It looks as though Nicolas Sarkozy’s son, 23 and doing his second year of university over again, will NOT be running the billion-euro enterprise that is La Défense.

A Johns Hopkins undergraduate was killed a few days ago by a hit and run driver.

… Miriam Frankl, a junior molecular and cell biology major from the Chicago area, was surrounded by dozens of friends at Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where she was taken after the accident at 3:15 p.m. Friday.

Frankl had serious head wounds, as well as other injuries, Moses said. She remained on life support, dying at 2:30 a.m.

The university released a statement Saturday saying Frankl’s parents “told us they were deeply moved and comforted by the presence of so many of Miriam’s friends at the hospital with them.”

… The death of Frankl, who was a member of Alpha Phi sorority, coincided with Hopkins’ Greek Weekend. Organizers postponed events and asked that participants at other events wear red in honor of Frankl and to support her sorority sisters.

Anna Johnston, a senior at Hopkins and one of her friends, said five or six of her good friends gathered at the hospital shortly after the accident, but as the evening wore on 70 Hopkins students came to be with her and her family.

“She had a lot of strength and personality and had a lot of confidence,” said Johnston. Her favorite color was purple, and friends around the Hopkins campus began wearing small purple ribbons Saturday in her memory.

A petite woman with freckles and short brown hair, Frankl had recently become interested in science and had begun working at a Hopkins laboratory that studied the brain. While Johnston said Frankl spent a lot of time in the library, she also was devoted to working with the sorority and was supposed to plan the recruitment of new members in December.

Johnston said her friend was very poised, loved scarves and getting other women interested in the sorority. She was learning to cook and Johnston believes she might have been on her way to a Greek Weekend cook-off when she was struck…

He was one of two students stabbed after a fight broke out at a university-sponsored dance.

The other student survived.

The student killed was a football player for the school.

… Jean Sarkozy, who [has] yet to complete a university degree, is all but assured of being elected to the presidency of Epad, the public corporation that runs the La Defense office park, after his candidacy was endorsed by his father’s ruling UMP party.

Epad brings in more than 1 billion euros a year, and has plans to triple the size of La Defense, a cluster of office sky-scrapers to the west of Paris.

“Whatever I say, whatever I do, I’ll be criticised for it,” Jean Sarkozy, who only recently cut his long blond hair into a more respectable serious style, said Monday night in an interview with the Le Parisien newspaper.

On Tuesday, UMP officials rallied to the young Sarkozy’s defence.

“The political scene is made up of people who started very young, very early, without having too many diplomas, and we’re lucky because this acts as a social elevator,” said UMP spokesperson Dominique Paillé.

“Jean is the son of a political genius, so it’s not surprising that he’s precocious,” said UMP regional counsellor Thierry Solère.

“I can tell you that Jean Sarkozy, at 23, might just have more talent than his father did at his age,” UMP official Patrick Balkany said.

Sarcastic endorsements have proliferated online. The twitter feed jeansarkozypartout or “Jean Sarkozy is everywhere” sprung up Monday night, with comments like Florent Latrive’s: “Jean Sarkozy, candidate for L’Académie française”, referring to the French-language council of wise men, or Bertrand Lenotre’s “Jean Sarkozy is chosen as the model for the next bust of Marianne,” an honour already bestowed upon French beauties Catherine Deneuve and Letitia Casta…

An undergraduate chemistry student slashed the throat of his lab partner during class. It sounds as though she will survive, though her injuries are very serious. She lost a lot of blood.

LAPD detectives were seeking a motive in the stabbing of a UCLA student by a classmate, and people across the Westwood campus remain stunned at the sudden violence.

… Students in the chemistry lab watched helplessly Thursday afternoon as their classmate suddenly slashed the neck of the female student, causing serious injuries.

The attack occurred just past noon on the sixth floor of Young Hall, prompting swift police mobilization and leaving students shaken by the violence as word spread across campus.

Police have booked [Damon] Thompson on suspicion of attempted murder.

Thompson was arrested inside Young Hall minutes after the incident. The name of the victim has not been released. She was rushed to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center, which is on campus, in critical condition. She underwent surgery and her condition was improving.

Los Angeles Police Department detectives said they don’t know the motive for the attack. A law enforcement source said there might have been a verbal altercation before the slashing, but details were unclear. Both students were seniors, and some campus sources said they may have been lab partners.

… UCLA student Saad Ahmed said the violence left even unflappable med and pre-med students in shock.

“There was blood all over the place, so much blood where you thought, ‘Is she going to make it?’ ” Ahmed said. “People were panicking, they were in disbelief, saying, ‘How could this happen at UCLA?’ “

The echoes with the recent Yale incident are disturbing.

Annie Le’s murderer may have been a young lab technician (he apparently failed two lie detector tests and has defensive wounds to his chest) whose refusal to give the investigators a DNA sample meant that police raided his apartment last night in order to get one. They led him away in handcuffs.

If reports that Le was asphyxiated, and that she was found fully clothed, are true, the crime seems less about erotic obsession than about rage. Did the guy feel Le had dissed him in some way?

