What would you do if one day you were walking along Harvard Yard and suddenly came upon THE MEMBER'S MANUAL OF THE OWL CLUB FOR MEN??!! (For those of you who don't know, the Owl Club is one of eight final clubs at Harvard, boasting exclusive all-male membership, vast alumni connections, and a constant bevy of barely-dressed freshman waiting outside its doors on Saturday night.)

Well, if you were Garrett Dash Nelson, Harvard '09, you'd publish this gem on your blog "Legion," a blog fully equipped with snarky commentary and refreshingly witty insight about everything from politics to Harvard life. Like so:

The opening page to the manual is an appropriately button-up affair, but perhaps a bit too austere. For example, this owl is hocking potato chips and having a fucking awesome time doing it. This owl is peacing out with Abe Lincoln (!) and is also “wise to the monumental mischief of the Terror Twins.” By contrast, the Owl Club’s owl appears to have been “backed up” back up there for well over a century, standing on its anthropomorphic legs and stuffing its wings up its butt. And thus we have stumbled on our first ethnographic discovery: Owl men never poop.

Nelson and his fellow bloggers Jon-Mark Overvold and Maryellen McGowan take the most amusing selections from the Manual and proceed to tear it apart, all in good humor. In response to one rule listed in the Manual, "Alcohol and tobacco are the only drugs allowed on the premises. If any other drug is brought onto the premises, all members involved will be expelled and their names purged from the records," Legion writes:

That’s right PURGED FROM THE RECORDS. And what’s worse is, if you then break the mirror you were snorting coke off of before you were PURGED FROM THE RECORDS your collars (all of them) will refuse to pop for a period of seven years. Shackled to permanently flaccid neck accoutrements, exiled members then have little chance of spawning.

Highlights from the Manual analyzed and dissected by Nelson, Overvold, and McGowan along with comments about the article given exclusively to Ivygate by Nelson himself, after the Juuuump! Read the rest of this entry »

Damn, should've gone to Dartmouth. Who would've thought that the graduates of this little nugget of an ivy league school (pop. 4,100) in the middle of New Hampshire would be the wealthiest of them all?  According to Forbes, by way of payscale.com, it looks like alumni 10-20 years out of Dartmouth are making an average of $134,000 a year, beating Princeton out at a lowly $131,000.

What are these well-paid Dartmouthers doing, you ask?  Well, nothing too unusual:

Top employers for Dartmouth's 2008 graduating class include Bain, Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, which are almost all high-paying posts. Yet two other big employers of recent grads fall on the other end of the pay scale: Teach for America and the Peace Corps. Both organizations are focused on helping the less fortunate and require two-year commitments. So how do Dartmouth grads, many starting at nonprofits, leapfrog their peers when it comes to compensation as they gain more experience?

That's what I want to know.  I mean, I thought everybody either worked in banking or consulting or taught for TFA.  Why does Dartmouth get more money for doing it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember identical twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, Harvard '04, the ones who claimed four years ago that Zuckerberg stole Facebook from their original site ConnectU?  Yeah, they're still desperately seeking justice in the form of cash and shares, with ongoing litigation regarding their settlement with Facebook and the value of the stock.  But lately it looks like these suckers are back in the news for another reason.

Only this time Zuckerberg definitely won't be stealing their thunder, or their gold.  The Winklevoss twins will be rowing as a pretty pair in this summer's Beijing Olympics.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yale may enjoy throwing students out just for kicks. But starting tomorrow and continuing till Thursday, the University Divinity School will be welcoming prominent Christian and Muslim scholars and leaders to participate in a series of public sessions to promote peace and understanding between the two religious groups.

Hosted by the Divinity School and sponsored by A Common Word, the conference hopes to "foster better understanding between Islam and the West." A Common Word was founded last October by Muslim scholars and seeks to promote the two religions' common values: love of God and love of neighbor.

From A Common Word's official site:

Without peace and justice between these two religious communities, there can be no meaningful peace in the world. The future of the world depends on peace between Muslims and Christians...The Unity of God, the necessity of love for Him, and the necessity of love of the neighbour is thus the common ground between Islam and Christianity.

60 theologians began meeting this past Friday on Yale's campus, and events open to the public begin Tuesday at 8AM. Schedule of events with keynote speakers after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, Harvard students may not have much actual sex.  But they certainly like to think about it!  From sex bloggers to sex magazines to actually buying sex services, the good old ivy is crawling with horny yet mostly virginal overachievers.

The latest addition to this slew of slutty scholars is a certain Lesley R. Winters, whoever she is.  You see, Lesley R. Winters is merely the name behind last semester's awkwardly titillating literary phenomenon on campus.  The actual writers of The Stableboy have chosen to remain anonymous.  (tips!)

