Midterms

As a college student, midterms are an unavoidable part of my life. Since I'm a liberal arts students, my week is composed of exams in Russian History since 1917, and Principles of International Politics. Both these classes are intellectually stimulating, and I really like the professors. My politics class is full of game theory, including Nash Equilibriums and Sub-game Perfect Nash Equilibrium. To someone who is actually interested in non-cooperative game theory, it's very interesting, but people who are interested in non-cooperative game theory typically find calculus puzzles interesting, and I'm thankfully not great at math. The point I was initially making was that my exams are not difficult, and are actually in subjects I like, but I detest them all the same. I thought if I took classes I liked, I wouldn 't dread the exams so much. I then realized that I hate tests more than I hate Celine Dion.

On Wednesday afternoon, I'll be very happy.

New York sitcoms

as someone who now lives in manhattan, i try to find out the image outsiders have of life in new york. i think The Economist has a done a fine job through its analysis of sitcoms based in new york.

“Sex and the City” stars four young career women and is ostensibly about the difficulties of finding a man in New York. It has a point. According to an analysis for The Economist, there are 93 men to every 100 women among single New Yorkers aged 20-44. In the country as a whole, and in most other big cities, there are more young single men than young single women. What the programme mostly shows, though, are the joys of chatting, shopping and going out to glamorous places. The six young friends in “Friends” are poorer and don't have quite the right invitations. They hang out together, discuss who is hanging out with whom, then hang out some more. “Seinfeld” is about a self-satisfied comic who occupies himself by being mildly witty about the trivial frustrations of urban living and his eccentric neighbours.

ASSSSCAT

last thursday, i went to a taping for the Upright Citizens Brigade ASSSSCAT show that will air on Bravo this spring. for those that don't know, UCB is an improvisational comedy group and they are very irreverent and very funny. the show i saw featured amy poehler, tina fey, horatio sanz, rachel dratch, andy richter, matt besser, matt walsh, ian roberts, and kevin dorff. it was 2 hours of ceaseless hilarity, and then i stayed for the second show, so it ended up being 4 hours of hilarity. essentially, there are two people who perform impromptu monologues, tina fey and andy richter. the monologues are based on a single word yelled out by the audience. i loved every minute of it. watching improv comedy is like watching complete chaos. people are running around the stage, tapping people out like a tag-team WWF match, and sometimes abruptly terminate sketches. the anarchy on stage is thrilling. as you watch the players swirl around each other, you become enchanted with how manic it all is.

i am definitely going back.

the truth about harvard

there is a very interesting article in The Atlantic Monthly magazine about Harvard written by Ross Douthat titled, The Truth About Harvard. actually, it isn't just about Harvard, but is something of a condemnation of America's top colleges and the way they currently run their operations, with focused criticism on grade inflation and its resulting in an academic ease and overall lack of seriousness in Harvard's undergraduate halls. not quite a polemic, but something that college students like me are rather interested in.

as much as i like my friends at Harvard, and as some of my professors here like to make subtle and good-natured digs about their contemporaries at Harvard, i am pretty satisfied with life down here in lower Manhattan.

we'll always have reptilia

this week, i had a lot of work. i had two important papers to write, and a lot of reading regarding subgame perfect nash equilibria. by yesterday afternoon, however, i had finished all of it. instead of doing anything remotely useful, i bullshat with matt and bryce for a few hours, and read 'the onion' while listening to the strokes.

for those of you that don't know, i hate the strokes. i have always found them arrogant and poseurs of the highest order. julian casablancas, lead singer and modelling agency scion, went to some ridiculous swiss boarding school that dodi al-fayed and the prince of norway went to. another of his bandmates went to the same school, and they met again in the new york prep school, the dwight school. knowing this, is it wrong to to point out that the strokes dress, in fact their entire construction, is artfully created to make them seem like starving artists, when they are no such things? along with all this absurd affectation, they have a habit of playing their arrogance as one of their strengths, and people who don't like the strokes are charged, by band and fans alike, as not 'getting' the strokes, when there is not a whole lot to get.

so why was i listening to them, i imagine you'd ask. the reason is simple. despite my protests, and probably veiled hate, of the strokes, they make some of the best songs i've heard. i know, it tears me up, but when i hear 'reptilia,' it gets my right down in my dualistic heart.

hypocrite, meet the world.

proof

today i went to a screening of the new gweneth paltrow/anthony hopkins/jake gyllenhall movie Proof. this was the first time i'd been to a screening, and in many ways it resembles a homework assignment. first of all, it is the most paperwork i've ever filled out for a movie. after the film ended, sheets of paper were handed out in which about 30 questions were asked. some of them demographical, but many of them were directly related to the movie. examples include: what did you like about this movie (name scenes), how would you describe this movie, how would you describe the interaction between (all the characters). i was basicaly required to answer questions on every aspect of the film. from a purely intellectual and analytical standpoint, it was nice to ask myself questions about a movie i may not typically ask.

on to the film; it was good. anthony hopkins delivers a fantastic performance as a math genius who slowly went insane after making tremendous contributions to game theory etc. by the time he was 22. jake gyllenhall does what he always does, play a sensitive, geeky yet strangely attractive guy. gweneth paltrow plays another crazy genius who gets on your nerves, although that wasn't probably the intention. david auburn's writing is very good--pulitzer prize winning playwrights are kind of like that. the dialogue is amazing. i think all my criticisms; pace, confusion as to paltrow's character direction, will be solved in the editing room.

i hope.

Joel Stein

as if i needed another reason to love joel stein, columnist for time magazine, here is a quote from one of his articles on why oprah's retirement is eagerly awaited by men everywhere.

Oprah is the opiate of the female masses, teaching them to build self-esteem by confronting the past and setting goals instead of feeling good the old-fashioned way: by having casual sex. She encourages women to look inside and "find their passion" without once entertaining the possibility that this passion might be fed with lots of sleeping around. Worse yet, she sets all these ridiculous expectations about reading once a month.