**********************

Piling on to the sadness at Yale is the death of another student — a recent graduate — while riding her bicycle in the city:

Sylvia Bingham ’09, a Yale graduate who was passionate about social justice and the environment, died Tuesday morning. She was 22.

Bingham was en route to her job in Cleveland shortly before 9 a.m. when a truck collided with her bicycle. She passed away at St. Vincent Charity Hospital soon after. The truck driver did not stop, but police located him that afternoon using information provided by witnesses.

… Professor Hannah Brueckner, the director of undergraduate studies for sociology who got to know Bingham during her senior year, described her as a “fearless intellectual, a skilled field worker, and a committed activist.”

… “She showed up on my birthday with a box of dainty little madeleines that she had baked for me,” [a Yale friend] said. “I think that cookie and that act represent her persona perfectly: she was bursting with creativity and was a teeny, quirky fashionista.” …

A graduate student, Annie Le, has been missing since Tuesday.

… things are hotting up at another local university, Howard. Montgomery removed its non-functional president swiftly, and with little bloodshed, but Howard’s problem isn’t confined to one person. Its entire administrative apparatus fails to function.

Hundreds of students have been gathering in front of the administration building to protest crucial paperwork that never appears, buildings disabled students can’t enter, and a general attitude of arrogance and apathy on the institution’s part.

Students protesting
curricular changes at
the Victorian College
of the Arts and Music
(part of the
University of Melbourne)
paraded about with
Save the VCA
written on what
UD‘s parents taught her
to call their tushies.

Heart-rending story out of New York about four close-knit New York University graduates who “us[ed] their knowledge of the law and the financial industry to further the[ir] fraud.”

If they hadn’t learned finance and the law at NYU, in other words, they wouldn’t have been able to do what they did…

And what did they do, UD?

Well, let’s see.

… The four defendants are charged with stealing $422,000 over five years, by telling various banks that their ATM cards had been lost or stolen, after they allegedly emptied their accounts themselves.

… The indictment charges Eric Manganelli, 36; Lam Dang, 37; John Tluczek, 37; and Marzena Tluczek, 35; made false claims totaling more than $700,000, to more than 20 banks, that unauthorized transactions were made on their accounts.

The defendants then demanded reimbursement from the banks, which paid them more than $422,000, according to the indictment.

In each case, the defendants opened accounts and padded them with large deposits, over the course of several months. Later, the indictment charges, they drained the accounts, with withdrawals of $500 to $1,000 per day.

Once the accounts were empty, the defendants allegedly would contact the bank and say their ATM cards had been stolen or lost and that the withdrawals were unauthorized. After the banks reimbursed the money, the defendants would close the accounts…

Nice photo of her from college days.

“[C]oncerned that ‘not one permanent
course in this university now deals in
any notable detail with the Puerto Rican
or Chicano cultures,’ she succeeded in
convincing Princeton history professor
Peter Winn to offer a seminar on
Puerto Rican history.”

… Harvard professor….  And now…

He’s engaged to Ivanka Trump!

*************************

Update: How he got there:

When Jared applied to college, [his father] was determined to get him into the most prestigious schools, and he called in favors to achieve his goal. In 1998, [he] made a $2.5 million pledge to Harvard. According to The Price of Admission, the best-selling book written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Golden, [Jared’s father] asked New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg to lobby Ted Kennedy to put in a call to Harvard admissions dean William Fitzsimmons on Jared’s behalf.

… from the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library — the library where, one afternoon long ago, UD glanced down from a balcony on the second floor to a big round table on the first floor and saw Karol Edward Soltan, a Polish graduate student she’d met once or twice at parties.

For the first time, she took a good look at him.  And began to be smitten.

Here’s a sample of the graffiti..  Lots more here.

UD‘s delighted (with a couple of reservations) to see places like Green Mountain College in Vermont looking more and more like the self-contained medieval retreats colleges used to be. Adjacent to Green Mountain’s modern campus is a pre-industrial farm (no tractors; they use oxen) where students can spend a semester getting credit as they farm and learn about environmentally sound farming.

Two quibbles: Do they have to live in tents? And how does the college justify the $12,500 tuition for thirteen weeks?

One, James, told me today about a new novel by Don DeLillo, Point Omega, due to be released next year.  The great DeLillo website, DeLillo’s America, has a short plot summary:

A young filmmaker visits the desert home of a secret war advisor in the hopes of making a documentary. The situation is complicated by the arrival of the older man’s daughter, and the narrative takes a dark turn.

The other, Mary Anne, will meet up with UD at an Irish bar tomorrow night, where they’ll drink to James Joyce for Bloomsday.

Colum McCann has a pleasant little Bloomsday piece in the New York Times.

… The messy layers of human experience get pulled together, and sometimes ordered, by words.

… The book carried me through to the far side of my body, made me alive in another time. I was 10 years old again, but this time I knew my grandfather, and it was a moment of gain: he was so much more than a forgotten drunk.

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be…