October 31, 2006

"What I saw was pure debauchery," the Fox News producer said. "Girls were falling down drunk, and most were wearing just panties and bras. I went to the bathroom and heard guys having sex in the stall next to me. A record amount of people had to have emergency medical care." Good God, what was he talking about?

Sex.

Power.

God.

The libidinous event of the Ivy season. Brown's cocky scoff to Sodom and Gomorrah. SexPowerGod: Aren't you turned on just thinking about it? Can you wait for the Brown Queer Alliance's official promotional photos to be released? Wait, we found one!:

Hey, anyone seen our sex drive? It was here a minute ago...

For reasons unclear, this frightened boy is one of BQA's ambassadors of sexy to the student body. Three more room-temperature shots are after the jump. (Note that one of them is titled "Hot.")

Continue reading ""Yeah, Work It for the Camera, Baby! [Click] Be an Animal for Me! [Click] Be ... a Deer! A Deer in the Headlights! [Click]"" »

October 31, 2006 6:10 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (3) | Read more: Brown , Drinking , Sex , parties , sex power god

You know you've arrived when you get your own fan-blog. But the true measure of success is whether you've inspired a hate-blog.

Miriam Datskovsky '07, the Columbia Spectator's sex columnist (and opinion page editor), knows what we're talking about. She's been penning her column, "Sexplorations," going on two years now. During that time she's taken plenty of flak, like this scorcher that she ran on her own opinion page, but nothing has rivaled the meticulous vitriol of Fire Miriam Datskovsky. It's a new blog so anonymously, obsessively hateful it kind of twists in on itself and, by the eighth sentence-by-sentence dissection of Datskovsky's published prose, starts to read like a tribute. (Bwog's burbling comment section is afire on the topic; it's alternately hilarious and ad hominem.)

It's true, Datskovsky is edging into Natalie Krinsky territory with her vanity site. But she's been pretty good-natured about taking heat. "I don't have a problem with the Fire Miriam blog," she told us. "I think it's great people are taking the time to comment extensively on why they don't like my writing." (As for Bwog, she says they didn't contact her for comment before posting.)

Consider yourself lucky, Miriam -- after hate-blogs come book deals.

(Full disclosure: We're biased. Half of us had drinks with Miriam once and she is, for the record, a sweet, unpretentious gal.)

October 31, 2006 5:26 PM by Chris Beam | | Comments (7) | Read more: Columbia , Columbia Spectator , Sex , sex columns

If you're like us, you're aware that the Ivy League has something called "crew," and that it has something to do with muscled anorexics sitting in a boat, rowing in unison when a smaller anorexic with a funny name tells them to.

So this video from Sunday's Princeton Chase event pretty much encapsulates our view of the sport: It's long, it's confusing, and people we don't really know or see are passionate about it. You can find out what actually happened to Columbia's heavyweight "A" squad here, or you can just watch in simple, happy ignorance.

October 31, 2006 11:46 AM by Nick Summers | | Comments (2) | Read more: Columbia , Princeton , Sports , YouTube , crew

October 31, 2006 11:07 AM by RagTime | | Comments (4) | Read more:

October 30, 2006

Props to the Yale Herald for being the first college publication to get an interview with Aleksey Vayner. Too bad they left their spine on the mantelpiece next to their keys that day. Here's a snippet:

YH: One endeavor your résumé mentions is Vayner Capital Management, a business that you reportedly created. Could you describe this business?

AV: We’re a limited liability corporation, based in New York.

YH: Is that all you can say about it on the record?

AV: Yes.

Now that, folks, is what we call a follow-up question. The piece is so hard-hitting the byline is blank; no one on staff seems to want to take credit for it. Keep on sluggin', guys.

October 30, 2006 12:57 PM by Chris Beam | | Comments (14) | Read more: Yale , Yale Herald , aleksey vayner


Hi, I'm Chris Beam ... and I'm Nick Summers. And we do IvyGate. We both graduated from Columbia, '06 and '05. We've been running this little lawsuit magnet since July, and we figured it's time to stop pretending our identities are some big secret.

