THE UNDERGRADUATE MAGAZINE OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY , EST . 1 8 9 0 THE BLUE AND WHITE Vol. XVII No. II November 2010 SPEAKING IN TONGUES Not all languages are created—nor taught as—equal. WELCOME TO THE CLUB The Columbia sailing team tests the varsity waters THE BLUE & WHITE VISITS PELHAM BAY, STOPS BY MILLER THEATRE, AND TELLS YOU A SUPER SAD TRUE STORY JON HILL, CC ’11, Editor-in-Chief MISHAAL F. KHAN, BC ’13, Publisher MARIELA QUINTANA, CC ’11, Managing Editor ELIZA SHAPIRO, CC ’12, Bwog Editor ANISH BRAMHANDKAR, SEAS ’11, Bwog Co-editor LIZ NAIDEN, CC ’12, Features Editor ANNA KELNER, CC ’12, Literary Editor BRIAN PHILLIPS DONAHOE, CC ’12, Culture Editor MARK HAY, CC ’12, Senior Editor ADAM KUERBITZ, CC ’12, Senior Editor HANNAH LEPOW, CC ’11, Senior Editor CLAIRE SABEL, CC ’12, Senior Editor SAM SCHUBE, CC ’12, Senior Editor STEPHEN DAVAN, CC ’12, Graphics Editor CINDY PAN, CC ’12, Senior Illustrator SEAN V. ZIMMERMANN, SEAS ’12, Layout Editor HANS E. HYTTINEN, SEAS ’12, Online Editor Contributors Artists CHRISTOPHER BRENNAN, CC ’13 HANNAH FORD, CC ’13 SARAH CAMISCOLI, CC ’12 MADDY KLOSS, CC ’12 GRANTLAND D’AVINO, CC ’13 ELIZABETH LEE, CC ’12 CAMILLE HUTT, CC ’11 WENDAN LI, CC ’12 LIZ JACOB, CC ’13 LOUISE MCCUNE, CC ’13 PETER KRAWCZYK, CC ’13 ALICE MOTTOLA, BC ’11 MEGAN MCGREGOR, CC ’13 ELOISE OWENS, BC ’12 NINA PEDRAD, CC ’11 NORA RODRIGUEZ, CC ’11 CAROLYN RUVKUN, CC ’13 ADELA YAWITZ, CC ’12 CONOR SKELDING, CC ’14 MAHRAH TAUFIQUE, CC ’13 Copy Editors HELEN BAO, CC ’13 ELAINE BAYNHAM, CC ’13 ALLIE CURRY, CC ’13 HANNAH FORD, CC ’13 THE BLUE & WHITE Vol. XVII FAMAM EXTENDIMUS FACTIS No. II COLUMNS 4 BLUEBOOK 6 BLUE NOTES 8 CAMPUS CHARACTERS 12 VERILY VERITAS 17 DIGITALIA COLUMBIANA 34 MEASURE FOR MEASURE 36 CAMPUS GOSSIP FEATURES Sam Schube & Brian Donahoe 10 AT TWO SWORDS’ LENGTH: CAN YOU GET AWAY WITH IT? Our Monthly Prose and Cons. Sam Schube 13 IT’S MILLER TIME The director of Miller Theatre tunes up for a new season. Adam Kuerbitz 14 WELCOME TO THE CLUB The Columbia sailing team tests the varsity waters. Camille Hutt 16 TOO MANY LEFT FEET Columbia’s dance teams vie for practice space. Cindy Pan 18 THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE From Butler to the ballot. Mark Hay 20 SPEAKING IN TONGUES The politics of language learning at Columbia. Anna Kelner 26 THE CONSERVATOR A conversation with Michael Gallagher. Nina Pedrad 30 DOES ANYONE STILL USE MAIL? Introducing a monthly series of found letters from home. Hannah Lepow 31 OUR SUPER SAD TRUE COLUMBIA STORY What Gary Shteyngart’s dystopian future has in store for us. Claire Sabel 32 TAKE THE 6 TO PELHAM BAY The Blue & White visits the Bronx Riviera. Brian Donahoe 33 MAN ABOUT TOWN Our culture editor plumbs the zeitgeist. theblueandwhite.org f COVER: “Tower of Babble” by Maddy Kloss THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT More than 60 percent of Columbia students use Apple products, so why aren’t more of the Apple Store’s apps tailored to Morningside Heights? Here are five apps for which the staff of the B&W has determined there is the greatest need. m2m on the Hour Hourly updates on supply levels of miso soup, broth temperature, and tofu content. Runs, of course, morning 2 midnight. Teiresias2T-Pain Recite Lit Hum’s lines and receive T-Pain’s rhymes (feat. Mista Ramsay & Shorty Sancho). alk to John Jay Dining Hall on a weekday evening and Ballin’. take a look at the food offered around you. From the Wgrill at the front to the piles of lettuce at the salad bar Pothole Protection to the oblong steel pans heaped with steaming entrees, variety is Maps protruding and raised obstructions on king. And why not? After all, John Jay must cater to the tastes of College Walk, including but not limited to: hundreds of Columbians day and night—try agreeing on a restau- cracks, loose stones, divots, kids, and protesters. rant for dinner with a group of friends, and you’ll have an idea of No need to make eye contact with last weekend’s the challenge facing the dining hall staff every mealtime. mistake—or anyone, for that matter! But somehow they always pull through. Week after week, the Translator 2.0 John Jay Dining Hall never fails to swing open its doors, lay out Input foreign tongues and receive English. In tray after tray of food after food, and feed hordes of undergradu- this new Editing Edition, Translator 2.0 will ates. It’s an inspiration, really—such consistency and diversity and eliminate from speech pretentious qualifiers, efficiency are exemplars of what we at The Blue & White wish to allusions to Western Imperialism, and tangents