There are several distinct tiers of chain restaurants. On the high end, we have California Pizza Kitchen, a swell spot for an eighth grade mall date; lower down, Outback Steakhouse, where just the name "Bloomin' Onion" is enough to... ew. Intrepid journalists Marisa Calleja (B '10) and her friend Gabi Manga have taken it upon themselves to eat "at every chain restaurant in the Western Hemisphere" and write about it. Heart healthy!

Now, I really must back Marisa up when she says,

Bertucci’s rolls are probably my favorite starch-based food. They’re warm and soft and taste great with butter. However, two years ago Bertucci’s stopped giving you butter with your rolls, opting instead for a mix of olive oil, herbs and cheese. I don’t much care for it."

So true. Perhaps this switch precipitated a rapid decline in the restaurant's overall quality, because I don't remember anything like the following happening when I went to the Brookline Village Bertucci's during my formative years:

Then I got the wrong soup. Halfway through eating it, I realized that minestrone soup is hardly ever made out of cheese and sausage, and that I had probably received the cheese and sausage soup."

Heh. Read the rest of this entry »

There are few things more consistently irritating than Princeton's F. Scott Fitzgerald-fetish. If I have to read one more headline coyly heavy-handedly alluding to This Side of Paradise, I am going to crack up.

That said, a new blog at Princeton, The Underside of Paradise, is quickly becoming one of our favorites. Mordant, clear-headed, and above all, earnest, the author of Underside -- known only by his (or her?) electronic sobriquet "Amory" -- provides a much-needed voice of dissent from the humorless orange-and-black triumphalism of The Prince.

Here Amory comments on liberal icon Wendy Kopp's history at the Tory (she was on the masthead for three issues in the mid-'80s), here he unearths a cartoon from the Tiger so old it is actually funny, and here he posts about Whit Stillman's film Metropolitan, now available at hulu.com ("This movie could be boring unless you're self-conscious, status-obsessed, or an aesthetic reactionary. In short, if you go to Princeton.")

"The Anti-Sex Blogger," a guest feature on the blog authored by an Anscomber, is sheer genius and a window into the bizarre, anti-life pathology which is overtaking Princeton (or parts of it).

Finally, in one of his best posts, Amory proposes "firm" as a piece of lingo emblematic of Princeton:

Firmness sums up all the material promises of a Princeton education: one's pick of tight, thin coed bodies on campus and plum jobs upon graduation. Firmness is a way of life, a rule to be followed. According to a quick search, the Princeton website has about 40 pages that contain the exhortatory phrase "Be firm." So next time you want to express approval, forget "sexy", forget "exclusive", forget, "frat." When something is good say, Damn, that is firm.

(Hey, is your friend's blog really "rad"? Wouldn't it be just amazing if we did a Blog Man on Campus about it? Well, guess what: only you can make that happen! Please tell us about interesting, provocative, or entertaining blogs across the Ivy League.)

As the name of her blog expressly expresses it, Eleanor Mulhern (P '07) hates everything. Except talking about how much she hates things. This blog is pure negative energy. The pattern is simple: begin with a question ("Why is there that cheesy side-story in Independence Day?", "Why is Lohengrin played at so many weddings?", "Why do people struggle at staircases?") and then answer that question in the form of a vituperative rant. Why is the internet so wonderful?

As usual, here are a bunch of quotations which may entice you to read more: 

"Why do middle-aged women dress like débutantes? Why do fat girls dress like thin girls? Why do women not know to buy strapless dresses a size down?"

"Irregardless" is a vile addition to the vernacular and should be expunged without delay. Failing that, people who use it should be shunned.

And really, with a name like D'Brickashaw, if you don't make it to the NFL, what can you do? Work at a bank? Seriously.

Turn signals are not just for fun. They are not just pretty flashy lights. They are in fact intended to help other people on the road figure out what you, with your tiny little pea-sized brain, are going to do with your automobile.

Hallowe'en candy does not make your kid fat. Do not make him dread Hallowe'en because you are simultaneously too lazy and too interfering to be a good parent.

The candy might make him sick for a day, or bounce off the walls. This is a small price to pay for his not hating you for the rest of his life.

Her blog can be visited here.

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If Josh Duboff's (Y '08) blog, Text Message in a Bottle, looks like he made it in five minutes, that's because he probably did. What kind of stuff does he blog about? Certainly not ideas or politics, if that's what you were thinking. Some observational humor, some quirkography, and a lot of bitching about pop culture -- all in the best tradition of the internet.

