Cringe-worthy J-Sex moments, Animal Collective concerts at Kimmel, and the easiest jobs on campus. If it's interesting and at NYU, you'll read about it here.
Cringe-worthy J-Sex moments, Animal Collective concerts at Kimmel, and the easiest jobs on campus. If it's interesting and at NYU, you'll read about it here.
Cringe-worthy J-Sex moments, Animal Collective concerts at Kimmel, and the easiest jobs on campus. If it's interesting and at NYU, you'll read about it here.
Ed note: Because study abroad application deadlines for Fall ‘10 are fast approaching, every posting day from February 1 to February 12, we’ll be featuring a different NYU Study Abroad site to help you decide where you want to be constantly drunk for the coming semester. Check them all out here.
Florence, a prime location for student interested in art history, is one of the three sites abroad that offers classes to kids in LSP, making it more accessible to a broader range of students. Getting in contact with people that had gone to this site was something I found a bit more challenging than for the other sites. Nevertheless, this is the feedback I got. Continue…
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 11:33 - by Kit Hunter
It’s 10pm and you haven’t started a response paper due the next day. In fact, you haven’t even done the reading, which you just discover is a twenty-page argument on Foucault’s perception of media power as it retroactively relates to American industrialism at the turn of the twentieth century. You go to Bobst, but all the available seats are taken; Think Coffee and Starbucks are similarly packed. Defeated, you trudge back to your East Village apartment as rain begins to fall and you hear the faint of echo of your professor’s admonishments: “Why are you a terrible student and person? I hate you, get out of my class.”
You walk past a restaurant called Table 12, on Avenue A and 12th St. You read a sign on the window informing you of its 24-hour service and — could it be? yes! — free Wifi. You walk inside and sit down at a booth by the front door. Electrical outlets line the walls like paintings at a museum, and the selection of coffee drinks and teas blows your mind. The food itself is a tad overpriced, but you’re willing to pay an extra couple of dollars for the ability to work uninterrupted for a few hours. The place is filled with enough people that you don’t feel awkwardly alone, but it’s far from overcrowded. Your waitress has a cute European accent (vaguely Swedish, you think to yourself as you bite into your giant chocolate chip cookie). You finish your latte in twenty minutes but work for two hours; the waitress doesn’t mind at all.
Continue…
In Which Rosie & Andy Fail to Solve The Indian Restaurant Mystery from NYU Local on Vimeo.
Why are there a zillion Indian restaurants on two random blocks in the East Village? And what’s the deal with those three identical Christmas-light-infested ones stacked on top of each other (Panna II’s slogan: “Where Chili Pepper Lights Meets Christmas Tree Lights”)? Haunted by these pressing questions, Andy and I went in search of answers. While we didn’t get any, we did find out that there’s a lot of free dessert out there. Also, a crazy guy yelled at us about poisoning. Success? Commenters, let us know what experiences you’ve had at these restaurants.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 10:45 - by Rosie GrayBy Fall 2014, NYU Abu Dhabi will move from its temporary home on the mainland to a newly constructed campus on Saadiyat Island. New NYUAD neighbors will include branches of the Guggenheim and Lourve museums, a couple of golf courses, a marina and no less than 29 hotels. However, as the meticulous model in the image on the left begins to materialize in the real world, Saadiyat Island is simultaneously becoming a centre of culture and an epicenter of appalling human rights violations.
The Coalition for Fair Labor at NYU helped highlight the issue yesterday by organizing a panel discussion that featured both concerned NYU faculty and a member of the Human Rights Watch. A report released by the HRW in 2009 profiled abuse of migrant workers on Saadiyat Island. According to Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of the Middle East division of the HRW, laborers on Saadiyat Island earn an average annual wage of $2575 (less than a tenth of the UAE’s average per capita income), often have their passports confiscated by their employers, are denied collective bargaining rights and work 10 hour days in temperatures as high as 120F.
For two years NYU did not address questions what kind of practices were used to assemble its Middle East outpost, but last Wednesday it agreed to demand that its contractors implement more humane conditions for workers, including 40 hour work weeks, a discontinuation of the policy of seizing their passports, guaranteed annual leave, and that employers will pay the recruiting fee owed to the UAE government instead of putting employees into debt by unlawfully making them pay it themselves.
Continue…
There was no better place to be this weekend than the Tea Party convention in Nashville. The main, attraction of course, was the keynote address by Sarah Palin, who wasted no time in laying into Obama’s first year in office. “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for you?” Palin asked, spawning rapturous applause from the audience. This is about the time I started to feel brain cells dying and left the room. I wondered, “What is it about Sarah Palin that makes me, and other liberals, just feel viscerally upset?”
