Outsourcing is here, it’s growing, and it kind of sucks. First it was limited to low level work: call centers and their ilk; things American college grads weren’t competing for. But now, more and more, outsourcing is rapidly encroaching on jobs that have historically gone to Ivy League students: analyst positions at New York investment banks.

According to a recently published article in the Times, Wall Street’s woes have fueled a bona fide bonanza of work in cheaper locales like India and Eastern Europe, where the research tasks that were once handed to newly-minted college grads and M.B.A.’s for salaries in excess of six-figures can be had for a fraction of the cost.

At India-based Copal Partners, which “churns out equity, fixed income and trading research for big name analysts and banks… business is up about 40 percent this year alone.” Similar upturns in work have been seen by other third-party firms as well.

It doesn’t seem like outsourcing will stop just there:

After research, the next wave may include more sophisticated jobs like the creation of derivative products, quantitative trading models and even sales jobs from the trading floors… In the future, executives in India like to joke, the only function for highly paid bankers in New York or London will be to greet clients and shake hands when the deals close.

More sobering quotes for all you finance types after the jump.

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After working hard, graduating from an Ivy League school and rising to a successful law career, a girl deserves her own Kevin Federline, right? Not if he’s from a “different cultural and socio-economic background,” says a concerned parent in last Sunday’s “Social Q’s,” an advice column in the New York Times “Fashion and Style” section.

The parent writes,

My daughter, a much-loved, brilliant, Ivy-educated, well-reared lawyer, surprised my husband and me with her new boyfriend. He’s unemployed, socially inept and from an entirely different cultural and socio-economic background. He has moved into her town house, and to see our daughter we must also spend time with him. Am I duty-bound to be more polite to him than I would be toward any other gigolo?

Columnist Philip Galanes goes through the motions of a response and tells the advice-seeker to wait it out because these type of romances don’t work out anyways. Read the response in its entirety after the jump.

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Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine featured an interview with Columbia religion professor, Dalai Lama friend, and famous person spawner Robert Thurman. Thurman, who was the first American ordained as a Tibetan monk (and a Harvard man himself), is on university leave this year but normally teaches classes on Buddhism.

At first, the interview seems to be standard fare — thank you, New York Times, for hard-hitting journalism along the lines of:

As a Buddhist, how do you reconcile your pacifism with the roles your daughter Uma has played in films like Quentin Tarantino’s bloody “Kill Bill”?

But then something really fascinating and bizarre emerges. Follow the jump for an image that will sear itself into your brain.

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We did a mini-post yesterday on the NYT article “Students of Virginity” featuring Harvard’s True Love Revolution, Lena Chen stuffing her face with ginger cake, and our own esteemed IvyGate commenters. Today we considered writing a lengthier post deconstructing the article blow-by-(not that kind of)-blow, but then we thought, why rush this? If we’ve learned one thing from TLR it’s the value of “taking it slow.” So instead we will deal with this in painstakingly small increments, gradually, pleasurably, one baby-sized scrap of hilarity at a time. Now presenting hilarious scrap #1: TLR co-president Leo Keliher (’09) in one of the more glorious photo/caption combos of our time:
 

Is that even a dorm room, or did he import a 12C monastery to sleep in? Leo’s 15 minutes of rather embarassing fame after the jump.

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From the New York Times Sunday Magazine article about Ivy League abstienence societies:

Chen’s perspective on society, and Fredell’s, was borne out in the aftermath, as people wrote in to Ivygate, calling Lena Chen a “slut,” a “whore,” a “total whore,” a “whore whore slut.” And then someone by the screen name of Sex v. Marriage wrote in to say that “most guys out there would rather end up with a girl like Janie.”

My favorite? “Whore whore slut.“ We love you guys. Even if you are real bastards sometimes.

More BREAKING NEWS on the New York Times‘ far too generous approach to True Love Revolution to come.

“What’s squash?” someone once asked over brunch at my eating club. “It’s like tennis, but richer and whiter,” someone else replied. Yeah, that’s pretty much it. But I would add the detail, “people named Khan.”

An article in the New York Times, part of its obsessive catering to the anxiety-wracked parents of the almost college-aged, reveals squash to be not the abstract pursuit of extracurricular excellence we all thought it was, but rather something more worldly. The Times explains:

Squash, an indoor racket sport long associated with private clubs and old-boy networks, is so esoteric that it barely qualifies as a back door. In terms of the number of actual spots on college rosters, it might be more of a pet door.

Squash tends to be played by people who live in places like Greenwich, Conn., and not — to use an exquisitely Times-y euphemism — “young people from the inner city.” In other words, the cultivation of a relatively esoteric sport like squash becomes a way the affluent can leverage their affluence into improving their child’s shot at getting into an Ivy.

This is because squash, while a definite “pro” on an admissions app, requires things only available to a certain minority — leisure time, equipment and access to courts, club membership or boarding school attendance, or even a certain degree of cultural capital.

As one parent puts it:

Parents, Mr. Sher said, like the idea “that not everybody can play it, not everyone can afford it - it’s almost like it’s a more upscale product.”

