American Pie: How a Neapolitan street food became the most successful immigrant of all.
This is a really interesting look at the history of pizza in America. I had no idea that it was essentially unknown in the 40s before becoming immensely popular in the 1950s. There were some growing pains - thank goodness the Good Housekeeping version referenced didn’t become popular (though it does have its heir in the nasty Chef Boyardee pizza kits). The article talks about how pizza started here in New York City then was customized to the Midwestern palate in Chicago. It does not mention the unique abomination that is St. Louis-style pizza, which is probably a good thing.
As a side note, this bit at the ending made me smile:
Both spontaneous and economical, ordering pizza remains a signifier of carefree camaraderie; pizza seems to automatically make any event a little more fun. “We will have pizza(!),” the Carleton College history department announced last year in a memo meant to lure students to a meeting. It’s hard to imagine fried chicken or tofu having the same drawing power.
My med school comrades and I have learned that it is in fact possible to get sick of pizza, even if it’s free. Our most successful talks advertise “Free (non-pizza!) lunch!” these days. It’s true that fried chicken doesn’t go over well, though - our biggest draw is Indian food.
For those who know my parents or are interested in funny stories about people’s parents, see today’s livejournal post.
I run across a NYT op-ed entitled Brand U, and my alma mater is the prime exhibit.
I recently did some research for a satirical novel set at a university. The idea was to have a bunch of gags about how colleges prostitute themselves to improve their U.S. News & World Report rankings and keep up a healthy supply of tuition-paying students, while wrapping their craven commercialism in high-minded-sounding academic blather.
I would keep coming up with what I thought were pretty outrageous burlesques of this stuff and then run them by one of my professor friends and he’d say, Oh, yeah, we’re doing that.
[…]
My final straw came when a friend at Case Western Reserve University (now referred to as Case, after their consultant concluded that all great universities have single-word names) sent me a packet of information on the university’s new showcase undergraduate seminar program. Called SAGES (this supposedly stands for Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), the program offers as an essential component of its core intellectual experience an upscale cafe that serves Peet’s Coffee and is “staffed by baristas whose expertise in preparing espresso is matched only by their authoritative knowledge of all things SAGES.”
The cafe is for real, and the SAGES program is pretty much as ridiculous as the editorial implies. But the worst part is that the majority of the marketroid crap that’s been going on at Case isn’t even in this article!
There’s been a lot of talk about building up the school so it can compete in a higher tier, which is great. Except that the administration appears to have decided to aim for the Ivies, which is ridiculous, because Case’s strengths are more along the lines of Carnegie Mellon, University of Chicago, Berkeley: schools with smart, nerdy students where the sciences are emphasized but the liberal arts don’t lose out. It’s astonishingly stupid to throw away the particular strengths of the school just because some MBA type decided that the Ivies are the best so that’s what Case should become.
As a result, you get all the things that recent alumni are currently angry about:
In addition to the rebranding (it used to be that “Case” was the engineering school and “CWRU” was the whole university) they got a fancy new logo that doesn’t look like anything other than a fat man carrying a surfboard (it’s supposed to have some sort of symbolism about interconnectedness; the old one was a stylized sunrise).
They advertised on TV and altered their admissions criteria to get a different type of student - cute but dumb as opposed to the smart, nerdy type that made Case such a fantastic place for me to be.
Then, they segregated freshmen from upperclassmen to keep the old culture from being passed down. The talk was about “class cohesion” but — and I know this from discussion with people who were involved in the decision-making — the real problem was that upperclassmen were school-apathetic (or whatever the opposite of school-spirited is) and that was being passed down to the new classes. Granted, there were other problems like alcohol abuse, but overall, my experience was that being able to get tutoring and advice from older students vastly outweighed any downsides. And dorm spirit certainly existed, and that’s better than class or school spirit anyway. Finally, Case is supposed to be full of smart nerdy people; that type doesn’t do school spirit.
And they drove the engineering alumni association (Case Alumni Association) off-campus. There’s been a push to roll everything into one university-wide alumni association, and CAA felt that their particular calling was for supporting engineering students in particular, as they’ve been doing very well for years. That didn’t fly, and they were driven out. They are still allowed to give scholarships, and I hope that continues because CAA is the organization that will be getting my money (when I have some). I won’t be donating to the university at large unless things change drastically.
I guess I will just have to hope that the bad publicity will make the powers-that-be rethink their strategy. It’s probably the only thing that could.
Those of you who don’t regularly read Cute Overload probably missed out on two exceptionally cute stories with Amanda angles.
One of the cutest things I’ve ever seen in my life was pig racing at the Montgomery County (MD) Fair. They have little piglets with jerseys, and they race around a miniature track. The piggies start out in stalls just like horses, and they really go! It was amazing. Apparently, the cuteness of pig sports is not limited to Maryland; Moscow has Pig Olympics.
Since moving to St. Louis, I’ve spent a fair amount of time at the excellent and zoo. Since it’s free and centrally located, I can pop in to see a few animals when I have an hour or so to kill. One of my favorite exhibits is the hippo habitat, believe it or not. They’ve got a glass wall so you can see underneath the water, and hippos are very graceful when they swim. It’s fascinating. Unfortunately, they do not have any baby hippos.
I’m currently sitting in a delightfully nerdy lecture about STD transmission. The lecturer is discussing various models drawing from different areas of study. First there was population biology stuff with assortative and non-assortative mating, and then there was graph theory to analyze sexual networks, with references “betweenness” and “centrality”. I’m very amused.
(It’s also a good lecture in general; he’s emphasized the need to respect people’s decisions about their own sexual behavior, the fact that not everyone is at risk, and the fact that while you can predict whether certain groups are likely to be at risk, you can’t definitely say that a given individual is or is not at risk without private information.)
