Reasons to choose Svedka?

I learn the greatest things from foreign coverage of the US. The following is top news on corriere.it, the website of Corriere della Sera: "The Absolut Vodka Initiative."

Apparently Absolut is running a new ad campaign in Mexico utilizing a map from the 1800s, which shows a large portion of now-U.S. lands were then Mexican territories. The ad text reads "In an Absolut world." Probably not going to go over as well in the states...

The LA Times blog La Plaza has it here.

On a side note, though, I discovered this while I was messing around with Google Reader. I think Google Reader just changed my life, no joke. Do other people know about this already and I'm late on the scene?

I want to post about the David McCullough lecture from Saturday night, but tomorrow. Maybe. Hopefully.

Who doesn't get into Harvard?

Um, roughly 93% of applicants, apparently.

A New York Times article reported on Tuesday that elite colleges such as Harvard, Yale, Columbia and Dartmouth have admitted miniscule percentages of their applicants for entry into the class of 2012. The article states that, clearly, a number of factors has contributed to the lows, including the expansion of financial aid packages, the increase in number of high school graduates and availability of online applications.

There was a pretty funny and pointed satirical letter written as well, addressing the issue of legacy students, which I'm sure make up some not at all nominal percentage of the shockingly low 7.1% of Harvard students admitted this year.

"At Harvard, as at Yale, the applicant pool included an extraordinary number of academically gifted students. More than 2,500 of Harvard’s 27,462 applicants scored a perfect 800 on the SAT critical reading test, and 3,300 had 800 scores on the SAT math exam. More than 3,300 were ranked first in their high school class," the article states.

While of course the perfect score students are probably also gifted in other ways, I'm completely unconvinced that being first in your class or having a 1600 is really an indicator of anything much when it comes to the academic world. These are just number games.

I couldn't help but think back, though, to an old article from about a year ago (glad that my brain is filled with past newspaper articles and not other useful information) "Young, Gifted, and Not Getting into Harvard," in which an Alumni interviewer talked about his experience with Harvard rejects.

"What kind of kid doesn’t get into Harvard?," Michael Winerip writes, "Well, there was the charming boy I interviewed with 1560 SATs. He did cancer research in the summer; played two instruments in three orchestras; and composed his own music. He redid the computer system for his student paper, loved to cook and was writing his own cookbook. One of his specialties was snapper poached in tea and served with noodle cake."

Vassar's acceptance rate dropped significantly this year as well, something the Misc will be covering.

Bad book tastes: The english major's romantic dilemma

Molly sent me the following Times article; not hard to see why 1. she would be reading this (it's in the book section after all) and 2. why she thinks its applies to me. One of my exes Facebook profiles lists "Where's Waldo" among his favorite books. Not hard to see how that floundered...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/books/review/Donadio-t.html?ex=1207454400&en=3fe2d9d47b60bac0&ei=5070&emc=eta1

"We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility."

Nice Inferno 5th canto shoutout.

I think its probably more likely that I exclude someone for not reading the newspaper than for reading bad books. If you are unlikely to read nerdy and dorky articles like this one, really, where is this going?

Tall Women...Unite!

The majority of my friends these days, especially now that I've moved on from the world of basketball, fit nicely under my arm. So I was pretty excited to see the following blog post on The Times blog Well. The author is a 6-foot-4 University of Wisconsin senior.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/life-as-a-tall-girl/?em&ex=1206676800&en=06faa791ad018d9a&ei=5087%0A


I will say though, that tall or short, no one should have the fact that they are different from the "average" pointed out to them. My brother, who is 6-foot-5, hates it when strangers come up to him and inform him that he's tall. This happens regularly, and I can't blame him for being annoyed. No one would ever walk up to a stranger and tell them "You're short!" or "Woh, you're a big lady."

Don't worry, the cheese is safe

The government is falling apart, the biggest airline just got auctioned off to France, but don't worry... la mozzarella di bufala sopravive, as the Times The Lede blog assured readers.

"Everyone seems to agree that the buffalo-milk version
of the soft white cheese is far superior to the cow’s-milk kind."

check it:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/21/italys-mozzarella-makers-fight-dioxin-scare/index.html?hp

Dreams of my...democratic candidate?

Last night I dreamt about Hillary Clinton. Hold on, hold on, let me explain.

I was -- for some inexplicable reason -- sitting with her on the set of some sort of talk show. The host of the show, however, wasn't asking Clinton any questions, she was just using her as a sort of prop. So I asked if I could conduct a little interview after a commercial break.

