Being a person of faith is just another of a wide range of fun activities available to those who come to Harvard. When Harvard boasts to admitted students of its more than 40 religious groups, it does so in the same vein that it boasts of its nearly dozen a cappella groups.
I majored in extracurriculars, honestly. I joined the Harvard Stand Up Comedy Society, which is a ragtag band of misfits. I wrote for 'On Harvard Time,' which was a student TV show trying to be 'The Daily Show.' And I wrote a humor column for 'The Crimson' starting my sophomore year.
Everyone praises Harvard 'for the students.' But what makes Harvard's students so great is that they are, in many ways, a cross-section of the larger world. They are normal people who happen to be excellent, and this sets them apart. People who go to Yale go because they want to attend Yale. People who go to Harvard go because they can.
Bills ought to be passed with deliberation by committees. Change should be achieved in a bipartisan manner. Incrementally, day by day, we should reach a consensus - not perfect, by any means - but something that we can be proud of, nonetheless.
Once, as my New Year's Resolution, I telephoned the Extenze Male Enhancement hotline every day for a month.
Nearly everything faith-related that I have done at Harvard has been followed by free food, from going to services at Harvard's Episcopal Chaplaincy to attending a day of interfaith discussion and dialogue hosted by the university chaplains in the fall.
No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
If you want to be famous because you do something well or badly, be it singing while fat or hitting balls of various shapes and hues, you have to be prepared to divulge. We live in the age of the chronic overshare.
While MIT and the University of Chicago duke it out for the title of nerdiest school, James Franco and Renee Zellweger show up at Harvard to party. Somehow, miracle of miracles, Harvard is 'cool.'
All that time that we spend tweeting our thoughts and emotions to our next of kin, we could be writing the great American novel, starting a business, or just living.
There should be no real difficulty in condemning Nazis, white supremacists, and the Ku Klux Klan. They are, for God's sake, Nazis and white supremacists. This should not require moral courage. This is obvious. This is the moral equivalent of the text you type to prove you're not a robot.
Every so often, when I am feeling plucky, I try to write a screenplay that combines all 10 of Americans' top phobias and market it as a sleeper hit.
Thanks to postmodernism, we tend to see all facts as meaningless trivia, no one more vital than any other. Yet this disregard for facts qua facts is intellectually crippling. Facts are the raw material of thought, and the knowledge of significant facts makes sophisticated thought possible.
Millennials give comics the kind of adulation past generations reserved for musicians. We respect Lady Gaga. But we'll travel hundreds of miles to touch the hem of Jon Stewart's robe.
Pleasure reading has long been an American ideal - generations of schoolchildren have headed home for the summer toting recreational reading lists. But try to pitch it to a group of non-readers, and they quickly become suspicious.
Harvard prides itself on its diversity - economic, racial, social, geographical - but it remains intellectually segregated. It's not what conservative commentators seem to imagine - a bastion of liberal professors force-feeding radical opinions to a naive student body.
I would say 'competence' actually might be slightly more important than passion. I understand that it is important to feel strongly about things, but give me a competent dentist over a passionate dentist any day, if only because something about the phrase 'passionate dentist' is deeply unnerving.
My goal is to be weirder than everybody else and hope that no one stops me. So far, no one has.
Snow is like a manic pixie dream girl: fun and whimsical when you encounter it only through the barrier of a movie screen - but absolute misery to have to put up with in real life.
Harvard is a wondrously tolerant climate for debate and exchange among a wide variety of thoughts, backgrounds, and beliefs, but the voice of religion on campus is largely inaudible.
