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Dear valued faculty,

In light of the recent budget cuts, the university administration thought it would be helpful to clarify a few things about our institution and our mission. We are not a “school.” We are a hospital system with a football team. We collect grants from the federal government, payouts from insurance companies, and licensing revenue from television networks. That is our raison d’être.

At our core, we are devoted to learning. Specifically, we want to learn how to extract as much value as possible from everyone and everything we interact with.

Yes, we have an untaxed, multibillion-dollar endowment. But that doesn’t mean we can burn money on frivolities like a classics department. That involves hiring professors and maintaining a library, which, as you well know, does not help our hospital or our football team.

The fine arts are lovely, but do they receive NIH grants? Have you ever seen a cellist on ESPN?

One Friday night, in the long, hot summer of 1976, 18-year-old Gudip Singh Chaggar had gone to the cinema with his friends. Chaggar never made it home. The young engineering student was stabbed to death by racist thugs just outside the Dominion Cinema on Southall High Street.  A pool of his blood remained on the […]

Last September witnessed what used to be a truly rare weather phenomenon: a Mediterranean hurricane, or “medicane.” Once upon a time, the Mediterranean Sea simply didn’t get hot enough to produce hurricanes more than every few hundred (yes, few hundred!) years. In this case, however, Storm Daniel assaulted Libya with a biblical-style deluge for four straight days. It was enough to overwhelm the al-Bilad and Abu Mansour dams near the city of Derna, built in the 1970s to old cool-earth specifications. The resulting flood destroyed nearly 1,000 buildings, washing thousands of people out to sea, and displaced tens of thousands more. Saliha Abu Bakr, an attorney, told a harrowing tale of how the waters kept rising in her apartment building... Read more

In this column, professional speechwriter Chandler Dean provides partly satirical, partly genuine “How To” advice focused on a hyper-specific subcategory of speeches—from graduation speeches to wedding toasts to eulogies, and all the rhetorical occasions in between.

Tick-tock: the bachelor or bachelorette or bachelorx party is approaching, and your buddy has insisted that they want you to “totally roast them.” Unfortunately, there is no time to question what ignominious circumstances led them to this masochistic desire. There is only time to write jokes.

I’ve written roasts for celebrities and politicians at fundraisers and closed-door events; I’ve roasted coworkers at their farewell parties; I’ve made fun of friends when they made a typo in the group chat and then I’ve changed the name of the group chat to have the typo in it.

So take it from me: you can both get laughs and protect your friendships (and professional contacts, and geopolitical relationships). Here’s how.