Invades Columbia Classrooms by Marc Tracy AG
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THE UNDERGRADUATE MAGAZINE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY , EST . 1 8 9 0 Vol. XII No. VI March 2006 CHARACTER WARS A conflict made in China (or Taiwan) invades Columbia classrooms by Marc Tracy A GUTTER PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME Washed-up dope fiend philosophers in Tompkins Square by Andrew Flynn CONVERSATION WITH R.L. STINE Who knew Fear Street was on the Upper West Side? ALSO : MTV ’ S MADE , EPCOT COLUMBIANA , DISILLUSIONED MAJORS Editor-in-Chief ZACHARY H. BENDINER Publisher HECTOR R. CHAVEZ Managing Editors JESSICA SHIZU ISOKAWA AVI ZVI ZENILMAN Senior Editors CHRISTOPHER BEAM BRENDAN O. PIERSON JOSIE DOLL SWINDLER MARC TRACY Bwog Editor TAYLOR WALSH Graphics Editor Web Master JERONE L. HSU ZACHARY VAN SCHOUWEN Senior Writers KATHY GILSINAN, BETHANY MILTON, DAVID PLOTZ, CODY OWEN STINE, C. MASON WELLS Editorial Staff BRENDAN BALLOU, OHAD BARKAN, PAUL BARNDT, IGGY CORTEZ, LYDIA DEPILLIS, IZUMI DEVALIER, MAX DILALLO, AMANDA ERICKSON, COURTNEY ERVIN, OWAIN EVANS, PAUL FILERI, PHILIP FILERI, ANDREW FLYNN, NICHOLAS FRISCH, GAUTAM HANS, MERRELL HAMBLETON, MARK KROTOV, ORIANA MAGNERA, KATIE REEDY, KABIR SINGH, WILL SNIDER, IAN SOLSKY, JAMES WILLIAMS, GLOVER WRIGHT Artists SUMAIYA AHMED, JULIA BUTAREVA, MATT FRANKS, BEN GROHSGAL, RACHEL HIMMELFARB, NOREEN RANA Contributors NATASHA CHICHILNISKY-HEAL, ANDREW CHUNG, JESSICA COHEN, ANNA CORKE, ALEX DE LEON, SASHA DE VOGEL, NISHANT DIXIT, MATTHEW HARRISON, SARA HASBUN, JOHN KLOPFER, DONNA LOFFREDO, JONA MICI, NATHAN MORGANTE, ASHLEY NIN, LYDIA ROSS, ANDREW RUSSETH, PAUL SOTO, ADAM STERN, JACOB VICTOR, SARA VOGEL, BARI WEISS, ROB WILE, YINAN ZHANG, LAUREN ZIMMERMAN Business Staff KARL GUNDERSON, NANCY LOI, ERIC WANG 2 THE BLUE AND WHITE THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XII FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS No. VI COLUMNS 4 CAMPUS CHARACTERS Thomas Reardon and Kate Berthold, these are your lives. 6 LETTER TO THE EDITOR The Spec responds to the B&W article “The White Pages.” 26 DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA Mortal women are the last of the suspects. 30 MEASURE FOR MEASURE “Yellow Sky (Buffalo, NY),” by Katie Reedy. 39 CAMPUS GOSSIP Tom Selleck. Pillow Fights. Astrology. COVER STORY Marc Tracy 7 CHARACTER WARS A conflict made in China (or Taiwan) invades classrooms. FEATURES Josie Swindler 12 PROFESSORS’ KIDS—THEY’RE JUST LIKE US! Free-riding FacBrats have their own lessons to impart. Andrew Flynn 14 G A UTTER PIRATE’S LIFE FOR ME Washed-up dope fiend philosophers in Tompkins Square. Ian Solsky 22 YO! MTV SUCKS How reality television MADE me into a douche. Lydia DePillis 25 LECTURE HOPPING: THEOLOGICALLY TRANSMITTED DISEASES Is God a parasite? THE BLUE AND WHITE 28 THE DISILLUSIONED MAJORS GUIDE The roads that should not be taken. James Williams and Oriana Magnera 31 THE CONVERSATION: R.L. STINE Who knew Fear Street was on the Upper West Side? Hector Chavez 36 EPCOT COLUMBIANA The ultimate pan-Columbian experience. CRITICISM Gautam Hans 34 ON MONKEY Book Review: Nick Laird’s Utterly Monkey. C. Mason Wells 35 C I AN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT GOULASH Hungarians bring America back to the movie theater. This issue of THE BLUE AND WHITE is the last under Editor-in-Chief Zachary Bendiner. WWW.theblueandwhite.org COVER: “C haracter Attacks!” by Jerone Hsu MARCH 2006 3 Campus Characters ou might not know the following figures—but you should. In Campus Characters, THE BLUE AND YWHITE introduces you to a handful of Columbians who are up to interesting and extraordinary things, and whose stories beg to be shared. If you’d like to suggest a Campus Character, send us an e-mail at [email protected]. THOMAS REARDON similar paths: today, they are truck drivers, plumb- ers, waitresses. Thomas Reardon, GS, confesses to me that he Reardon was different. He had a gift for math, uses Mozilla Firefox. This wouldn’t be a big deal, and by the time he was 15, his Catholic high except that he created Microsoft Internet Explorer. school had run out of classes for him. He started We have just finished a class on Homer. He is taking math and computer science classes at MIT. a lanky, dark-haired man who doesn’t look his 35 By high school graduation, he had completed the years, and he stands out in class. He often arrives equivalent of half of a Master’s degree in math. late, and while most of us stare with glazed eyes That would be the end of his formal education for at difficult passages of Herodotus, Reardon—he more than a decade. always goes by his last name alone—prods the Reardon moved to North Carolina to work in a professor to explain minute