Here we are, wrapping things up for the school year, and what more Ivy way to do it than with a big ol' dose of gazing lustily in the mirror? Here's three ways of measuring the year's top content.

I. COMMENTS As of this moment, we've written 572 items this year, and you've posted 5,751 comments -- almost exactly 10 per, a really outstanding number for which we are truly grateful. We want to thank the vast majority of you for keeping things lively, and in the interest of limping past the finish line without touching off a shitstorm, we'll leave unsaid our thoughts on the distinct minority that amplified the stereotypes of the Ivy League.

Without further ado, the Top 10 Most-Commented-Upon Items:

• Lord of the Lies: Aleksey Vayner Outdoes Himself (228)
• Calling Aleksey Vayner's Bluff (156)
• Barbara Bush Displays Remarkable Commitment to Drinking (126)
• Harvard-Yale Rivalry Escalates to Beef, Now With A Soundtrack (114)
• How Not to Apply for a Job in I-Banking (107)
• We'll Be Sure To Show This To Our Lawyers When They're Out Of Class (99)
• Introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League: An Eight-Part Investigative Series (76)
• More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About the Dartmouth Fraternities (73)
• Apparently Third Eye Blind Still Exists, Is Popular (65)
• Skull and Bones Member Burns American Flag (63)

(God, we're a one-hit wonder band. Subtract Aleksey and you get these extras:)

• Cornell So Proud Of Itself For This (61)
• RagTime, RagTime, Wherefore Art Thou, RagTime? (56)
• J-Schooler Sure to Be Put on the Hard-Hitting Investigative Beat Now (54)
• Dartmouth Sororities Made Easy (51)

II. TRAFFIC The most objective look at what people consumed most, according to Google Analytics.

• How Not to Apply for a Job in I-Banking
• Calling Aleksey Vayner's Bluff
• Lord of the Lies: Aleksey Vayner Outdoes Himself
• Barbara Bush Displays Remarkable Commitment to Drinking
• Goodness Gracious
• We'll Be Sure to Show This to Our Lawyers When They're Out of Class
• Fact-Checking Yale's 50 Most Beautiful
• Alright, We're Just Gonna Say It: He's the New Kaavya
• Shower Stalls Are For Showering
• The Dartmouth Redemption 

(Wow, we're worse than Right Said Fred and The Knack put together. Subtract Aleksey and you get these extras:)

• Naked Pictures. Of Ivy League Students. Thousands of Them. Famous Ones. Spanning Decades. We Dare You Not to Read This.
• Kitchen Sex Is the New Shower Sex
• Princetonian Joke Issue Shows Knack for Subtle Social Commentary
• Box in a Box Singer Unboxed
• 8th Graders vs. 9th Graders: It's On 

III. PERSONAL FAVES And then there's the items closest to our own shriveled, blog-black hearts. In reverse order of appearance:

• Yale Alumni Magazine Rather Regrets the Error
  
• Fact-Checking Yale's 50 Most Beautiful
• Introducing Tasty-Ass Sandwiches of the Ivy League: An Eight-Part Investigative Series
  
• This Is Everything We Have Ever Wanted IvyGate to Be
• Evan Gogel Should Get Beat Up More Often
• Is That an Inflated Grade in Your Pants?
• Harvard Economists Visibly Dead Inside
• These Will Come In Handy at the Confirmation Hearings
• IvyGate Index: Calibrating Hegemony Since 2006
  
• Prof. Charles Nesson Now Permanently High

May 17, 2007 5:00 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (4) | Read more: IvyGate , it's been real

"Hey, looks like one of our deans got blitzjacked (his email account got hacked, to normal people)," a reader at Dartmouth emailed us yesterday. One look at the attached message, and we had to agree:

Date: 14 May 2007 16:16:53 -0400
From: Stuart C. Lord
Subject: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!
To: (Recipient list suppressed)

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

I have amazing news to report to the student body! In just a few months as the Interim Vice President for Institutional Diversity, I am delighted to report that the Campus climate is repaired and we have achieved a standard of excellence other schools only long to attain!

