper Diana Clark reports. 

The fifteenth floor of IAB is all corporate conference rooms, which, when the sun goes down, reveal the kind of glittering skyline New Yorkers pay penthouse rents to see. But Jennifer Egan, author and Pulitzer Prize-winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad, had a Fort Greene sensibility that seemed to bring things a little nearer to the ground. The occasion for her visit was Rewiring the Real, a series of talks on religion, technology, and literature hosted by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life. She was interviewed by Willing Davidson, the trim and dour fiction editor of The New Yorker.

A pensive Jennifer Egan

The novel, said Egan, was inspired by rereading Proust in her thirties, and coming to identify with his nostalgia for a world that had disappeared. That world, for Egan, was one without technology. Is technology changing us fundamentally as humans? Egan highlighted the rise of image culture, “the growing sense I think many of us have of our images as something separate from ourselves.” And while she herself is not an avid tech user—she noted that she writes only on legal pads because, “I need to get into a more meditative, instinctive state where I have ideas that surprise me”—many readers have told her that the loose interlocking structure of the twelve short stories that make up the book (“It’s a concept album,” Egan said—and the book, of course, focuses on the music industry) reminded them of the way Facebook allows the user to follow tangential connections between people. Egan, who did not join Facebook until after the book’s release, called the website “tremendously dull. It’s like everyone lives in huge Soviet apartment block” where you have no control, and can’t change around your furniture or decorations at any time.

Another dreary Saturday morning in November brings you another cheerful edition of Saturday morning cartoons – this time in bigger and more legible font! Enjoy!

“I love just hanging out in my favorite chair.”

By Edward Koren from The New Yorker

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For some Sunday morning is a sacred time. For Columbia scholars, however, leisurely  brunches and other holier Sunday morning traditions are often sullied by Saturday night’s hangover and Monday’s looming deadlines.  But, remember it’s only Saturday and today must borrow nothing of tomorrow!

So this drizzly November morning, Bwog offers a spread of cartoons to give your day a sunnier start.  Everyone fondly remembers the matinal hours spent with the Animaniacs and Pepper Ann, and so does Bwog, but today we spotlight grown-up cartoons.  Today’s cartoons are inspired by the election and require a more liberal sense of humor – enjoy!

 ”I know it’s just a political buzzword, but the idea of change really resonates with me.”

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In which Bwog Lecture Hop Editor Pierce Stanley braved his way through the masses in the IAB elevators to make it to the ultimate floor and IAB’s most spectacular conference center for a talk on Literature and Terror hosted by the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life.

The Columbia Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life continued its blazing emergence onto the academic scene tonight with its second event in an on-going series entitled Literature and Terror.  This evening, graduate students of the Arts packed into the ornate Kellogg Room at the top of IAB to join a handful of undergraduates, religion professors, and fans of one of today’s most accomplished young writers, Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, to watch as George Plimpton’s protege joined Richard Locke, Professor of Writing at the School of the Arts in conversation about Gourevitch’s most recent work concerning the American atrocities at Abu Ghraib, entitled Standard Operating Procedure. Read more…

Compared to last year’s all-star lineup (Ian Buruma vs. Martin Amis! A master class with Robert Hass!) this year’s New Yorker Festival is oddly underwhelming. In any event, there are some things that should prove interesting and worthwhile. Here’s what we think they are, not including things that are sold out:

Friday, October 3:

Race and Class in America

With Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, John McWhorter, Leslie Sanchez, and Cornel West. Moderated by David Remnick. 7 p.m. Town Hall ($20)

One of the wonkier of the Festival’s events, the New Yorker editor himself will moderate the panel of Nickel and Dimed author Ehrenreich, Baffler-founder and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? Frank, market researcher Sanchez, linguist and Sun columnist McWhorter, and Princeton professor (and Matrix star, kind of!) West.

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This year Barnard’s Class Day speakers will include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New Yorker editor David Remnick, famed tennis player Billie Jean King, and organizer of Harlem Head Start programs Thelma C. Davidson Adair. 

Bwog just ran into outgoing BC President Laura Stoffel who could hardly contain her excitement. Expect a more official announcement from Barnard in the next few days.

Worry not jealous Columbians: Luckily, there are going to be unlimited BC class day tickets this year.

In non-housing-selection related news, this week’s New Yorker has a piece by Jane Kramer (it’s not online, but you can read an excerpt here — and an interesting critique of the piece here) about Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. In truth, it’s something of a misrepresentation to say that the piece is about El-Haj, as it ranges in focus from discussing MEALAC’s history of controversy to examining the tenure process’s relationship to politics. But it is interesting and worth a read, if only because it’s the most we’ve heard out of press-averse Abu El-Haj following the ordeal of her tenure process in the fall.