Commercial break one ends and the host does some sort of roll call instead of letting me do my interview. This happens again after a second break, and after a third an episode of Seinfeld starts to roll instead of cutting to me. Hillary and I are both entirely displeased.

The amazing thing is I remember some of the questions I wanted to ask, because I was furiously writing them down so as not to forget before my first on-syndicated television interview of a democratic candidate for president.

1.) "This studio is filled with young women (it was), many of whom are feminists and say that true feminism means choice and therefore support Barack Obama. What is your take on female choice going against the female candidate? And what do you plan to do to win over votes of young American women - many of your votes are coming from retired and middle age women."

2.) "In recent weeks the democratic primary trail has been plagued by distraction with the Reverend Wright comments and attack politics. What are you going to do to bring the focus back to the important issues?"

I think there was a third about the actual differences in prescriptions for the economy and war and education, but I can't recall specifically. Even in my dreams I am interviewing someone. It would be nice if Hillary did answer these questions.

Note: Apparently I'm not alone in dreaming of the democrats. Check it: idreamofbarack.blogspot.com

Pondering the way we read

In cross-generational discussions about school and books, there is a common phrase:

“Oh yeeeah, I read that in college.”

The Scarlet Letter. Hamlet. Paradise Lost. Leaves of Grass.

If you are a liberal arts student talking with a college graduate, the odds are that it’s all been read before. And, circumventing various questions about the problematic nature of formulating the literary canon, let’s just say that in most cases there is a reason why these classics are still being assigned. Now it is more likely that they are supplemented with letters, post-modern critical literary analysis and illuminating biographical contexts—but still, Great Expectations is very much the same text it was 50, 100, 150 years ago.

My question for the moment, however, is not whether reading these works is warranted and worthwhile (I think it is, of course)—my question is, what does that obvious rejoinder mean?

“I read it in college.” “We read that in high school.”

Did you? Am I, really? Depends on your definition of reading.

As a senior at a prestigious private college, I have to say my idea of “reading” is a little warped these days. Between practices, meetings, school newspaper articles, my campus job and being in class, I have precious little time for reading the work assigned for my three seminars.

I think I do as well or better than most at completing the majority of my assigned reading. But there seems to be a basic understanding that people who can and do complete it all are either inhuman superachievers or otherwise have no other commitments to speak of (and are therefore lazy or uninvolved).

While this fact of life is given among my friends and classmates, there is no reason to assume that our sometime definition of “reading”—that is, skimming the last 150 pages of a 450 page book or reading only the first and last page of an article—extends beyond Vassar. Right?

During Spring Break, it was my happy task to read the great American classic, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. I was spending the week with my grandparents on the beach, so reading this 427-page book (printed on bible paper, of course) should not have been much of an onerous assignment.

One afternoon, upon returning from the grocery store, my grandfather came upon me sprawled out on the couch, the text sprawled next to me with my thumb in it, as I slept.

“How’s that book coming?” he laughed when I awoke, adding, “Yeah, that’s pretty much how I read it too.” He said he’d find a comfy chair on the top floor of the library and read a nice fat paragraph of Melville’s uhh..descriptive.. prose before conking out.

So, I thought, maybe my concept of “reading” is not so new after all.

Don’t misunderstand me: as students, we do an unbelievable amount of work. Most of the people I know are absurdly on top of their lives.

And as for myself, over the past four years I have become a much better reader, in a perhaps atypical definition of the word.

See, “to read” can mean glossing your eyes over printed words and absorbing their meaning. But it can also mean interpreting, uncovering, exploring. The latter definition is the skill that I have lately honed; it is the rarer and more important ability.

Being able to “read” in a broader sense is a vital skill for interpreting our world of ulterior motives, subliminal messages and double-talk. In a post-modern, post-feminist, post-Freudian world of hypertext, we no longer simply read Shakespeare’s soliloquies, we read films, blogs, and advertisements. We read people’s social networking profiles—understanding the subtle art of when to take individuals’ relationship status or professed favorite quote seriously, or with a hint of irony.

Learning how to interpret the plethora of media surrounding us in our daily lives is learning the difference between what is being said and how it is being said, who is saying it and why they are saying it to us and in such and such a way. We read novels and texts this way, too. Answering these delving questions is the aim of education.

I plan to soldier through Moby Dick and to “read” it, in the traditional sense, in its entirety.

However, I know that no matter what, the most important reading will be done when my book is closed: sitting in class having a discussion about what the whale’s “whiteness” means or debating Ishmael’s narrative reliability on an online Blackboard forum.

While I still love the simple act of reading, I am glad that my education has made me a much better “reader.”