Word: viswanathans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Much ink has been wasted wondering whether “Opal Mehta” is autobiographical. Opal Mehta is surely not Kaavya Viswanathan in disguise; she is, more likely, Kaavya Viswanathan in Kaavya Viswanathan’s dreams. Letting us in on the fantasy is Viswanathan’s gift to us. We get to follow Opal as she transforms overnight from member of the “Geek Squad” to literally the center of every male’s attention...
...Viswanathan is hardly the first to point out that such children exist. After David Brooks coined the term, former Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 wrote his “Slow Down” letter as an attack on the same kind of thing. The popular press caught on almost as quickly, overworking the “College Admissions Game Getting Harder to Win” angle until phrases like “extracurricular activities” and “unweighted grade point average” became household terms...
...modern Ivy League overachiever: Why do the country’s top performers cap weekdays of hard work with nights of binge drinking and commitment-free physical intimacy? But he failed to do much more than solidify the term “hook-up” in pop parlance. Viswanathan actually offers an answer: the college generation’s reckless profligacy, she suggests, is the result of the same goal-directed purposefulness that has produced its academic success...
Like Brooks and Lewis, Viswanathan is not a fan of this approach. “You can put the girl in couture,” one of the Haute Bitchez tells Opal, “but you can’t put the couture in the girl.” Similarly, put the automaton in Manolo Blahniks and all you get is an automaton in uncomfortable shoes...
...Viswanathan had a chance to debunk the Harvard myth for good. Instead, she perpetuates it. Given the market power with which DreamWorks seems to have endowed her, that is truly unfortunate. The overachieving girls and boys who flock to theaters to watch “Opal Mehta: The Movie” might learn that there is more to life than can be contained in a resume, but they’ll still leave the theaters convinced that an easy pill called Harvard exists. Finally, they’ll face a Catch-22: play into the system in order...