I read the whole archive, and it's pretty funny. Here are two entries from a list (there are a lot of lists) entitled "awkward moments:"

1) When you are on the subway and your iPod happens to be on something like "Glamorous" by Fergie or "Bye Bye Bye" by N' Sync (this has never happened to me, obviously) and the cool guy who has just the right amount of facial hair and those really big noise-canceling headphones who is sitting next to you glimpses the album art on your iPod and looks away smirking.

3) When you are sitting with your friend Ed in the dining hall and that girl who you met at that party who you talked to for like 45 minutes walks by and you say to Ed, "Oh, that's Kara! You'll love her. She's great - really funny." "Kara," you shout! She doesn't hear you, it seems, and keeps on walking with her gaggle of girlfriends in hip outfits to the back of the dining hall. You shout "Kara!" again, this time a little softer (it's more for show than for actually getting her attention at this point). She doesn't turn around. Ed looks down at his half-eaten lasagna.

You can read more here. 

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Harvard easily outdoes all the other Ivies in the depth  and variety of her political blogs. There's really no contest -- these kids went to Harvard for a reason: to blog politics like there's no party tomorrow (and there's not). Let's take a look at a few.

Bikini Politics, which boasts "the body-politic will never be the same," is run by Harvard grad student Paloma Zepeda. It's not so much a women's issues blog as a news blog in the inflection of women's issues. We all know what that means.

The Harvard International Review covers such topics as the "history of suffering in Poland," while Immigration Orange covers such topics as recently embattled migrant Pedro Zapeta. I have no clue what's going on at Team Zebra ("We spent nine days last October trying to bring two zebras to Harvard Yard. This somehow justifies our existence."), but it seems to be unfortunately defunct at this point anyway.

We've written on the inimitable Gadfly before (sample post:"Semi-circle? It's those damned Muslims"). Cambridge Commons also seems to be kind of important (sample post: "Let's Give Ben AffleckMore Credit").

Dem Apples, the official blog of the Harvard College Democrats, is informative and well-updated (sample post: "Andy Card: the Man, the Myth, the Legend"). Maybe even too well-updated -- the last post on the front page dates from October 29!

But let's hope for the sake of the Harvard College Republicans that RedIvy is not their official blog (sample post: "Why I F-ing Hate Communists (and why you should, too)"). Other posts sing the praises of Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity. But this one ("Israel to World: 'We Support Genocide') by Frances Martel is my favorite. Criticizing Israel for refusing to take in Darfugees (so far, so good), Martel channels the cliff-notes to the The Merchant of Venice and writes:

No one should deny another the help they begged on their knees for not even a century ago. No one should deny life and safety to anyone else when they themselves live only through the magnanimity of another. But I guess the result is to be expected when one lives through "eye for an eye" rather than "turn the other cheek".

What a "magnanimous" post. Way to show those Pharisees the light of the Lord. You're a real Mensch, Frances. 

In this sphere of blog, you come across a lot of crap. In fact, I would say at this point that blogging itself is a mostly terrible phenomenon which has attracted a bunch of terrible people to write a lot of terrible things about their terrible selves. But there are always redemptive exceptions.

Molly Young (Brown '08), is one of those exceptions. Her blog, Magic Molly, is loosely confessional, but in the sense a dream-journal or notebook of errant ideas could be called confessional. Surreal but still landed, pensive but never theoretical, well-read but not obtrusively so, a healthily self-amused Magic Molly writes about various minor events from her life and thoughts of interest -- all within a neat, minimalist format that other bloggers would do well to emulate. Here's a representative excerpt from her blog:

I went out for the papers. At this time, of course, they all have their special sections to eulogize famous deaths of the past year. I tried to summon a generalized mourning, but felt the only real loss to be Pluto. There was a photograph of the former planet in the science section.

Certain facts invite a peculiar melancholy: the fact that the Babylonians buried their dead in honey, or the ability of the Araucana hen to lay pink or blue eggs. Pluto's demotion from planet to trans-Neptunian object will join the ranks of these facts.

Really there's nothing more I can say about this except to check out her blog for yourself. Seriously, do it -- it's a genuinely interesting web presence. Kind of a rare thing.

UPDATED: So it turns out that this is not actually a picture of Molly but rather a picture of her best friend.