We know you're full of burning questions, like "What the hell do I care?" and "So what?" We're telling you this because some of the stuff we've been covering (fraudulent megalomaniacs; intra-paper scuffles; profs we'd like to tenure, over and over again) shouldn't be done from behind a veil. And we're confident enough in the reporting behind our newsier items that attaching our names is just a journalistic no-brainer.

So, I'm Nick ... and I'm Chris. Aleksey Vayner, please do not come to our homes and kill us.

October 30, 2006 11:00 AM by Chris Beam | | Comments (17) | Read more: IvyGate

October 30, 2006 9:46 AM by RagTime | | Comments (2) | Read more: Dartmouth , Harvard , Penn , RagTime , Yale

The Crimson has just posted a story on Kathleen Breeden '09, the Kaavyariffic, Jaysontastic, Glasstacular staffer who has boldly pushed the frontier of plagiarism to cartooning. An Oct. 25 piece bears a "noticeable similarity" to an Oct. 12 panel by Pulitzer winner Walt Handelsman in Newsday, the Crimson notes.

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

Yeah, "noticeable" is the word we would have used, too. There are three more ripoffs, the piece says -- but no mention of whether Breeden will be fired. It's understandable. Their hands are pretty full right now. (Breeden hasn't responded to our request for comment.)

October 30, 2006 12:54 AM by Nick Summers | | Comments (19) | Read more: Harvard , Harvard Crimson , plagiarism

The away message of the Crimson's associate managing editor said it all: "does anyone have a spiderhole i can borrow for a few days?"

The newsroom staff at 14 Plympton Street is agog this weekend over top editors' handling of what should have been a minor incident: a single poorly sourced column. Now the campus is talking about the paper's credibility, and the controversy is entirely of their own creation.

At 3 a.m. Friday, Crimson president Will Marra '07 decided to pull a news story on columnist Victoria Ilyinsky's firing from the print edition, and posted it online the following morning instead. Managing editor Dan Hemel '07 ran a blank space on page three in protest -- the universal journalism symbol for "CENSORED," and an unmistakably public Eff You to his boss.

Marra explained in an email to the news staff that he wanted to let the paper's opinion editors have first dibs at addressing the flap with an editor's note. "Holding off for a few hours with the story did not at all undermine news' credibility (and among our readers would have only increased it)," Marra wrote. But in what universe does withholding news increase cred? In an effort to be hyper-ethical (or just cover his own ass), Marra's bending over backward just became convoluted.

Crimson bigshots flipped. Former managing editor Zach Seward (who covers Harvard for the Wall Street Journal) slammed Marra's "extraordinarily cryptic" decisionmaking. "The Crimson was censored on Thursday night," Seward wrote everyone. Sitting on hot news for arcane reasons of propriety, while the Boston Globe and others wrote all about it, meant "the paper was, in perhaps a first, willfully scooped. To protect its own credibility? It's like destroying the village in order to save it." The rest of his blistering critique is after the jump, along with Hemel's response. (Marra didn't respond to our interview request; the author of the news story had no comment.)

We don't have enough buckets to catch all the Crimson leakage. Editors are pissed. Alumni are coming out of the woodwork with questions. Everyone agrees: Marra screwed up. 

Does it get worse? Yup. History seemed to repeat itself this weekend when news staffers – remember blood in the water? -- discovered that an editorial cartoon by Kathleen E. Breeden, '09, bore similarities to another cartoon published recently in Newsday. As with the Ilyinsky piece, CrimEds spent Sunday night waffling over publishing their news piece in the print edition vs. online. Last we heard, the story’s gonna be in the paper.

Click through for e-mail correspondence.

Continue reading "Crimson Crisis: Pretzel-in-Chief's Moves Baffle Newsroom" »

October 30, 2006 12:19 AM by Chris Beam | | Comments (8) | Read more: Harvard , Harvard Crimson , Victoria Ilyinsky , plagiarism , zach seward

October 27, 2006

October 27, 2006 7:55 AM by RagTime | | Comments (4) | Read more: Columbia , Cornell , Dartmouth , Harvard , Penn , RagTime


You know, in all the stuff we've written about Aleksey Vayner, we've never actually used the word "douchebag." Well, we're getting pretty close to using that term right now. Only we're not talking about Aleksey.

