• 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.

Aliza Shvarts, she of the miscarriage art that caused such a stir at Yale a few months back, has been hiding out since April, even declining to come to graduation. But for everyone who hoped that her fifteen minutes were up, bad news.

Shvarts is back on the art scene, and not at any old two-bit gallery. No, she will present a piece at London's Tate Modern this weekend. Considering that the Tate is also home to skull-encrusting, shark-pickling Damien Hirst's cow and calf carcasses, it sounds like a great match!

Shvarts was invited by Seth Kim-Cohen, a Yale art history professor and curator of the event. The Tate is calling it "an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners," but a spokesperson was quick to emphasize that Shvarts' piece is "not going to be in the Tate gallery. Nothing is on display." (Translation: "No abortion art, please. We're British.") Read the rest of this entry »

We saw this YDN headine:

For Senior, Abortion a Medium for Art, Political Discourse

And thought the headline editor made a humorously inappropriate mistake. But then we read this:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

So- wait a- holy shi-

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

I think I saw this, once. In a horrible, horrible nightmare.

If L'Affaire Papaya is any indicator, Shvarts should think about getting a security detail for her dorm. Drudge Report linked to the article, and you know what they say: First Drudge, then the blogosphere, then psychotic right-wing militiamen with websites hosted on Angelfire. Due to sudden influx of Drudge-related traffic, YDN's website is periodically going down. So, until YDN stabilizes, we're running the full article and a li'l more commentary after the jump. Oh, and in case you're wondering:

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Well, at least she has a sense of modesty.

Read the rest of this entry »

The weirdest thing about the most high-profile plagiarism scandal of the year is that copycat White House staffer Timothy Goeglein chose the Dartmouth Review to knock off. Dartmouth? sniffed incredulous student writers at the holy elitist trinity of HYP. If the White House is stealing from Dartmouth, surely somebody more important is stealing from us!

And since everyone knows the only American institution more revered than the White House is the New York Times, a tipster has connected the dots between NYT and the Yale Daily News. Specifically, NYT's article on "drunkorexia" (helpfully placed in the Fashion & Style section, lest we believe this is actually a disease or serious addictive problem) and a recent YDN article on sexually transmitted diseases. Besides the fact that long nights of drunk puking often lead to STDs, our tipster points us to the "lede/nutgraf similarities."

Now, we can never truly know who copied what, for what reasons, and how many chakras it will take to exorcise the plagiaristic demons. But you can judge the YDN-NYT "similarities" for yourelf after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

A brief discontinuity in the IvyGate continuum: Around 2PM yesterday our post on papayagina abortion went dead, following Yale Daily News' removal of an online article about a pro-choice event where, among other things, students simulated abortions on papayas. YDN's explanation:

Out of concern for Rasha Khoury, whose quoted comments were being dangerously misinterpreted throughout the blogosphere, we removed the story yesterday afternoon from YaleDailyNews.com

Leave it to pro-lifers to get all dangerous with misinterpretation. (Does Francisco Nava have a blog?) Of course, YDN's removal of the story is slightly futile, since copies of the original are already circulating right-wing blogs. We also have a feeling the Eric Rudolphs of the world aren't the type to check facts. Khoury (Med '08) writes in today's YDN that the papayabortions were "to practice and demystify, not trivialize, the procedure."

Oddly, the trivializing forces of L'Affair Papaya are mostly on the other side. Dawn Eden, author of Thrill of the Chaste, hosted a contest to rewrite Yale's anthem "for all those liberal arts students ... about to learn how to suction a live baby out of the womb," a clear homage to conservative Clinton Taylor's "Taliban Boolah Boolah" fight song.

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember when the Daily Princetonian ruined kittens for an entire generation of Ivy Leaguers? Yale Daily News (and the people they write about) just did that for papayas:

Students who walked into WLH 119 on Tuesday night were greeted with models of the female pelvis complete with fallopian tubes, cervixes, vaginas - and papayas on which to perform mock abortions.

Adds unexpected context for this headline, though.

UPDATE: This post links to a Daily News article that has since been removed. Read here to find out why.

