HAS BOSTON LOST ITS MIND?

DreamWorks Via Everett Collection

Something weird is going on with the colleges up in Boston. This week, two respected institutions of higher education, Emerson College and Harvard University, announced that they were partnering up with celebrities for special events. While it's not unusual for public figures to take an interest in furthering their education, or even for colleges to recruit famous faces for publicity, the choices that Emerson and Harvard made were so unusual, it almost makes us worry that Boston universities may be losing their minds. 

'Saturday Night Live' recap: Lady Gaga lives for applause, but gets laughs too

If there was one takeaway from last night’s show, it was that Lady Gaga knows what you all are saying about her. And in the constant jostling for pop-culture supremacy, one of Gaga’s advantages has been that, when she allows it, she often comes across as a down-to-earth goofball. And happily, last night viewers mostly got the silly theater kid and not the art-house provocateur, which led to an overall enjoyable 90 minutes that, while not always laugh-out-loud hilarious, was consistently amusing.

From the moment she busted out of the doors in a 1930s stage costume straight out of Chicago, there seemed to be two goals for the evening. 1.) Remind people that she’s the pop star, who can, you know, really belt; and 2.) Send up her image before the bloggers can. On both of those counts, she succeeded. She didn’t have a super viral moment like her “Three Way (Golden Rule)” sketch from the last time she was a musical guest (with host Justin Timberlake), but with only one real dud, she anchored what was easily one of the better episodes of the season so far.

Her monologue consisted of singing (of course!) a jazz-y version of “Applause” that segued into “New York, New York” as a somewhat nervous-seeming Gaga did what she does best: Just plain singing. Point of fact: Much like Miley Cyrus should really consider the country music her voice seems best suited to, Gaga should really consider a jazz album. “Applause” sounded much more impressive here than it does on the radio, and the fact that she regularly turns her pop hits into jazz ditties when she performs them live tells me she knows how well the genre suits her.