No Glass on the Table

Students came back to Columbia College this September with printed books and pens. In Literature Humanities, phones stayed in bags. Laptops stayed home or shut inside backpacks. Some of the paperbacks were already creased. You could hear pages turn. For the length of each seminar, the only networked machine in the room was the human being across the table. The same rule now governs every section of Contemporary Civilization, the sophomore course that asks twenty-odd students at a time to argue about Plato and Du Bois face to face.

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No Sex Please, We're Yale

Yale University just released a new mandate governing morality and values on campus between a horny faculty and a titillated undergraduate student body.

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Yale University Goes e-Book Crazy

In a delightful turn of events, Yale University decided to make large bits of its library holdings available as e-books and e-journals so students may more easily search for relevancy based on the actual text of books and journals instead of only by their abstracts or a publisher’s promotional blurp.

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Open Yale Courses Opens the Floodgates

Well, it happened: Yale University now offers free online courses for anyone interested in learning online.

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David Milch's Active Imagination

When former Yale Professor, former heroin addict, former alcoholic and Emmy winner writer/producer David Milch creates a script, he eschews period punctuation in scene directions. Milch prefers the double dash – for its employment suggests the infinite possibilities of a pause in the moment where great things can happen feverishly and invisibly off the page in the vacuum created by the indiscernible Em-dash. A period bespeaks a prosaic finality that the ephemeral creativity of David Milch cannot bear and even in a colloquial telephone interview the double dash is always there – pausing – waiting – jockeying just beyond the ether of a cross country conversation.

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