Dear, dear readers,

I’ve had terrible experiences with meeting heroes before. It can be kind of earth shattering. Sarah Vowell has said that she doesn’t understand why people would want to meet their musical heroes; the kind of music she listens to is not made by people you’d want to have a beer with. When I met Jonathan Franzen at the New Yorker Festival last fall, I was slightly put off, even after I coaxed him into talking about his relationship with his typewriter. When I met Kurt Vonnegut after a lecture, standing outside puffing on a cigarette in all his wonderful decrepitude, I was too shy and uncertain to say a single word. I just shook his hand and let my friend do the talking.

Despite these bad experiences and those of others, I still have the urge to go talk to the people I admire when I see them. Tonight, I am glad I did. The title of this post is a reference to one Glass family whom I love, and tonight I interacted with another Glass family.

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Another good reason to go to the women’s basketball games (despite the fact that the last one was Saturday night). Just in case the game, the cheerleaders, and the dance team aren’t entertaining enough, the band is now offering a post-game show: tuba racing.

I know I’m intrigued.

They’ve now been spotted at Levien several times, as well as on one memorable occasion at the Dodge track. Very impressive, band, very impressive.

[Commentariat newbie Corydon Shea takes a personal look at this month's production of the Vagina Monologues.]

The Vagina Monologues is one of those plays that most people have seen or, at least, know about. Arguably, it is famous for being a beacon of womanhood and sexual liberation. Personally, having seen The Vagina Monologues a few times, I have always supported Eve Ensler’s aspiration to put an end to violence against women.

However, having been born a woman who felt more like a man, I found I could support the ideas represented in The Vagina Monologues but not make them my own. Then, I heard that this year’s production was going to include new, original monologues and I knew I had to be part of it. I would call the director’s decision to include original pieces daring, because three months ago, when we started the writing process, most of us had not written anything. I wrote three other monologues before settling on the poem that I performed.

What I learned through the writing process is that it’s not very easy writing about something, like gender, when your own is ambiguous and you’re still struggling to understand yourself, let alone trying to inform others in a transparent way. There were a few points in the writing process when I was unsure whether I could finish a final piece, yet I kept writing because I wanted to create a space for my experiences, which continually felt confined by expectations of femininity, which felt very different from who I was.

According to this RCP wonk, if you support Obama or Clinton’s domestic policies, the answer is yes. Hanson says that the Dems’ are nothing but class-baiting hypocrites willing to trade our last shreds of personal responsibility for cheap electoral success. It’s a standard argument, but this article is noteworthy for offering the first right-wing critique of Obama and Clinton’s single-lender student loans program that I’ve read in any mainstream media outlet:

Likewise, students are failing to graduate from college because there are too few government-guaranteed student loans. We don’t hear that thousands enter public universities without basic reading and mathematical skills - or that their college problems might in part be the fault of their own misplaced priorities in high school, and in part the fault of an educational system that is mostly therapeutic, offering fluffy courses and self-esteem training rather than rigorous math, science, literature and history classes. Nor is there ever mention of teachers’ unions, the system of tenure, or a vapid, politically correct curriculum, as explanations why our students are not competitive in the global marketplace.

Not sure there’s much of a connection between high-school curricula and the availability of need-based financial aid, but I’ll ignore the demagoguery for this reason only: higher education issues are finally seeing daylight. Hopefully the right will begin questioning the possibly-misplaced priorities of a single-lender system, and start pressuring the Democratic candidates on a fundamental ideological difference: whether higher education should be seen as some inalienable public trust (as in most other countries on earth), or whether acadme should be allowed to operate like any other private sector industry.

Also holy shit, Radiohead is coming.