Lecture Hop Editor Pierce Stanley attended this year's New Yorker Festival. Here, he discusses the Festival's ethos and the state of political dialogue. And protein bars, there are those too.

The Metropolitan Pavilion, a sleek hardwood floored and white-walled Chelsea outpost nestled comfortably on 18th Street, played host this weekend to the city's finest exercise in pretension, the New Yorker Festival. The festival, as usual, lived up to all of the bloated expectations of ostentatious spectacle that any New Yorker might anticipate from Condé Nast's favorite love-child, but yesterday's "Campaign Trail" panel on domestic politics surprisingly departed from that mold.

Compared to last year's all-star lineup (Ian Buruma vs. Martin Amis! A master class with Robert Hass!) this year's New Yorker Festival is oddly underwhelming. In any event, there are some things that should prove interesting and worthwhile. Here's what we think they are, not including things that are sold out:

Friday, October 3:

Race and Class in America
With Barbara Ehrenreich, Thomas Frank, John McWhorter, Leslie Sanchez, and Cornel West. Moderated by David Remnick. 7 p.m. Town Hall ($20)

One of the wonkier of the Festival's events, the New Yorker editor himself will moderate the panel of Nickel and Dimed author Ehrenreich, Baffler-founder and author of What's the Matter with Kansas? Frank, market researcher Sanchez, linguist and Sun columnist McWhorter, and Princeton professor (and Matrix star, kind of!) West.

This year Barnard's Class Day speakers will include New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New Yorker editor David Remnick, famed tennis player Billie Jean King, and organizer of Harlem Head Start programs Thelma C. Davidson Adair.

Bwog just ran into outgoing BC President Laura Stoffel who could hardly contain her excitement. Expect a more official announcement from Barnard in the next few days.

Worry not jealous Columbians: Luckily, there are going to be unlimited BC class day tickets this year.

If you're looking for a piece that will outline Abu El-Haj's argument, explain her methods of analysis and interpretation, and provide excerpts of her very dense book "Facts on the Ground", this isn't it. (If you are, the Current did so subjectively last fall.) While Kramer meanders in this direction, what she's mainly interested in is how one academic's tenure process turned into an online firestorm of misinformation and vilification that often said more about Columbia's Jewish community and faculty than Abu El-Haj's work.

Tipster Rick Betita directed Bwog's attention to Gothamist, whose attention was focused on The New Yorker's Letters to the Editor section. Specifically the letter in which Michael Allison, adjunct professor of astronomy at Columbia, had written about January 28th's cover (see right).

Allison insists that due to the certain conditions (namely,"the angle of the long axis of the concourse, following that of Manhattan's east-west streets, is not 90° but 119° east of north, and aligns with the sun through its "west" windows only from late May to early July, and then only at an elevation of less than 3°"), the scene must have been deliberately revered. Allison continues, "But aren't those the south-side ticket windows at the left of the picture, with the tracks and trains therefore on the right? And doesn't the clock seem to read three-fifty, hardly a time for the morning sun?"

You can read the full letter here, in all its wonky glory.

We hope you already know that everyone is welcome to The Blue and White's weekly meetings every Monday evening at 9:30 PM
in the basement of St. Paul's Chapel. If you've been avoiding us all semester, this is a particularly wonderful time to swing by: we're having Lauren Collins, staff writer at The New Yorker and the one responsible for Bwog's one mention in those pages, to talk about what life is like at the B&W's platonic form.

In honor of her visit, we'll be meeting a little earlier than usual, at 9:00 PM rather than 9:30. See you there!

Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported that Columbia and USC lead the nation in percentage of international students, edging out downtown rival NYU. The Times also commenced its coverage of the hunger strike on its CityRoom blog.

In which Bwog lecture hopper Pierce Stanley throws up his hands at the New Yorker Festival.

For decades a bastion of intellectual arrogance, The New Yorker magazine reaches the pinnacle of sycophancy once a year during the first weekend of October when it hosts its Festival, during which journalists, artists, and intellectuals with deep or dubious ties alike to the magazine participate in a three-day festival of self-congratulation. Despite the big names, it often falls far short of what it seeks to deliver, turning instead a predictable three day campaign of ego stroking.

This year's New Yorker Festival debate between two badasses of journalistic fame Malcolm Gladwell author of Blink and Tipping Point (and owner of the world's most beloved Jewfro) and Charlie Rose regular Adam Gopnik (who still can't decide whether he likes Paris or New York better) was no exception to this rule, as both attempted to live up to the wit that frequently graces the magazine's pages but fell far short in substance as they tackled this year's resolution for the annual parliamentary style debate, RESOLVED: The Ivy League Should Be Abolished. To mediate this intellectual tussle at New York's Society for Ethical Culture was none other than the embodiment of self-indulgence, Columbia's once-in-a-blue-moon Art History professor Sir Simon Schama. As speaker of the house and with a gavel in tow, Schama took no shame in prodding both debaters with peculiar inquiries, making side comments to the audience, and erupting with random outbursts of laughter throughout the evening. It was clear from the beginning that the debate would be not serious, but a playful exercise in name-calling and joke telling by non-Ivy educated Canadians, and a slight disappointment to a bwogger expecting a little more meat.

Our source sez:

The New Yorker poetry department receives over 1,000 submissions every week. Each of these is destined to be lovingly rejected by an intern, usually a Columbia grad student, with a carefully handwritten note. It's understandable then that sometimes things get backed up. Really backed up. According to one of the interns, there has been a box of unanswered submissions that have been languishing in the office since 2003. Like a girlfriend who's worn out her welcome, it just sits there, increasingly hard to ignore, but even harder to get rid of.

So it was with much fanfare that the interns were told that they were finally going to throw out the box. But first wouldn't they be so careful as to go through the submissions and remove all the self-addressed stamped envelopes? Why? To save the stamps, of course. Yes, the poetry editor of the New Yorker had her interns cut out each and every 37 cent stamp they could find, even though these stamps on their own were useless without a two cent supplement to compensate for the 2006 cost of postage.

Midway through their task she stopped them. Touched by the hand of reason? Of common human decency? "I just wanted to make sure...neither of you has a blog, right?"