For all that is good about Ithaca, it is affected by the peculiar liberal preoccupation with smoking. The City of Ithaca, after banning smoking in restaurants and bars in 2003, is considering extending the ban to all public places, most notably the Commons. Supporters have cited the environmental impact of cigarettes and the health effects of second-hand smoke as motivating factors. Last week, Wegman’s announced that it would stop selling cigarettes (this decision will affect all Wegman’s stores, not just the one in Ithaca).

It is an enduring sign of moral torpor that social conservatives prefer that women in Africa contract HIV rather than risk promoting “promiscuity” by telling them condoms prevent it. This perverted hierarchy of values prizes the trivial over the consequential, counting the regulation of human sexuality among the primary goals of government and society. Insidious in its vacuity, it led President Bush to propose the Defense of Marriage Amendment to the Constitution in the midst of the Iraq War. Two weeks ago, it led the Cornell College Republicans to protest a lecture about anal sex — Anal Sex 101: Everything You Wanted to Know But Were Afraid to Ask — funded in part by the Student Assembly.

The Ithaca Police Department keeps the city’s inhabitants safe from an array of criminal minds. The press sometimes notices its work. On the local page of this weekend’s Ithaca Journal is a (side-lead) story about Lisa Nembhard, 44, whom police apprehended in the parking lot of CVS Pharmacy with over 100 bootlegged DVDs and CDs; this puts an end to “Lisa’s World”— a freefall of mendacity and home-labeled jewel cases. The District Attorney here recently dismissed drug charges against Robert Gelinas, 61, who had transferred his anti-anxiety medication from large prescription bottles to smaller, portable ones that did not have the pharmacy label. Gelinas learned his lesson: “Now I carry the original pill bottles with me in the car,” he said.

Under threat of legal action — and a $30,000 fine — universities have become extended arms of publishing companies and the Recording Industry Association of America, taking up the responsibility of ferreting out and penalizing instances of copyright infringement among students and professors. Some university administrators complain that these groups have unfairly targeted universities to make an example of them, but RIAA President Cary Sherman ’68 has said the approach is valid given that copyright infringement is especially prevalent at universities.

Underlying the discussion about grade inflation is the almost Calvinist suspicion that students are getting away with something, the echo of an avuncular “in my day” admonition. That grade inflation exists at universities in the U.S. is not in question. According to a 2003 study that included 80 institutions, grades have risen at a rate of 0.15 on a 4.0 scale per decade since the ’60s. And at Cornell, the percentage of As handed out has more than doubled since 1965.

Working as a legal assistant in New York before grad school, I remember the elegant procession of pressed pants, suit jackets and skirts as I exited the Wall Street subway station every morning. The suit-and-tie uniform seemed incongruously conservative by modern standards of dress, but it manifested the basic marketing maxim that presentation matters, that it reflects the product.

In writing a few weeks ago about homophobia in fraternities, I made the passing comment that parent organizations invariably shield fraternity chapters from criticism, preventing problems with fraternity culture from being addressed. No sooner had The Sun gone to print than the wheels of the frat anti-defamation league began to turn. I do not want to revisit the issue I addressed in the original article, but to state more forcefully the criticism that any critique of fraternity culture is met with categorical denial and sidesteps. The Intrafraternity Council and those who responded to the article resemble the Bush Administration: they operate under the logic that something is only true if they acknowledge it as such.

For college-aged women, “feminism” has been a bad word for some time. As columnist Maureen Dowd put it, “the triumph of feminism [lasted] a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years.”

It conjures up not the highfalutin ideals and aspirations of the ’60s, but a caricature: a woman harping on about gendered pronouns and “patriarchal societal structures,” insisting on the spelling of “womyn” and derogating “housework.”

College girls do not want to be this person; it’s not sexy.

I cannot count the number of times I have waited at a stoplight in Ithaca in the middle of the night, not a car in sight. And I always wonder why my hometown — with a smaller tax base than Ithaca — can afford sensors and pressure plates while this city cannot. My natural inclination is always to treat these as stop signs and go through them, but as you might have noticed, Ithaca is a police state; I have had five parking tickets since I came a year ago, had a cop follow me after giving up on parallel parking in a tight space and had another yell at me for being on a cell phone at a stoplight. (Maybe Ithaca police officers should be given Sudoku puzzles to keep them busy.) Depending on my mood, I either go through the lonely intersection at 2 a.m.

When I started graduate school here and added Cornell to my list of networks on Facebook, I received a “poke”— a flirtatious or friendly signal depending on its source — from a member of a fraternity largely comprising athletes. The guy’s profile said he was interested in men. Under activities, he had listed various sports. His photos: vertical striped shirts, popped polos, board shorts, flip-flops, beer-in-hand shots with groups of guys.

I ignored the poke. A day later, the joke had blown over. The profile was changed back to “interested in women” and a smattering of goading posts appeared on his wall: “interested in men eh ... [I] always knew there was something a little off about you,” for instance.