Well we've come to that point in the summer where its time for the temporary IvyGate editors (Max and Michael, not that it matters) to say goodbye. It hasn't been a great season for the Ivy League though. Cornell lost everyone's social security numbers. Harvard is broke and is trying to own English. A Brown student and a Yale student competed to see who could be more annoying. Californians don't understand us. Don't even mention lacrosse. And we seem to be forgetting something. What could it be? Oh well, it probably wasn't important.

But the worst news of all came just this week. Forbes Magazine, the nation's premier experts on all things list-related, released their ranking of America's Best Colleges. Here are the sobering results:

1. Army

2. Princeton

3. Caltech

4. Williams

5. Harvard

6. Wellesley

7. Air Force

8. Amherst

9. Yale

10. Stanford

11. MIT

12. Swarthmore

13. Columbia

14. Centre

15. Haverford

...

...

...

Umm, it'll be a while until we reach the next Ivy League school, so we'll warp ahead after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

The Paper Trail - an education blog for U.S. News & World Report - has once again listed IvyGate as a contender for the best alternative media outlet of the year. Other nominees for the poll, which closes on February 17, include Wesleying, Bwog, The Daily Clog, Mads Vassar, Onward State, Saxa Speak, Timothy Dwight, MiddBlog, and the Critical Badger. Presently we are in last place, with a mere 1.35% of all votes. By contrast, Timothy Dwight - a blog about a certain cult group residential hall at Yale - is leading the polls at 28.72%, and Bwog - the blog of Columbia's Blue & White - is in second place with 24.9%.

The reasons why IvyGate is being trounced by the likes of a dorm blog at Yale and campus-specific new media rags are numerous. One explanation is that some sites, like Timothy Dwight and Bwog, have posted links to the poll below their mastheads and are urging readers to vote multiple times. Another reason may have to do with the fact that IvyGate content has been conspicuously spare since the beginning of the new semester. This is due to our own laxity - we're lazy and underpaid (read: paid nothing) - and also because we've been sorting out, in a productive way, our various levels of commitment for 2009 and onward.

In short: the hibernation is over and we're as eager to probe the bizarre depths of higher ed as we've ever been.  If you've got a hot tip or want to write for us - we're hiring! - email us at tips@ivygateblog.com.

Here's wishing happy holidays and long winter breaks to our readers, especially to those poor souls who attend Harvard and Princeton, where fall semester final exams occur after winter vacation. Nassau and Massachusetts Halls: Thou art a Grinch.

We'll be back on January 5. Until then, how about some premature nostalgia and self-reference? This year saw our redesign and tech upgrade at the hands of nimble-fingered Tech God Zach Ozer, to whom we are constantly indebted. Also, the addition of several new writers and editors, all of whom are obscenely talented and frighteningly dedicated to this wretched little blog. They created the following Top 10 Fall '08 stories, listed here by pageview:

• 1. Egotistical Freshman Wants to Rule the World: 15,300 views for that breathtakingly bizarre sensation, Stephany Her Royal Highness.
• 2. "I Was Shocked I Would Be Joining a Lower-Tier Bank": Life After Buyout: 9,800 views
• 3. Ivy League Scores Low in Forbes College Ranking: For some reason you guys continue to be obsessed with rankings: 7,800 views
• 4. Harvard's Very Own Hugh Hefner, If Hef Devoted His Magazine to Pictures of His Own Penis: 7,700 views for Not-so-Big Man on Campus Matt diPasquale and Diamond magazine.
• 5. Middle-Aged White Guy Sues Columbia for Discrimination: An Interview with Roy Hollander, Men's Rights Pioneer: Messiah of Misogyny scores 7,500 views, never gets laid again

The rest of the top 10 + assorted tidbits, time-wasters, and arbitrary "Best Of" designations: Read the rest of this entry »

I woke up the morning after IvyGate's big bar bash relieved that I was in my own bed and apparently still wearing my underroos. So far so good, I rationalized, and that was when I heard the shower turn on.

Despite the early morning haze of one too many gin and tonics, everything came back to me. I hadn't gone home from that party alone. I had gone home with my new co-editor.

**

I don't usually take showers in unfamiliar apartments the morning after. Hell, I usually just grab my pants and run. But this time was different. It was uncanny how much we complemented each other. Robyn was from Irvine, California, a student at Barnard, and headed to med school in the next few years.  Basically, she could do a Korean accent better than I could; she was the daughter my mother was meant to have. I was raised in New Jersey, a former prep schooler and a student of literature at Harvard.  I should have been bat-mitzvahed years ago.

