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.

With squirming delight we read the New York Observer's Princeton bicker takedown this morning, thrilling to each student's oblivious elitism, each eating club's repugnant practices, each Shermanesque detail.

To be honest, we weren't sure what we could possibly add to Spencer Morgan's exquisitely unsourced piece -- just go take it in now -- but readers at Princeton have filled us in on how the campus is reacting to a story that makes the social/cultural scene feel as friendly as Fallujah. One level-headed tipster reports:

Princetonian parents everywhere are probably hyperventilating, but all in all, it's a lot tamer than it could have been. ... Many of us are surprised that the reporter was able to attend several of the parties and get students to talk on the record. To my knowledge, most clubs make members sign an agreement saying they will never, ever, ever talk to the press, on pain of expulsion. When we heard the NYT was doing a story on bicker, for example, my club called a meeting where we were reminded to keep our big traps shut. But for the most part this article has elicited a minor shrug, since it's all old news to us. 

Another student, belonging to Ivy, messaged the club's listserv to joke that the misnamed Tamara "Watson" was in deep trouble:

In light of the dirty bicker that obviously took place, you have been retrohosed effective immediately.

To all the other new members, I love you despite any dirty bickering (which would NEVER happen in ivy anyway). You are all wonderful, and Spencer Morgan can stuff his own dick (if he has one) up his ass.

Naturally, not everyone took it as well. After the jump, read one outraged Tiger's email to Morgan. With critics like this, who needs supporters?

[Photo stolen from New York Observer's Melanie Flood until they make us take it down]

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College is full of ill-fated magazine startups. Just ask Harvard's Scene, a training-wheels Vanity Fair minus the journalism. Let us turn our collective attention to Princeton's upcoming Oh-So-Fresh Magazine (please, O.S.F.), a "lifestyle and entertainment" publication with a rather unfortunate name. Guys: How can you possibly expect to avoid "douchebag" remarks when you call your magazine "Oh So Fresh"?

In an interview with the Princetonian, editor-in-chief Harrison Schaen '08 describes it as "a combination of GQ and Rolling Stone." So far, so good. But suddenly, as if hit by the hyperbole truck, he starts unleashing quote after Vayner-worthy quote:

• "When I was in high school, I said to my friends, 'By the time I'll be 21, I'm going to start a revolution.' "

• "You have to have your 'in,'" Schaen said. "It's not about what you know, it's about who you know. We know who to talk to. We know executive heads, we know producers, and that's how OSF serves as the medium between the University and the entertainment world."

• "What sets us apart is our contacts," Schaen said. "We have contacts with MGM, Sony and Paramount, as well as major record labels. It's all about getting your name out there and having someone who matters look at you, and that's what we intend to do with OSF magazine."

We hope, for the sake of everyone involved, the Prince reporter botched these quotes. Even Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, a Princeton prof contributing a piece to the first issue, fails to say anything substantive: "Universities have to be alert to what's happening in the world," he says. "The academy is about making sense of the world. What else are we to make sense of? And the world is very varied."

We know starting a publication is no small feat -- you gotta commend Schaen a hundred percent for that. But a friendly word of advice: Pick up a publicist when you hire the rest of the staff. (Wait, we just re-read the Princetonian piece. You already have a publicist. You already have a publicist for your undergraduate magazine? On second thought, maybe that's the problem.)

Hey kiddos,

It's about time we sat down and had a talk. About commenting.

We want to hear from you. That's why we have a comments section. Call us dreamers, but at launch we pictured it as a place for Ivy smartasses to shine. But lately ... well, maybe it's best to point to this recent Churchillian battle of wits, from an item about a rap song:

Brown kid says:
Cornell sucks, I say we purge them from the ivy league

Harvard2007 says:
Yale sucks, Whatev...

Bravo, really. Do you guys intern at Aaron Sorkin's dialogue shop?

Yeah, okay, this is the Internet, and that's par for the anonymous course. And yeah, we ain't writing Shakespeare ourselves, neither. (Please never visit our ghastly July archives.) But it kills us that a lot of people are posting awesome comments, and getting lost in a sea of "ahahha says: Cornell is the worst ivy hahaha, better than brown and dartmouth, hahahahahhaha."

So: By all means, be tasteless, be destructive, be vitriolic. Tear our ill-argued screeds to shreds. Just don't be Fred.

For the record, we reserve the right to remove any comment that's derogatory or patently offensive. (If you're that uninspired, go here.) And we're gonna try to comment more frequently ourselves, so it's not just one-way yelling.

In conclusion, we're not angry. Just disappointed. We're die-hard behaviorists around here; we believe in positive reinforcement. That's why we want to start giving brilliance its due with a new comments round-up at the end of every week. So go -- sharpen your skewers, and prove those acceptance letters were deserved.

The editorial board has proven to be an excluding, cliqued organization that stands commensurate with as final clubs, all while criticizing those same clubs with a hypocrisy that would startle Mark Foley.

So a Harvard sophomore wasn't elected to serve another year on the editorial board of the Crimson, and he is just a touch unhappy about it. In a 1,183-word letter of resignation emailed to Crim president Will Marra and the entire board, this kid unloads on pretty much everyone, from the mortals who dared edit his pristine copy to the editors who made the "baffling" decision not to keep him aboard.

