Yes, they can tell when you haven’t done the reading. Facebooking during lecture? They notice. And no, they won’t tell you what questions are on the exam.

But TAs are on our side. Recently undergraduates themselves, TAs understand us better than we do them. “I remember that going to these sections was like jabbing hot pokers in my eyes,” says Ariel Zellman, a fourth-year Ph.D student in political science. “We’re not quite at the point in the Ivory Tower where we’re supposed to be looking down at the ants below.”

Though we resent trudging to Tech for 9 a.m. discussion sections, TAs devote themselves to making time count. Many spend up to 20 hours a week preparing for sections, which they juggle with their own coursework and academic responsibilities. They craft careful lesson plans and grade endless essays.

But just as we never stop being students, they never stop being TAs. “I could be going to the bathroom or in downtown Chicago in a CVS, I’m always a TA,” says Monique King a third-year Ph.D student studying communication sciences and disorders. “I’m never seen as a student with my own goals and responsibilities.”

Though TAs are students first, teaching has its perks, namely seeing students improve. “Teaching is so rewarding in ways that I think scholarly work is not apparently,” says Maha Jafri, a third-year in the English department. “Scholarly work is a lot of trial and error, ups and downs, and for a lot of it there are no tangible results immediately.”

After two weeks at Northwestern, Henri Lauzière hasn’t had time to decorate. Five rows of wall-length shelves and two dozen books line the first-time assistant professor’s office. A handsome desk houses a phone and a few sheets of paper pertaining to his first course at Northwestern, a seminar called The Arabian Peninsula in the 20th Century.

Photo by Katherine Tang / North by Northwestern.

Lauzière, 35, is an expert in Islamic movements in the Middle East and North Africa. He earned his Ph.D at Georgetown University, researching the Salafi movement, a form of Islamic extremism. Hired as part of an effort to enhance Middle Eastern studies at Northwestern, Lauzière impressed the history department with his innovative research and linguistic abilities, strengthened by a year spent in Qatar at the end of his Ph. D studies.

But before he could work on his Arabic, Lauzière first had to learn English. Though a Canadian citizen, Lauzière is from Francophone Quebec City, where English is taught but rarely mastered. He continued his graduate studies in Western Canada.

When Lauzière arrived at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, he attended a meeting for TAs whose first language was not English. “When I said I was from Canada, everybody started laughing and waited for me to say where I was really from,” Lauzière says. “It did not occur to them that you could be born and raised in Canada and barely speak any English.”

Facing his first class at Northwestern, Lauzière is open about how new he is, asking his students if it’s normal to keep them in class for three hours on the first day. (He doesn’t.) He speaks a foreigner’s English – musically accented but occasionally too formal, an English peppered with words like “pedagogical” and “inculcate.”

Discussion sections still stress him out, a result of his “annoying French background,” where professors lecture at students and rarely hear questions. “If you want me to just talk for three hours, at least I’ll prepare. It might be boring, but I can prepare,” says Lauzière. “But discussion is something else. You put one brick there, but the student has to put another, and together we build something, we build a wall, we end up constructing something. But if the students say nothing, what do you do?”

Brian Odom in Pompeii. Photo courtesy of Odom.

$875,000 — that’s a lot of money. What’s that going to allow you to do that you couldn’t do before?

This is fantastic. $875,000 doesn’t go as far as you might think it would go. The award is for five years, so this will support two graduate students and allow me to buy a laser, that’s it. It really is hard to raise money to do research — students and equipment are expensive. But it’s not easy to come by $875K, so this is huge. It will free us up to pursue creative ideas that we might otherwise have trouble getting funded.

You also won a $600,000 Career Grant from the National Science Foundation. Sounds like a good year for you. What kind of projects will these grants fund?

Yes, it has been a very good year. We have several projects, and every agency signs up to support one project, so they’re slightly different. They’re all within the context of trapping molecular ions, but then we’ll do different things with the trapped ions.

Two other Northwestern professors won Packard Fellowships in the past two years, but they’re both in geosciences. Is it time for some interdepartmental warfare?

(laughs) Actually, the physics department has done very well historically. This is our fourth Packard award, which is pretty good, since our department is relatively small.

How will the grant change your involvement at Northwestern?

It means that I can do better research than I could do otherwise, which is a big part of the job as a professor. You teach classroom courses, but a lot of our effort goes to research, which is teaching graduate students by the apprenticeship system. That part of the job is very important for the university and for the department, and things will be much better now with this grant. We won’t be scrambling for funds, we won’t be worried that we’re going to run out and we have to play it safe to get funding. We can really be creative and see where it takes us.

Your research is about cooling molecules to sub-Kelvin levels. What is the ultimate goal?

Packard has decided to fund us to do very high precision spectroscopy on molecules. Did I use the word spectroscopy? I probably didn’t explain what that was.

I tried to pretend that I knew.

Spectroscopy is measuring quantum energy levels. We can do that with atoms, measure to 17 decimal places. We can’t do anything near that well in molecules. The best molecular spectroscopy is to 12 decimal places, something like that. We have techniques to cool atoms down and to hold them in traps, a container without walls. The atoms are held in this trap not because they bounce around and hit something and come back, but because we use electromagnetic fields, so it’s a much gentler container. But we don’t have any techniques to hold molecules in traps. That technology is just being developed.

