New column: Blue Like Jazz

I have a new column at The Interim's website, on the pretty-much-straight-to-video college/coming-of-age putatively Christian film Blue Like Jazz. Here's a quote:

Taylor has a lot of fun with the overbearingly nonconformist and aggressively flakey campus life at a college like Reed. In search of extracurricular activities, Don learns that flag football is canceled for lack of interest, but Lamaze For Non-Mothers is fully subscribed; it’s only a shade more absurd than the course in the Science of Superheroes actually offered by the University of California, Irvine, or Underwater Basket Weaving, an elective enrichment course offered by UC, San Diego.

I'm not at all sure how important college will be when it's time for my kids to go. It was a very big deal - and a huge disappointment - when I went, thirty years ago, but seems to have peaked as the single most important decision in your kids' life, and if you get it wrong they'll end up on the pole or driving a truck. If the whole Higher Education Bubble thing turns out to be true, it might be very different in a decade or so. In any case, academia changes very slowly, so I don't imagine it'll be any less stridently liberal by the time I'll have to convince my daughters to learn a trade or join the army.