One would be hard-pressed to find a world leader more appropriately named than Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal of Nepal. And it is a shame that nothing more positive may be said of the man or his speech, entitled “Post-Conflict Challenges and Development,” at Low Rotunda Thursday afternoon than that his name is easy to […]

The motorcade hanging around college walk, the red carpet paparazzi frenzy outside Low – those sly dogs at the World Leaders Forum must have booked another celeb. Bwog contributor Kate Hughes snuck past the cameras last night to hear what Serbian President Boris Tadic had to say. Serbia and Columbia go way, way back. Turns […]

 Photo by Anish Bramhandkar For all the statistics about Argentine economic achievement mentioned last evening, one might be surprised to learn that Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the current president of Argentina, is languishing in the polls.  Her approval rating slid nearly 30% in the four months after taking office and she has remained a controversial […]

The Heyman Center kicked off its Fall 2009 lecture series with Harvard Library Director Robert Darnton. Stacks Correspondent Mark Hay reports: A fair chunk of the audience at the Schapiro Center’s Davis Auditorium on Thursday fully expected this, the first Heyman Center event of the fall, to be yet another aging professor’s lamentation on the […]

  Columbia’s Low Rotunda played host yesterday to a couple of really nice chaps—the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and our very own big-wig, Mike Bloomberg. Before saying anything else about the World Leaders Forum, what the mayors said, how they said it, and what they meant, it is crucial that you know two things. […]

Bwog “Newspaper-Reads-You” Expert Valerie Sapozhnikova joined a tiny audience at the Harriman Institute to learn about media in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. Sitting amongst an audience of about 15, and listening to the moderator become bored with herself as she droned on about each speaker’s accomplishments, I almost started to regret my decision to […]

Bwog’s Associate Literati Expert David Berke spent some time in the Kraft center with writer Paul Auster. He brings us this report. Paul Auster, acclaimed novelist and former Columbia undergrad, dropped by the Kraft Center for the final installment in the Literature and Terror lecture series. Because fiction and fright are like academic peanut butter […]

Bwog’s Spirits-and-Scrolls Correspondent Anna Kelner attended a reading at the Ding Dong Lounge by author Zadie Smith. Provided with the opportunity to luxuriate under dimly lit chandeliers, splurge on a $2 Pabst Blue Ribbon, and hear one of Granta’s best 20 young authors of 2003 read from an unpublished novel, MFA students tore themselves away […]

Bored with hearing lawyers talk about law, the Columbia Pre-Law Society held a Q&A Tuesday night with Steven Chaikelson, director of the Theater Management and Production Program at the School of the Arts. Bwog’s Lawyers In Disguise Specialist James Rathmell was there to hear his story. Though the Columbia Pre-Law Society has been pushing for […]

Bwogger Eliza Shapiro may be a full year away from the CC dose of Freud, but that didn’t stop her from getting up for this semester’s CC Coursewide Lecture. Groggy CC sophomores and their balding elbow-patched professors filed into Miller Theater Friday morning for a coursewide lecture given by Jonathan Lear, a professor at our […]

Bwog’s Postmodern correspondent James Rathmell, who is really a synthesis of previous Bwog art correspondents, spent a few hours with the loveable Teuton Thomas Demand. He brings us this report. Though a lecture with the pretentiously alliterative title “Fiction, Fact & Fabrication” sounds like something better suited for an art school than Avery’s Wood Auditorium, […]

Professors gathered last night to discuss the G20 summit in London last week. Bwog’s International Quibbling Correspondent James Rathmell reports on the profs’ hopes and fears for the economic futures of the US, Latin America, Russia, and India. If you’ve been under a rock in Butler, you may or may not have heard that the […]

How do you put the biggest economic meltdown in eighty years into historical perspective? Bwog Money Madame Anna Kelner went to Havemeyer tonight to find out. Today’s economy is rapidly turning into the stuff of Shakespeare.  Headline after headline spells disaster, AIG is handing out multimillion-dollar bonuses, the federal government is bailing out household names […]

 Photo via Voices from the Gap In a night of good theater and crazy-ass/disastrous commentary, famed authors Toni Morrison and Assia Djebar stopped by Miller Theater for a presentation of selections from their theatrical works. Though the night started out well, it ended with an onstage intellectual train wreck. First up was Margaret Garner, an […]

Bwog contributor Anna Kellner sends this dispatch from Thursday night’s Creative Writing Lecture Series talk, delivered by James Wood. (No, not that one, this one.) Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Harold Bloom. A Creative Writing MFA student opened the talk, titled “Creating Fictional Character: Presences and Absences,” by rightfully exulting James Wood’s place in this pantheon […]