The Stableboy is a steamy farce of a Victorian and oft-times-homosexual romance novel.  Part One was published in five installments in The Arts section, and is to be continued after the summer.  The basic plot is something along these lines: there is an unhappily married couple, the woman is dissatisfied; the man is a sleazy lush.  The new stableboy on their property is a hot young thing that manages to catch the lady's eye...and then her husband's.  Budding romance - and budding homosexuality - ensue in a prose that's so self-consciously imaginative, sensual and innuendoed that reading it (or listening to it being read to you by The Crimson's new audio option/robot voice) is pure, indulgent fun.

Here's what I mean, from the fifth installation:

The yellow firmament above the vast courtyard was assuming an ominous gray. The play of moisture and heat in the air made the supple boughs wag. The tumultuous wind tore violently at her hair and thrust its cold cruel fingers through the laces of her bodice.

Then came the rains, first in scattered drops that teased her skin with their heated lightness, then in a warm torrent that laved her arms and head and parted the shirt from her bosom and thrust its tongue into her bare-stript heart. She struggled, gasping, in the direction of the stables.

When she came into the stable, she was thoroughly wet. She was unraveled.The mares and steeds were pawing restlessly at the ground in their stalls. “Stable Boy!” she called. There was no answer.

An instant later The Stable Boy strode through the door. He was soaked from the rain, and as he entered he pulled off his shirt in one fluid motion and tossed it to the ground. In the gray light of the stable, drops of rainwater could be seen sliding between the Olympian muscles of his shoulders and back.

“Why don’t you take off that dress?” he suggested coolly, his biceps bulging as he raked his fingers through his darkened curls.

With the recent news that our favorite sex blogger will be taking the next year off, let's be glad that more Harvard students have decided to hop onto the media bandwagon of impossibly lewd prose.

After the jump, a link to The Crimson's audio version of The Stableboy for your listening pleasure, and more pictures of Harry Potter's Daniel Radcliffe trying to be a sexy stableboy and failing/succeeding miserably. Just cause the pictures are too good not to post.

Read the rest of this entry »

I got off the L train on Jefferson Street yesterday after work and saw nothing but industrial buildings, factories, barbed wire gating.  A thick smell of fish carcass hung in the air, and I was the only person on the street as far as I could see.  A pick-up drove by slowly, the window rolled down, a catcall yelled.  I phoned my friend, cursing when I got his voicemail.  Where the hell was I?

A few days ago, fellow Verso intern Colman Durkee, Sara Lawrence '10, had invited me to a show that his house was hosting in Bushwick.  His band would be playing, along with a number of other punk bands from Boston, New York, and Seattle.  This is not something that I would normally go to.  But that's probably becauase I never have.  Colman had come to a show of mine earlier this summer and I was sort of fascinated by the scene, the music, his tattoos.  So there I was.  Walking into a huge red building that looked more like a prison than a coop.

They (nine or ten of them at any given time) live in a vegan, substance-free apartment above what turned out to be an envelope factory with a third floor walk up to the roof.  Graffiti covered the building's door, the stairs, the hallways.  Inside the apartment, bicycles hung in racks suspended from the ceiling along with beautiful, elaborate, and somewhat disturbing hand-made prints.

As the showtime drew nearer and then passed, the emptied apartment began to fill up.  Six bands got ready to play and one dude began stretching in preparation for the mosh pit.  If you thought punk died out in the mid-nineties, boy were you were wrong.

After the jump: the music rocks, I bump into Nate Dern - Harvard '07 - of Beauty and the Geek fame, and yeah, shut up, i know my Orientalist theory. Read the rest of this entry »

From a mystery source within the Obama campaign come some updates/accusations targeted at proactive Obama-lovers in the ivy league. According to the political blog Open Left, Obama’s campaign has “had it up to their ears” with ivy interns getting in the way of business, even adding fuel to the Republican’s fire. Contributer “KosherDutchAfro” writes:

My source within the Obama campaign in Chicago has told me campaign employees have had it up to their ears with overly ambitious Ivy League volunteers who have been causing problems for the campaign by putting their individual ambitions over the larger goals of the campaign as a movement. This employee and fellow South Side native has shared with me that the campaign is getting a sense that the attitudes of dedicated Ivy League volunteers had, over the course of the primary, given Republicans enough stories to run with the ‘elitist’ trope in the general election.”

What are these kids doing: arguing over who gets to plug those numbers into an excel sheet? Or… maybe it would be more relevant to ask: who is this KosherDutchAfro, and why all the crazy haterade for us innocent ivy leaguers with big political dreams? Because later on in the post he writes about how Obama’s loss to Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary can be blamed on “pushy” Penn students:

In Pennsylvania, where the campaign lost big time to Hillary due to pushy Penn students stoking conflict with long-time city activists, the Obama campaign has instituted a training that teaches volunteers how to be senstive to existing communities.”

OK. Fine. We know that this sort of insensitivity can be a problem not only amongst ivy league students, but also within the ivy league administration. So maybe this kind of training isn’t such a bad idea after all. But isn't blaming Obama's loss on a few Penn students taking it a bit far? And wait…didn’t Obama attend ivy league universities himself? According to the mystery source, “Senator Obama himself feels Ivy League graduates have held sway over Washington too long and even though he attended Harvard and Columbia, if elected, he intends to do very little hiring from the Ivies.”