I know this because I had invited students to Campus Climate lunches, and out of the entire student body, only 20 (yes, just 20!!) students responded. I am certain this must be because we have accomplished complete diversity and harmony and almost no one thinks there are any discussions left to be carried on.

However, in the event you think there is still need for discussion, and still need for healing, I would invite you to sign up for one of the lunches. There is plenty of room. There is also probably plenty to discuss. Tomorrow Tuesday May 15 or Next Tuesday May 22, 2007.

Stuart

To RSVP respond to the email and say ___ Yes I will be at Lunch this Tuesday or Next Tuesday.

**************************************************
 We Must Be The Change We Wish To See In The World
                                  ~Mahatma Gandhi
**************************************************

Dr. Stuart Calvin Lord
Vice President for Institutional Diversity & Equity (Interim)
and the Virginia Rice Kelsey '61S
Dean of the Tucker Foundation
Associate Provost
The William Jewett Tucker Foundation
Dartmouth College

Has to be a "blitzjacking" stunt, right? No administrator would joke about diversity with a sarcasm sledgehammer like that -- and certainly not a guy whose name is, terrifyingly, Dr. Vice President Dean Associate Provost Stuart Calvin Lord. And no one seriously has that Gandhi quote as their signature. We were all set to bemoan the continued devolution of the college prank into all-digital form when we got an update: Lord really had sent the message in question.

Date: 14 May 2007 23:43:20 -0400
From: Stuart C. Lord
Subject: Regarding Mission Accomplished
To: (Recipient list suppressed)

The goal of the e-mail I sent earlier was to generate publicity and increase attendance at our campus climate luncheons. In addition, The Office of the Vice-President for Institutional Diversity values the hard work that many members of this community have devoted to raising awareness about issues of diversity. The purpose of the Campus Climate Lunches is to provide a forum [blah blah blah]...

Stuart

Ooooookay then, Stu. Our tipster gets the last word: "Sorry for the false tip. I guess I just never expected a college-appointed dean would be so flippant about a serious campus issue. ... Evidently our vice-president for institutional diversity just thought diversity was a joke."

May 15, 2007 11:07 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (22) | Read more: Dartmouth

If you haven’t noticed, The Office is multiplying at a lapine rate. First there was the British version. Then NBC’s remake. Then some French and German versions. Extrapolate this trend and you get a parallel universe consisting entirely of Office remakes, one for every corporate culture on earth. The Onion: "CBS To Release Own Version Of NBC's The Office." It was only a matter of time before Office fever spread to academia.

This time the story is set at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, an institution that we imagine buys red tape by the mile. These are students training to be parts of bureaucratic machinery. Navigating the school's rigid hierarchy, financial aid office, and shoddy advising system -- that's just part of your education! At the very least, a few students saw enough similarity between their school and the existential mudpit of The Office to write and shoot their own remarkably faithful remake. It's got the same characters as the NBC version, only everyone is Columbia-fied: Michael Scott burns time surfing J Date. Dwight denies students financial aid. The deans award fellowships by picking out the cutest applicants' photos and throwing darts at the finalists to determine the winner. It's worth a gander, but you'll have to fill out a permission request first.

Part 1:

Part 2:

May 15, 2007 11:51 AM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (6) | Read more: Columbia , YouTube

As most of you no doubt have noticed, we've been phoning it in for quite some time now. (Seriously, YouTube's on speed dial.) And this Friday, by which time five-eighths of y'all will have finished for the semester, we'll make it official, putting IvyGate into a suspended-animation summer schedule. We're taking the month of June off; then guest editors will host two-week stints through July and August. So whether you're building houses in Honduras, poring over foundational texts on the alternative minimum tax on Capitol Hill, researching the first annual Let's Go: Anbar, or finding personal fulfillment on Wall Street, we'll still be helping you find new ways to waste time. And come fall semester, we're looking to shuffle off this bloggy coil and hand the keys to the site over to a new pair.

