The ameteurishness of the journalism, the strange mix of attempted erudition and sophomoric inside jokes -- this is powerfully undergraduate.
This is very true. As a Brown graduate, I would like to defend this piece/guy, but I can't. It is really very bad, and as much as I loved my college, the piece is sadly indicative of much of what I had to endure in many college classes.
I thought I would never again have to hear about something being "privileged" (i.e. "Calvin and Hobbes privileged the individual subject's imagination in a celebration of both natural and psychological worlds..."). But I guess not.
For the record, the Independent is published by both students at Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design. So I would like to partially blame RISD, but this guy goes to Brown so to hell with it all. At least I hope it got him a good grade when he used it in his comparative literature class.