If you’re looking for a piece that will outline Abu El-Haj’s argument, explain her methods of analysis and interpretation, and provide excerpts of her very dense book “Facts on the Ground”, this isn’t it. (If you are, the Current did so subjectively last fall.) While Kramer meanders in this direction, what she’s mainly interested in is how one academic’s tenure process turned into an online firestorm of misinformation and vilification that often said more about Columbia’s Jewish community and faculty than Abu El-Haj’s work.

Read more…

Bwog was especially delighted to stumble upon this week’s New Yorker. Not only does one Talk of the Town article discuss the decision to dismantle Columbia’s Cyclotron—which, we learned, was actually gutted in 1965 and mostly shipped off to the Smithsonian in bits and pieces—the author of the piece is Kate Linthicum, BC ’08 and a Blue and White senior editor. 

Tipster Rick Betita directed Bwog’s attention to Gothamist, whose attention was focused on The New Yorker‘s Letters to the Editor section. Specifically the letter in which Michael Allison, adjunct professor of astronomy at Columbia, had written about January 28th’s cover (see right). 

Allison insists that due to the certain conditions (namely,”the angle of the long axis of the concourse, following that of Manhattan’s east-west streets, is not 90° but 119° east of north, and aligns with the sun through its “west” windows only from late May to early July, and then only at an elevation of less than 3°”), the scene must have been deliberately revered. Allison continues, “But aren’t those the south-side ticket windows at the left of the picture, with the tracks and trains therefore on the right? And doesn’t the clock seem to read three-fifty, hardly a time for the morning sun?”

You can read the full letter here, in all its wonky glory.

Because Columbians are all over the press today. CU Student groups are no stranger to the Talk of the Town section in The New Yorker, and the Columbia Libertarians are the latest to be featured. In the article, Ben McGrath asks the Libertarians about Ron Paul. “He’s the most boring little old man from Texas who has these laughs that make him look like a Muppet sometimes,” said Adam Sparks, CC ’08.

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that Columbia and USC lead the nation in percentage of international students, edging out downtown rival NYU. The Times also commenced its coverage of the hunger strike on its CityRoom blog.

In which Bwog lecture hopper Pierce Stanley throws up his hands at the New Yorker Festival. 

For decades a bastion of intellectual arrogance, The New Yorker magazine reaches the pinnacle of sycophancy once a year during the first weekend of October when it hosts its Festival, during which journalists, artists, and intellectuals with deep or dubious ties alike to the magazine participate in a three-day festival of self-congratulation.  Despite the big names, it often falls far short of what it seeks to deliver, turning instead a predictable three day campaign of ego stroking. 

This year’s New Yorker Festival debate between two badasses of journalistic fame Malcolm Gladwell author of Blink and Tipping Point (and owner of the world’s most beloved Jewfro) and Charlie Rose regular Adam Gopnik (who still can’t decide whether he likes Paris or New York better) was no exception to this rule, as both attempted to live up to the wit that frequently graces the magazine’s pages but fell far short in substance as they tackled this year’s resolution for the annual parliamentary style debate, RESOLVED: The Ivy League Should Be Abolished.  To mediate this intellectual tussle at New York’s Society for Ethical Culture was none other than the
embodiment of self-indulgence, Columbia’s once-in-a-blue-moon Art History professor Sir Simon Schama.  As speaker of the house and with a gavel in tow, Schama took no shame in prodding both debaters with peculiar inquiries, making side comments to the audience, and erupting with random outbursts of laughter throughout the evening.  It was clear from the beginning that the debate would be not serious, but a playful exercise in name-calling and joke telling by non-Ivy educated Canadians, and a slight disappointment to a bwogger expecting a little more meat. Read more…

Our source sez:

The New Yorker poetry department receives over 1,000 submissions every week. Each of these is destined to be lovingly rejected by an intern, usually a Columbia grad student, with a carefully handwritten note. It’s understandable then that sometimes things get backed up. Really backed up. According to one of the interns, there has been a box of unanswered submissions that have been languishing in the office since 2003. Like a girlfriend who’s worn out her welcome, it just sits there, increasingly hard to ignore, but even harder to get rid of.

So it was with much fanfare that the interns were told that they were finally going to throw out the box. But first wouldn’t they be so careful as to go through the submissions and remove all the self-addressed stamped envelopes? Why? To save the stamps, of course. Yes, the poetry editor of the New Yorker had her interns cut out each and every 37 cent stamp they could find, even though these stamps on their own were useless without a two cent supplement to compensate for the 2006 cost of postage.

Midway through their task she stopped them. Touched by the hand of reason? Of common human decency? “I just wanted to make sure…neither of you has a blog, right?”

Ah, Columbia freshmen: still vulnerable to the classic street scam. This one, written up in The New Yorker, involved a broken bottle, “pink stuff,” and babies.

Lesson learned: If you break something, just keep on walking.