“I’m not as I was,” Christopher Hitchens poignantly remarked recently. Afflicted by oesophageal cancer and, now, pneumonia, Hitchens, who I interviewed for the New Statesman last year, was too ill to appear in conversation with Stephen Fry at the Royal Festival Hall in London last night. But rather than cancelling the event, the organisers assembled an extraordinary selection of Hitchens’s comrades and friends to pay tribute to the great essayist and polemicist.
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PZ Myers: This is why I hate college football programs

Posted on 11.10.2011 by AlwaysQuestionAuthority

I know, students enjoy them, and a weekend of sports can be a fun event, and yes, they do have a strong effect on college enrollments (which always seemed bizarre to me—students actually select their academic institution based on the performance of the athletic team? But the correlations in the enrollment/season wins data all bear it out). But they also turn into hyper-inflated domains of privilege, where the coaches are paid more than faculty, students and alumni vividly demonstrate the etymological source of the term “fan”, and the athletes too often turn into swaggering assholes. Can we just have small athletic programs where it’s all for fun, and no one makes the games more important than the academics?
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