When we met, we finished each others sentences. We ordered the same drinks, a few too many.  Sometimes you know right away that it's not going to work out.  But sometimes you know that it will.  And so I stayed for my shower.  We were going to be the best of friends.

**

Our beautiful-yet-awkward relationship started out where most healthy, substantive relationships begin: through Facebook. After stalking the shit out of each other once we were assigned as co-editors, we decided to meet for drinks.

We were both in New York for the summer, interning in publishing (Juli), and taking summer physics classes whilst editing Columbia's bioethics journal (Robyn). Well, drinks turned into a baking fiasco, then a round of embarrassing sex story trade offs, a trip to Nick and Chris's aforementioned IvyGate party, and finally a drunken subway ride uptown, which culminated in what can only be referred to as a slumber party.

Yes, really. A slumber party. With pajamas and giggling and cookies and all that girly shit. And now we're, like, totally BFFs. Over the past few weeks we've gone to the theater, the park, a nice Italian restaurant.

So thanks, Ivy Gate, for the first completely not awkward morning after we've ever experienced (i.e. In the words of Douglas Adams, 'So long, and thanks for all the fish').  And, as an act of gratitude, the plan is basically to turn this blog into the next Sex and the Ivy.  It's a hard job. But someone's got to do it.

Send us tips, recipes, personals, or embarrassing sex stories at tips@ivygateblog.com

---
Juli Min, Harvard '09, is the singer in a funk band and also an acoustic indie duo that performs in and around New York.

Robyn Schneider, Barnard '08.5, is the author of several forgettable books for teenagers.  She hopes to attend medical school and bedazzle the shit out of her scrubs.

--ROBYN SCHNEIDER AND JULI MIN

Well, we've all suspected it for some time, but now we have it directly from the horse's mouth: IvyGate founding co-editor Chris Beam is a Republican operative intent on destroying the reputation of America's Greatest Hope for Survival.

Beam, who is a Columbia grad, has a prominently placed item at Slate today in which he claims responsibility for widely circulating the phrase "terrorist fist jab" as a possible interpretation for the fist-bump shared between Barack and Michelle Obama on the night that Obama clinched the Democratic nomination. Like so many things in our Internet-crazed lives, it seems that the trouble originated in an anonymous comment on a website:

The morning after Obama locked up the nomination, I was writing a "Trailhead" item that mocked the media's difficulty in figuring out what to call the now famous gesture. "Fist-pound," "knuckle-bump," and "fist-to-fist thumbs up" were among the funnier examples, but one of them—"Hezbollah-style fist jab"—was particularly risible. It came from the Web site for Human Events, a hard-right weekly. Unfortunately, I failed to note that its provenance was not the magazine itself but a reader comment posted below an unrelated column by Cal Thomas. I linked the phrase to the column but didn't explain that the words weren't Thomas'

A couple miscommunications later and the phrase ended up on Fox News, causing a great deal of hand-wringing about how low the Republicans are willing to go to paint Obama as a the scary "other."

As usual, the left has proven that the only thing more dangerous than the vast right-wing conspiracy is the vast left-wing ability to fuck itself over unnecessarily. Beam's confession coincides with day 3 of the mass hysteria provoked by the cover of the latest New Yorker, which depcits Barack in traditional Muslim garb terrorist fist-jabbing a machine-gun toting Michele while an American flag burns in the fireplace. The cover has led to cries of umbrage from Obama's camp, a great deal of shouting on cable news, and mumblings of "Didn't New Yorker covers used to be funny?" from sane people.

Meanwhile, real terrorists killed more real people, but I'm not sure how you make that into a cartoon. Oh, right.

Welcome to IvyGate, version 3.0. Zach Ozer, our preposterously gifted business and technology guy, has coded up a pretty major upgrade. We know you want to start complaining in the comments, so here's just a brief rundown:

• Speed. IvyGate is now a Wordpress blog hosted by MediaTemple, not a Movable Type blog hosted on Yahoo. Hopefully, this means zippier page load times and comments that post immediately, instead of the old 45 business days.
• Speaking of comments! Now you have to register to register your discontent. You can do so here.
• Bugs. Please let us know what you find via our fancy bug tracking gizmo.

Think that's it. You've got bitching to do in the comments, and our first guest-editor duo needs to make up for lost time, so we'll get out of everyone's way. Except to say once more that Zach, if you need a kidney, just ask.

