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Task Failed Successfully: The Cracked Columbia Takeover and Expulsion

The sputtering 18-hour barricade-aided takeover of Columbia University by Hamas supporters ended last night faster than Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall; of course, the occupier’s task failed successfully only after being rightly pushed from the second story ledge of Hamilton Hall by NYPD riot officers. As a graduate of Columbia University, I was chagrined for the students who occupied Hamilton, and who are now about to learn the hard way why — the university does not not belong to the student — and those failed occupiers can now successfully weep into their expulsion letters.

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Fast Food Forgetfulness and the Poverty of Memory Loss

Eat a Big Mac.  Lose your mind.  Is there a link between eating fast food and Alzheimer’s?  Susanne Akterin, a researcher at the Karolinska Institutet’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, believes she has found the cause-and-effect for that behavioral disease.

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Six Thousand Languages

We currently have 6,000 languages in active use across the world; by 2050 we will have lost half of them.  Peter K. Austin, in — One Thousand Languages — takes us on a multicultural tour of the most interesting remaining languages.

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The Second Betrayal: Stung in the Smothering Sky

Were you ever lost as a child and the experience shook you so much that the experience sticks with you today? When I was young, my cousin and I were playing together at a park — a proving grounds — during a Fourth of July city celebration and it was a night I will never forget.

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Things We Have Lost

Today we live in perpetual moments of melancholia that now define our modern lives. We do not live in a state of regret, but we live with an ongoing consciousness of things we have lost. How do we handle the recognition that, over the last four years, so many precious things have been forever stolen from us?

We have lost our sense of sanctuary. There are no safe places. We cannot find protection in schools, mosques, churches, or even with each other. We have lost our right to privacy.

We walk the streets and we are watched. We enter public buildings and we are required to provide ID just to remain in the building.

We surveil our neighbors. People different from us — in color and tone and financial stature — are our silent enemies and are ripe for the reporting. We have lost our joy to depravity.

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