What would you do with that?

There are two goals that I submitted in the Packard proposal. One is to see if fundamental constants change with time. That should sound strange.

I was hoping for elaboration.

We would be looking at the ratio of the electron mass to the proton mass. So you would think that constant should stay constant, it shouldn’t change in time. But a lot of speculative theories in physics, which try to unify the forces, theories of everything, predict that constants aren’t really constant. They’re more or less constant, but they change a little bit in time, or they might have been different in the early universe. It might or might not be the case, but it’s the job of physicists to go and look to see. So if we can do spectroscopy on molecules, then we can start probing for this effect to an interesting level, seeing if the electron to proton mass might be changing ever so slightly every year.

What would be the implications of that?

If you measure an effect, then there’s new physics there. One of the speculative theories of everything might gain some ground, as compared to the others.

Does it have more practical applications?

If we measure the constants changing in time, that bit of science will probably never see a technological application, because it’s so small. But when you work really hard to do an experiment like that, you have to invent new technology. And that new technology often has pay-offs that were unforeseen, spin-off projects that are technologically useful.

When I Googled you, the first thing that came up was a blog post you wrote about your relationship with God. Since the scientific community is so overwhelmingly atheist, do you ever feel like the odd one out?

At Northwestern, it hasn’t made me feel like an odd one out because we haven’t talked about it. At Chicago, [where I did my post-doctorate], when it did come up with my colleagues there, it was warmly received. It was a difference of opinion. But generally, things are changing in science. Fifty years ago, if you weren’t an atheist and you were a physicist, people thought something was wrong with you. Now we scientists in the current era are a little more humble about what we know and what we don’t know. So people like me, that have thoughts on God and maybe some spiritual experience, don’t turn other scientists off very often anymore.

Do your beliefs inform your research and vice versa?

Yes, there is interplay. My training as a scientist makes me have a certain interpretation of how the world got started. I’m not an intelligent design proponent, although a lot of people who believe in God are. So if I wasn’t a scientist, who knows, I could be a creationist, but as a scientist I believe in evolution.

The other side is a little harder to articulate cleanly. But there have been times when I’ve done research in one way rather than another because of conversations I’ve had with God on the subject. My interaction with God affects all of my life, including how I do my work, and every once in a while I behave differently because of something that happened in that interaction.

What I remember most are the non-memories. I remember snapshots, not scenes, thoughts instead of actions, moments but not events. I don’t remember saying goodbye, waiting for the plane, arriving on a probably muggy day (they were all muggy, weren’t they?) in September or any of the basic scenes that accompanied moving to a tiny boarding school in the middle of nowhere on the island that once ruled the world.

But I remember that beach. The beach, the ocean, always left me with that convoluted feeling of endless possibility and inevitable doom. Something about vast, open spaces fills me with a sense of hope and wonder, mitigated by doubts and fears, a kind of certain knowledge that options are limiting, possibilities caging. The beach asked me what I was going to do, whether I would stay or leave, whether it was home I missed or just the myth of home — questions that were met with a dreadful silence. “I don’t know,” I murmured, a shout rising in my throat. But the quiet waves rolled in, so calm a scene that I couldn’t bear to disturb it with my senseless whispers.

The clear days were the worst. Some days were so crisp and light that you could see for miles and sometimes, far off in the distance, you could catch a glimpse of the Isle of Man. I hated those days because on the surface, I knew how beautiful it all was, how lucky I was to catch this sight, the rarity of the opportunity. I knew one day I would miss it, would remember the sunsets and the smell of salt in the air and romanticize it into something it had never been. I’d view the beach as a scene of quiet moments I would share only with my past and future selves, and wonder how I’d let it all drift away. But I resented the island for being there, for proving that I was much more than an ocean away, that the obstacles between the life I lived and the memories I’d abandoned were much too solid.

Sometimes, the beach would overwhelm me and I’d try to stay away. I’d walk along the sea wall instead, close enough to watch but pretend that I was an outsider, one who didn’t belong, just getting from one point to another. I’d read the street names I passed: Westbourne, Shaftesbury, Marlborough — cloak myself in the identity of a traveler, a cold observer, one who saw and thought but felt only moderate curiosity. I watched as boys skipped stones into the sea, and I smiled.

It’s been three years since I stepped foot on that beach for the first time, and my only souvenir from it now lies in a drawing, a flimsy scrap of notepaper I received the night before I left, my year abroad cut short in the middle of February. A teacher I had never gotten along with wrote me a goodbye letter, and on the bottom, she’d drawn the beach at sunset. We had talked about it once, about how the sanguine sky broke into patches of gold and crossing-guard orange, how the sun shined like a ball of fire, falling into the sea, disappearing and leaving behind a paling pink then purple then blue-black sky. I’ll never be sure why she did that.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to the few friends I had made in my time there. I don’t remember packing, my last glance at my room, or the ride to the airport. But I remember the last breath of salty air, the way the wind blew hair into my eyes and the crunch of the sand that got stuck in my shoes as I walked away for the last time.

