This week The Eye (weekly magazine of the Columbia Spectator) investigates the eerily eugenics-y world of Ivy League egg donation via pseudonymic sorority girl Alex Greenbaum:

How has she been feeling since her egg-removal surgery in September? She takes a long gulp from her Ethos water bottle and pauses for a few seconds. “You know, I felt like shit for days,” she finally says. “But they were able to extract 10 eggs from me... my check just cleared, so that’s $9,000 I can put to post-graduation travel and apartment-hunting.”

Alex's financial woes stem from her lack of a "viable major" (fertility jargon infecting every area of her life, apparently) and "My parents said they won’t pay for my BlackBerry [after graduation]." Kind of makes you miss the good old days, when impoverished lady students just plain whored themselves for extra cash, right? Like high-end prostitution, high-end egg donation requires a certain nubile je ne sais— oh, who are we kidding. We know exactly which quoi they want, and it's the same Barbie doll nonsense as everywhere else. In Alex's words:

“If I was short, overweight, or a minority, I’m sure I wouldn’t have found immediate success or made that much money to start. I made more money than what’s typical because I was deemed an ‘ideal type’ by the agency."

As the article continues, the only thing creepier than the $500K payday "for an Ivy League donor who was taller than 5 feet 10 inches and scored at least a 1400 on her SATs" is author Sadia Latifi's rhapsodic description of Greenbaum's statuesque Aryan glory. (Despite "50-percent Jewy-ness" — a minority who doesn't resemble a minority! Jackpot!) Read the rest of this entry »

The Ivy League has had a rather complicated relationship with the military in recent years (see Sanchez, Matt-- or better yet, don't). Despite the ideological gap that has alienated many liberal Ivyfolk from their country's adventures in Iraq, the Schools have produced a few good military men with a penchant for writing about their experiences. A couple years back, Columbia's magazine The Eye ran recurring dispatches from Lt. Josh Arthur, CC ’04 in Baghdad. Now Princeton alum Capt. Nate Rawlings is providing commentary and answering questions about his current deployment in Iraq for NPR.

Rawlings comes across as extremely hesitant to cross party lines and doesn't say anything even remotely controversial, but it's hard not to have some affection for a guy who's writing a bafflingly eclectic advice column from a war zone. In yesterday's installment, his three questions were: a heart-tugging letter from a soldier who will likely miss his son's birth, a scathing anti-war screed disguised as a question, and a jaunty inquiry about being an Ivy Leaguer in Iraq. I wonder which of these we're interested in? Read the rest of this entry »