Unfortunately, the more opinion columns I write, the more absurd I feel. It seems like everything that gets published on this page is hackneyed from overuse -- sort of old, weathered and slushy.
A couple of weeks ago, Orhan Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, spoke at Dartmouth.
Unless something unprecedented happens in the next three years, the first decade of the 21st century will likely be remembered as a lost decade: a decade punctuated by an aimless and divisive war, spattered with terrorist attacks, and one during which people were fleetingly but admirably brought together by catastrophic natural disasters.
Like iron filaments passing through a magnetic field, nation-by-nation the world is being realigned.
We've all heard the familiar claim that at Dartmouth we learn as much outside the classroom as we do in it -- that we learn as much from our peers as we do from our professors.