So what is squash? Is it a quasi-nefarious way for “rich, white people” to circumvent the otherwise meritocratic standards of modern college admissions, or just an esteemed niche sport caught up in the craziness and ruthless market pressures of same modern college admissions?

Sam Jackson, didn’t you go to Exeter? Weigh in on this.

After the jump — the article in full, nothing actually, because the Times has informed us that posting the article was a violation of copyright.

No, but seriously, enough with this schlemiel. To conclude our coverage of Ahmadinejad’s visit to Columbia, here’s Columbia miscreant J.D. Porter again with a roundup of the reactions in the news and on campus. Hopefully Lee Bollinger won’t take offense at one of J.D.’s statements and yell at him, but that’s his problem.

Of all the media covering the Ahmadinejad speech, Fox News was the most impressive. After a week decrying Columbia as maniacal liberals supporting a dictator, a weaker network might not have known how to report on an orderly hour spent ridiculing him. In classic form, however, Fox simply elected to report on their own fictional version of the event.

More of J.D.’s trenchant commentary and edgy photography after the jump.

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This is dedicated to the robot person from the previous post, obvi.

But yeah — It just. Keeps. Giving. We will continue to write about the 7/29/07 New York Times (Magazine) article-by-image-by-article until it’s exhausted. And I want to keep this brief, because I’ve had enough with nerds for the day, but there was yet another relevant article in this issue of the Magazine. It’s called “Who’s a Nerd, Anyway?” and no, it’s different from the robot cover story. I could write a whole post on it… or I could just let you chew this one over:

By cultivating an identity perceived as white to the point of excess, nerds deny themselves the aura of normality that is usually one of the perks of being white.

Sleep well!

–JIM NEWELL

Hillary Rodham was quite the scholarly scribe at Wellesley in the late 1960s. A popular and inadvertently funny article in Sunday’s New York Times (hey, remember this?) reveals letters she wrote to her goody goody Illinois friend, John Peavoy, then a Princeton undergrad. Peavoy, like any trustworthy old pal, recently sent the Times copies of these really personal letters.

One of these letters is notable for IvyGate’s reasons. It might just involve some Ivy League debauchery, Hot Rodham-style. But first, let’s check out some of our bespectacled maven’s best lines. They’re… weird.

• “Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three-and-a-half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me. So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved pseudo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.” Intellectually perturbed Hillary Rodham, spring of 1967
• “I’d play out in the patch of sunlight that broke the density of the elms in front of our house and pretend there were heavenly movie cameras watching my every move.” Wistful Hillary Rodham, fall of 1966
• “I have been enjoying myself too much, and spring and letter-writing are — to the bourgeois mind — no excuses!” Self-flagellating Hillary Rodham, fall of 1966

Oh Barrister Peavoy, I dost feareth that my oeuvre of lexical configurations will be coarsened by an upstart ragamuffin medium as I chance electorally for neo-Queen of the colonial republic!

And so, on with the tale. When not churning out her overwrought woe-is-me’s, Rodham was gettin’ down and… not having sex. Not until one night, that is, when she got keen on a (Big?) Green in the hamlet of Hanover, New Hampshire.

Readers, this might get a little too steamy for some of you. But if you’ve got a curious mind and an even dirtier disposition, I suggest you put the kids to bed, spin some Marvin and let the Telegraph’s account of young Rodham’s Dahhtmouth tryst set your mind ablaze.

For censorship reasons, it will come after the jump.

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According to an article in Sunday’s New York Times, schools once institutionalized as safeties for Ivy aspirants are becoming first choices themselves due to higher application rates. It’s a pretty no-fucking-shit argument, but the Times goes further and offers the kids this juicy morsel:

If you want an intellectually rigorous, urban campus, the University of Chicago may be a fallback for the University of Pennsylvania. If you fell in love with Columbia for its international studies program, consider Georgetown as a safety.”

Whosawhatsitnow? I thought Chicago and Georgetown were like, hard to get into and stuff. Didn’t U.S. News & World Report rank Chicago and Columbia as a tie for ninth in 2007? Isn’t Georgetown ranked sixteenth for selectivity, six spots above Cornell? Sounds like this “world report” should read the Times‘ naughty little secret: any Ivy League wannabe can get into Georgetown and Chicago. How ignorant we all were before this tell-all!

Read the Times, you bright-eyed 16-year-old Ivy gropers. The old standby safeties may be competitive now, but you’ll always have stinky Georgetown and Chicago to land on. Lying liars like U.S. News might rank them as top-tier, but, um, do you see an “Ivy” in the names of their leagues? If you can’t get into those “schools,” then stop masquerading as a student and go to voky.

And don’t say the Times might be wrong. When has the Times ever been wrong about serious issues in recent years?

If you hadn’t caught onto the sarcasm, hopefully that last sentence cleared it up. It’s not that I hate the Times. I enjoy Frank Rich’s columns instantly confirming my predetermined views as much as the next guy. But describing Chicago and G’town as safety schools for anyone is like saying that I have job prospects. I know only one person who ever got into Georgetown but 3.5 who got into Princeton. Does the Times want no one to go to college, like heartbroken Colin Hanks in Orange County? Find some real safety schools. We can’t all be like that girl who refused to read Romeo & Juliet:

–JIM NEWELL