Are you a recent college graduate living in Manhattan? Does the white-collar job you kept at the expense of thousands of others not excite you anymore? Has New York City turned dull after living and working there for nearly three months? Well you don't have to stay in your comfortable rut anymore!

Dartmouth grad and former Wall Streeter Maia Josebachvili started Urban Escapes NYC, a company that organizes outdoor expeditions--backpacking, rock climbing, fruit picking, and the like--for yuppies bored with New York. Excursions on offer for the gainfully employed range from one-day hikes for $55 to a week in the Yucatan Peninsula for $600. Of course if you opt for the latter, you may not be gainfully employed for much longer once those photos from that nightclub in Playa del Carmen are posted on Flickr.

The high costs of these trips are actually fair deals when you consider transportation, guides, and food. And when compared to other enterprises from Ivy Leaguers, Urban Escapes is a worthwhile venture. However, there is still this air of pretentiousness about Josebachvili's company. Urban professionals who have already lost interest in New York paying a significant amount of money (whitewater rafting costs about the same as a senior week wine tour) to leave the city and rough it for a day or two. The website also says that on these trips you'll "meet fantastic and interesting new people in a totally different setting." Because it's so hard to meet new people on your own when you're in a city of 8 million people. You can't really Facebook friend someone until you share a kayak with them. Read the rest of this entry »

• Columbia: Lerner Hall will no longer be open 24/7 due to the economy, but you can still look inside anytime from anywhere
• Cornell: Former Cornell star goalie Dave McKee has been charged with rape in southern California, Kobe Bryant not returning his calls
• Dartmouth: The reign of Jim Yong Kim begins today
• Harvard: Annenberg Dining Hall's card-swiper--the most popular person on any college campus--has been laid off
• Harvard: Twenty library staffers laid off
• Harvard: Eighteen Kennedy school staffers laid off
• Harvard: Forty subcontracted janitors laid off
• Penn: Basketball player Harrison Gaines decides to leave the Quakers and transfer to the UC-Riverside Highlanders, saying "in the end, there can be only one"
• Penn: University has the fourth most illegal downloading violations in the country, most of which are Transformers 2 bootlegs 
• Yale: Supreme Court rules in favor of New Haven firefighters, finally giving white people their shining moment

Conservatives have said for years that the Ivy League elitists hate the troops. In recent years, Ivy Leaguers have attempted to undermine the United States military by trying to disenroll family members from the Naval Academy or contaminating the Marines with gay. But as of yet, no Ivy alum has physically harmed members of the military. Until now.

The New York Times reported last week that Dr. Gary Kao of the Philadelphia V.A. Medical Center is the worst doctor since Doug from Scrubs. Dr. Kao--who has a Ph.D. from Penn--had been treating veterans with prostate cancer by using a common procedure in which radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate to attack tumors. The obstacle for Dr. Kao is that you can't find the prostate on Google Maps.

Most of the seeds, 40 in all, landed in the patient’s healthy bladder, not the prostate.

Yeah, that's not good. So that patient had to return for a second implant. This time, Dr. Kao injected his rectum, missing the prostate again. According to the Times, Dr. Kao's team at the V.A. Hospital had screwed up 92 of 116 cancer treatments over six years. That rate of failure is so incredibly high that Dr. Kao must have been trying to give veterans radioactive butt on purpose. One internal medicine doctor--upon seeing the 92 of 116 statistic--said, "He could have done better just by guessing."

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This is Louis Leblanc. He's from Kirkland, Quebec. Last season, he played for the Omaha Lancers of the USHL. On Friday, he was selected by the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the NHL Draft. That made thousands of Québécois very happy and subsequently irritating. But Leblanc isn't going to suit up for the Habs just yet because next year he'll be attending Harvard University and playing for the Crimson men's ice hockey team.

Congratulations Louis Leblanc. By being a French-Canadian hockey phenom and a Harvard student, you are officially the most loathsome hockey player ever.

Professors in the Ivy League apparently are somewhat aware of the problems facing academia. You usually don't see them doing anything about it other than whining at conferences and writing editorial columns in the New York Times. Tenure is a great thing, sort of like being emperor of Rome while it burns down. No one's gonna stop your fiddling (or publishing).

