Category: Uncategorized

A Summer Education in Hawaii

I’m thrilled to be a witness after many uneventful years in suburbia.

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Dangerous Presidents (and Precedents)

I am going to start off by saying, for the record, that I happen to like Bill O’Reilly. I almost never agree with what he has to say, but I almost always find him entertaining. If we can agree that the purpose of television is primarily to entertain (at least in our society), then Bill must be doing something right.

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Balls Dropped: Full Design

In the first issue of Volume 48, the Nass is more back than ever, reading, listening to country music, and getting away from it all.

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Nasty Culture

The President of Italy and his three friends, a Duke, a Magistrate and a Bishop, sit at the head of a table surrounded by teenage SS officers, a few older women, and about twenty young boys and girls. Some of the youths are dressed in suits and dresses, others in their underwear, while still others sit naked. A nude girl emerges from the kitchen with a large tray of steaming shit…
~and~
There is a neighborhood on the outskirts of a city with a lousy bar and grimy brick buildings and orange lamps in the alleys. There are towns where in the deep hours of night cars prowl the streets full of dumb menace. Vague criminals and edgy losers grope at women dressed in cheap finery and the sex is drunken and ugly and brief…

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L.A. Sublime

One of my favorite pieces of writing that I’ve ever read is “Pafko at the Wall,” a novella by Don DeLillo that also serves as the opening to his massive novel _Underworld_. The story is about “The Shot Heard ‘round … Read More

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Princewatch: The “Prince” Once Again Confirms That We Are All Losers

A triumph of data analysis or a sick project of perversion?

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Nass List: What’s Wrong With Me?

What’s wrong with us?

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True and False: Bay Area

A drug deal that wasn’t. A minister on mushrooms. Which is real, and which is fake?

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Blazin’ for Buckley

Thirty-seven years ago a group of stoners at a California high school had a dream that they could smoke weed every day after school at a regular time. With the precision and commitment rare to their kind, they carved out a slice of late afternoon (and probably beyond), dedicating it to the illegal indulgence they share with an estimated 100 million Americans. If Wikipedia is to be believed (and really, for the scholarly subject of stoner cultural history, why shouldn’t it be?), this 1971 San Rafael High School tradition was the bong that launched a thousand hits. 4:20 P.M. daily outside the cafeteria evolved into the ‘High Holiday’ of 4/20.

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Spring 2011 Course Guide

__ARC 269 / EEB 269__
Owl City: Could It Happen?

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That Darn Cat

Garfield is a terrible comic. I hate to say it, but there’s no two ways around it. Whatever pep, zang, or originality the comic may have had at its inception has long since been drained over its twenty-two year continuing … Read More

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Princeton Cemetery: Can You Dig It?

…The gravedigger’s laugh turns to hacking as he takes off his soiled gloves and exposes his hands, which are caked with cemetery earth…

Come closer, come closer (my pretty, my sweet): let me feel your weight on my chest, the rubber soles of your sneakers marking my skin pink. I feel you, lingering, some feet away—hesitant, glancing shyly at this patch of grass, not raising your eyes to the stone that marks it…

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