A visual exploration of how the place of physical education at the university has changed over the past two hundred years. What does taking the bird’s eye view allow us to see? Is anything to be gained by treating a football stadium as the subject of poetry?  Let me know what you think. I Nothing moves.Not even the eye of the blackbird.  Queen’s College, established in 1766, middle right.   II Three squares.I am of three...

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....

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...