So, two things: 1) If you've been sitting on a tip, email it now or never. We know you're in finals -- traffic has been super-high lately, but our inbox is pretty dry; remember our stuff is only as good as you give us.

And 2) If you're interested in either guest-editing for a spell this summer, or even (God save you) taking over in the fall, get in touch soonish.

May 14, 2007 1:16 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comment | Read more: IvyGate , sweet release

It's practically a ritual for seniors to get righteously pissed off about their Class Day speakers. Jim Lehrer? Too stuffy. John McCain? Too conservative. Soledad O'Brien? OK yeah, she's actually pretty lame ...

So after seeing how the Ivies stack up in terms of musical guests, we thought a Class Day speaker-measuring contest would be in order. Who scored the hot shots? Who got stuck with duds? Your call:

• Brown: Craig Mello, Nobel Prize-winning biochemical researcher
• Columbia: Matthew Fox, actor (Lost, Party of Five) 
• Cornell: Soledad O'Brien, CNN anchor 
• Dartmouth: Henry Paulson, Treasury secretary
• Harvard: Bill Clinton, former U.S. president; Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft 
• Penn: James Baker, former secretary of state 
• Princeton: Bradley Whitford, actor (The West Wing, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip)
• Yale: Fareed Zakaria, editor, Newsweek International

It seems clear Harvard scored the jackpot this time around. You'd think just one of the two most famous Bills in the world would have been enough. (Maybe Harvard wasn't sure which one was more prestigious, so they invited both just to be safe.) But don't rule out some dark horse performances. Who knows, maybe Bradley Whitford will deliver one of those rousing paeans to American values and soft backlighting. Maybe Matthew Fox will share anecdotes about his own sexiness back when he attended Columbia. If you get video, let us know.

(Re the Fox uproar: Now is probably a good time to tell you that in March, we read at Bwog that the actor Robert Maschio -- aka Scrubs's "The Todd" -- had offered to give a counter-Fox commencement speech at Columbia, opposite Fox. We emailed him to offer IvyGate as an official sponsor of the greatest speech ever; Maschio was totally into it, until it came time to commit, and then he backed off. Something lame about t-shirts. We were crushed, but regardless, now we can tell our children that we discussed going halfsies on kegs with the greatest actor of his generation, and no one can take that away.)

May 11, 2007 11:06 AM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (51) | Read more: Brown , Columbia , Cornell , Dartmouth , Harvard , Penn , Princeton , Yale

We've often wondered what might have become of Aleksey Vayner had he never made his hit film "Impossible Is Nothing." Where would he be in five years? What levels of success would he have achieved?

We're pretty sure the answer has arrived in the form of Timothy Ferriss, Princeton '00. Currently a "guest lecturer" at Princeton (sounds a little misleading to us; he's not in the official directory), Ferriss has honed self-help guruship down to an art -- he's good-looking, well spoken, and he knows you initially assume he's a fraud. His new book, The 4-Hour Workweek, explains how to work very little (check e-mail twice a day, outsource all your work to Asians for $5 an hour) and still live your dreams. Among the dreams Ferriss has already lived: Motorcycling across China. Dancing tango in Argentina (and on Regis and Kelly). Kickboxing. Skiing in the Andes. Gaining 34 pounds of muscle in 4 weeks. In other words, impossible is nothing.

The book already seems to be taking off. It's currently ranked in Amazon's top 10. The site's reviewers have given it five stars, nearly across the board.

And that's where it gets weird. The Amazon comments are absurdly positive. Frighteningly positive. Eyebrow-raisingly positive. Just look at the slew of reviews left all on the same day, April 24:

C. Ashenden, April 24: I don't give away compliments easily but I guarantee that this book will change your life. Don't wait.

Brian Page, April 24: I'm not a reviewer of books. In fact, this is the only one I've ever commented on. So as the first person to review The 4-Hour Workweek, I'm going to make a prediction. Remember, I called it first. This book WILL be a best-seller.