Daro Mott and Marcelino Pantoja (Yale '06, above) sent the book query below to the Wiliam Morris mega-agency. G'head, read it, we'll wait.

From: "Mott, Daro" [redacted]
To: "Suzanne Gluck" [redacted]
CC: "Marcelino Pantoja" [redacted]
Re: Query: Aleksey Vayner, a Memoir

October 25, 2006
Suzanne Gluck
William Morris Agency
1325 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10019

Dear Ms. Suzanne Gluck:

We would like to preface our query letter with a short paragraph about ourselves. My name is Daro Mott and I graduated from Yale University in May of 2006; I currently live and work in Louisville, Kentucky. My co-author's name is Marcelino Pantoja; he lives and works in Tracy, California and he also graduated from Yale this previous spring. We are budding writers and intend to produce a memoir regarding our puzzling friend, Aleksey Vayner, whom we met as undergraduates at Yale.

In our book, we reveal the most intriguing and entertaining Ivy League persona of today: Aleksey Vayner.

The story of Aleksey Vayner is both sensational and seemingly apocryphal. On the one hand, Aleksey and his family, penniless, emigrated from Uzbekistan to the United States; at eighteen, he gained admission to Yale University as a tennis recruit. On the other hand, Aleksey Vayner sexed up his accomplishments one time too many: recently, he single handedly became the laughing stock on Wall Street after sending an eleven page résumé and
promotional video to UBS AG, the world's largest asset wealth manager.

On October 9, 2006, the New York Sun went to press on Aleksey. Within the span of a week, the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones News Wire, Fox News, US News and World Report, London Times, Daily Mail, Forbes, the Yale Daily News, Market Watch, the New Yorker and dozens of other national and international media ran articles on Aleksey. The New York Times, the Today Show and other media picked up the story the following week. Following suit, Aleksey Vayner was featured on Inside Edition and MSNBC early this week. Blogs can't get enough. Yale students scream Vaynergate. Public interest is skyrocketing!  Why?

Aleksey lifts 495 lbs of steel, clocks a tennis serve at 140mph, whirls around a ballroom dance floor with a gorgeous dancer, shatters six bricks with a karate chop, pulls off fantastic stunts with skis—he choreographs all this information and more in his promotional video. Moreover, Aleksey boasts of being the CEO of Vayner Capital Management, a partner in a mega real-estate development firm, a professional athlete and the founder of Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES), a non-profit. He even claims to have self-published a book on the Holocaust from the perspective of female survivors!  Aleksey has chutzpah!

But Wall Street erupted with laughter. And they have not stopped. Aleksey is being bombarded with requests for interviews. The calls have not stopped. Wall Street circulated Aleksey's video and résumé because, Aleksey, whether we like it or not, is simply entertaining.

In the light of this, his cadre of friends proposes to write a book about Aleksey situated in Yale University where we first met him. As his closest friends and recent graduates of Yale, we have personal access to him; in other words, we are self-anointed experts of Aleksey.

In his memoir, we detail the reality that is Aleksey with a flavor made possible from having tasted the "inside scoop." We raise interesting issues and get down to bottom of life at Yale with Aleksey Vayner. We will answer soul searching questions: Who is he? What does he want out of this gift of life? What is folklore, what is reality? Did the allure of Wall Street make a zany guy even zanier? Is he a typical Ivy Leaguer? Is Aleksey Vayner legitimate or is he an imposter? We know the truth.

We look forward to speaking with you.

Respectfully Submitted,

Daro Mott
Marcelino Pantoja

Choo choo! All aboard! The Aleksey Vayner gravy train is leaving the station! Good to know that even during these tough times, Aleksey's "closest friends" are standing by him ... ready to cash in on his fame.

Seriously, though -- most intriguing Ivy League persona? The New York Sun as catalyst? "What is folklore, what is reality?" Sign us up, you "budding writers," for the "flavor made possible from having tasted the 'inside scoop'" on your "puzzling," "zany" friend.

October 27, 2006 3:05 AM by Nick Summers | | Comments (52) | Read more: Book Deals , Yale , aleksey vayner , plagiarism , this is why people hate the ivy league

October 26, 2006

Remember how we reserved the right to freak out if more dirt on Victoria Ilyinsky came to light? Well, looks like the Crimson has done it for us.

