Now that we're officially in a recession and everyone's throwing around words like "death of the middle class," "what job market?" and "SPAM for every meal", perhaps you're having trouble keeping track of all the bad news. We're here to give you the rundown, Ivy-style. In this afternoon's installment of Recession Watch '08: Harvard is out $8 billion! Brown makes like Dartmouth and Cornell and imposes a hiring freeze! And Columbia looks to sell its private equity holdings (maybe)!

This morning, the New York Times reported that Harvard's endowment has lost $8 billion, or 22 percent of its value, in the last four months. In a letter to the deans, University President Drew Faust and Executive Vice President Edward C. Forst '82 said that the total loss in value will likely be closer to 30 percent by June, the end of the current fiscal year. Harvard's endowment is the largest in the country, and the $8 billion loss alone is larger than the endowment value of all but four other American universities (Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and MIT). Read the rest of this entry »

Over 600 students attended the Brown Queer Alliance's annual wild sex party, Sex Power God. How wild was it, you ask? Not as wild as in 2005, when Bill "Falafel" O'Reilly sent a undercover cameraman and "24 students required EMS attention." This year, only 3 party-goers required EMS services (though 6 others who may or may not have attended the party also required attention). Decrease in alcohol poisoning aside, Sex Power God was probably still a lot of fun. Below, Aida Manduley, '11, event coordinator, answers a few of my questions.

What was the hottest thing you saw at Sex Power God?

AM: Hottest things I've seen on the dance floor? Personally, just seeing couples dancing really well, sort of "performing" for each other and raving with the glow-sticks, then smiling at each other and dancing together really sensually. That's the hottest thing--seeing the progression of attraction and how people perform for each other--because you can just FEEL the chemistry. It's hot, it's consensual, it's super sexy, and it's fun--a mix of lightheartedness that can beautifully segue into something very sexual and arousing. Seeing two people dancing, then slowly closing the distance between each other and closing their eyes as they kiss and move as a unit? It's a wonderful thing. The sort of anticipation and degree of restraint as people negotiate boundaries and possibly hold off on sex until the dance is over is excellent, because the hottest thing for me is not just seeing people having sex on the dance floor. It happens, sure, but there are more layers of erotic complexity and tension when sex is NOT directly had at SPG.

"It happens?" "Sure?"

I come from a land (Columbia, unpopular subsection of) where sex on the dance floor is all but unthinkable. I am stunned and jealous. After the jump, Aida talks about bondage gear and calls me on my heteronormative assumptions. Read the rest of this entry »

A few Ragtimes ago, I posted a story from the Brown Daily Herald about David Horowitz's visit to celebrate "Islamofacism Awareness Week." What's "Islamofasicsm Awareness Week," you ask? Apparently, it's a week where Horowitz goes around college campuses warning students about radical Islam. This year, Horowitz went to Brown, a school he was all but banned from in 2001 when he authored an ad in the Daily Herald called "10 Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is a Bad Idea and Racist Too." But gone are the days when Horowitz would pen batshit propaganda for the Herald. "Horowitz Lambastes Islam in Near-Empty MacMillan," the Herald's unflattering writeup of Horowitz's talk, drew the conservative thinker's anger.

In a 2,000 word article (Brown really pissed this guy off), Horowitz addresses the problems conservative thinkers encounter when speaking on college campuses:

Far greater is the problem presented by the generally hostile environment a conservative normally encounters on any campus. This includes destruction of flyers advertising one's event, failure of the campus newspaper to publicize it and failure of professors to recommend or even require student attendance as they regularly do for radical speakers.

Wait, I was supposed to go to all of those out-of-class lectures? No wonder I didn't get honors. After the jump, find out why Horowitz has no love for the Brownies. Read the rest of this entry »

• Brown: Corporation to meet this weekend, and you students are so not invited, so don't even think of crashing.
• Columbia:  Third party candidates coming to campus this weekend, hopefully they won't be assaulted on Broadway.
• Princeton:  Freshman appointed class treasurer despite appeal from another kid whose overspending on his campaign disqualified him from the election.  Oh, the irony.
• Princeton: James Frey spoke to a class, tried to do damage-control on his old-news crappy image.
• Yale:  Is it just us, or is Yale subtly mocking Hofstra students for being politically apathetic?

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 »

When I was trying to decide which "New Yorker Festival" events to cover, the "American Dream" discussion between Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri and T.C. Boyle caught my eye. Why, you ask? Primarily because its panelists have Ivy ties, making this post marginally relevant to the topic of the blog. Also, the Ivy League and the American Dream seem to be somehow linked. At least, after spending so much money and emerging with no practical skills, I hope they are.