On a rainy afternoon in January, Bookman’s Alley is almost empty. Roger Carlson, the store owner, sits at a book-strewn desk near the entrance, and in the course of an hour, only a single customer steps in. She disappears in the back, looking for a book on hypnosis.

The store feels like your grandfather’s study would, if we lived in a time where old men still regularly kept large libraries with worn leather chairs and bowls of gumdrops. The store’s a mess, or maybe it’s magical; it depends on your point of view. Shelf after shelf, case after case, is lined with hardcover books, stretching across the room; then turning a corner, disappearing into a labyrinth of books. No surface is left uncovered, no wall undecorated: trophies, sporting equipment, an original, framed letter by Dorothy Parker, military uniforms, a piano and a chalkboard listing the bestsellers of 1980 compete for your attention. Hand-written signs organize the store — “Presidents” on one bookcase, “Black Interest” on another, and an ox head with the words “Western Americana” written on it direct you through the maze. You can’t walk five feet without stumbling into a chair, ready to catch you, entreating you to stay. And in the front, watching over the world he has created, sits Carlson, listening to Chet Baker as the music drifts softly through the store.

Whatever else it may be, it’s the end of an era. Bookman’s Alley is one of eight bookstores within easy walking distance of campus — a respectable number, but, according to former Evanston bookstore owner Jeff Rice, only a fraction of the 20-something Evanston had in its golden age. Evanston hasn’t shrunk in 20 years, so how did a 75,000-person college town that could once support two dozen bookstores lose so many of them?

In the past two decades, Evanston bookstores have gone the way of countless bookstores across the country. Independent bookstores, which sell new books, and used bookstores work on different models, but were hurt by the same competitors. First, Barnes & Noble and Borders came in, centralizing a good deal of books and drawing walk-in customers away from Evanston’s other stores. Recessions came and went, reducing how much luxury spending people could afford. Then, 1995 brought Amazon.com, overturning bookstores’ most basic business models and introducing crushing competition. In short, the big chains hurt locals; Amazon killed them.

Great Expectations

So what happened in Evanston?

There are, in fact, only three independent bookstores selling new books left within walking distance of campus, and that’s if you count Beck’s Books and Adler’s Foreign Books (though the latter is a warehouse without a traditional storefront). The other is Comix Revolution on Davis Street, and both it and Beck’s are technically local chains, as Comix Revolution has another branch in Mount Prospect and Beck’s has several in Chicago. The only used bookstores left nearby are Bookman’s Alley on Sherman Avenue, Amaranth Books on Davis, and Howard’s Books on Foster Street and Maple Avenue.

Carlson, who opened Bookman’s Alley 30 years ago, has watched as other used bookstores have gone out of business. He says he understands the appeal of the chain stores and how they so rapidly replaced local businesses. “They have attractive shops with food and coffee. For the first few years, they became gathering places,” he says. “They were taverns that don’t sell liquor. They were an attractive alternative to something that wasn’t there before.”

But the answer to why a few remaining bookstores survived is the same as the answer to why others couldn’t. Near the Foster El stop, a sign for Great Expectations, a bookstore, hangs above the newly relocated After Hours video shop, which this past summer replaced the Russian Press Service in that space. Great Expectations closed eight years ago, but the sign is a reminder of what was arguably the greatest bookstore in Evanston history.

According to Howard Cohen, owner of Howard’s Books, Great Expectations was “the best philosophy bookstore in the United States for many years.” Whereas Barnes & Noble might carry three or four books by Dutch philosopher Benedict de Spinoza, Great Expectations would fill three or four shelves.

Once a Northwestern undergraduate and now a history professor here, Jeff Rice was the last owner of the store. He paints a romantic picture of it, a place where professors would meet, famous writers would come and go (Saul Bellow got kicked out of the store “for being an asshole”) and people would get into political arguments and shouting matches while a Cubs game played in the background. “And what independent bookstores could do was make that happen,” Rice says. “They were salons.”

So how, in a college town, could one of the greatest scholarly bookstores in the country close in the same year that a comic book shop successfully opened less than a mile away? It has to do with the kinds of books each sold. In the book industry, there are three types of books: textbooks, academic/scholarly books and trade books — which are, essentially, everything else. Trade books, which are often the cheapest, have the largest profit margin between the price the bookseller pays to the publisher and the price he charges customers.

What this means is that selling trade books is essential for subsidizing a core collection of other books, which often cost more to maintain. For a store like Great Expectations, which dealt in academic and scholarly literature, trade books were what allowed the store to stay in business. After all, it’s easier to sell a copy of Oliver Twist than it is to sell obscure books about Martin Heidegger.

When Barnes & Noble opened its first location in Evanston, it drew away the walk-in customers that had helped cushion Great Expectations. “Literally, within a month, we were watching our business drop by 25 percent,” Rice says. But as the “preeminent scholarly bookstore in America,” according to Rice, the store had a loyal base of mail-in customers who had few other options. Before the arrival of Amazon, it was often difficult for collectors or scholars to get books. After Amazon was founded, mail-order sales dropped by 75 percent.