Sherwood Forlee, April 24: Because of this book, I would have to say that my dreams will soon become reality.

Matt, April 24: I don't know Tim, nor do I have any financial connection to this book. ... I have never written a review on Amazon before, but this book compelled me to write my first. I highly recommend you get it, and I guarantee it will get you thinking about making changes in your life.

Lindsay, April 24: I have always been a little wary of books focused arond life-improvement, but "The 4-Hour Work Week" book strikes the perfect balance between practical guidebook with real-world suggestions for how to maximize the work/life balance (something everyone needs to learn to do) and inspirational encouragement that yes, the life you want is just around the corner.

Michelle Bartakova, April 24: I believe this book is going to be a bestseller, will inspire many, and I would go as far as to say it will save lives. ... The revolution has began.... If this review sounds little bit over the top, well it is and so is the book. This is my first review on amazon, and who knows my next one might be written by my virtual assistant:)

(Hilarious commenter exchange on that last one is here.) When a tipster pointed out the unbroken slew of over-the-top raves to us, we saw this comment among them:

Smells fishy!, April 26, 2007
Reviewer: cyan (Sydney, Australia)
There are 18 reviews beneath me. Every single one was written on the same day. This is the only review of every single reviewer bar one. I wonder what the odds are of 18 individuals who never review on Amazon logging onto the site on the same day and giving the book 5 stars?

Even more fishily, that last comment is now gone. We have to agree, it's hard to see more than a dozen glowing, similarly-argued raves spontaneously cropping up all at the same time -- from people who have never before reviewed another title. If indeed Ferriss had a hand in arranging them, that's not necessarily wrong -- just really off-putting, really douchey, really ... Aleksey.

May 10, 2007 1:25 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (39) | Read more: Princeton , aleksey vayner , gawker

Ti dose fele a littel mena ot mkae fnu fo Corlenl's yeabrook, teh Cornellina, fro eon mitsake otu fo na netire voluem.

Btu hten agani, we'er tlaking abuot hte ufcking ocver.

UPDATE May 11: Forgot to mention that the clip above is from the Snu.

May 10, 2007 11:01 AM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (22) | Read more: Cornell , yearbooks

Some a cappella groups are at their best when they're not singing. That's not to say the Cornell Hangovers, a sub-group of the Cornell Glee Club, can't make the sun shine and the bras unclasp with their dulcet tones. (You can judge for yourself here.) All we know is, if stardom eludes them, they can always fall back on careers making intro films for other a cappella groups.

Of course, it's nearly impossible to make a bad film with the X-Men animated series theme song at your back. (Click that link, by the way. You won't regret it)

May 9, 2007 4:35 PM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (12) | Read more: Cornell , YouTube , a cappella

After the Great RagTime Insurrection of Aught-Seven, in which you people bizarrely fought to revive the feature from the dead, we knew our daily(ish) dailies round-up had somehow become more than the sum of its rag-parts. Now, with the Ivy papers shut down for the semester, what can its cold calculations tell us about the performance of the Ivy League's tabloids and broadsheets?

Well, probably very little. There you have the raw numbers -- give or take a few times we forgot to tag an entry properly, that's the number of stories the Herald, Spec, Sun, The D, Crimson, DP, Prince and YDN landed in the 90 installments of our roundup. But our calling this a scoreboard aside, this really has a lot more to do with our own reading habits, and those of the faceless serfs who wrote the column between September and February, than the relative quality of the newspapers. Nevertheless, we hand the information over to you and your ever-tasteful commentary to interpret as you will.

May 9, 2007 10:18 AM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (18) | Read more: RagTime

When Cornell booked Georgia rapper T.I. to play its annual Slope Day, it must have known his reputation. Possession charges, gun fights, parole violations -- Clifford Joseph Harris Jr.'s record is no secret. (We do admire his work with the Make-a-Wish Foundation.) But even they must have been surprised when, mid-song, the emcee stopped the music and went on a two-minute diatribe against a kid who'd apparently thrown a water bottle at him.