This discussion took place in what I think was a church on the Lower East Side. Young and old New Yorker fans packed the room to capacity. In fact, there were people standing in line outside the building (this made me feel bad about nodding off a few times during the discussion. But whatever--I was tired.) The moderator, a British guy who probably works for the New Yorker, opened with a joke about how incongruous it was for a British guy to moderate a discussion about the American Dream.

And then the panelists started talking.

Boyle on social mobility:

If the 'American Dream' is about about social mobility, I am its exemplar.

Boyle, working-class son and author of World's End and other award-winning books, modestly admits it wasn't until he was a junior in college that he "blundered into a creative writing class."

London-born Lahiri, Barnard '89, on America:

It's taken me my entire life to understand and accept that I'm an American.

Lahiri explains that Indians are more exotic in America than in Britain, where they are part of "the fabric of the culture."

After the jump, Jeff Eugenides, Brown '83, tells us greed is good and Boyle tells us his pet name for his wife. Read the rest of this entry »

This is how the world used to be for us ladies:  If you went to Health Services, no matter your complaint, you were invariably given a pregnancy test.  Of course, what with the recent update at Brown’s Health Services, a friendly visit might go a little more like this: Here is a pregnancy test, we hope that sex was worth it.  Now, would you like us to help you achieve orgasm next time?

That’s right, according to an article in the Brown Daily Herald, it seems that Brown’s Health Services have undertaken a new cause: Ladies Must Finally Achieve Orgasm (LMFAO) --and no, it's not really called this.  We're just messin' with you.  You can thank all the girls who actually went to health services because they couldn’t come for this.

More to moan about, after the jump:

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally defaced when a hurricane tore its arm off in 1938, a bronze statue of Caesar Augustus standing in Brown's Wriston quadrangle was vandalized this past week when someone attached a new arm made of packing tape. This arm (or rather, the hand attached to it) is making a sign of some sort. Today at Brown, the news blog Brown runs out of its official website (why did I not know this blog existed?) muses:

How did the lucent limb get there? And why is it making a gang sign with its hand? No one is sure.

Is it making a gang sign? I thought the hand was making the "rocker" sign kids throw up in heavy metal videos.

Am I right? Is Today at Brown right? Does Dominoes still have that three pizzas for $15 deal? Write in and tell me what you think.

Full shot of statue after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

In the annals of the Ivy League there are countless tales of bright men and women who went astray. There was Harvard MBA graduate Jeffrey Skilling, who helped bring the Enron Corporation down to its knees. And then there was former Penn Professor Rafael Robb, who bludgeoned his wife to death in 2006.

So every once in awhile it's refreshing to hear about reversals of fortune that cut the opposite way. Meet one-time drug dealer Andres Idarraga. At the age of twenty Idarraga was given a felony and a 14-year prison sentence.  Ostensibly because jail sucked and there was little to do, Idarraga

began reading books — voraciously.  As he read, he began to dream, not about pimped-up cars and drug money, but about going to college, about doing something that he and his parents could be proud of.

After attaining his GED and receiving an early parole, Idarraga - whose parents emigrated to Rhode Island from Colombia - applied to Brown. He was rejected, so he excelled at another school, reapplied a year later, and got in. Now thirty, Idarraga is currently a 1L at Yale Law.

The question now is where's Idarraga's Lifetime movie deal?

As today's Ragtime notes, last summer in Rhode Island a man named Stanley Kubierowski was pulled over and arrested for drunk driving. What does this have to do with the Ivy League? Well, the man happened to be Brown President Ruth Simmons' "former part-time house chef."

But that's not important in the least. What's important is Kubierowski's BAC at the time of arrest, as confirmed by multiple tests administered by those trained in such things: .49. Let me repeat that number, this time in italics, spelled out for dramatic effect, with ellipses all over the place, and capped by an exclamation point: his BAC was point...four....nine...!

This is simply unbelievable. Forget charging Kubierowski with any sort of crime. Give that man a medal for his Rasputin-like tolerance. According to some chart I found on Wikipedia, the only consequences listed for having a BAC over .4 are "Unconsciousness" and "Death."

Of course, we shouldn't get too caught up in the boozy-boosterism side of the story. There's definitely a potentially tragic aspect here: God only knows what might have happened if Kubierowski had attempted to make Ruth Simmons a Caesar salad in that condition. Salmonella? You bet.