Two days ago a friend sent me a message. "I'm listening to Fresh Air, the Sean Wilentz episode, and they're playing a clip from Glenn Beck's program, where he's banging on complaining about talking to some Ivy League Columbia PhD who didn't know the details of some conspiracy...

Last week over 1,000 sophomores began the annual Columbia University ritual of reading the greats of philosophy, from Plato to the present.

The Columbia course Contemporary Civilization, the center of its undergraduate Core Curriculum, has been controversial since its inception as a War and Peace issues course in 1919....

The east coast is stifling through one of the worst heat waves on record. In a city like New York, where concrete ratchets temperatures from hot to hellish, refuge can only be found inside air-conditioned interiors. But how did New Yorkers deal with the heat in the days before A/C?

Last Saturday 10,000 people boarded boats at Pier 11 at the tip of Wall Street to ferry five minutes over to Governors Island for New York City's fourth annual Brewfest.

Organized by the New York State Brewers Association, the event brought over one hundred breweries to island's the open...

Four men stood on stage in New York's West Village last Friday evening, stripped naked and read works of literature. And not just any literature, literature by women: "Great" women. Or, as the flyer simply stated: "Naked Guys Read Great Women Writers."   

This might be why Virginia Woolf wanted a room of...

I give walking tours of New York City. I work for Big Onion, the largest historical walking tour company in the country, second in the world only to London Walks. London Walks hires actors and any old person with a London accent to give their tours. Not Big Onion. Our...