Instead of politely asking the student to refrain from throwing projectiles, T.I. took the next logical step and put $50,000 on his head. At a club or arena, this would be notable but uninteresting. At Cornell, it's surreal.

The video below is spotty, so we've included an abridged transcript. You may notice the DJ gets a little carried away with the gunshot sound effects: 

Don't motherfucking play with me, homeboy ... You don't throw nothing at me, I won't throw nothing at you, you dig that? [gunshot sounds] ... I respect your school doing your thang [Ed. note: Can this blurb please be engraved into stone on Ho Plaza?], but I'm a real street nigga, I don't play that shit, homes. ... Anybody else throws something up on this stage, I got 50,000 on his head, I ain't bullshitting. [gunshots] [guns cocking] [more guns shooting / cocking] ... That's the way it goes ... Don't motherfucking play with me man [gun cocks] ... Y'all see what it going have to be , right? ... [cocks] Hey, we need to continue this show. Throw something up here and you're getting thrown out, you're going to jail tonight. ... Let's do this [cocks] ... I need some head busters out there in the crowd. ... I need some plainclothes out there. ... If you see someone throw something, you know them out, come on and get your money.

It's hard to know where to start. First off, is it just us, or is T.I. really telling Cornell to snitch on its own? For shame. Plus, all that gun-cocking gets a little excessive. Everyone knows you can only cock a gun once in between rounds. It also makes you wonder how many "head busters" actually attend Cornell, and whether T.I. is aware of the likely scarcity.

P.S. We're actually not positive it's the original bottle-thrower that T.I. puts the bounty on -- it could be a hypothetical reward for violence against any subsequent hurlers. Close textual analysis appreciated.

UPDATE 5:30 p.m.: Nooooo! T.I. has pulled one over on us for the last time!

May 8, 2007 3:28 PM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (44) | Read more: Cornell , YouTube , gawker

Q: One of the instructors of a required freshman seminar gives out the exact content of the coursewide final exam in advance. A "study guide" rapidly spreads to hundreds of students, who use it to ace the exam -- except for the one question subbed out at the last minute. This is:

A) Cheating

B) Cheating

C) Cheating

D) Cheating

E) Not Cheating 

Welcome to Columbia University, where students are circling (E). Or they are on Bwog, at least, where we should admit upfront we're getting 90 percent of our information on this four-alarm Ivy cheating scandal. (Spec has some more details and confirmations here.) Let's back up and let Dr. Deborah Martinsen, a dean of the Core Curriculum, explain:

There has been an unfortunate breach in Lit Hum final exam security.

Notes identifying the quotations and sketching out the essay questions circulated among students prior to the exam. (We have one copy of these notes.)

THE TELL-TALE SIGN: Crime and Punishment - the students did not know of the last-minute quotation substitution.

SO, if any of your students identified the passage from Crime and Punishment as occuring in the Epilogue, chances are they had access to these notes. If the student correctly identified all of the other passages, chances are even greater. If they identified the exact Canto in Dante, they are very high indeed.

... WE WILL REQUIRE THAT ALL INSTRUCTORS SUBMIT ALL BLUE BOOKS TO THE CORE OFFICE.

It is, to quote another email from department chair Patricia Grieve, a "complicated situation." Namely, the situation that hundreds of students may have cheated on the single-most important exam at Columbia College. But in the raging id of the Bwog comments section, the few students pointing that out are being shouted down by students who blame the professor, Martinsen, the course itself -- basically, anyone and anything but themselves.

Posted by sophomore: I think it's more wrong of the professor to put her students in such a situation: on one hand, they might have realized (but we can't be sure of that) that they had an unfair advantage, but on the other hand, what were they supposed to do? Speak up and get their teacher in trouble right before a final?

Martinsen, get your fucking act together. Blame the PROF not the students. Understand the precedent you're setting here. If you put the blame on the students and not on the professor, you have created a system where the teachers can now "trick" students into cheating.