Which leads to the final point. Real, physical stores need inventory. The only way they can survive is to have on hand the books that customers seek. “To every book there is a buyer, but that buyer may never come in or may come in once,” Rice says. To sell 50 books, Great Expectations had to carry 800. Physical bookstores have limited hours, pay high rent costs and suffer from theft. All Amazon needs is a warehouse.

The lone survivors

Comix Revolution thrives because it serves a niche market, has no real in-town competition and deals primarily in trade. Beck’s is the only physical alternative to Norris, and with often-lower prices, it’s in fair shape. But it’s hard to imagine any other independent bookstore that could make it.

The used bookstores that remain have survived mostly through will. It took Carlson 10 years of working 70- to 75-hour weeks at Bookman’s Alley before he began making a decent living. “I was fairly certain when I started that it involved a vow of poverty,” Carlson says.

He joked that, despite having only about a quarter of the business he did five years ago, the only thing that might close the store in the next few years is his death. At 80 years old, he has quietly, stubbornly defied the changes the rest of the bookselling world has had to accept — namely, moving to the Internet.

“The business has changed radically, and I have not changed radically,” he says. “I don’t have anything on the Internet. The last few years I’ve been doing this mostly for the fun of it, and [the Internet] isn’t fun.”

Howard’s Books, according to Cohen, has survived through “stubbornness and having a wife who supports us.” But he did not have the luxury of shunning the Internet. Cohen says that Carlson is one of only two owners he knows who has not put any inventory online, but that without it, Howard’s Books would have to close.

“After opening, I had a choice: to either join them or die, or at least leave the business,” Cohen explains. He estimates that as many as two-thirds of his total sales now take place online. And while the Internet opens up a larger customer base, the sheer competition forces prices down — which is good for customers, but bad for the bookstores.

The owners of Amaranth, Bookman’s Alley and Howard’s try to help each other. “We’re all friendly. We don’t see each other often, but we refer people to each other’s shops,” Carlson says. “We’re all desperate people.”

How we help kill bookstores

Any basic economics class will teach you one of the great lessons of capitalism: economic efficiency. We are taught that the best, least-expensive products will thrive, inefficient business will fail and consumers will ultimately benefit from lower prices.

Of course, this basic lesson comes with the assumption that the only thing that matters is how much something costs. And at a time when even the least-engaged people regularly check up on how the Dow is doing, maybe it is all that matters. But anyone who’s watched their favorite local coffee shop go out of business and be replaced by a Starbucks, or who saw Arrested Development get canceled while The Bachelor is now in its thirteenth season, can tell you that sales and numbers and profits can tell you what’s popular, but not necessarily what’s the best.

The interior of Comix Revolution. Photo by Katherine Shaum / North by Northwestern.

Despite their college-town location, most Evanston bookstore owners say they don’t think that students really help sustain their businesses. Carlson and Cohen both say they rarely see students, though Comix Revolution enjoys a somewhat larger share of student customers. “I don’t think they’re interested in books at Northwestern,” Carlson says. “I think they’re interested in the money they can make when they get out of school.”

Which isn’t to say that anyone really blames students, per se. “Students, even at Northwestern, they’re very cost-conscious, which I understand,” Rice says. “And if you put a book in a bookstore at $20 and they can find it online at $5, why shouldn’t they buy the $5 book? How do you get to ask them to support their local bookseller rather than save $15?”

Still, the problem may be more than just price. Carlson may have a point; with so much work and reading devoted to classes, and as a generation that’s comfortable reading online, students may not be reading many “traditional” books.

Daisy Chen, a first-year Medill graduate student, says she never goes to bookstores. “I really don’t buy any books, my whole life. There is no need for me to buy books because you can get everything online.”

Even students who do read, however, rarely stray beyond the comfort of the chains they’re used to. McCormick freshman Cole Berhorst says that because he doesn’t have many independent bookstores in his hometown, he’s just used to buying books at the chains. “It’s habit almost, you never think to shop somewhere else,” he says. “The brand name is really powerful.”

And advertising hasn’t helped. Cohen tried to advertise in the Daily last year, offering a coupon for $5 off any purchase to new Northwestern students. Only three customers brought in coupons; two were elderly.

Waldenbooks are closing across the country; its parent company, Borders, is in big trouble. Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book retailer, is losing money but staying afloat; the Evanston branch has shortened its hours. But if the trend continues, in a few years you may only have two options for buying books: order from Amazon or shop at the one mega-chain that will remain.

It makes sense. Even Northwestern alumnus Jim Mortensen (Weinberg, ‘94), who runs Comix Revolution, admits that physical stores are inconvenient. “I think it’s just what we have and how we offer it is very inefficient,” he says. “We have to have the individual item someone’s looking for at the moment they want it and at the right price.”

He predicts that the book industry will die in five to ten years, and that competition with digital distribution will mean that even his own business will have to change its focus, maybe to selling comic-related merchandise rather than comics themselves. “You can download a comic, you can’t download a t-shirt,” he says. “There’s ways to sort of change things or mutate the core of what we do into something different, but I don’t know that there’s any way to hang on to what we do today.”