Francis McLellan, a Brown Ph.D. and Princeton's former head Russian language instructor, evidently had a different experience as a senior lecturer than the professors did. Lecturers are to Princeton what migrant laborers are to, well, Princeton. And it seems as if four years of teaching elementary language made giving up women, possessions, and meat an attractive option for McLellan. In January he was tonsured Iosaf, a hieromonk in the Russian Orthodox Church. Now he's archimandrite of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Jerusalem, a city just slightly less dangerous than Cambridge. Sexy monk results after the jump.
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Given the insanely high costs of tuition these days, college students have certain expectations of their academic institutions. These expectations include good concerts, at least one place on campus that sells crepes, and cops that aren't complete buzzkills. Most importantly, students expect their college to keep their personal information safe. So when a Cornell-owned computer containing the names and Social Security numbers of thousands of Cornellians was stolen, it was clear that somebody focused too much on the crepes. On Tuesday afternoon, Cornell sent this e-mail to over 45,000 current and former students and faculty in order to say "our bad".

Dear Current or Former Member of the Cornell Community: 

Last week, we learned that a Cornell-owned computer that was stolen earlier this month contained your name and Social Security Number. Please accept our most sincere apologies for this unfortunate event. 

In order to inform you of this situation as quickly as possible, we are sending you this email in advance of a formal notification via U.S. mail. 

Hooray! We're all fucked!

The entire e-mail after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

• Columbia: Barnard's new career counselor will console graduates as the come to grips with the reality that they will never find a job
• Cornell: Men's basketball introduces the 2009 recruiting class that will allow the team to only lose by 25 in the first round of the NCAA tournament
• Harvard: The Office of Sexual Assault Prevention will close for July because of financial constraints and the fact that it's too hot outside to rape
• Harvard: Med School gets a 'B', which is not good enough for it to be accepted to itself
• Penn: Spruce Street location sees its third restaurant turnover in five years and the incoming restaurant will not accept Dining Dollars, so it'll close within two years
• Princeton: Tigers continue to hemorrhage coaches
• Yale: Decendents of Geronimo have sued Skull and Bones seeking the return of their ancestor's skull; the secret society is reportedly regretting turning it into a bong

Why would the New York Times bother to do a story on your slightly unhelpful yet quasi altruistic non-profit tech start-up? Because your name is Joshua Kushner, your brother Jared owns the New York Observer, and the word "scion" can be applied to you, that's why.

It seems aside from pimping themselves out to a shady Mexican billionaire and music mogul David Geffen the Times is buttering up the Kushners for a loan by writing a 1,300 word profile on little bro Joshua's new pet project UniThrive. Besides being all jazzed that they might get some sweet Kushner cash, there was a fail. The reporter didn't even check out the microfinance group Kiva.org and the Times was forced to run a correction yesterday. That's just odd given UniThrive co-founder Tanuj Parikh is the cousin of Kiva's president.

Details and why begging is the new working after the jump.

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In the new "Thinking Big" blog on The Atlantic Online, blog writer Conor Friedersdorf wrote a post about his thoughts on New York and the East Coast--having grown up in California before moving east for graduate school. Before relocating to New York, most of the East Coast existed only as an idea to Friedersdorf, with one major eastern presence being more theoretical than even peppermint unicorns.

My own final abstraction was the Ivy League, a group of institutions I knew nothing about for most of my life save the fact that Harvard and Yale were among them. As late as age 26, when I began looking at Columbia University for graduate school, I never thought of it as being in the Ivy League, nor did I put Brown, Princeton or the University of Pennsylvania in those categories. I'd scarcely heard of Cornell or Dartmouth until I moved to the East Coast.

Before all you Ivy League alums start writing hate mail to Conor Friedersdorf--and in the case of Princeton grads, order an air strike on his house for grouping your alma mater with "the other five"--be aware that it is not a singular notion. In fact, there's an entire state that doesn't grasp the concept of obsessing over elitism. Read the rest of this entry »

Apparently it's still 1934. Harvard cannot stand to have a poor, black, female student from Brooklyn wearing a cap and gown, let alone on its campus. That's according to Chanequa Campbell, whose lawyer claims Harvard prevented her from walking after tying her to the alleged murder that occurred in Kirkland house last May. She pulled a Kanye West to our collective Mike Myers a fortnight ago when she told the New York Post, "Harvard is doing this to me because I'm black, I'm poor and I'm from Brooklyn."

Okay. Right, it could be that Harvard might be more hesitant to pillory a student of a wealthy donor. It too seems possible she believes that because she is black the university is presuming her guilty whereas they might give white students the benefit of doubt. It appears she is not enjoying as much solidarity from the Harvard black community as she might like, though.

But what does Brooklyn have to do with anything? Everyone knows Harvard dislikes Staten Island much, much more. And Brooklyn is hot right now. There are plenty of rich kids living on daddy's money in Williamsburg who attend or attended Harvard.

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