Tyler Clementi’s body was pulled from the Hudson River on September 29th, 2010, a week after he had changed his Facebook status to read “jumping off gw bridge sorry.” That same day, Gawker (“Today’s Gossip is Tomorrow’s News) posted a screen shot of Dharun Ravi’s Twitter account, with Ravi’s tweets about spying on Clementi highlighted:   I dare you to video chat me from 9:30 to 12 Ravi is now on...

I hadn’t planned on returning to the case of Tyler Clementi’s suicide. I wrote extensively about it last year, starting in late September when the news broke that Clementi, a first-year student at Rutgers, had jumped from the George Washington Bridge after discovering that his roommate, Dharun Ravi, had streamed live footage of him with another man for others to see. The news coverage in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy was...

One bad apple don’t spoil the whole bunch, girl! The one bad apple argument is extraordinarily resilient. Here’s President Bush on Abu Ghraib in a speech at the US Army War College in 2004: “A new Iraq will also need a humane, well-supervised prison system. Under the dictator, prisons like Abu Ghraib were symbols of death and torture. That same prison became a symbol of disgraceful conduct by a few American troops who...

About the hacking scandal and its consequences, a friend wrote to say: “I’ve been looking forward to news of Rupert Murdoch’s death for years; this may just be better.” I share the feeling, even as a part of me is stunned by just how many stars had to align to bring Murdoch before Parliament to testify on what he described, incoherently, as “the most humble day” of his life. It has been a matter of record for...

Act One, Scene one: April 27th, late in the afternoon. Returning from a matinee performance of Tony Kushner’s “The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Communism and Socialism, with a Guide to the Scriptures,” (the title is a snide reference to an unfinished dissertation, twenty years in production, by the main character’s son). There’s a line stuck in my head that’s been looping the whole train ride home....

Ready for your test? Describe YaWifeyLovesMe, the videographer/citizen journalist/ringside announcer, who excitedly recorded “This is Just 2 Crazy,” the four-minute video of the brawl in front of the Rutgers Student Center that has racked up over half a million views on WorldStarHipHop.com over the past eight days. (If you’re lagging the action, I’ve been writing around and about this video over the first three posts in...

In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold’s foundational act of public criticism, the author looks on in horror at the society that is being brought into being by the Industrial Revolution. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, although most of Arnold’s observations are about practices, institutions, and factions long gone, Culture and Anarchy remains an object of interest because Arnold had a way of categorizing that would now be...

And now we turn to the runaway hit from Rutgersfest 2011, a video that to date (some 48 hours out from the event) has garnered more views than all the other videos of fist fights, drunken walks, revelry, and stupidity from that day combined: “This Is Just 2 Crazy: Fight Outside Rutgers Fest 2011!(Girls Poppin Off On Everybody & Boyfriend Fights 3 Chicks While His Girl Gets Jumped).” This video, captured by a cell phone, has far...

Is this when it begins, the end of civilization? I had the ringer on my phone turned off, so I didn’t wake at 3:14:53 when the string of text alerts came in announcing a shooting on campus. As it turns out, the three text messages were lagging reality: at least four people had been shot in separate incidents hours earlier. Here the technology provided not so much early alert as eventual alert. What’s a few hours on a Saturday night?...

Four people shot on campus after the Spring music festival: live footage of the aftermath and campus brawls distributed on YouTube. What is the fate of higher education in the jobless future? 1. Culture and Anarchy 2.0: Broadcasting the End of Civilization Four people shot in New Brunswick and drunken violence occasions a prehistory of Rutgerfest, including Snooki’s recent visit to campus. 2. Culture and Anarchy 2.0, continued. Students...