Editor's Note

At the Columbia Political Review, we don’t want to be swill merchants. Our project? A journalism of ideas. And yet this issue’s theme, POLITICAL BODIES, points not to airy ideas, but to life at its dirtiest and most material. But insisting on the body is one way of approaching the mission of this humble rag: cracking open the notion of what the “political” might be. We want to suggest that politics happens on the level of the body as much as on the level of ideas-that discourse matters to life as we feel and sense it. And so, David Zhou probes both the ideals and the physical facts at the heart of campus consent culture. Susanna O’Kula interviews Professor Jenny Davidson on “breeding,” politeness, and their relation to politics, showing how the novel of manners can confront the modern world. David Berke reports on the post-election future of New York state sex law. And in the cover story, J. Bryan Lowder thinks about the difficult position of queer students in the debate over the return of the Naval ROTC to Columbia’s campus, tracing sexual identity politics to a contest over the University’s character. It would be a mistake to think that ideas can’t be made flesh. Karen Leung