points of grammar, his Duke medical lab. There, he met Matt McCaughan, expressive face scrunched in puzzlement. co-founder of Merge Records, member of the band Nothing in Reardon’s background suggests he Superchunk, and a Columbia grad. McCaughan was destined for Columbia’s classics department introduced Reardon to Chapel Hill’s music scene, by way of dot-com zillionairedom. He was born where he began DJing. in a small New Hampshire town to working class, He also met Bill Gates’ girlfriend. She was then Irish Catholic parents, who adopted eight children working for Symantec, where Reardon eventually after they had Thomas, their tenth and last biologi- landed a job. She introduced him, at age 21, to the cal child. His father was a bartender, his mother a Microsoft CEO. The hiring process was informal; waitress. His brothers and sisters have followed Reardon doesn’t think they even knew how young he was when they offered him a senior position. At Microsoft, he was a big-picture man. Less than a year before the launch of Windows 95, he looked at Netscape and saw the way the wind was blowing. Microsoft couldn’t wait another two or three years—the new version of Windows needed a built-in web browser. Bill Gates agreed. So Reardon put together a “cowboy team” to write Internet Explorer in six months. “We sort of just rodeoed the motherfucker together,” he said. “And it was a piece of shit. It was horrible.” He added that it got much better, but acknowledges that, partly because of a culture of complacency at Microsoft, it hasn’t kept up. In 1999, he left Microsoft and started his own company, Avogadro, which made cell phone mes- saging software. It was less lucrative than Micro- soft, but more satisfying: “There’s always a ques- tion of whether you did well because you were one of the people who drove, or just because you were on the bus,” he says of working at Microsoft. In 2003, he retired and moved to the West Vil- 4 THE BLUE AND WHITE lage. As he pondered his future, he remembered a when Cam’ron’s “Hey Ma” came onto Café 212’s meeting with renowned physicist Freeman Dyson stereo system during an interview, she began to in which the conversation had turned unexpectedly rap along from memory to lines like, “You smoke, from physics to Herodotus. He remembers saying I smoke, I drink, me too, well good/ ‘Cause we gon’ how he would like to brush up on his Latin. “Yes,” get high tonight.” Dyson responded, “but, you know, Herodotus is in With her love of rap and hatred of country mu- Greek.” And so Reardon resolved to get the classi- sic—she points to the Lynyrd Skynyrd lyric, “My cal education he’d never had. —B rendan Pierson hair’s turnin’ white, my neck’s always been red, my collar’s still blue” as exhibit A for the prosecu- tion—Kate might not seem so different from your KATE BERTHOLD average Columbia student. Yet she has the kind of technical skills most college kids dream about: she With her elastic facial expressions and end- cooks homemade pasta, tends bar, cuts her friends’ less supply of voices, Kate Berthold, C ’06, is a hair, and welds. Yes, welds. “It’s the gayest thing natural—both on stage and in life—at slipping I’ve ever done,” she says. into character. Kate describes herself as an “actor/ Looking toward a future presumably not in playwright/lesbian solo performance artist,” but welding, Kate can cross at least one specific post- she’s probably best known for the acting—whether graduate goal of hers off the list: last semester she it’s for sold-out crowds of 100 in the Lerner Black starred in a one-woman show on campus. Kate’s Box or 1,000 in Roone Arledge Auditorium. Soon, semi-autobiographical solo piece, The Saman- Kate will appear before an audience of millions. tha Show, which addressed her sexuality and the Kate auditioned for a part on Rosie O’Donnell’s death of her father, illustrated her main theory of new nationally syndicated LGBT sketch program on comedy, that “everything needs an undercurrent a whim, entering an open casting call of thousands of sadness.” In the performance, Kate uncannily without an Actors’ Equity card or a formal head- inhabited a variety of gawky misfits, from a Brit- shot. (In place of the latter, she brought a photo ish janitor named Terry to the eponymous little girl taken by her mom.) Anyone familiar with Kate’s with two dads and a love of unicorns. But the show work on Columbia’s stages, though, shouldn’t be also offered a rare glimpse of perhaps Kate’s most surprised Berthold got the gig. In three consecu- stunning character yet, one without any peculiar tive Varsity Show appearances, she displayed an voice or facial tic: herself. —C. Mason Wells impressive range, depicting a maniacal Spec edi- tor, a kindly Lifelong Learner, and a pompous king of the gods.