On a more personal note, I ask these same incompetent or undedicated peers, who would be editing and evaluating my signed pieces and my layout work next semester if I do not resign: Who are you to judge the quality of my work, when I was the one often cleaning up after your sloppy content and making so many solid contributions to the board this semester?

Yes, I have "weaknesses." I can imagine being criticized during deliberations for not always being the most fluid elocutionist and for not being able to "think on my feet." No, especially not after running on my feet, dressed up, to the board-wide shoot interview from Cabot to Dunster for 30 minutes in the pouring rain. Or going to a schmooze after getting zero sleep the previous night because I was working in The Crimson (how ironic) and had two midterms that week.

The entire rant-tastic missive is after the jump. Baby, this is Harvard! You expected to be judged on your merits?

UPDATE: After some published soul-searching, we've redacted this kid's name.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know, in all the stuff we've written about Aleksey Vayner, we've never actually used the word "douchebag." Well, we're getting pretty close to using that term right now. Only we're not talking about Aleksey.

Daro Mott and Marcelino Pantoja (Yale '06, above) sent the book query below to the Wiliam Morris mega-agency. G'head, read it, we'll wait.

From: "Mott, Daro" [redacted]
To: "Suzanne Gluck" [redacted]
CC: "Marcelino Pantoja" [redacted]
Re: Query: Aleksey Vayner, a Memoir

October 25, 2006
Suzanne Gluck
William Morris Agency
1325 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY  10019

Dear Ms. Suzanne Gluck:

We would like to preface our query letter with a short paragraph about ourselves. My name is Daro Mott and I graduated from Yale University in May of 2006; I currently live and work in Louisville, Kentucky. My co-author's name is Marcelino Pantoja; he lives and works in Tracy, California and he also graduated from Yale this previous spring. We are budding writers and intend to produce a memoir regarding our puzzling friend, Aleksey Vayner, whom we met as undergraduates at Yale.

In our book, we reveal the most intriguing and entertaining Ivy League persona of today: Aleksey Vayner.

The story of Aleksey Vayner is both sensational and seemingly apocryphal. On the one hand, Aleksey and his family, penniless, emigrated from Uzbekistan to the United States; at eighteen, he gained admission to Yale University as a tennis recruit. On the other hand, Aleksey Vayner sexed up his accomplishments one time too many: recently, he single handedly became the laughing stock on Wall Street after sending an eleven page résumé and
promotional video to UBS AG, the world's largest asset wealth manager.

On October 9, 2006, the New York Sun went to press on Aleksey. Within the span of a week, the Wall Street Journal, the Dow Jones News Wire, Fox News, US News and World Report, London Times, Daily Mail, Forbes, the Yale Daily News, Market Watch, the New Yorker and dozens of other national and international media ran articles on Aleksey. The New York Times, the Today Show and other media picked up the story the following week. Following suit, Aleksey Vayner was featured on Inside Edition and MSNBC early this week. Blogs can't get enough. Yale students scream Vaynergate. Public interest is skyrocketing!  Why?

Aleksey lifts 495 lbs of steel, clocks a tennis serve at 140mph, whirls around a ballroom dance floor with a gorgeous dancer, shatters six bricks with a karate chop, pulls off fantastic stunts with skis-he choreographs all this information and more in his promotional video. Moreover, Aleksey boasts of being the CEO of Vayner Capital Management, a partner in a mega real-estate development firm, a professional athlete and the founder of Youth Empowerment Strategies (YES), a non-profit. He even claims to have self-published a book on the Holocaust from the perspective of female survivors!  Aleksey has chutzpah!

But Wall Street erupted with laughter. And they have not stopped. Aleksey is being bombarded with requests for interviews. The calls have not stopped. Wall Street circulated Aleksey's video and résumé because, Aleksey, whether we like it or not, is simply entertaining.

In the light of this, his cadre of friends proposes to write a book about Aleksey situated in Yale University where we first met him. As his closest friends and recent graduates of Yale, we have personal access to him; in other words, we are self-anointed experts of Aleksey.

In his memoir, we detail the reality that is Aleksey with a flavor made possible from having tasted the "inside scoop." We raise interesting issues and get down to bottom of life at Yale with Aleksey Vayner. We will answer soul searching questions: Who is he? What does he want out of this gift of life? What is folklore, what is reality? Did the allure of Wall Street make a zany guy even zanier? Is he a typical Ivy Leaguer? Is Aleksey Vayner legitimate or is he an imposter? We know the truth.

We look forward to speaking with you.

Respectfully Submitted,

Daro Mott
Marcelino Pantoja

Choo choo! All aboard! The Aleksey Vayner gravy train is leaving the station! Good to know that even during these tough times, Aleksey's "closest friends" are standing by him ... ready to cash in on his fame.

Seriously, though -- most intriguing Ivy League persona? The New York Sun as catalyst? "What is folklore, what is reality?" Sign us up, you "budding writers," for the "flavor made possible from having tasted the 'inside scoop'" on your "puzzling," "zany" friend.