Tim Fernholz

Features

Georgetown’s Secret Report Card

A confidential report compiled by a group of 13 top faculty members last spring wants to significantly impact your life—how you study, what grades you’ll get, how and when you party, and whether or not you work or have an internship—and its proposals have already begun to make headway. Bad news: The report doesn’t think too highly of most of us.

Click here to download the full 72-page intellectual life report.

By January 17, 2008

Voices

Carrying on: A light in the dark of Darfur

Underneath the Christmas star that seems, in the dark, to float on the Healy building, a small group of students gathered for a candlelit vigil last night. They were members of STAND: A Student Anti-Genocide Coalition, marking the end of a day of fasting to raise money for refugees displaced by the genocide in Darfur. Far be it from me to inflict a journalistic cliché on you, but as the group worked together to light their candles in the freezing cold while other students shuffled numbly by through the slush, there seemed to be a bit of metaphor in the air. Not a million points of light, but enough.

By December 6, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy: A Bi-Weekly Column on Drinking

It’s cold outside, and I’m sick. I don’t favor medicine as a solution for illness since it just weakens the immune system, but I am determined to beat this microorganism into the ground somehow.

By November 15, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy: A Bi-Weekly Column on Drinking

Lotus Lounge, a newish nightclub downtown, recently invited me to check out a new promotion, “Choose the POTUS at Lotus.” The club has come up with a signature cocktail for every presidential candidate, ranging from the banal—a brown drink for recent drop-out Senator Sam Brownback, Tanqueray for Representative Tom Tancredo—to the weirdly inspired—Representative Dennis Kucinich’s drink is peach-flavored to commemorate the perennial candidate’s desire to impeach Vice President Dick Cheney.

By November 1, 2007

Features

The Thin Blue Line

“I don’t like school papers,” Officer Malcolm Rhinehart told me, minutes after I sat down in his patrol car. Apparently, a past interview had gone awry.

Rhinehart, an unassuming black man with thin frame glasses, a graying buzz cut and short mustache, would spend the next four hours on his evening patrol shift as I rode shotgun, trying to learn something—anything—about what it is to be a police officer in our neighborhood.

As Rhinehart set about police work, from ticketing errant taxi drivers to lecturing a pervert, I wouldn’t find out much about him. But watching him work through situations bizarre and depressing, filing pages of paperwork as he went, it was possible to get the sense that D.C.’s police aren’t just those who arrest Georgetown students for being drunk and disorderly; they’re the people who take care of the District when it sleeps.

By October 25, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy: A Bi-Weekly Column on Drinking

Thinking about drinking means considering every aspect of the process, including how your drink is served, and perhaps more importantly, who served it. The art of bartending, passed on from father to son or gleaned from one of those bartending guides you never seem to have the right ingredients for—blue curacao? Chambord? Seriously?—is a critical one.

By October 18, 2007

Features

Georgetown searches for its pride

How September’s hate crime reignited a decades old campaign for LGTBQ integration at Georgetown, and why both stories converge on the two-month anniversary of the assault.

By October 18, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy

How about we get out on the town? Hit the bars. Meet some folks. And most importantly, take a break from the monotonous Georgetown bar scene—do you really want to go someplace where everyone knows your name? Really?

By October 4, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy

Nobody likes a wine snob, but I don’t need you to like me. I need you to like good wine. And I want you to drink it at a restaurant, paired with good food. An honest bottle of wine—poached from the low end of the wine list and foreign, if at all possible—is the pinnacle of the culturally constructed drinking experience.

By September 20, 2007

Leisure

Goes Down Easy: A Weekly Column on Drinking

Your hangover is a worthy foe. You’re not face-to-face with this challenger because you didn’t go out; you’re dealing with Johnny Hangover because you had a great night. At least for part of it.

By September 6, 2007