achieve. Like John Jay, we also seek to provide for the Columbia about that time you felt enlightened in a Third public, though we hope the issue before you delivers more mental World country. nourishment than physical. And with a little less grease. And maybe a bit more spice. Shut It Down With these goals in mind we set about putting our November Turn neighbor noise to white noise. No more electric guitar riffs, Freddie Mercury impres- issue, a wide-ranging medley of investigation, observation, and sions, or questionable grunts. Sleep soundly. review. Senior Editor Mark Hay, for example, keeps things close to home as he delves into the politics of Columbia’s language programs to understand the quirks of language learning at this university (pg. 20). Senior Editor Claire Sabel, meanwhile, takes BY THE NUMBERS us far off-campus to the end of the 6 line subway to discover the With the holiday season approaching, the pros- city (pg. 32). Contributor Camille Hutt grounds us again with an pect of time off from classes is an occasion for exploration of the campus’ shortage of dance space (pg. 16), and excitement—and jealousy. Because comparisons Senior Editor Sam Schube follows with a look at Miller Theatre’s are inevitable, here are the number of total annual director one year into her tenure (pg. 13). If reality isn’t exactly vacation days enjoyed by our counterparts at peer what you were hungry for, though, don’t worry—Senior Editor institutions. Hannah Lepow has whipped up a fanciful peek into Columbia’s near-future through the lens of novelist Gary Shteyngart’s newest Columbia: 162 days of vacation book (pg. 31). NYU: 162 days of vacation These selections are but a few of the offerings on the full menu Fordham: 162 days of vacation inside this November, so grab a plate and dig in. We realize we are City College: 160 days of vacation no Wilma, but as you begin your mental meal, we wish you bon appetit nonetheless. Princeton: 162 days of vacation Yale: 169 days of vacation Jon Hill Editor-in-Chief THESES TITLE TANGO Match the titles of real, in-progress Columbia senior theses with their actual subtitles TITLE SUBTITLE a. Seeing Stars 1. Where’s Your Mustache b. Tears of Blood 2. African American Perceptions of China, 1900-1939 c. Flowers in the Mirror 3. Melodrama, the novel, and the social imaginary in nineteenth-century Japan d. Kaleidoscopic Memory 4. How the Women of 1970s New York Punk Defied Gender Norms e. The Anxiety of Irrelevance 5. Duchamp’s Etant Donnés and the Fortunate Fall f. Two Sleeping Giants 6. Power, Dissent, and the Contest of Intellectual Virtues in the 1950s g. Vision, Folly and Balance 7. Sports celebrity, identity, and body culture in modern Japan h. Mortification 8. Deconstructing Argentina’s Proceso of 1976-1983 i. Rip “Her” To Shreds 9. Vision, Gender, and Reflections on Chinese modernity j. Female Olympic Athletes 10. Imperial Approaches to Commerce and War in the Roman Near East a-7, b-3, c-9, d-8, e-6, f-2, g-10, h-5, i-4, j-1 i-4, h-5, g-10, f-2, e-6, d-8, c-9, b-3, a-7, ANSWERS: ANSWERS: POSTCARD FROM MORNINGSIDE Compiled by B&W Staff Postcard by Stephen Davan BLUE NOTES lways an area of intense pressure and Acontinental clashes, Morningside Heights was pretty much the same place 450 million years ago as it is today. Except instead of panic attacks in Butler and anti-protest protests on College Walk, the neighborhood distur- bances tended towards the geological. Continents collided, layers of sedimen- tary shale burst through the surface, and an extremely tough form of bedrock known as schist abounded. Today, a 30-foot pile of schist remains on 114th Street, sandwiched between the service entry to Havana Central to the east and the nature and us living here sustainably.” Covered in Columbia-owned brownstone Greenborough to the moss and saplings of an invasive species, some refer to west. Although it’s roughly the size of a circus tent, the it as the Tree of Heaven, the rock leads Resetarits to rock is far from a spectacle. Instead it is a surprisingly transcendental ecstasy: “If I could go out and sit and uncared-for piece of Morningside lore. read on the top of the rock, I’d be the happiest person “It’s hard for many of us to imagine that there once at Columbia.” was, and still is to a lesser extent, a natural landscape A recent construction project undertaken by here,” says Andrew Dolkart, professor of architecture, Columbia Housing, however, would suggest that the planning and preservation and author of Morningside organic majesty of the rock lies more in the eye of the Heights: A History of Its Architecture and Development.