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Since we arrived here and settled into Manhattan, I’ve been picking the brains of the people I’ve met for places to go in this city.  Amidst the handfuls of restaurant, museum and park recommendations, I was given one common suggestion.  In so many words I was told repeatedly that New York is a walking city. 

Airports are peculiar places.  People come and go to all sorts of destinations - some exotic and some mundane - with names such as Maui, Oslo and Pittsburgh.  My neurotic tendency of being early to important things provided me ample opportunity to study the controlled chaos around me as I waited for my boyfriend to arrive from Oklahoma.

When many people think about New York City, especially in a visual sense, they often think about 5th Avenue, Madison, Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza, the Empire State Building, and all else that makes this city so grand.  And while I think of these places too, they make up my past image of the city more than my current one.  As a kid, I remember my favorite part about visiting the city was looking up at the tall buildings and feeling dizzy.  I remember going to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Special and being amazed at how magnificent everything was, how bright and extravagant it all looked.  It was like everything was larger than life and covered in glitter. 

Having related New York’s optimum mode of transportation last week, the subway, I will take the opportunity this week to discuss the opposite end of the spectrum: driving in the city. This was something I hoped never to have to experience, but fate thrust into my hands the keys of a rented Plymouth Voyager used for delivering props. My mission was to return the van from the studio at 42nd and 7th Avenue Times Square to the rental place just a few blocks away at 40th and 10th Avenue.

"Bahamas Cruise $229~ , Mexico $199~ , Vegas $22~" the e-mail alert reads, urging us to buy now, buy on-line and save, save, save. But is surfing the Internet really the best way to go?

Hamilton College had a team participate in this year's America's Greatest Heart Run and Walk on Saturday, February 28. Co-organizers Linda Michels and Kelly Walton reported on the event.

Burke Library has initiated Hamilton College's membership as a registered deployment partner for The Fedora™ Project, an open-source digital repository management system. In September, 2001, The University of Virginia received a grant of $1,000,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to enable its library, in collaboration with Cornell University, to build a sophisticated digital object repository system based on the Flexible Extensible Digital Object and Repository Architecture (Fedora). Hamilton joins the ranks of the University of Virginia, Cornell, Northwestern, Rutgers, Tufts and Yale in evaluation of the system by applying it to testbeds of their own collections. The experiences of the deployment group will be used to fine-tune the software in later phases of the project.

Though this year's Levitt Center lecture theme is about the natural environment, Associate Director for Community Research Judy Owens-Manley said that speaker Alex Kotlowitz fit into the theme in that he speaks to the state of our nation's community environments. Alex Kotlowitz, journalist and writer-in-residence at Northwestern University, spoke on Feb. 25 about his experience writing the award-winning book There Are No Children Here in a lecture titled "The Things They Carry: Growing Up Poor in the World's Richest Nation."

While these restaurants are novel and nostalgic, I can’t help but think that this throwback to signature homemade meals fills a void left by the constant hustle of Manhattan.  Populated by mostly young adults, New York City’s eight million residents rush to work, to lunch, from work, to dinner…jumping from experience to experience.  In this endless cycle of sprinting through the day, people have lost sight a simpler life represented by this type of food.

One of the hottest topics now seems to be “the downfall of Dean.”  Whenever I mention to someone that I worked on the campaign, they immediately try to engage me in a conversation about why he lost.  Why the initial popularity?  Why did they end up voting for Kerry in the end?  Everything from looks to rhetoric to wives is debated.