The Harvard daily fired Ilyinsky Thursday after learning that the senior had failed to cite sources in her column on misuse of the word "literally." In addition to one passage drawn from a Slate story, "two other parts of the opinion piece also do not meet The Crimson's standards for source citation, and it is on this basis that we have decided to retract the column," the editors wrote in a statement posted late Thursday.

They kind of had to. After pummeling Kaavya Viswanathan last year for plagiarism, the Crimson doesn't want to be seen protecting someone even remotely tainted by the p-word, even if it's a small infraction. And you just know the Romenesko-horny reporters smell blood in the water. As we type this, every Crimson newshound is Googling Ilyinsky's past columns sentence by sentence -- desperate, desperate, desperate to become the next David Zhou.

Evvvverybody, take a breath. A note and a retraction might have sufficed. The additional infractions that supposedly convinced the CrimEds to yank the column are no more grave than the first. Her two sources, "Literally, A Web Log" and Slate, are the first and third results of a Google search for "literally." As we said before, this isn't a high crime. (Unless other bogus columns surface!) It's laziness, and a failure to learn the first lesson of sloppy journalism: If you can Google a topic, so can your readers.

We'll see what happens next. (The Globe reports, weirdly, that the Crimson plans to pull the article offline. If they remove it, we've cached the article here.)

UPDATE 5:45 p.m.: The Crimson has officially yanked the piece from the website. You guys realize that's exactly the wrong move, right? Leave it up with a note attached for readers to make their own judgments.

Also, not that this is relevant, but we hear Victoria Ilyinsky is a princess. Literally. Like, descendant of the Romanov dynasty. We're kind of tempted to forgive everything.

October 26, 2006 11:47 PM by Chris Beam | | Comments (17) | Read more: Harvard , Harvard Crimson , Victoria Ilyinsky

An apparent suicide attempt by a student in Leverett House yesterday prompted an e-mail from Harvard College Dean Benedict Gross to the student body, respectfully edging around the details. Later that day, Gross sent out a second e-mail -- presumably planned long ago -- cheerfully asking students to participate in the web-based Survey of Student Well Being. An honest mistake to be sure, but jeez, couldn't someone have caught this? (The student is in critical condition and improving at a local hospital.)

October 26, 2006 11:39 PM by Chris Beam | | Comment | Read more: Harvard

If students had a rallying cry today, it would probably be "We're bored as hell and we're not gonna take it anymore!" And where are the legions of bored people congregating? Online, naturally.

The anonymous chat site Bored at Butler -- a reference to Columbia's Butler Library -- launched last fall and quickly became Columbia's id. Students don't vent; they fume. The discussion doesn't devolve; it starts on the ground level. No subject is off limits, from racial stereotypes to sex positions to whether the girl in the green sweater in Room 209 is a virgin. You'll also find the occasional nonstop solicitation. This conversation excerpt is pretty representative:

"sex now?"

"I'd be game"

"but alas"

"where is everyone else"

"we're all guys"

Now the site's creator, Jonathan Pappas '06, has used the B@B template to create Bored at Lamont for restless Harvard kids and Bored at Bobst for NYU. Pappas thinks the Columbia site's popularity was "difficult to recreate elsewhere" since it's the result of a "culture specific to Columbia." But wait, what's more universal than sounding off online behind a comfy veil of anonymity?

"The goal of these Web sites was to create a forum for truly free speech," he wrote in an e-mail. "Taking away inhibitions results in a colorful display of extreme brilliance and extreme ignorance." Take it away, comments section.

October 26, 2006 2:46 PM by Chris Beam | | Comments (18) | Read more: Columbia , Harvard , NYU

The moment a political race turns ad hominem, that's when we tune in. Our ears perked up when we heard one candidate in a New York State Assembly race has accused the other of -- cover your ears, children -- not graduating from Penn.

Well, it's slightly more complicated. Greg Ball, a Republican running in the 99th district, accused his opponent Ken Harper of falsely claiming he received a B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania, the Journal News reports. Sounds more like Harper fudged it by designating himself "English, 1978-82, University of Pennsylvania," which some political groups misinterpreted and replaced with "B.A."

