It’s a measure of how numbed we were by the heat that Chris and I actually sat through a reality show last night called “The Scholar.” It was so awful that I feel I have to say something about it, yet it was also so awful that I don’t even know where to begin. The premise is that a bunch of high school kids are competing with each other for a hefty scholarship. Except that the competition itself has so little to do with academic achievement in any sense that the whole thing is just baffling. The kids involved are not writing papers or taking tests, no - they have to run around the USC campus solving grammar school logic puzzles, and the whole thing is topped off with a gameshow-style trivia quiz.

And yet the numbnuts host keeps saying through the whole thing that this is somehow preparing them for “a real college curriculum.” How do you figure? I seem to have made it out of NYU without ever being graded on my performance in a scavenger hunt or literature bee. Maybe they do things differently at USC, but I doubt it.