Today's Yale Daily News opinion page puts a post-Halloween doodle on wash, rinse, and repeat. Please compare today's Entryway K by Sara Freiberg:

...with last year's November 1st Artist's Alley by David Muenzer:

Interestingly, Muenzer is still on staff and shares white space with Freiberg, which makes us think the YDN opinion staff should form a circle around them and start chanting Fight! Fight! Fight! to settle issues of intellectual ownership. Of course, the concept is simple enough that each doodler could have come up with it independently, much like the time I thought I invented using DP as a pun (say what you will about YDN, at least its acronym isn't also a feat of slutty acrobatics).

You know it'll be a good e-mail when it starts like this:

YALE DAILY NEWS: PLEASE RESPOND ASAP - DEADLINE TONIGHT

It's like the reporter thinks it's our fault he's on a short schedule, his hastily-pressed caps lock key indicating the vital urgency of the following questions about Yale's attempt to sabotage Harvard's H-bomb-vs.-Y-bomb football smackdown t-shirts:

3.) Would you qualify this as a prank, and how so?
4.) I'm just curious what you mean by the obnoxious sixth grader comment.
5.) Do you expect this issue to intensify to anything else? A prank war perhaps?
6.) How effective was this Yale stunt at achieving what it is doing? And what do
you think it is trying to achieve?

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Xiaochen Su (Y' 10) incited furor when he penned a guest column for the Yale Daily News. In it he lamented America's "failure to control population growth" which will in turn force, "the government to spend more to evade riots by poor, hungry, unemployed minorities." Su's humane solution: after instituting a child tax, "welfare programs should be cut back and the cost of children's necessities, such as infants' formula and college education, should be raised in price."

Naturally there was some blowback in today's Letters to the Editor. Austen K. (Y '10) begins her strongly-worded epistle:

Don't throw the baby out with the bath water." That's the adage as I always heard it, but according to Xiaochen Su, we can't get rid of the babies fast enough. Forget the bath water, he implies, just start by chucking those little brown babies out the window!

She goes on to characterize Su's article as, "a racist plea that the U.S. government engage in ethnic cleansing," as well as to accuse him of painting, "a picture of non-whites as a ragged bunch of poor, uneducated, unintelligent, violent, lazy thieves, with the sole caveat, 'notwithstanding exceptions.'" Somewhat melodramatically, Austen K. asks, "Doesn't the sound of crying babies as they starve to death ring prettily in your capitalist pig ears?"

OK, OK, but Su's probably a good guy who just made a bad decision , no?

After the jump: an extremely offensive picture.

Read the rest of this entry »

Xiaochen Su (Yale '10), following the lead of misanthropic YDN contributor Jun Teresa Ding, has written an op/ed so ill-conceived, insensitive, and fundamentally absurd that you have to wonder if we aren't being treated to some elaborate hoax. It reads like an SAT-II writing exercise, as taken by Thomas Malthus in a bad mood.

Su is alarmed by America's, "increase in population, due to the failure to control population growth in the past." Even worse, Su reports:

"Statistics show that majority of U.S. population growth comes from immigration and high birth rate among the minorities, while the native Caucasian population is stabilizing."

Then Su reminds us why we don't like minorities again:

Notwithstanding exceptions, larger numbers of minorities are ill-educated, have less desirable jobs, and thus are less capable to financially sustain their livelihoods.

In fact, many more minorities depend on government welfare and low-income assistance than whites. Over time, jobs that require less skill will continue to decrease, being outsourced to developing countries with lower labor costs, and the percentage of minorities in the U.S. population will increase, forcing the government to spend much more to evade riots by poor, hungry, unemployed minorities.

The minorities are coming! The minorities are coming! Not to worry, though, Su has a radical solution to thin out the teeming underclasses. It's reminiscent of Communist China, so you know it's good. He want to eliminate the child tax-credit and replace it with... a child tax.

And if this doesn't work, true-born philanthrophist Su thinks that, "welfare programs should be cut back and the cost of children's necessities, such as infants' formula and college education, should be raised in price." He writes of, "extracting taxes and fees from the lower class and poor immigrants." Spoken like a true German bureaucrat. Unsurprisingly, Su is also against immigration by poor people:

"With no understanding of the country's economic dynamics, the poor continue to reproduce and immigrate to lightheartedly siphon off the state's budget."

Those poors, so lighthearted, so numerous, if only they understood this country's economic dynamics like our Great Leader Xiaochen Su.

After the jump -- the article in full.

Read the rest of this entry »