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Performing CPR on Pablog last week (his sinus rhythm is still flatlining; clap harder, damn you!) made us guiltily wonder who else was toiling away out there on the student blog-quad, under our radar. We do have a blogroll, way over on the right somewhere, but it was last updated around the time Lincoln was shot; and we do have our Blog Man on Campus critic, who chimes in every so often. But there's obviously a ton of sites we miss, and so, with open hearts and open minds, we set out looking for signs of life.

Blogs it took to piss us off: 1.

We want to like Yale blog 06520-2848, we really do. The site's name, for starters, we assume is a middle finger to the insufferable Harvard magazine 02138. And when we saw the April 6 entry, we got straight-up Christmas-morning-when-you're-seven giddy. You know Gawker's delightful Blue States Lose column? (For those who don't: a caustic -- even for Gawker -- observer rips on the 10 most obnoxious hipster pics from photo sites like Misshapes, Last Night's Party and the Cobrasnake.) Well, 06520 has his own little imitation, except the pics are of drunk Yalies at New Haven dives like Toad's and BAR.

Ordinarily, this feature, called "Go Shawty!", could not be more up our alley if we purchased an actual alley and paved it with printouts. But then we started to actually read the copy underneath each photo, and ... let's just say Mr. ZIP Code gives IvyGate commenters a run for their title of Worst People On The Internet.

Through five "Go Shawty!" installments (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), blogger 06520 probably couldn't be more hateful or misogynistic if he tried. Literally, there isn't a single photo of a girl that doesn't reduce her to a sex receptacle. Mix in some casual racism and contempt for anybody that doesn't look like they attend Yale, and you have a caption contest that accomplishes the impossible: 06520 makes sloppy-drunk kids at Toad's come off decent by comparison.

UPDATE 2:45 p.m.: Silly ZIP code! Deleting posts from your web site doesn't mean a "thang," in shawty parlance, to Google Cache. Archived copies of the pages are here. While we're updating: we forgot to mention that we emailed 06520 late last night and haven't heard back.

You may have noticed that our recent pictorial on the lives of the saints (standard fare really -- St. Valentine in sunglasses, St. Brandon in a wheat field, St. Francis with anal rosary beads) -- drew some outside attention. One Catholic who was offended conveniently makes his cyberdwelling at ivycatholic.blogspot.com. And, God love him, his blog -- For God, For Country and For Yale -- like St. Sebastian, will be punctured by the arrows of our BMOC critic's scrutiny. Or something. (That critic, btw, is Kathy Gilsinan.)

NonCatholics, I think, will find this blog just as offensive as Catholics find the photography. More offensive still, I think, because personally hurt will be liberal Catholics like myself. I fall into the school of so-called "cafeteria Catholics"; I admit that I choose what I like about the religion -- teachings that I don't find offensive or outdated or in place solely to perpetuate a benighted patriarchy -- then I pray the rosary and basically feel good about myself. And my relationship with conservative Catholics such as this blogger runs thus: I find it offensive to exclude gays from the community of believers, he finds it offensive to make saint-porn. Tomato, tomahto.

I'm not saying our altar boy should apologize for his beliefs. Perhaps, having had the misfortune to read IvyGate, he feels persecuted for the sake of righteousness. As a defensive end on the football team, he is certainly persecuted for the sake of Yale. (But check out his championship ring!!) And he is wounded, he reflects, by the "disasters modern society has wrought." What might these be? AIDS, modern warfare, rapacious capitalism? Not so much. He's more concerned with the evils of contraception and absolute gender equality. (Though the extent to which the latter has actually been "wrought" is debatable, anyone who feels particularly oppressed by progress in this direction can take refuge at the local parish.)

Another big deal, apparently, is naked artwork. He gets huffy in his posts on the "Theology of the Body", wherein he lauds chastity and contemplates the lies of feminism.

My problem with this blog is similar to my problem with much of the catechism: It asserts what's right, sometimes counterintuitively, and leaves off the work of persuasion. Or maybe it's just that I don't find him persuasive. Maybe it should be enough for me that he quotes Aquinas as saying that the reason women shouldn't be priests is because they are "in a state of subjection." Maybe I should nod submissively when he tells me that God asks "we do not do anything to artificially hinder or block ... sexual activity from reaching its natural end (no contraception)." Stephen confidently asserts that, well, "Jesus is the Truth," and I guess that's fine. But what does that even mean? And does some football player at Yale think he can tell me on blogspot?

There's no winning or even having an argument with faith like this. What kind of scholar refuses to ask why?

