Yesterday's Washington Post ran an article about how Brown was one of nine universities that decided to run David Horowitz's advertisement regarding the idea of slavery reparations being racist. I must admit that my initial interest in the article was to scan the accompanying photograph of protesting students to find Calderwood, but when he wasn't immediately found, I began to sink into the text.

A similar thing happened when I was a sophomore in college when a man named Bradley Smith approached The Lantern staff requesting that they run his advertisement claiming that the Holocaust was a hoax. As I remember the faculty was outraged, and while the student Editor-in-Chief and most of the Lantern staff were offended by Smith's theory, they didn't want to be edged down a slippery slope of censorship. In our case, the defiant editorial staff even went as far to refuse Smith's money and print the advertisement as an editorial.

I was out with Kanani and her Lantern friends-- including the god-like Shawn "Cal" McAllister, to whom Kanani introduced me as "Fluff" and for which I have not as of yet forgiven her-- at Ruby Tuesdays on Indianola Avenue after they put the paper to bed. The article was running in the next morning's edition. As tired and frustrated as these students-- older by two enormous years and in my mind, wiser beyond compare-- were, they spoke passionately about their belief in the First Amendment. They were young and righteous and idealistic to the core, and they inspired in me a value and a hope and a passion that linger still.

Yesterday as I read the article I privately commended Brown University for publishing Horowitz's advertisement, just as I commended the Lantern's staff that rainy night ten years ago for risking their reputations, graduate school recommendations, and coveted newspaper staff positions in order to raise the level of debate on our college campus. And while in retrospect it may seem small, trivial, a single ripple in a sizable ocean, it looms large in its power to arouse that young, righteous idealist in us all.

I was simply trying to buy CDs: an old Softies, a used Shoestrings, and a superfluous Cinerama single with two B-sides that I simply couldn't live without. But there was no room on the counter on which to set them. Stacks of paperback books the color of weatherless sky consumed every square inch. My experienced nose smelled the remnants of an author event lingering in the air.

As the clerk rang up my purchases, I couldn't help but pick up one of the books and flip through it. I never turn to the front to read that fabulously well-tempered, much-labored-over first sentence. I never turn it over to read the canned text synopsis written by the Assistant to the Assistant Editor, whose total familiarity with the book probably comes from using it as a coaster for a Diet Coke. Instead I dig right in, around page 63 and look for some way out, like the person who clings to the possibility of a landmark rather than bothering with a map.

The first words I read were "Hannah and Her Sisters". Flipping back a few pages I saw the phrase "oak wood floors". And then somewhere around beginning I caught the tail of a sentence that read, "emphatically casual affairs that buckled under their own inertia."

It wasn't until I'd handed the clerk my credit card for the second time that I realized it was a collection of essays. But it only took roughly six pages, read intensely by candlelight at an hour much closer to dawn than dusk, to realize that they would change my life.