Wish you were in Paris right now? Bwog foreign correspondent Sumaiya Ahmed reports on Columbia's big weekend in the City of Lights.

This weekend, Columbia students in Paris were treated to another sort of World Leaders Forum organized by the Columbia Alumni Association. The three day affair included Nobel laureate and 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan as the keynote speaker, as well as Columbia professors Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, David J. Helfand, and President Lee C. Bollinger.

Saturday featured a full day of panels on globalization, arts, and the media at La Bourse, the historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange. The first panel, "A Critical Look at Today's Media" touched on a number of issues, such as how journalism has changed under the Bush administration. The moderator, Graduate School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann described the current administration as "post-modernists of the right" who refuse to trust journalists, and recalled that Karl Rove had once written to a colleague that "the press is just another interest group."

Not everyone spent Spring Break in Jamaica. Below, Bwog editor Chris Szabla reports on his visit to cold - and contradictory - Istanbul.

The train from the airport emerges into open air, weaves through tired concrete apartment blocks painted in worn pastels, occasionally grants glimpses between them of an endless, rolling cityscape of similarly dilapidated structures, all suffused in a dull green-blue haze. It halts at a transfer point shrouded in fog and you exit, your face sprinkled with forty-degree rain. That's when you remember: despite the minarets puncturing the distant horizon, the hijabs, the buzz-buzz-buzz of calls to prayer mediated by electric megaphone, Istanbul is far closer to Bulgaria than Bahrain.

Sure, "East and West": both are present in this city, which legendarily spans continents and cultures, shores and civilizations. That the two meet here is the cliché that has saddled Istanbul at least since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in the 1920s, when one Orientalist trope after another was swept away by Atatürk's steady - some would say overzealous - Westernizing hand. Some dissenters, naturally, have chosen to paint the city one way or another, instead. "This Istanbul is European thing is bullshit," one grad student told me before my departure. "Most of it is just like Damascus." In Orhan Pamuk's Snow, on the other hand, distant Istanbul comes off no less foreign, no less "Western" to ur-Turkish Anatolia as Paris or London.

In his memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City, the Nobel-winning author strikes closer to the truth about this beguiling metropolis. East and West - if, for convenience's sake, we can collect a variety of stereotypes under these contested categories - do both exist, indeed coexist, in Istanbul. Whether they, in fact, meet - this is another question entirely.

As you may or may not be aware, Orhan Pamuk, a visiting prof at our fair institution, just netted ol' Alma another Nobel, this time for literature.

Though there is some speculation as to what exactly Pamuk does around here, (this says he will have a MEALAC position, which is news to those who spend way too much time in Kent) Bwog correspondent Chris Szabla offers this contextualization/legitimization:

"He also spent time here for a number of years in the 80s while his ex-wife was getting her doctorate; he actually wrote one of his books, Kara kitap ("The Black Book") in Butler. Tenuous connections maybe, but he does have a longstanding relationship with the university.

"Pamuk attended the Iowa writing school and taught a Turkish language class, but mostly he occupied a small room above the Columbia library where he began work on The Black Book, the contemporary story of a lawyer searching Istanbul for his lost wife. 'My cubicle was above three million books and I was very happy there,' he says. 'There was a good collection of Turkish books going back to the 1930s and many of them had not even had the pages cut. No one had ever looked at them before me.' "
[From here]

And offers a global perspective:

"Second, nationalists in Turkey who have not quite been fans of Pamuk since his Armenian genocide comments are convinced the prize was awarded to him as a snub to them. On top of that, France just became anti-Turkey when its National Assembly passed a law this morning making it illegal to deny the Armenian genocide.
Ironically, the bill only passed because most delegates left the chamber in protest over what they said were attempts to pander to ethnic Armenian voters in France
More here.

Finally, a choice quote from the New York Times:

"Pamuk, currently a visiting professor at Columbia University in New York, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that he was overjoyed by the award, adding that remarks he made earlier this year referring to the Nobel literature prize as ''nonsense'' were a mistranslation."