So Harper attended Penn for four years and didn't graduate. Judging from our experience, that's actually a huge accomplishment. Once you've been admitted to an Ivy, it takes nothing short of murder to get kicked out -- and sometimes even that might not do it. Our advice to Ken: Accuse Ball of graduating!

October 26, 2006 11:03 AM by Chris Beam | | Comments (3) | Read more: Penn , politics

October 25, 2006

October 25, 2006 9:05 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (1) | Read more: Brown , Harvard , RagTime , Yale

We ain't from around these parts, y'see, so we weren't sure what to make of these photos sent in by a Brown correspondent. All we know is they call it BEAN Fest -- sponsored by the Brown Environmental Action Network -- and it involves cows, llamas and "cider pong."

Recreational cow milking? Petting-zoo dance party? Wait a tic. Is this one of them hazing rituals where the new kids get sloshed on hard cider and take turns with the livestock? So that's what they mean by "environmental action." You guys are gross.

More photos after the jump.

UPDATE 11:06 p.m.: It's an alpaca. IvyGate regrets the error.

Continue reading "Hot! Exclusive Sex Power God Phot-- Oh Wait, Sorry, Wrong File" »

October 25, 2006 6:52 PM by Chris Beam | | Comments (4) | Read more: Brown , livestock

Yale Daily News reporter Tom Kaplan is our new hero. Only a freshman, he's penned a piece about Aleksey Vayner with actual (gasp) reporting! Unlike the toothless Times, credulous MSNBC, or effortlessly spun New York Post, Kaplan's piece moves the ball, noting that the president of Charity Navigator has asked New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer to investigate Vayner's fake charity.

Also -- and this is pure sugarcane -- it's apparently Academic Integrity Awareness Week at Yale now, but deans are stonewalling on whether they're looking into Vayner's several plagiarisms.

Kaplan's piece is a serious take, but the last two sentences are the funniest thing we've read all week:

Vayner's attempt to stand out in his application appears to have backfired, although advertising executive Donny Deutsch said on MSNBC he would hire Vayner immediately for his creative genius. Director of Undergraduate Career Services Philip Jones declined to comment on whether Vayner's strategy is a sound one.

But with Halloween less than a week away, some Yalies in need of an outfit may have found inspiration of their own in the Vayner scandal: some students said that "Aleksey Vayner" will likely be a popular costume on campus this year.

One Metro North ticket to New Haven for Oct. 31, please! If we come out there, will someone throw a party?

October 25, 2006 12:16 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (21) | Read more: Yale , Yale Daily News , aleksey vayner

After crashing 02138’s launch parties in New York and Boston, we knew we had to complete the trilogy in Washington. We weren't angry at ourselves for giving favorable coverage to the first two -- just disappointed, and you know that always hurts worse. So we went in determined to hate it. Sigh. We tried.

When David Bradley, owner of 02138 and another rag, invites you to party at his home, you don't ask questions. A sampling of the questions we didn't ask: "Is Bradley Manor visible from space?" "Where did those two Maybachs in your driveway come from?" "How would one go about being you?"

The house -- the former Cuban embassy, we hear -- is a secular materialist's conception of heaven: Impressionist paintings. Statuary. Mirrors, everywhere. A chandelier in the kitchen. Wood-paneled bookshelves. Clocks on every other wall. Couches in the kitchen. Ivy spilling out of massive stone-carved furnishings. A roaring fireplace in the kitchen.

As we soaked it all in, the magazine brass shushed the room and told everyone the evening's guests had collectively clocked 325 years at Harvard -- that's, like, 569 in Cornell years! Editor Bom Kim then took a moment to lie with a straight face that this crowd, compared to the New York and Boston launch parties, was way better-looking.

Only two members of the Harvard 100 showed up: Grover Norquist and Walter Isaacson. We were a little disappointed, considering four of the top five live in DC. (That, and we were totally planning to shave one side of Ben Bernanke's face once he'd passed out). As for the rest of the crowd, thank God for name tags.