See you next summer!

--Nick & Chris

Hello, it's your negligent overlords checking in again. We just want to remind everyone of a post that went up last week, in case you missed it: We're hiring for the summer.

The valiant Maureen O'Connor and Jacob Savage (also Hal Parker!) -- of whom we are much enamored, to whom we are much indebted -- have been helming the HMS IvyGate since September, and their final post of the semester goes up May 2. Then the site goes dark till June 16, when we return with a new summer slate of guest editors.

We want you to apply. 'Cause it's summer, we're desperate excited to take a look at all comers. Maybe you're a newspaper geek who wants to enlarge her patrol to all eight campuses; maybe you're an anthro major with well-penned takes on the tribes and customs of these parts; maybe you're an inveterate gossip who wants to crown a real-life Blair and Serena.

Maybe you know better. But let's face it, you attend an Ivy, which means you've bit hook, line and sinker on a bad sales pitch before. Make that mistake again! Be an IvyGate editor! The pay is nonexistent, the commenters pustulent. And yet writing this stuff is fun -- witness our inability to take the blog out behind the lean-to and shoot it in the back of the head -- and there can be rewards. Why, just look at our recent alumni. We promise either a wildly lucrative promotion to the blogging bigs, or a nervy b.

To apply, email ivygate@gmail.com by May 16. 

Cheers,

Nick and Chris 

P.S. Disproving the existence of karma, we have been blessed recently with the talents of Zach Ozer, one of those ridiculously impressive tech guys from MIT. He's overseeing a big upgrade of the blog that will yield a prettier (shut up) and faster site. Leave your ideas and requests in the comments, where they will be rounded up and shot.

It looks like this fine rag is good for something after all. An email sent to us yesterday begs us to contact Jennifer on behalf of the United States Army. As patriots, we obviously do everything in our power to help the government of this great country. We've therefore decided to post the email so that Jennifer can use her stellar resume to go forth and save the world:

[name redacted], CIV USA HRC

Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED
Caveats: FOUO

We'd like to get in touch with Jennifer.  Please send her this note, if you can.  Thank you.

[name redacted]
Mgmt Svc Spec (Human Resources/Civ)
Management Support Branch
Officer Personnel Mgmt Directorate
U.S. Army Human Resources Command

In a follow-up, the Army explained:

Just pass it on to Jennifer, if you can...  Yes, there are positions within the Army Human Resources Command that we are recruiting for.  I cannot offer her a position, but can let her know what is available and how to apply.  The jobs are posted on www.cpol.army.mil. Again, thank you!

Contact us, Jen. We can totally help you, if a position as a secretary or whatever at the Army Human Resources Command isn't like, beneath you.

With the exception of our of endorsement of Francis Martel, IvyGate hasn't traditionally thrown its weight behind presidential contenders. But in light of the excitement Barack Obama has generated throughout the Ivy League - and the excitement he's generated in our own heads - we hereby Barack the Vote. We endorse Barack Obama for President.

Let's go through some of the support Obama has garnered. First, we owe Andrew Mangino a mea culpa; it turns out the YDN does not consist of Clinton stooges. Following the lead of their Editor-in-Chief, the YDN has endorsed Obama:

An Obama presidency promises a reassertion of the natural, American optimism for which JFK stood, but also new reforms of which he could only have dreamt. Let us not let this moment slip away."

So has the Crimson:

Obama represents an opportunity for a Democratic nominee who represents the value of service, intelligence, and judgment, and, most of all, an opportunity for real change, unburdened by favors owed and ideals lost.

And then there are the literally zillion articles about student support for the junior Senator from Illinois. Brown loves Obama; Columbia student and ex-IvyGate contributor J.D. Porter endorses Obama; at Cornell, 1,100 people "Rocked for Barack"; Larry David came to Dartmouth just to talk about Obama; and a different Prince columnist seems to endorse Obama every other day.

After the jump: some more thoughts about America's future.

Read the rest of this entry »

Alright, listen up: you don't like us and we don't like you, so we're gonna keep it brief. We're peacing, and some new people are taking over. They'll (re)introduce themselves shortly and explain how things will work from now on.

We won't bore you with too many thank-yous, regrets or What We Learned, but some things must be said: (1) Society is probably the worse for our creation. (2) We couldn't have done it without a team that was often uncredited -- so thank you, stringers and tipsters. (3) We never got a chance to do LOLivies, so here's one at right.

New guys, go nuts.

Onward,

Chris and Nick