Posted by obviously: just to get it straight, i don't view any of this as cheating on behalf of the students.Posted by fy who never saw it: NO WAY. NONE OF THIS IS CHEATING.

Posted by lit hum bullshit: this is such bullshit. just because some teacher is incompetent and gives out the answers doesn't mean that the rest of us should suffer.

That's selective, of course, but go read the desperate screeds (there are a few particularly nasty ones) and see if you come up with a different take. In closing, we'll turn the mike over to one last commenter.

Posted by word: For those of you who want to deny it, let me clarify for you: IT WAS CHEATING. 

May 8, 2007 11:23 AM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (45) | Read more: Columbia , gawker

Even with every Ivy school on hair trigger for offenses against political correctness, Princeton has handily won this year's Most Ridiculous Bias Sweepstakes, thanks to January's "I So Good At Math and Science" op-ed and April's Pictionary anti-Semitism. And with the orange and black, there's always room for one more outrage. In today's Princetonian, an editor's note reads:

A letter published May 3 on this page used the word "beaners" in reference to Hispanic immigrants and comedian Carlos Mencia's frequent use of the term. While we strive to allow our readers to represent their views freely in the letters section and generally edit only for grammar, length and clarity, this letter's use of the term in question did not meet our standards for offensive language.

As a general policy, we only print coarse or offensive language that is directly relevant and necessary to the topic at hand. In this case, the term was not germane to the writer's argument about University storage and we should have asked him to reconsider this language. We sincerely regret this oversight.

Anybody else not see that bolded part coming? We were expecting the unfortunate use of "beaners" (btw: like our tipster, we actually weren't even aware that was a slur) to have come in one of those "edgy" essays on race that appear like clockwork in college periodicals. But no, the offensive language was this:

Are there no mini-storage places along U.S. Route 1? Are there no beaners (as Mencia would call them) with trucks for rent in the area? Or does the Student Agency monopoly prevent such trucks from driving anywhere near campus?

Jonathan Baker '87

Also absurd: Are we really at a point as a society where we refer to Carlos Mencia by only his last name, like "Seinfeld" or "Goethe"? And why is an alum from the Class of 1987 writing to a college newspaper to do so?

May 7, 2007 5:00 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (27) | Read more: Princeton , daily princetonian

It's always irritating to hear people criticize college kids for "having too much time on their hands." After all, it's those kids -- the ones with all that extra time -- who end up starting little companies like, you know, Facebook, or Microsoft.

Case in point: this e-mail sent out to Harvard's Adams House Sunday afternoon: 

From: [redacted]
Date: May 6, 2007 4:41 PM
Subject: [ADAMS] SAVE CLAVERLY!!
To: [redacted]

My fair Adamsians,

Right now, our beloved Claverly Hall is in grave danger.  The blue skies over Mt. Auburn stree are darked by a teeming horde of barbarians.
These foul creatures will stop at nothing to get their greasy hands on the jewel of gold coast housing.  I am, of course, referring to Winthrop house.  Right now, they have 64 armies poised on our border, ready to sweep in and occupy.  It is defended by only 35 valiant Adams knights. Brave and strong as they are, their numbers are too few.  As a resident of Claverly, I cannot bear to live ruled by the debaucherous Winthropians!  I beg you, my friends, to come to our aid!

We will fight them on Linden Street!  We will fight them in the pool! We will fight them in the tunnels!  WE WILL NEVER SURRENDER!  Sign up for Risk before 5 PM!

~Will

We haven't seen Harvard kids so riled up since The Crimson tried to take away their maids!

The idea for a campus-wide game of game of Risk is nothing less than genius. For starters, it's perfect for finals period: Unlike the squirtgun shootout Assassins, you never have to leave your dorm. Students form teams that must then conquer other dorms. Whoever conquers all of campus by May 20 wins. Between now and then, we expect many battle-cry emails like the one above. (Even if you didn't get into Harvard, you can watch the game here.)