The death of bookstores will not come without consequences, even if some are mostly romantic. The art of browsing, of wandering around a bookstore and finding something that catches your eye, of literally judging a book by its cover and deciding to try something new, is dying. The salon-like atmosphere that Rice describes already sounds like a hokey glimpse into the past, an indulgent memory like those of malt shops and drive-in movie theaters.

“A real bookstore is not just a place where books are bought and sold. It’s a place where an intellectual life takes place,” says Bill Savage, a senior lecturer in the English Department and Weinberg adviser. He often orders books for his class through Comix Revolution, encouraging students to enter a bookstore that doesn’t also double as a college paraphernalia shop.

He compares stores like Borders and Barnes & Noble to McDonalds and Burger King. “Sometimes you have to have a cheeseburger and okay, that will do,” Savage says. “But if we didn’t have any other restaurants in Evanston, would we feel happy about that?”

But the greatest consequence may be the loss of professional expertise. Now, anyone who sells a book online is a bookseller, not a book expert. Mortensen says he occasionally had customers come into his store, solicit his advice and knowledge, find a book they liked, then write down the ISBN to purchase it elsewhere. There’s even an iPhone application designed to find the lowest price for a book online when you enter an ISBN. It’s an incredible convenience — and how can you tell a generation that grew up downloading music from Napster and reading free newspapers online that information costs money?

A sign outside Howard’s Books. Photo by Katherine Shaum / North by Northwestern.

A sign in Howard’s window reads: “Come in and find that perfect book you weren’t looking for!” It’s a used bookstore credo, the idea that you’ll look around and stumble across something great that you weren’t expecting to find. But it also implies that you’re looking in the first place.

Back in Bookman’s Alley, the phone rings. Carlson picks it up and talks for a few seconds, but he doesn’t have what the caller is looking for. A few minutes later, his one customer walks out. She leaves empty-handed.

For one Northwestern sophomore, though, that’s exactly what happened. Maxine Christine (her chosen publishing name) is one of those typically over-involved Northwestern girls, active in Kappa Kappa Gamma, Boomshaka and Graffiti, while double-majoring in dance and Spanish.

Photo courtesy of Playboy Enterprises, Inc.

It’s no surprise, then, that when Playboy started looking for Northwestern girls to model in their Big Ten issue, Christine missed it. “I never saw the fliers or anything,” she said. But after an article about the search was published in The Daily, Christine felt she had missed a chance. “I heard about it and people in my dorm were talking about it, and I thought, ‘Oh, I missed this!’ And I thought it would be so much fun to just give it a shot.”

Although Playboy was only in town for a day and a half after Christine found out about the auditions, she e-mailed them immediately, and within an hour, she was at the Hilton Garden Inn for her audition. After she was chosen, they did a photo shoot that week in a house in Evanston in which she posed in a library with Northwestern paraphernalia. She was nervous at first, but the photographer quickly made her feel comfortable. “It was kind of like the photographer, George Georgiou, and I were having a conversation through the lens while the other people in the room made sure everything looked just right,” Christine said of the experience.

Posing topless in Playboy, however, isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Her roommate, McCormick sophomore Andrea Vonk, respects Christine’s choice, though she wouldn’t want to emulate it. “It’s nothing I personally would do,” Vonk said, “but if she’s comfortable with her body, more power to her.”
Christine, however, had no reservations. There were opportunities to pose clothed, as some Big Ten models did, but she did not know about that until after the spots had filled up. And while she said she didn’t feel comfortable modeling fully nude, going topless didn’t seem like a big deal to Christine. After all, “boobs are boobs,” she said.

For Christine, the opportunity was too much to give up. She had always wanted to be a model, but at 5′4″, felt she was too short for most opportunities. “I’m in the entertainment industry and I always say there’s no such thing as bad advertising unless they spell your name wrong,” Christine said, “and this was just another way to get my name out there. It was just a unique opportunity that I’ve never come across before.”

Christine said she has met only positive reactions after her appearance in Playboy. Her family supported her, she said, throughout the entire process, and her friends’ reactions have ranged from simple enthusiasm to insisting on introducing her to others as, “Guess what? This is Maxine, she’s in Playboy, and you have to go buy the issue!”

She has, in fact, become a bit of a celebrity on campus. Her roommate, Vonk, said she’d already heard of Christine before she met her, and mentioning her elicits interesting reactions. “I would be out or something, and someone would ask, ‘Who’s your roommate?,’” she said. “I’ll say, and half the frat guys will have Playboy and they’ll ask, ‘Which one is she?’”

It may be surprising that no one has responded to her negatively, but she and her friends insist that everything they’ve heard has been supportive. “I think everyone thinks it’s cool and gives her credit for being brave enough to do that,” Vonk said, “and I think we’re all glad that she’s representing Northwestern well because people think we’re the dorky school in the Big Ten and don’t have anyone attractive here.”

Her male friends say they feel the same way. Communication senior Jake Herbert, a friend of Maxine’s, explained, “Everyone thinks it’s sweet. Obviously, if she’s in Playboy, it’s not something frowned upon in the guy world.”

