Columbia Ping-Pong goes to the Midwest. Next stop: Beijing? No.

If an editorial doesn't express an opinion or make a point, is it still an editorial? No.

Columbia student locates Brooklyn, but is it "the new Broadway?" No.

Will any Columbia student go to this Soho restaurant for $15 Vietnamese tapas? Sigh.

A White House spokesman goes to ... a web forum... to insult Joe Stiglitz. And then George Bush calls him a "green eye-shaded accountant." Eye-shaded?

The Three Trillion Dollor War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict is Nobel Prize-winning, globally-thinking Columbia prof Joseph Stiglitz's new book. The book posits that Bush's cost estimates for the war in Iraq were incorrect—the administration cited a $200 billion figure—and that the Iraq conflict will cost almost double that of WWI, putting the figure at just about three trillion dollars. Ergo, attention-grabbing book title.

But the thing is, taxes (particularly for the rich) haven't really risen—in fact, they've been lowered in some cases. And Stiglitz argues that deficit spending makes not raising taxes possible. In fact, he'll be testifying in front of the Senate on Thursday saying so.

So... Columbia in the news. And by "the news", of course, we mean probably MSNBC.

- JNW

In which Bwog lecture hopper Phil Crone reports back from the Heyman Center's discussion on climate change

Altschul Auditorium was host last night to a panel discussion featuring PrezBo, Joseph Stiglitz, and various experts on the ever more apocalyptic science of climate change. What exactly PrezBo, a freedom of speech scholar-cum-university president, was doing heading a discussion on climate change was anyone's guess, but by the end of the evening it was clear that he had taken on the position of moderator mainly to provide comic relief for an audience presented with the grim scientific and political realities surrounding the topic.

Comedy, however, was not the first item on the agenda. The main event began shortly after eight with PrezBo introducing the four members of the panel: James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; R.K. Pachauri, the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); Cynthia Rosenzweig, an adjunct professor at Barnard who also works on the IPCC; and Columbia's favorite Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz.

Economics Prof. Joseph Stiglitz (who has recently filled in, on occasion, for Nicholas Kristof on his New York Times blog) may be January's most-quoted man -- and he's well on the way to claiming the same role in February. On Wednesday, he wrote a guest column in the Times preaching economic gloom, offering a suggestion to address pretty much every economic problem America is [potentially] facing. He also appeared on Monday in the Times of London (Day of Reckoning in the US Glasshouse) and, earlier in the month, in the Guardian (Stagflation Cometh). The winning quote? Describing the Fed's recent rate cuts as "pushing on a piece of string."

Previewing Stiglitz's Next Best-Seller

Last Tuesday night's World Leaders Forum kickoff event was billed as "a discussion with distinguished panelists" on the subject of globalization. It ended up more like the first leg of a book tour for University Professor and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who monopolized the event, discussing his forthcoming manifesto, Making Globalization Work. No one seemed to mind.