The Village Voice

"Wow -- as if I'm not paying Columbia enough already, now there's a dude profiting off my financial misery." According to an online poll last week by the university's student newspaper, The Spectator, that's the most common campus reaction to news that Columbia's financial aid director, David Charlow, held $72,000 in stock in Student Loan Xpress from 2002 to 2005, even as his office at Columbia was promoting the student loan company as its top "preferred lender."

From this side of the Pacific, we've always shuddered at the prospects for young people in a place like Japan. The routine of archetypal sarariman, or corporate drone, sure sounds dreadful: a drab college education followed by a youth of low-paid toil, long commutes into Tokyo, and little chance for advancement beyond middle management. The very best a sarariman can hope for, we're led to believe, is to someday go into hock for a suburban condo and to scrape together enough money so the kids can attend after-school cram sessions.

The case against Robert Hood is far from airtight. The Colorado Springs resident is charged with aggravated robbery and kidnapping; in June, he allegedly forced his victim into a car trunk at gunpoint and drove him around for hours, demanding his ATM password, before abandoning the vehicle at a 7-Eleven. When the victim mentioned that his attacker sported a gold tooth, detectives immediately keyed on Hood, who is also a suspect in a separate murder case.

Last year, Theodore Postol began distributing a report critical of a missile-defense system made by aerospace giant TRW. Postol, an MIT professor of technology and security policy, argued that Pentagon scientists had doctored TRW's data to conceal the fact that cheap, low-tech decoys can easily fool the $60 billion-plus system. A nuclear warhead could be encased in a Mylar balloon, for example, and released with a flurry of identical balloons; the defensive missiles would be unable to detect which one carried the lethal payload.

Technology has been a popular scapegoat in recent years, shouldering the blame for everything from Columbine (all those violent video games) to the economy's recent nosedive (all those nefarious dotcoms). So it was scant surprise when technology was labeled a minor culprit in the horrors of September 11. When word leaked that Osama bin Laden's suspected minions likely encrypted their electronic messages, communicated via free e-mail accounts, and even made their fateful airline reservations on Travelocity.com, the hand-wringing commenced.

To say that Brian Dalton has "issues" is to put it mildly. His own mother calls him "a lonely misfit kid," a 22-year-old high school dropout with a nasty case of attention deficit disorder and lousy job skills. The tragic topper, though, is Dalton's pedophilia, an obsession that netted him a 1998 child-porn conviction for downloading verboten pictures. Despite that legal scrape, he has yet to squelch his truly stomach-churning fantasies, which involve the caging and rape of 10-year-old girls. r Dalton's inner life may be creepy--nay, repulsive--but is it criminal?

Were the Republican Party to design its ideal up-and-comer in a Gattaca-style genetics lab, the result would look and sound a lot like Michael K. Powell. A scion of Beltway royalty, Secretary of State Colin Powell's only son is that rarest of political gems -- a black Republican diehard free of the kooky far-right vibes that dog Alan Keyes and J.C. Watts. John McCain loves him, as do a number of starstruck Democrats bewitched by his lineage and smarts. For many, the junior Powell seems a younger and brighter version of George W. Bush.

We'll never know who pawned that copy of Angela's Ashes at a New York bookstore, whether the person was male or female, minor or adult. But with one swipe of a new drug test across the paperback cover, we learned something infinitely more private: the previous owner likely endured the McCourt clan's Limerick woes with the aid of Marijuana.

The decidedly seedy Hotel Pennsylvania, a tourist magnet opposite Madison Square Garden, seems like an odd place for a guy like Greg Newby to foment his cyberrevolution. After weathering countless sales meetings and sweaty travel clubs, ITS airport-chic interior has warped and faded. The lights are caked with yellow gunk, and the claustrophobic rooms appear plucked from an old videocassette of The Shining.

Given the rising agitations against police brutality in the wake of Abner Louima's sexual torture in a precinct house bathroom and this year's acquittal of the four white officers who executed Amadou Diallo on his front doorstep, this anthology is perfectly timed.