If she could go back and do it again, she insists that she would. For now, though, she’s content to stick with her dancing and studies. “I had an amazing time,” Christine said, “but now I focus on school. But it would be hard for me to turn down another opportunity from them, just because they made it so easy and it was just a really great time.”

Now, we admit we’re not the first to sit down with Maxine Christine and ask her a few questions, but rather than be like Playboy and ask about what she looks for in guys, what her favorite position is, or whether she’d be in a threesome, we thought we’d find out a little more about the personality behind the looks. Here’s what we discovered, in Maxine’s own handwriting:

Wiesel — a Holocaust survivor, Nobel Peace Prize winner, activist, and author of more than 40 books, most famously Night — was the highlighted speaker at the Israel @ 60 Gala, a sold-out commemoration of Israel’s independence. I and about 8,000 other people attended the event, which included music and speakers, including Wiesel, comedian Jeff Garlin and Barukh Binah, Consul General of Israel to the Midwest.

The audience included prominent Illinois and Chicago politicians, as well as representatives and consul-generals from 20 nations, ranging from Bolivia to Jordan to Australia. Most received enthusiastic applause — except France and Germany, which were met with claps and boos. The event’s tone was congratulatory and hopeful, a celebration of Israel’s 60-year history as a nation and its longer history as a Jewish land.

Despite the hopeful overtones, many of the speakers’ messages were clearly political. Barukh Binah, in his opening remarks, praised Israel’s achievements in the arts and sciences. “I promise you today: We will never cease to astonish the world,” he said.

Nevertheless, he warned that those accomplishments would not come without a price. “I humbly suggest to you that Israel is unique in just about everything, but it is most unique in that it is a country that must still be fought for. We may take Israel for granted, but unfortunately, some of her neighbors do not.” And when Wiesel called for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of the most outspoken Holocaust deniers, to be thrown out of the United Nations, he was met with enthusiastic applause.

Optimism is to be expected at the birthday celebration of a nation that many fought so hard for. But the steady self-assurance troubled me slightly. In a video celebrating four Chicagoans who fought for Israel, one man, who was in the audience, spoke about learning to throw Molotov cocktails at tanks, and how it was the most exciting time in his life. And when the audience stood to clap for him, it did not seem to recognize that the tanks he destroyed were filled with people trying to regain the land that had been taken away from them.

I do not mean to make a political statement about Israel one way or the other — enough has already been said about the injustices and cruelties committed on both sides of the debate. But when Wiesel proudly stated, “Israel rejected hatred as a principle. Anger, sometimes, but hatred is on the other side,” I felt a stirring in my stomach that was not of pride, but of shame. If, 60 years later, young Americans can boo when Germany is mentioned as a supporter, but cheer for Turkey, which still denies the Armenian genocide, then perhaps hatred has not been rejected by all.

The creation of Israel was a major, long-fought-for accomplishment for the Jewish people, and I do not begrudge a celebration by a people whose history is full of such hardship and overwhelming resilience. But when, even at this occasion, that pride threatens to turn to arrogance, when that celebration loses sight of the complexities and contradictions that fill the history of Israel’s formation, we Jews momentarily lose sight of the reality of our position. We must keep in mind that although Israel came at a large price, that price was not paid only by Jews.

But in the end, I do say “we.” Because sitting in that audience, surrounded by people who look like me and share my past, there was no question that I was a Jew. In the middle of an audience dotted heavily with yarmulkes, waving white-and-blue glow sticks, and singing along to the Israeli national anthem, Wiesel’s words struck me: “We shall never speak of Israel as ‘them,’ but as we — for after all, we are one people.”

Evanston changed its curfew law for minors to 10 p.m. on weeknights and 11 p.m. on Friday and Saturday nights, an hour earlier than it was. Pros: Fewer annoying high school kids at Kaffein! Cons: Young-looking students better start carrying ID as soon as the sun goes down.

Northwestern withdrew its offer of an honorary degree to Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, saying the controversy surrounding him would harm the celebratory mood of Commencement in June. As the school explains in the student handbook, “Northwestern University is committed to the principles of free inquiry and free expression.”

After weeks of judging, and being judged by, prospies, the incoming class of 2012 finally made its decision on whether or not to come to Northwestern. We’ll miss the little guys, and the sweetly satisfying (and/or ego-boosting) explanations that yes, that very large piece of curved metal is the Arch. Oh, ignorant prospies, soon to be ignorant freshmen: how we adore you!

The Feinberg School of Medicine has stepped boldly into the future this week as well. A study discovered that causes of high blood pressure can be predicted with a person’s unique “fingerprint” (urine). This bodes well for the future, since we’re hoping that soon we’ll be able to predict a person’s thoughts by measuring their “fingerprint,” making silent urinal conversations finally a reality.

Take Back the Night happened on Thursday. No, it wasn’t an emo band concert. The College Feminists put on a barbeque picnic and march to protest sexual assault. Nothing says “rape is whack” like free dessert.

It was also Africa Awareness Week, which featured events ranging from dance performances to an African bake sale. While we were happy to learn more about Africa, we had to wonder, when was the last time it wasn’t an “Awareness Week,” but just a “week”?

