Tag: Uncategorized

Commencement this past weekend for the Class of 2010 could not have been better.  The weather cooperated, but more than that, the Commencement address by Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn was poignant and inspirational, as was the address by graduating senior Peter Baumann. In addition, the honorary degree candidates were among the most impressive I […]…Continue Reading Commencement 2010

As some of you may know, I’m spending all of academic year 2010-2011 abroad in the middle east. In an act that can be characterized as nothing else but a total cliche, I’ll be keeping a blog. If you should be so inclined as to follow my travels and regional political commentary, look no further: […]…Continue Reading Shameless self-promotion

Talk about institutional pride!  In what might be an even greater long shot than the Butler Bulldogs making it to the championship game of this year’s fabulous NCAA D-I basketball tournament, a team of more than 55 Middlebury undergraduates won entry into the Department of Energy’s 2011 Solar Decathlon Competition. The Department of Energy Web […]…Continue Reading Middlebury wins entry into the 2011 Solar Decathlon

News about the College’s just-announced initiative to provide on-line language courses for pre-college students has generated great interest.  Much of the information I provided to the campus community in an email this morning can be found at http://www.middlebury.edu/mil The New York Times covered the initiative today (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/education/14middlebury.html). Needless to say, this is a big, yet […]…Continue Reading Middlebury Interactive Languages

This whole business about housing units in Jerusalem strikes me as more ridiculous than usual, and worse yet is the fallout, which is downright unsettling. The headlines of most important newspapers (like this one)today have included Netanyahu’s stubborn resistance on the subject of housing construction for Jews in East Jerusalem, most importantly, his speech in […]…Continue Reading “I can’t heeeear you…”

Over at MERIP, an interesting piece by Mustapha Bayoumi just appeared, in which he takes a look at race in a post 9/11, post Obama era America. The piece starts off with an amusing quote from this Dean Obeidallah skit, but then starts to dig deeper into recent pop culture representations of Arabs in American […]…Continue Reading Bringing the Middle East into the American Racial Landscape

Well, it looks like people out there are reading the blog. I was recently contacted by Matt Trevithick, who runs the Middle East Alliance out of the American University in Iraq. The website provides an overview on the Middle Eastern blogosphere, with updates on stories that Matt thinks are especially interesting. The portal of the […]…Continue Reading Middle East Alliance