On the way out, gift bag in hand (We'd been meaning to read The Namesake! They're mind-readers!), we gave in and climbed behind the wheel of one of the two Maybachs. They weren't there to be driven; only felt. And as we sat there, petting the hand-stitched upholstery and making quiet vroom noises for a good two minutes, it occurred to us: This is what it feels like to be David Bradley.

We're so disappointed.

October 25, 2006 9:12 AM by Chris Beam | | Comment | Read more: 02138 , Harvard , parties , washington

October 24, 2006

A team of Brooklyn-based Yalies and other miscellaneous Ivy-types have started what may well be the world's first online sitcom: Duder. Although the terrible name is probably setting off alarm bells of lameness for some of you, judge not too quickly! The three episodes posted so far are actually pretty hilarious. Plots: sturdy. Production values: impressive. Comic timing: competent to inspired. We've come to appreciate the show's Seinfeld 2.0 themes and delightful awkwardness -- the show's take on interracial dating in episode one, shown below, is guaranteed to have you squirming.

So here's to you, Duder. You're proof that we don't all have to become stunningly mediocre tools after we graduate.

More solid clips after the jump.

Continue reading "Yale Kids, Web Sitcom: If We Don't Hate It, It's Gotta Be Good" »

October 24, 2006 9:05 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (10) | Read more: Yale , comedy

One of the things we learned when compiling Ivy crime stats back in August was that universities get to report or withhold pretty much anything they want. If someone steals the entire contents of your dorm room, but there's no sign of forced entry, sorry! That's larceny, not burglary, so as far as the public knows, it never happened.

Harvard's Zach Seward -- he of Summers-scooping, academic-probation fame -- has a good piece on the subject in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, detailing how universities game the system. Seward also re-calculates Ivy crime data to include both kinds of theft, yielding the authoritative chart at right on which school is the robbingest.

October 24, 2006 1:33 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (15) | Read more: Brown , Columbia , Cornell , Dartmouth , Harvard , Penn , Princeton , Yale , crime , zach seward

The next Kaavya! The next Kaavya! That's the shrill-ish noise we're hearing from Cambridge, after the Crimson ran an editor's note yesterday apologizing for an Oct. 16 column by Victoria Ilyinsky '07. The column bore some similarities to a Slate piece on misuse of the word "literally." The relevant passages (via Steve Melendez '07 and his blog, Rabbits and Robots):

From Slate:

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat."

From The Crimson:

Not only is “literally” one of many misleading terms, but it’s also had multiple meanings for quite a while. The third aforementioned quote—“the land literally flowed with milk and honey”—comes straight from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel “Little Women.” And who doesn’t remember Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby: “He literally glowed?” But neither was the town of Plumfield overrun with food-stuffs nor our favorite social climber actually luminescent.

Melendez notices how Ilyinsky makes the same points about "Janus words" and "contranyms" as the Slate writer and emerges unsympathetic: 

My conclusion is that Ilyinsky plagiarized [Slate's] Sheidlower; of course, she may not have started writing with that intent, but it looks like that's what happened.

Honestly, we're not so sure. Ilyinsky definitely ganked the Slate author's ideas with no attribution whatsoever. But there's a line between honest mistake and you'll-never-work-in-this-town-again plagiarism/fabulism. We say Ilyinsky falls, with a couple inches to spare, on the honest-mistake side. The bigger sin is lazily revisiting tired subject matter that's been treated in a classic David Cross routine, this blog, and every pop grammar book ever. (IvyGate reserves the right to flip out if more infractions come to light.)

October 24, 2006 12:07 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (10) | Read more: Harvard , Harvard Crimson , Victoria Ilyinsky , plagiarism

October 24, 2006 9:39 AM by RagTime | | Comment | Read more: Brown , Penn , Princeton , RagTime , Yale

October 23, 2006


BREAKING NEWS ALERT: At 11:25 p.m. IvyGate received a communique from a person or persons claiming to be Josiah Stinkney Carberry, the reknowned Brown professor of psychoceramics, and evidently the mastermind behind the kidnapping of the Penn Quaker. As proof of life, Prof. Carberry submits the above photo (click to enlarge) of the Quaker with a recent edition of the Brown Daily Herald, followed by a list of demands. The dispatch, in full:

Drum Major [Brian] Phillips ['07],

To indicate that you are willing to negotiate for the life of your beloved
Quaker, the Penn Band must play the Brown fight song during the fourth
quarter of the Penn vs. Brown football game this Saturday. And Cheeseman
must wear brown socks. We will have a representative present to observe.