There's just one problem: Yale had the idea first. Earlier this year, Gabe Smedresman, Yale '06, designed a campus-wide game of RISK that ended up attracting over 350 students. (Check out the original Yale version here.) Do the Harvard biters give credit? Meh, sort of. If you look at the Harvard edition's FAQ page, it says the site was created by the Harvard College Events Board. But then at the bottom, in tiny print: "Based on idea and source code by Gabe Smedresman." Aha!

If there was ever a sign that Yale looms large in Harvard's rearview mirror, this is it. Next thing you know, Harvard dorms will start calling themselves "colleges," the Crimson will transmogrify into a navy blue, and Harvard students will suddenly become fulfilled human beings. Mmm, on second thought, unlikely.

May 7, 2007 11:11 AM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (16) | Read more: Harvard , Yale

A few of the Ivy dailies have a tradition -- a combo of classy and self-indulgent -- of giving departing columnists and reporters the opportunity to write one final column. In their minds, it's the column by which they will be remembered for all time. (This is not always a good thing. Trust us on this.) Most of them put more time into these than they care to admit. But rarely do you get a chance to examine these good-byes as a whole. So we've rounded up some of this year's batch. They're not necessarily the best of the bunch, but they're the ones we noticed. (Look for more as some of the other dailies close out for the summer.)

• Columbia: Copy editor loves her job; other editors find this incomprehensible, but dare not question it [Spec]
• Columbia: I have awesome, quirky friends and many ex-boyfriends. [Spec]
• Columbia: The Internet has changed everything! [Spec]
• Columbia: I actually went to class. [Spec]
• Cornell: U.S. News ranking is just a number. Right? [Sun]
• Cornell: I toiled away four years at a college daily, and all I got was this lousy column [Sun]
• Cornell: What we learned from reading this column: Cornell has a "Ho Plaza" [Sun]
• Cornell: New drinking game: take a shot for every tired socialist cliche [Sun]
• Yale: A 10-step guide to selling out [YDN]
• Yale: Idealist somehow emerges with ideals intact [YDN]
• Yale: There is no "bubble" [YDN]

May 4, 2007 3:49 PM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (11) | Read more: Columbia , Cornell , RagTime , Yale

Nowadays, thanks to the internets, the classic ritual of meeting your freshman roommate on the first day of college is long gone. We'd be shocked to find any pair from the class of '10 that didn't Facebook/MySpace/LiveJournal the shit out of each other months before move-in. No more sweet, agonizing anticipation over whether the other person will be messy or neat, early riser or night owl, punk rock or lame; you just show up, and say hi to a person you already know all about.

Sebastian Gallese, a freshman at Brown, thought his roommate sounded ideal on paper: standard-issue econ major, big sports fan, plays rugby -- as a bonus, he even has a British accent, just like on Undeclared. But even with all that foreknowledge, there are things about a roommate you cannot know until you live with them, day in, day out, night after night, marathon session of online role-playing game after marathon session of online role-playing game.

Ahhhhhh, it's funny 'cause it's mortifying. But you know what? Here's the backstory. Gallese sent this to us back in early February ("Nobody really knows about his video game habits other than a few of his close friends, so I wanted to expose his nerd side to the world"). We emailed back and forth, and then he suddenly yanked the YouTube -- his "very offended ... extremely pissed" roommate had discovered the video. "He said I violated his trust, blah, blah, blah, and he told me to take it off. I'll probably post it back up at the end of semester, but for now he is just pissed at me," Gallese explained. Not two weeks later he emailed again to say he had indeed re-posted.

So, yeah. If we had to pick a roomie, we'd probably go for the gamer.

UPDATE 1:38 p.m.: Gallese speaks in the comments: "It was my mistake to post the video a second time, but I am more than willing to substitute this video with me acting like a douche in a different way." Normally, we never, ever take stuff down (sorry Maite), but this seems like an honorable offer. So, readers: what should Sebastian do in this new video? Send suggestions to the comments, and feel free to use this clip from 30 Rock as inspiration. We'll sub out the roomie video once he submits it.

