I suppose I was never really aware of it, but recent events have led me to believe that I have felt most of my time here at Pomona. It was a strange sort of comfort, one lined with Italian leather and tooting soft jazz in the background, maybe a nice full bookshelf thrown in as an indulgence. I’m talking about the secret, pervasive yuppie dream that I assume most of my fellow Pomona students harbor somewhere in their deep subconscious. You know it. I know it. Some of you, in a weird compulsion, have installed it in your dorm room already; don’t try to hide that Pomona College martini glass, I know it’s there.

North America, Circa 1960: Help! Help! The author is dead! Literature is dead! Ahhhh! What am I to do? Where am I to turn? I am lost in a post-structuralist world! Oh, no, wait, it’s all right, I’m gonna be O.K., post-modernist meta-fiction is here to fill the void! Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, John Barth, Donald Bartheleme, Samuel Beckett, these are the men for the job, these are the paladins of the new literary era! With an over-developed sense of irony, cynicism in excess, and, above all, the ability to suck the meaning right out of any idea, these men will save the day!

>I implore you, reader, to not take any of this too lightly, as is wont to happen in this late postmodern age, lest you forsake your humanity in genuflection to the almighty god Deconstructo. So open your eyes my dears, awaken from your tranquilized slumber in the Void, and follow me to the new (Promised?) Land. Oh, and try not to mistake my entreaties as coming from the voice of Jah (or from some form of schizophrenia): I merely channel the screams and dreams of my fellow beings. And I am but a man, too, with my own faults and weaknesses.

On Monday, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld an earlier ruling against Napster, the Internet music-trading service. The ruling, which could seriously cripple or even destroy Napster, states that the service assists in the unauthorized transport of copyrighted material. This legal victory for the music industry gives a lower court the green light to issue an injunction that would essentially shut Napster down.

We are living in the future. For all of those who dream about what things will be like a few years hence, look under your nose. We have computers that allow us to communicate across the world instantaneously, and we can physically travel anywhere in the world within 24 hours. We can fix our eyesight with lasers and we can even clone organs in our body to replace damaged ones. The one thing we have not learned how to do is use our knowledge wisely. Human technology has advanced so much in recent decades that we must address the issue of how all of this information will be used.

The United States of America is a curious creature. On the one hand it wants to be left alone, but at the same time it loves to have its grubby mitts everywhere. EV-ERY-WHERE! However, somewhere along the line someone forgot to point out to our grand nation the fact that those two desires are in direct conflict with each other. Thus the United States is forever reasoning itself into pickles in a futile attempt to satisfy both deep-rooted desires.

There has been a lot of misinformation going around since the Friends of Bernard Biological Field Station decided to settle their lawsuit against CUC, the most significant of which being the belief that the BFS issue is settled. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The Friends’ compromise allows KGI to be built on 11 acres of the field station, allows an additional 30 acres to be sacrificed for another school, permits a Native American monitor to be present during construction, and protects 45 acres of the 86-acre field station for a mere 50 years, probably the amount of time it would take CUC to build more colleges anyway.