It must be a slow week at Not Penn State because an opinion blogger for The Daily Pennsylvanian decided to devote an entire post on the "Best places to kill yourself on campus". To his credit, the writer provides a hyperlinked disclaimer in the second paragraph:

...stop reading somewhere around HERE if you get all uppity with sensitive things. My editor would like me to link to ponies and rainbows at this point in the post.

One link is to Penn's Reach-A-Peer Helpline, and the other is to Ponystars, an online game created for five-year-old girls. We get it: the post is not meant to be serious. But is poking fun at suicidal college students ever acceptable? And where's the editor in all this, the voice of reason that should have shot this down before it saw the light of day? The only conclusion I could draw is that the editor is probably too busy tending to his or her ponies on Ponystar to really care. More quotes from Will Steinberger's not-so-funny post after the jump.

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• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

If you torture a dog with random electric shocks, will the dog become sad?

Such was the question millions of Americans were once frantically asking, until Penn professor and psychologist Martin Seligman decided to find out once and for all. (The answer: Yes.) However, Seligman's results, after they were first published 40 years ago, had a perhaps unintended effect. As it happened some time later, CIA torture aficionados became very interested in Seligman's work and wanted to examine the implications of this revelation for human torture. Seligman's dog studies, it turns out, were instrumental in developing techniques used at Guantanamo Bay. So say the muckraking journalists, at least. The Daily Pennsylvanian reports:

[Writer Jane} Mayer's book [The Dark Side] alleges that Seligman's research heavily influenced the psychologists that developped [sic] CIA interrogation techniques at the Guantanamo Bay military prison. But in a pre-publication review of the book's content, Harper's Magazine writer Scott Horton writes that Seligman "assisted" in the development of their interrogation techniques. This statement has since circulated on several psychology-related blogs and is a claim that Seligman unequivocally denies.

At last, the truth comes out: everything is the Ivy League's fault. Read the rest of this entry »

The Daily Pennsylvanian - yet again proving true the axiom that Ivy League Dailies have no senses of humor - wants to make sure that you do not enjoy April Fool's Day. After campus pranksters began placing tickets to a "secret" Obama event scheduled for April 1 in Easter eggs scattered around campus, the newspaper's "journalists" decided that most students probably wouldn't be able tell the whole thing was a joke and that they therefore had to "break" the "story."

For some, April Fools' Day has come early -- despite the "Obama" eggs scattered around campus and the flyers posted on Locust Walk saying otherwise, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama will not be speaking at Irvine Auditorium tomorrow night."

I guess the DP was worried that some incredibly gullible hopemongers in the student body would fall for the prank, which obviously would have been tragic.  God forbid kids who believe everything they ever see or read should have to suffer the non-existent consequences of their non-actions.

Still, the DP was too lazy to do any follow-up: who was behind the hoax?  What did students think of the hoax? Etcetera.

As our tipster wrote, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry."

Happy April Fool's, folks.

Having recently left his cushy post with us for the greener swamplands of DC, Jim Newell is already rolling in the perks. Today he wrote an op/ed for the Daily Pennsylvanian on that whole Stetson affair thing.

Seizing on the telling detail ("Lasers! Amy Gutmann in strapless red!") and making use of everyday analogies ("It's like a babysitter refusing to feed an infant its Gerber, and then at the end of the day asking that infant for $3.5 billion."), Newell makes a compelling case that Lee Stetson should not be forced to give money to Penn even though he had sex with a 19-year old, or something like that.

After the jump -- words, sweet words.

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Sighted: Beauty & the Geek star Joshua Green at Princeton University's D-Bar ("Debasement Bar," in de basement of de graduate college here, remember? B&G brought their camera crew there to recruit last year). The 5'5" Joshua wore yellow shirt unbuttoned at the neck, damp black chest hair mussed across his pallid chest. His dance-move of choice is a lateral jumping movement paired with upraised arms and pumping fists.

I cornered Joshua and demanded an impromptu photo shoot (more pictures after jump). Sadly, the CW keeps its reality slaves on a strict gag order; I failed to get any details juicier than those his stock-quote-chocked Daily Princetonian profile. Penn '06 Will Frank got some press, too, in the Daily Pennsylvanian. Where is he these days, anyway? Anybody have sightings?

But enough rumormill foreplay. Let's get down and dirty with this week's episode, after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Because after only two weeks with strangers in a strange land, you might get made fun of by a jackass 14,000-circulation magazine you've never heard of, by soulless editors you've never seen, for trying to appear confident/fetching in a headshot taken at Sears that your mom probably made you dress for. Penn '11, meet 34th Street Magazine's "Freshmen Superlatives."

(Let's get full disclosures out of the way: I was Editor-in-Chief of 34th Street in 2006. Go ahead and complain, but I don't even know half of these people anymore.)

Street, the Daily Pennsylvanian's weekly culture magazine, released in today's first issue its annual--and highly popular, as these things go--"Superlatives." In years past this meant stealing a copy of the freshmen directory, scanning funny headshots and writing a superlative for each (think high school yearbook). "Superlative" eventually became "random asshole comment," and this year the University didn't even publish a freshmen directory. Street editors took shots from Facebook instead.

Click on the top image for a JPEG of unrelenting abasement. And if you're a Penn freshman not seen here, you've dodged your first bullet.

We've already brought you some of the Class of 2011's incredible exploits. Yet there's something infinitely worse than pre-frosh acting dumb: upperclassmen who deign to give freshmen advice in campus newspapers. Year after year, we are subjected to the selfsame verbal diarrhea as semi-nostalgic upperclass columnists blow smoke up their own asses.

These advices employ a time-old formula of mixing general banalities with college-specific banalities, i.e., "you have such wonderful opportunities at [school] and should totally take advantage of [local record shop or bar in town]."

After the jump, a round-up of the inane "wisdom" to which the Class of 2011 is being so cruelly subjected.

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John P. Pryor, director of the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania's (HUP) trauma program, describes in a fantastic Washington Post op-ed from Sunday how Philadelphia's violent crime rates in low-income areas are spiking. "The War in West Philadelphia" is the second national bit I've read this summer that likens Philadelphia's dangerous neighborhoods to Iraq:

In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time mascals [mass-casualty situations] would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or 10 patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying "just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia."

Penn is situated between West Philly and Center City in the neighborhood of University City, a district Penn helped found in 1997 to make itself sound and look yuppier. And if you measure yuppie success by Starbucks, I usually passed two on my way to class.

Mmm... gentrified Frappuccino with eminent domain sprinkles... University City makes me feel so warm and guilty inside.

But to the Penn '11s, you might consider hiding a collective Glock under those "New Student Orientation: Library Social 2007" t-shirts you'll soon get. University City is still only 6 or 7 blocks from the new Sadr City. Thank God I peaced out when I did. Boogity boogity boo!

If students have any defense it will be behind the Daily Pennsylvanian's hard-nosed crime awareness reporting, as exemplified recently by the paper's weekly summer outlet, the Summer Pennsylvanian. Think Ernie-Pyle-in-World-War-II quality. Then imagine the complete opposite, only fully realized in vibrant Adobe Creative Suite 2 mauves and ecrus.

After the break, "Why report on this 'crime epidemic' when Nintendo's making some 'Wii' dojiggly?"

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