UPDATE May 7: This seemed like a fun idea at the time, but we probably should have thought this through more. Here's Sebastien's self-flagellating replacement video; it involves consuming a dozen raw eggs and a gallon of milk, and we strenuously urge you not to watch it. Not because the footage is gross -- because it's just really ... odd, and kind of makes you want to reach for the phone to dial Brown University Psychological Services (x3476, fyi). Anyway, a deal's a deal; we're sorry we ever went down this road.

May 4, 2007 10:44 AM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (17) | Read more: Brown , YouTube

Diffferent blogs chart progress in different ways. Some look at pageviews; some at Google rank; some at the number of times they place stories in established media outlets. At IvyGate, we prefer the yardstick of infamy. And by its inerrant measure there can be no topping the month of April.

On April 11 -- thanks, we're guessing, to two recent visits from the male nudity fairy (Justin Kan; balls) -- we got our first-ever report that IvyGate is officially blocked at someone's place of employment:

Access Denied (content_filter_denied)

[Redacted] has blocked access to this website as it has been categorized as Nudity;Personal Pages;Sexual Materials. Refer to [Redacted] Corporate Information Security Policy for additional information.

Believe us, we were some proud papas when the news arrived. But that just didn't compare to the dispatch we got last week from a reader on the other side of the planet:

Thought you might like to know that your blog seems to be blocked in China--Keep up the good work! ... I'm mostly in Beijing, though the site is unavailable everywhere in the country as far as I know.

Guess it was the all the class warfare!

May 2, 2007 4:36 PM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (5) | Read more: IvyGate , nudity , plagiarism

If you didn't catch last week's Crimson article on abstinence, that's OK. The only detail you really need to know, as Dana Goldstein of Campus Progress helpfully pointed out, is this one:

According to an online survey conducted by University Health Services (UHS) last spring that drew an undergraduate response rate of 40 percent, nearly half of all respondents (47 percent) reported that they had never engaged in vaginal intercourse. The national average for undergraduates at other colleges stood significantly lower at 31 to 32 percent.

Funny, we figured it was a piece about voluntary abstinence.

We didn't mention this story when it ran because we didn't really have much to add. But then we spotted this Harvard video, and suddenly everything just sort of made sense:

May 2, 2007 10:01 AM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (30) | Read more: Harvard , Sex , YouTube

In honor of the cinematic triumph that is Grindhouse, we present not one but two films for your viewing pleasure. Both take place at Yale and both center on one theme: unalloyed stupidity. That's not to say that this behavior is at all rare, or that we haven't done equally dumb things ourselves. It's just this time, for better or worse, there happened to be a camera present.

Part One: A Song

Part Two: 6 inches

May 1, 2007 4:41 PM by Chris Beam | Link | Comments (7) | Read more: Yale

Okay, so by Monday we meant today. Regardless! An anonymous prankster lulled us out of our stupor yesterday with a delightful stunt: emailing the entire student body with the names of the (alleged) recent inductees of the secret societies Skull & Bones, Scroll & Key, and Wolf's Head. (Skulls above; full image after the jump.)

Yes, Rumpus prints this list each year -- but that's usually done at the end of the term, with the names of graduating seniors. While we've written before that outing secret societies usually just serves to validate the egos of those involved, this prank carries some undeniable juice: Tap Day was April 19, so these poor elites had just 10 days to savor the secrecy.

Also noteworthy: whoever was responsible appears to have hijacked the Yale College Council / Yale Student Activities Committee email system -- again. Are all college stunts/pranks going digital? You can't email a cow onto a rooftop, people.

Continue reading "Yale's Not-Secret-Whatsoever Societies Now Even Less So" »

May 1, 2007 11:12 AM by Nick Summers | Link | Comments (48) | Read more: Secret Societies , Yale , gawker , pranks