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.

Dean of SEAS Zvi Galil, spam robot extraordinaire, strikes once more with an idiosyncratic personal e-mail before he leaves to take over the presidency of Tel Aviv University. Just another example of what we'll be missing...

Hi All,

SEAS is hot. (Don't hold it without gloves, you may get burnt.) We now have final numbers of Early Decision. Last year we had a record. This year's new record is 51% higher. This is beyond anyone's expectations. As for regular applications, we are "only" 40% higher than the number of last year at the same time. It is too early to predict the final number, as most applications arrive early January.

Every Thanksgiving I read the piece below, which is now 17 years old, and laugh again. Every few years I send it to the students. So if you have received it from me, it perhaps means that you have been here too long... Anyway, you can delete it as any other spam.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Dean Galil

Read more of his e-mail after the jump.

Eagle-eyed Bwog Editor Jessica Cohen noticed this interesting sign in Milano.

Nothing like "freshly killed turkey" to stir the appetite!

Thanks to Sumaiya Ahmed for the photo!

Ah, the penultimate installment in Addison Anderson's Lamont-Doherty series. Savor this moment; it shall not always be with you. In this episode: urgency, wild turkeys, total chaos, nuclear testing, Greenland, and forced labor!

"One of the joys [of research at Lamont] is how cross-disciplinary it has to be," says Dr. G. Michael Purdy, director of the Observatory. Not "tends to be," but "has to be." One cannot easily miss the urgency in the diction of a man running an organization faced with the "challenge," as the website and pamphlets declare, "to provide a rational basis for the difficult choices faced by humankind in the stewardship of this fragile planet." The director's offices sit on the edge of a cliff. One wonders if this serves as an instructive global metaphor for visitors, or as a personal reminder.

A bust of Doc Ewing watches over the conference room, and two wild turkeys sit on the office's porch. "Yes, they're known to bite."

Dr. Purdy, "back when [he] had a real job," studied the earth's crust using sound and contributed to the design of underwater seismometers like the yellow contraption I saw on the way in. Purdy relates that these devices, used in part to listen for underground nuclear tests in violation of the Test Ban Treaty, had captured the rate at which the Christmas 2004 earthquake (responsible for a tsunami that killed over 100,000 people) moved along its fault off the Sumatran coast, and will improve our ability to predict damage risk from large quakes and tsunamis.

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."