Christians Sue for Right Not to Tolerate Policies
Christian groups (mostly on college campuses) are upset that tolerance codes prevent them from expressing their beliefs about homosexuality or accepting non-heterosexuals (or people who don’t have a problem with that) as members.
Christians are fighting back in a case involving Every Nation Campus Ministries at California State University. Student members of the ministry on the Long Beach and San Diego campuses say their mission is to model a virtuous lifestyle for their peers. They will not accept as members gays, lesbians or anyone who considers homosexuality “a natural part of God’s created order.”Legal analysts agree that the ministry, as a private organization, has every right to exclude gays; the Supreme Court affirmed that principle in a case involving the Boy Scouts in 2000. At issue is whether the university must grant official recognition to a student group that discriminates.
The students say denying them recognition — and its attendant benefits, such as funding — violates their free-speech rights and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court, with the groups prevailing.
I think student groups should certainly have the right to express their opinions and to choose their membership as they wish; the rest of us have the right to either ignore or picket the bigots. I don’t like the idea of tax dollars going to support such groups, though. Actually, I don’t understand why the funding of religious student groups by state universities doesn’t appear to be controversial at all; it seems like a violation of the establishment clause to me. And if universities start making judgments about groups’ stated beliefs before awarding funding, that definitely sounds like a problem.
But the solution to this issue looks pretty simple to me: stop funding student groups with university money. There’s no need for official recognition at all, in fact; any student should be able to reserve unused classroom space for any (legal) purpose, while more popular spaces (like large auditoriums) should come with a fee.
I don’t see why student groups need university funding at all; most of it appears to go to free pizza and copying expenses. If the groups are popular enough, they shouldn’t need to bribe students to attend meetings, and if flyers weren’t so heavily subsidized I suspect most groups would move to more-effective, less-annoying advertising like emails to interested students rather than polluting the campus with brightly-colored paper.
Groups that attract enough interest should be able to fund whatever needs they actually have with member dues, bake sales, and outside donations. While many college students will claim that they couldn’t afford to pay dues, this isn’t true for most of them (and if the “activities fee” went away as a result it would be true for even fewer). For those few individuals who really can’t scrape up any extra cash without skipping meals, groups could certainly waive fees. As an added bonus, this might cut down on the number of annoying people who join every group around as a resume-padding tactic.
And it would spare university resources by cutting down on a useless bureaucracy as well as legal fees resulting from denied funding.
This week, after my knee had been injured for 10 days or so with very little sign of improvement, I finally went to Student Health to have it checked out. Unsurprisingly, there were no findings on physical exam, so I got tentatively diagnosed with an “overuse injury.” (The theory is that doing so much driving and walking over break stressed my knee, and then when I twisted it in Central Park it wasn’t robust enough to handle that.)
So now I’m gimping around on crutches, under the reasoning that if walking hurts, that probably means I’m further inflaming the knee, and I’ll need to stop doing stuff that hurts in order for it to heal. I really want to get better as soon as possible, because I’m very much looking forward to playing outside now that it’s spring, which is why I consented to use the crutches. (I also had x-rays yesterday, and will start physical therapy in two weeks or so if it hasn’t resolved by then.)
The crutches are a mostly annoying but somewhat interesting experience. While the people on the shuttle bus (which I now have to take between the parking garage and the medical school building) have been very nice as far as giving me good seats and letting me go first, the crutches have not been sufficient to get my classmates to break their usual habits of blocking the aisles and hallways, oblivious to anyone who might want to actually get through. I’m thankful that I actually can still walk, so I can pick up the crutches and sidle through small openings when necessary.
I’m actually feeling a lot better today, after two days on the crutches, so hopefully I won’t have to use them for too long.
My finals went reasonably well; I was pretty wiped out by the end but I think I passed everything, and I actually learned a lot while I was studying (which, I guess, is kind of the point).
The day after finals ended, Tim and I took off on our East Coast road trip, with stops in Charlottesville, DC, Princeton, New York City, Cleveland, and Terre Haute. I feel like I saw every single person I know during the trip, but I know there were plenty of people I missed, and if you’re one of them, I’m sorry! I’ll post pictures soon, and some sort of trip report.
Since I got back, things have not really slowed down. Actually, I guess I slowed down: somehow I managed to injure my knee while we were in Manhattan, and it hasn’t healed yet, so I’ve been limping around. Then on Tuesday I decided to try donating blood, which didn’t work out so well: I got almost all of the possible negative effects the Red Cross warns about: dizziness/fainting, stomach upset, bruising at the needle site, and so on.
Despite that, I’ve been pretty busy; I volunteered to help with sets for the med school’s first-ever spring musical. We’re putting on Guys and Dolls in the first-year lecture hall, which is a pretty impressive feat, as lecture halls don’t really have wings or backstage areas. They actually created sets out of insulation foam - they fold up (and are light enough for me to carry). Since there’s no backstage, they created one by curtaining off a tiny corner of the stage, behind the permanently-installed podium. There’s just barely room for the three sets and one desk, and if I squeeze between them and the podium there’s a little trapezoidal space in which I live during the show. If I’m very careful I can sit down without knocking anything over.
Since I’m only doing set changes, I just started rehearsing this week, but the rest of the company has been working on this for months, and the results are really impressive. They’re sort of a motley assortment, with some people who have tons of musical theater experience, and some who still haven’t quite figured out what “stage right” and “stage left” mean. (No joke - this caused a few problems with set changes at first.) Anyway, it’s all come together very well, and I wish I got to sit in an actual seat to see the show, because it’s going to be great!