Right now it’s cold and snowy outside. Walking is a tricky business, with seemingly arbitrary piles of sand appearing everywhere you step and salt crystals so big, you’re as liable to trip on them as you were on the ice in the first place. Conceding that I am ...

I’m happy there’s some sort of controversy about ROTC on campus. It’s an tangible debate over ideas about which we usually argue in the abstract: the greater good, civic duty, and equality.

Apologies to the Queen Mary
By Hal Pratt

There's nothing here to live up to the beauty of “Do You Realize??” or the songcraft of The Soft Bulletin, instead, the Flaming Lips are dancing – and the tracks are as compulsively danceable as ever – yet in more openly dark territory. From the provocative opener's “If you could make everybody poor just so you could be rich/ Would you do it?” to the anger of “Haven't Got a Clue,” “Every time you state your case/ The more I want to punch your face,” there's nothing like the optimistic reservation expressed earlier, it's been supplanted by the gloomy question, “How do we keep going on?”

I've finally begrudgingly admitted to myself that I am a bad writer. I'm particularly bad at writing dialogue, which I suppose underscores that I am a horrendous conversationalist, by which I mean I am hopelessly self-involved. I find this particularly unfortunate, because I regularly come up with ideas ...