It’s not that I simply disagree with their politics. I disagreed with McCain in 2008 and Bush in 2004, but never with the wall-punching fury that she inspires. “Ahh, then it must be her sheer stupidity,” I thought. But no, our previous President was certainly not an accomplished intellectual. Sure, he graduated from Yale, but with a C average. Maybe he’s a grade above Palin, but the asymmetry of hate is pretty brutal. That couldn’t explain it.
Palin was asked a question about the “two words that scare liberals: President Palin”, which she promptly blew off. And then it hit me. It’s not the way she is that frightens and depresses me, though I’m not a huge fan of it. It’s the fact that she is that way and people admire, believe, and crave it. It’s the staggering ability of, in this case, the Tea Partiers to ignore her hypocrisy. The deficit, which was of course attributed to the current President, was denounced as “immoral”. Yet does Palin favor scrapping the Bush tax cuts? Does she want to roll back the Medicare prescription drug plan? Did she reject stimulus funds as Governor of Alaska? Of course not. In Palin’s world, fiscal conservatism never applies to conservatives.
Continue…
In the second NPR Intelligence Squared U.S. debate of the year, high-profile panelists will be debating the motion “The U.S. Should Step Back From its Special Relation with Israel” at the Skirball Center from 6:45 – 8:30 p.m. tonight. Tickets are $12 for students ($45 for non-students).
Arguing for the motion are NY Times columnist Roger Cohen and oft-controversial Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi. Their opposition will be former Israeli ambassador Itamar Rabinovich and former White House advisor Stuart Eizenstat. As with all the other debates, ABC Correspondent John Donvan will be moderating. Yes, there will be blood.
As I mentioned during last month’s advisory (for the California debate), these NPR debates are awesome. Not only are they intellectually exhilarating, but it’s also pretty easy for audience members to meet the panelists after the event.
Visit the website for the season schedule.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010 8:30 - by Kenneth HsuA tale as heartbreaking as any, the 2004 Oscar-winning documentary Born into Brothels shed light on the difficulties faced by female sex workers and their children in poverty-stricken Calcutta. In order to encourage a passion for art and learning in the children, the filmmakers armed the kids with cameras so that they could capture their lives on film. At the end of the documentary, one of the boys, Avijit Halder, was invited to participate in a photo contest in Amsterdam. It turns out that Avijit, now 20, has emerged from his troubled family life to attend Tisch for film studies. A BBC article reports that the boy, whose mother died when he was in his teens and whose father was a drug addict, has overcome the harsh struggles of his childhood and built a new life for himself at NYU. Pretty powerful stuff.
(Image via) (H/t Wesley Chen)
Update: Apparently we scooped the BBC back in ‘08. And apparently Sam scooped me.
You know how shows like Arrested Development get cancelled, but shows like Two and a Half Men get renewed season after season? Well one day, Gallatin student David Bergmann hopes to keep the Tobias Fünkes of the world on the air, and the Charlie Sheens in rehab where they belong. He has carefully constructed a concentration in Keepin’ It Real: The Sociology of the Entertainment Industry (yes, the pronunciation spelling is official) with an Entertainment Media Technology minor in Stern in order to prepare himself for a career in whipping the entertainment industry into shape. He takes classes in entertainment and media studies, politics, television writing, acting, and public opinion.
In the interview below, Bergmann explains what it means to keep it real, and it doesn’t include emoticons or the Grammys.
Annie Werner: Where did you get the idea to call your concentration “Keepin’ It Real?”
David Bergmann: Actually, it rose out of an idea in high school—I founded a “Keepin’ It Real Honor Society” in response to all the other ridiculous honor societies at my school. We had like 12 different ones like the “History Honor Society” with a whole bunch of members that did absolutely nothing. KIRHS actually got things accomplished around the school.
AW: Like what?
DB: For instance, there was a school store that hadn’t been open in years, so I got my people to do it. Or we’d assign people to walk new students around the campus. That kinda stuff. Not bloated, obnoxious stuff just to put on your resume.
AW: What qualified someone to be a member of the honor society?
DB: Oh. We had an 8 or 9 page criteria form explaining what we did or did not want in a member. There was some crazy stuff on there, too—one section was dedicated to analyzing how a person used acronyms and emoticons on instant messenger. That shit was important back then. Very telling.
If you were watching the Super Bowl last night, you might have noticed this quite adorable commercial by Google that’s now taken the heart of the Internet. But you probably didn’t notice the subtle NYU plug at :04, did you?
Ah, just when you thought NYU and football would never be mentioned in the sentence ever again.
Monday, February 8, 2010 11:30 - by Kenneth Hsu
I only put one show per night this week, so feel free to suggest more in the comments.
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
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