Now this is truly scary. Because if this is potentially true, it’s grim news for us rising seniors. Hell, if nepotism is going out of fashion in politics, I’m never getting a job next year.

UPDATE: Information has emerged which casts doubt upon the motives and claims of the tipster "AfroDutch." It appears that nothing he told us can be taken as reliable -- to the extent that this post should be considered wholly compromised. There is absolutely no evidence of bad blood between the Obama campaign and Ivy Leaguers. -HP

Natalie Portman, Harvard '03, stars as a princess in her hairy boyfriend Devendra Banhart's new Bollywood-inspired music video, "Carmensita."

Do not watch if:

1. you are offended by pubic hair

2. you are offended by cultural inaccuracy

3. you don't like it when Natalie Portman does that whole i'm so cute and endearing i smile a lot and i'm perfect thing

4. you like Natalie Portman so much that you don't want to see her turn into an octopus

Oh how easily we do forget.

When Brown freshman and native Canadian Harrison Zolnierczyk was charged earlier this year on accounts of “child pornography,� the commentators on Ivy Gate went wild.  There were cries for justice, for retribution, for glimpses of the footage he put on photobucket of his girlfriend getting down and dirty on his friend/hockey teammate Bradley Harding.

You ivy league plebs demanded that the law (albeit Canadian) be put into effect, saying that he deserved to go to jail for secretly directing underage porn without his girlfriend's consent, and that he deservedly would never get this off of his record.  In particular, one commentator who goes by the name Irony wrote, “What a foolish mistake he made and now that will cost him for the rest of his life.�

Well, ironically, as the Brown Daily Herald recently reported, Zolnierczyk’s record will be as clean as a whistle by the time he graduates.  In April, Harry pleaded guilty to “two counts of electronic voyeurism,� and in June was sentenced to three years’ probation with conditional discharge.

This means that if he can keep his hands on his hockey stick and off of his video camera for the next few years, there will be no legal record of this crime.  All he needs to do is change his name (let's be honest, there are too many consonants in that thing anyway) and no one will ever know.  Zolnierczyk will be back in school this coming fall, and he may even be playing hockey.  Better yet, Brown’s Vice President for Public Affairs and University Relations Michael Chapman made this statement to The Herald:

"The conditional discharge means the court found no charges to pursue. We expect him to return this fall, and his conduct at Brown has raised no concerns."

Gotta love Brown: you can pass/fail all your classes, read whatever the hell you want, and maybe even create an academic major in something like “electronic voyeurism.�  Hey, it’s no concern!

--JULI MIN

I woke up the morning after IvyGate's big bar bash relieved that I was in my own bed and apparently still wearing my underroos. So far so good, I rationalized, and that was when I heard the shower turn on.

Despite the early morning haze of one too many gin and tonics, everything came back to me. I hadn't gone home from that party alone. I had gone home with my new co-editor.

**

I don't usually take showers in unfamiliar apartments the morning after. Hell, I usually just grab my pants and run. But this time was different. It was uncanny how much we complemented each other. Robyn was from Irvine, California, a student at Barnard, and headed to med school in the next few years.  Basically, she could do a Korean accent better than I could; she was the daughter my mother was meant to have. I was raised in New Jersey, a former prep schooler and a student of literature at Harvard.  I should have been bat-mitzvahed years ago.

When we met, we finished each others sentences. We ordered the same drinks, a few too many.  Sometimes you know right away that it's not going to work out.  But sometimes you know that it will.  And so I stayed for my shower.  We were going to be the best of friends.

**

Our beautiful-yet-awkward relationship started out where most healthy, substantive relationships begin: through Facebook. After stalking the shit out of each other once we were assigned as co-editors, we decided to meet for drinks.

We were both in New York for the summer, interning in publishing (Juli), and taking summer physics classes whilst editing Columbia's bioethics journal (Robyn). Well, drinks turned into a baking fiasco, then a round of embarrassing sex story trade offs, a trip to Nick and Chris's aforementioned IvyGate party, and finally a drunken subway ride uptown, which culminated in what can only be referred to as a slumber party.

Yes, really. A slumber party. With pajamas and giggling and cookies and all that girly shit. And now we're, like, totally BFFs. Over the past few weeks we've gone to the theater, the park, a nice Italian restaurant.

So thanks, Ivy Gate, for the first completely not awkward morning after we've ever experienced (i.e. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'So long, and thanks for all the fish').  And, as an act of gratitude, the plan is basically to turn this blog into the next Sex and the Ivy.  It's a hard job. But someone's got to do it.

Send us tips, recipes, personals, or embarrassing sex stories at tips@ivygateblog.com

---
Juli Min, Harvard '09, is the singer in a funk band and also an acoustic indie duo that performs in and around New York.

Robyn Schneider, Barnard '08.5, is the author of several forgettable books for teenagers.  She hopes to attend medical school and bedazzle the shit out of her scrubs.

--ROBYN SCHNEIDER AND JULI MIN