Should you choose to ignore this request, the Quaker will suffer.

Brown Division of Hostage Negotiations

We don't know what the Penn marching band policy is re: negotiating with terrorists. But Phillips, my God, man, look what they're capable of. We urge you to comply, or better yet, retaliate:

UPDATE: This is too funny not to include. From a Deadspin commenter: "It puts the lotion on its foam..."

October 23, 2006 11:45 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (6) | Read more: Brown , Penn , mascot , mascot kidnapping

What, are they eating Snackwells instead of Doritos after getting lit now?

A new study by researchers at Brown finds that freshmen there only gain 5.6 or 3.6 pounds (men and women, respectively), less than the storied 15 our RAs gravely warned us about way back when. Brave Eunice Eun '09 offers herself up to USA Today as a student who did pork up the full amount ("It was really startling for my parents when I went back home for Thanksgiving break"), and then burned it off with eight months of vegetables and exercise.

So congrats, Eunice, and congrats, Brown. You make Yale's yayo fiends look like the waffle fries line at Six Flags by comparison.

October 23, 2006 6:29 PM by Nick Summers | | Comment | Read more: Brown , food

Okay, so this scene from Dartmouth's Chi Heorot frat basement is just impressive.

A Dartmouth correspondent explains:

What he's doing is a "Quick Six." I don't know how widespread that particular drinking challenge is beyond Dartmouth, but this guy must have been in the top three or four kids in our class; I've never seen faster. (I rocked out at 26 seconds at my peak, and I have a friend who clocks in at about 14-16.)

October 23, 2006 12:23 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (15) | Read more: Dartmouth , Drinking , YouTube

When a journalist gets caught fabricating, he must atone for bringing shame on the profession by never being allowed to work again. Or at least that's the theory. In reality, they usually go on time-out for five minutes before staging a quiet comeback, often in a different medium. Case in point: Nick Sylvester, Harvard '04.

After last week's post on Sylvester's embarrassing guest appearance in Prof. Charlie Nesson's Harvard Law class -- in which The Fabricatin' Kid gave not the slightest indication he understood his sins -- someone informed us (perhaps inadvertently) that Sylvester has a new job working for ... drumroll! ... The Colbert Report. We checked, and hosannahs, Idolator did allude to this a month ago -- but no one noticed.

Really?! This is perfect. Is there a better gig for a fact-challenged guy than one where it's built right into the job description? It's like a convicted arsonist getting hired at a crematorium.

October 23, 2006 10:02 AM by Chris Beam | | Comments (3) | Read more: Harvard , nick sylvester

October 23, 2006 9:57 AM by RagTime | | Comment | Read more: Brown , Cornell , Harvard , RagTime , Yale

October 20, 2006

Breaking our promise already, sorta. We don't want to cover this, but we can't ignore it. Welcome to the party, NYT; headline says it all.

The Resume Mocked 'Round the World [The New York Times]

UPDATE 3:19 p.m. Oct. 21: Oh look, Michael J. de la Merced's story made it into the Times print edition. But with the guts cut out -- what little there were in the first place, anyway. This part makes us want to ram an airplane into an apartment building:

The Internet scrutiny also raised questions about some of Mr. Vayner's claims in his résumé, including assertions that he ran his own charity and investment firm.

There have also been questions over whether he copied sections of a self-published book, "Women’s Silent Tears: A Unique Gendered Perspective on the Holocaust," from Web sites.

Mr. Vayner, 23, contends that both the charity and investment firm are legitimate. And the accusations about his book, he said, were based on an earlier draft that has since been changed.

Oh! Well then! Mr. Vayner contends, does he? Then everything must be A-okay. You keep doing that tough reporting, Michael J. de la Merced.

October 20, 2006 8:53 PM by Nick Summers | | Comments (23) | Read more: Yale , aleksey vayner , new york times ,