Quick quiz: Whom are we fighting in Afghanistan? If you say “the Taliban,” you’re only giving the easy answer. What exactly is “the Taliban?” Who comprises it? What are its motives, its goals?

Most people would say that the Taliban is a hardened group of “terrorists,” an extremist group of murderers bent on destroying freedom and eliminating the West. This view is understandable — it’s all anyone hears from the politicos and pundits, who, in their laughably narrow debate over the war (has anyone in power seriously advocated immediate withdrawal?), paint “the enemy” in broad strokes and leave little doubt that we’re engaged in a conflict of ideas.

Historical precedent has been getting a lot of play in the news lately. Whether they’re discussing financial collapse or imperialist expansion, decaying morals or civil rights, pundits love to center on a few, oft-cited examples: the Great Depression, Vietnam, Hitler. By mixing historical anecdote into their analysis, the talking (and twittering) heads try to add a touch of gravity and validity to their arguments.

The book and the Internet: One is old, staid and respected, the other’s young, sexy and rude. The new guy’s looking to knock the king down, and he’s looking good. Think Achilles vs. Agamemnon, Magic vs. Kareem, Happy vs. Shooter.

Suffer another analogy: Our adjustment to digital media has been like losing your virginity — fast, messy and painful. While legal issues surrounding music, movies and books have hardly been resolved, everyone’s pretty much in agreement now that the InterWeb is the image of the world.

Well, not really. But it’s getting damn close.

This past year hasn’t been pretty, for Cornell or the world at large. Here on the Hill we’ve seen our endowment shrink at least 30 percent, our budgets slashed, our staff cut back and a bunker mentality descend over campus — and we haven’t yet seen the worst of it. Elsewhere, things aren’t so peachy, either: rising unemployment, astronomical federal debt, a general feeling of powerlessness and despondence.

Unless, that is, you happen to work at Goldman Sachs, Pfizer or Bain & Co.

As summer fast approaches, students’ thoughts turn from prelims and papers to the three months of freedom ahead. For some, these months will be filled with more hard work — pre-professional internships, grueling summer courses, long hours at a job — while for others they represent an oasis of laziness and tranquility.

President Obama has been jet-setting around the Middle East this week in an effort to convince Muslims that the United States doesn’t hate them. It’s no easy task, but, given his family background and reputation for reasoned rhetoric, he’s certainly the man for the job.

But there’s a problem. For all of Obama’s admirable accomplishments in foreign policy thus far, the man’s positions regarding torture and the legal framework of the War on Terror are nothing short of despicable. Maintaining the worst of Bush-era government secrecy and Big Brother intimidation techniques, our constitutional-scholar-in-chief has left many hopefully progressives scratching their heads.

With purse-strings drawing ever tighter around the country, states are scrambling for ways to cut costs and increase revenues. Strategies run from upping income taxes to slashing education budgets, but citizens are understandably wary of such measures. In navigating the risky waters ahead, lawmakers should look instead to one of the silliest and most unjustified policies of our time: the prohibition of marijuana.

For all the havoc that it has inspired, the recent economic crisis has engendered at least one positive development: humanities majors and like-minded literati have been able to make full use of the word schadenfreude. The German term, defined by the OED as “malicious enjoyment of the misfortunes of others,” has been so frequently invoked in recent months that The New York Times’ deputy news editor was forced to advise writers to lay off of it. But overuse is to be expected — these days, intellectuals have few occasions to rejoice.

You would think that being selected as a New York Times columnist would spur you to churn out some of the highest-quality prose you could muster. It was surprising, then, when Bill Kristol, founder of the Weekly Standard and scion of the right-wing punditocracy, blessed the Gray Lady’s Op-Ed pages with possibly the worst writing it’d ever seen. Kristol, no stranger to the argumentative essay or the persuasive piece, regularly gave his name to columns that were shoddily structured, shabbily researched and just plain boring; it seemed at times as if the veteran polemicist were doing little more than filtering propaganda into the backside of the front section.

Throughout last year’s presidential campaign, the thing that most excited me was not Obama’s oratory, Hillary’s histrionics or Sarah Palin’s comic relief. No, what really got my blood pumping was the prospect of the campaign ending. Each day, it seemed, brought another spurious scandal, another two-bit soundbite, another breaking story of shocking inconsequence. Invested as I was in the future of the country, my main concern was with the end of all the idiocy.