At Northwestern, it never is just a “week,” because it’s always “midterm week.” It might be hard getting through the rest of the quarter avoiding calls from semester-system friends on the beach, but look on the bright side: At least once you earn your degree, Northwestern won’t snatch it away right before June.

Three weeks after the shootings at Northern Illinois University, it’s tempting to ask what could have been done to prevent it, and what can be done to prevent such things in the future. The same question was asked after Virginia Tech — to which NIU’s president wrote a response last April highlighting how the university was preparing for emergencies.

In reality, it’s unclear that much can be done at all. The blessing – or danger – of a place like Northwestern is that it is so open, bleeding into the surrounding town and remaining accessible to all. How can you keep unwanted intruders out when it’s so easy to get in? And if it were a question of sacrificing more freedom to do so, many Northwestern students said they would hesitate.

Bill Banis, vice president of student relations, said the answer lies in deterring would-be criminals.

“Much of our investment has been to help protect students from themselves,” Banis said. “Part of the philosophy isn’t so much to interfere with the freedom of our students, it’s to create deterrence for those who would do harm, those who don’t belong on campus.”

The most affected so far have been residence halls, where video cameras and security guards have helped increase dorm security. And despite students’ complaints about measures such as locking the side doors of dorms, Banis insisted that most intruders enter through those doors or by trailing after students who open the doors ahead of them.

The focus, then, is on daily security. Neither Banis nor students said that they think that one can account for tragedies like the ones at NIU or Virginia Tech.

“I think that no matter how many security measures are in place, those would help once the bad event had already started happening,” Medill junior Vinika Porwal said. “It wouldn’t prevent the event from happening. Things like lighting are much more important than scoping out potential shooters.”

As for prevention, more power may lie with CAPS than with NUPD. Much of the media focus following Virginia Tech and NIU was on the killers’ psychological histories and the roles that therapy and medication played in the events leading up to the shootings.

“Our counseling center does a lot of gatekeeper training… to identify individuals in distress,” Banis said. “We have a good safety net in place. [But] despite everything that we do and all the investments that we make, the world is a risky place, and an increasing percentage of college students come into higher education with emotional and psychological issues.”

A New York Times article in 2003 described the trend. The percentage of college students treated for depression doubled between 1989 and 2001, according to the article, and the number of suicidal students and students seeking counseling have increased significantly. Although the numbers may reflect more students seeking help, rather than more students needing it, 80 percent of surveyed counseling center directors said they thought that the previous five years had seen an increase in students with severe psychological issues.

But as Banis points out, better psychological services do not guarantee protection. What if the school did more, requiring a WildCARD to enter classroom buildings that were protected by security guards? Would students feel more at ease? Not necessarily, they said.

“I want to go to a university that doesn’t feel like a prison,” said Binoy Shah, a mechanical engineering graduate student. “If all of a sudden the security is heightened to a point that it’s so visible it comes to my mind every day, then I think I’ll just feel more insecure, feel like there’s something going on that I should be worried about or keep an eye out on.”

Even those who would be willing to give up some freedoms doubted how effective any measures could be.

“I would sacrifice anything. Part of me wants to say that if you’re worried about security cameras and policemen, you may be at fault here, you may be doing something wrong,” said Chris Riggs, a graduate student in music performance. “But at the same time, I don’t think more security cameras or more policemen would prevent something like the NIU thing. It could happen in a split-second before anyone could react — it just happens.”

And while recent college shootings have played a role in many universities creating emergency notification systems and promoting safety measures, NU’s administration has tried recognize the difficulties of securing this campus without oppressing it.

“After Virginia Tech… First we were doing too much, taking away freedom, then after, we weren’t doing enough,” Banis said. “We don’t look at this emotionally. We did a thorough audit and we made our decisions based on a very balanced approach in terms of maximum freedom for students and maximum safety for buildings. There’s a trade-off.”

But that’s not always the case. Over the summer, the Northwestern Class of 2011 Facebook group was alive and buzzing with freshmen using the site to actually meet new faces, arriving on Sept. 18 with hundreds of Northwestern “friends” who, by most standards, were still strangers. I also found myself “friending” dozens of fascinating people who had required no special interaction except a simple request, and I was interested in meeting them.

And then I got here. I would never actually meet most of them, though I’ll sometimes recognize a face in a lecture hall with a little uneasiness about where I’ve seen it before. Others – well, I wish they too were just strange faces passing by the Rock. Turns out some of those really interesting people weren’t so interesting once I got around to talking to them. I’d fallen for the simplest marketing trick: I’d believed what I’d read.

Each of us, from the moment we create an account, is consciously, constantly shaping a public image. We are asked to boil ourselves down to something categorical – our jobs and educations, our interests and favorite bands. As a result, we end up summarizing how we see ourselves and influencing how others look in our direction. Real-life acquaintances will catch the blatant lies, but sometimes subtle things make the biggest difference. One study found that people with more Facebook friends are seen as more popular and attractive than those with fewer. After about 800, though, those people are viewed as insecure.