But then again, what kind of Catholic insists on it?

Our Blog Man on Campus critic is back, and she's got Yale's ElmRockCity in her talons:

I have to admit that I am pretty intimidated to blog on the blog ElmRockCity. It's not so much the authoress's intellectual bona fides tucked into modest corners of the site (Yale senior, Phi Beta Kappa). Nor even the fact that she's a legitimate writer, contributing occasionally to Fortune Small Business magazine, where she recently introduced readers to a Russian immigrant who composes corporate theme songs for hold music. Least intimidating of all is the fact that, as a tipster pointed out and as photographic evidence in the blog amply bears out, the writer is a stone cold fox.

All of this would be at worst enviable were it not for the fact that, a lot of the time, I have no idea what she's talking about. There's a good reason for this. She's focused her academic career on post-colonialism and post-modernism, both of which are minimally comprehensible to anyone outside those disciplines. And she's also really, really into them. As she herself points out, the relatively young blog showcases 15 posts on literary theory, 12 with the tag "haterade," and one about sex -- which turns out to be ananecdote about a guy complaining that the lack of magnum condoms at the convenience store forced him to resort to the use of a plastic bag. Hate when that happens.

Interspersed with humorous Yale-life vignettes -- Hanson is giving a Master Tea today! -- are analyses of academic articles. The girl is reading back issues of the Virginia Quarterly Review and comtemplating the death of the novel as a method of procrastination. Her resemblance to her brother inspires a riff on Girard's notion of violence as the result of undifferentiation, and how this conflicts with "Nietzche's view of the form as a positive, productive marriage of the Appolonian and Dionysian." Guh? If my brother looked more like me, I would totally just admit he's crazy attractive, albeit a tool, and leave it at that.

Nevertheless, the writing seldom veers toward the pretentious, and is often firmly grounded in the entertaining, the instructive, and the spot-on. A "Sunday Morning Haterade" about Maureen Dowd finds the Op-Ed redhead "overbearing, solipsistic, and indulgent," which criticism, if I were MoDo, I would take seriously, coming as it does from a writer much better than she.

Anyway, read it. See if ERC is smarter than you.

In the latest installment of Blog Man on Campus, our woman in cyberspace watches her moral universe disintegrate.

Ivy League Chic wears its erudition and penetrating insight like most people wear tight leather Gucci pants and D&G stilettos: not at all, not ever. Authored by a Cornell senior, Ivy League Chic is the perfect destination for those who tire of, you know, ideas.

First, let's get this out of the way: it's a fashion blog. So keep in mind that any criticism herein might actually register as high praise. For instance, "Blonde Belle," the writer and self-described "debutant" [sic], provides helpful tips on how to bring couture into the classroom. Couture, I've learned via Wikipedia, is that complicated handmade designer stuff that can be yours for the price of a small Carribbean island -- but luckily Belle has distilled some more affordable ideas out of the Chanel show. Like this $498 black dress. Here you will also find enlightening regular criticism of Britney Spears, complete with pictures, plus well-intentioned tutting at the former's association with Paris Hilton. She's only got your reputation in mind, Brit.

The blog actually does fill a gap in the cyber-Ivy community, which is stuffed with earnest young scholars pontificating through the lens of what they learned in Cultural Relativism 101 that morning. Belle is earnest but no scholar -- she uses a Capitol Hill invite-only reception to muse about the drab grays and browns the Senators wear. She also devotes a post to things that are like, so totally way more interesting than the State of the Union address, like the twist-off bottlecap. (Actually she's onto something there; there is never a bottle opener around when you need one ... particulary during the SOTU.) Her zeal can be cute, like her delight with an online quiz's findings that the celebrity she dresses most like is the adorable Reese Whitherspoon. (Belle threatened to kill herself if she was found stylistically similar to Tara Reid.)

But Belle can also be cruel. Witness her paparazzi'ing of an unsuspecting Cornellian, whom she photographed from behind for the purpose of generalizing about the too-goddamn-cold-to-look-nice population of college girls. The young lady's offense? Uggs, leggings, and a down jacket. Belle bravely discloses that she knows whereof she criticizes: She herself once wore a T-shirt and jeans to exams. It made her feel "icky."

Insecure but smart ladies who slogged frumpily through high school, dreaming of one day living somewhere where they would be judged not by the color of their eye makeup but by the content of their character, will be disheartened by this blog. You did not leave the mean girls behind in high school. They are following you. And taking pictures.