Whether or not you spend hours Facebook stalking our friends’ profiles – “Did you see he removed his relationship status?!” – profiles are a great way to learn how a person sees himself, which is inadvertently a decent portal into who that person actually is. The trick is in distinguishing between what a person expects people to think about him, and what that actually means.

People who describe themselves as “quirky,” “intellectual,” or, God forbid, “non-conformist”… Usually aren’t. “Quirky” in this case translates to “socially incompetent,” “intellectual” means “pretentious and elitist,” and “non-conformist” is just delusional. These are the same people who, in middle school, wore those ridiculous pins that say, “You laugh because I’m different. I laugh because you’re all the same.”

I looked through the profiles of my friends whom I consider to actually be the most fascinating individuals, who lead the “quirkiest” lives, and most of them don’t bother to describe themselves at all. One girl I know who is one of those frightening, do-everything-well types, a scholar-athlete-volunteer who will probably be a senator and whom I’d love to hate if she weren’t so – well, quirky and intellectual. But the only thing you’d really learn about her in her profile is that she likes Oscar Wilde and takes mundane group photos. On the other hand, I know a guy whose About Me says, in total earnestness, “Just like Lord Byron, sums me up really.” Needless to say, well, he’s not.

People with more than three visible Facebook applications… Are just annoying. Who really cares about which Disney princess someone most resembles or how many pounds of carbon gas they’ve reduced? (Whatever that even means.) If the sheer number of Facebook applications makes finding someone’s Wall a real challenge, that person should consider switching to MySpace.

People who change their profile photos daily, or who have hundreds of photos of themselves, most of which they’ve posted… Are really into themselves. But if you couldn’t figure that out without my help, you’re probably one of those people with too many applications.

People with photo albums exclusively dedicated to illegal activities… Are in college (I hope) and still a little too excited about it. I highly recommend you friend these people, if only to feel better about yourself once you realize you fall under one of the other categories.

Finally, it seemed, the faculty and students were standing as one against Lavine. It wasn’t just the unattributed sources; if Lavine had been more popular, the reaction wouldn’t be so strong. In fact, there probably wouldn’t be anything to react to – there’s no story in a well-loved dean sharing glowing comments from his students.

The letter pokes at something deeper, though. In a twist of delicious irony, the journalism faculty granted Lavine’s wish of uniting with the Integrated Marketing Communications faculty and staff. It criticizes Lavine for insulting the IMC faculty and staff by claiming that a public relations document isn’t held to the same standards of journalistic integrity as any other work, and for shortchanging his own audience by failing to provide strenuous journalism.

And yet, after the euphoria wears off, the letter feels like it’s missing something. I appreciate the public statement as much as anyone, but what are the faculty actually asking of the dean? To those who’ve asked, Lavine has reiterated the same explanations: sources’ names are lost, but the quotes are fact and we should take him at his word. No amount of cajoling is going to make names reappear, if they are indeed lost to time and bad note-keeping.

Lavine’s options are limited. He can stay silent and wait for the whole thing to blow over. He can admit that the quotes are fabricated, if they are. Or he can pull a Nixon and resign, essentially making the same admission. My guess is that he will remain silent, perhaps releasing a smug apology that says little more than, “Oops, my bad.”

But equally disappointing, Dean Lavine, head of the self-proclaimed best journalism school in the country, is a bad journalist. Less than a year after his letter was published, he can offer no record for his sources and doesn’t even remember where his quotes came from, exactly. And instead of apologizing at least for his unattributed sources, he is asking an entire journalism school to do what journalists should never do: just trust him.

But it’s not just Lavine who has failed us. I would hope that in response to this ludicrous display of journalism I would discover more rigorous coverage from the media. Instead, we find the Chicago Sun-Times misspelling Lavine’s name, the Chicago Tribune’s failure to quote a single student in its most recent coverage of the story, and a student letter that does nothing but stand behind the faculty, adding nothing to the debate. Even David Spett’s article, which started the whole debate, relied entirely on anonymous sourcing, a point Assistant Professor Michele Weldon made while defending her decision not to sign the faculty letter.

Admittedly, Weldon was right when she reinforced that a core tenet of journalism is to “assume nothing,” including that Lavine fabricated his quotes. (Unfortunately, she then argued that Medill’s faculty had not been too scared to speak out in the past. But Spett wrote about at least one Medill professor who “insisted upon remaining anonymous for fear of retaliation.”)

The greatest shame in all this is that in an act of (I’d argue) well-deserved uproar against the dean, Medill has dug its own grave. Rather than consciously going after Lavine’s policies and the perceived harms he was causing Medill before now, faculty and journalists have latched onto one case of poor reporting and used it as a stand-in for the bigger picture, still failing to attack Lavine for the real issues at stake: the quality of the school’s journalism education.

Now, the national media has caught on to a story that highlights the internal strife that has long been obvious to those associated with Medill. And though we may point our fingers at one man, we cannot lose sight of what Lavine stands for and how his actions reflect on the reputation of our entire school.

This, I believe, is the point the 16 faculty members were trying to get at by distancing themselves from Lavine and calling for higher standards. The problem is that it came too late, too loudly, and now we all must suffer the consequences.