The profoundly self-obsessed must be truly profound to catch our attention. Recently, in New Haven, profundity has once again reached a high—or low, depending on how you look at it—in Yale’s Movement for Beauty and Justice. Mission statement: Beautiful people are fucking awesome!

Our society is in a state of crisis. Political and social structures have disregarded the collective implications of our individual actions for too long. We live in a world of inequality, social injustice, and conflict.

We believe that promoting the proliferation, creation, and realization of diverse forms of beauty in the world will unite humanity and lead to a more just society.

Founders Justine Kolata and Ric Hernández ‘11 are pictured to the right. (At least their bunnies, "Beauty" and "Justice," somehow have the good sense to hide their faces.)

The Movement for BJ [our own abbreviation] seems straight out of Elle Woods’s HLS admissions video, but perhaps it's something more?

After the jump, the mission of what should be called The Movement for Butterflies and Pajama Bottoms and Cupcakes and Snugglebumblywumpsies.

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The Yale Pundits, culprits of the Scroll and Key application prank earlier this year, have released the list of taps for the top secret societies late last night. The newsletter-style email for the "Yale Does It Nude" addressed to and credited to former YDN editor-in-chief Andrew Mangino cracked what will hopefully be the last swine flu joke. Ever.

By the looks of it, Key is holding onto their YDN legacy by tapping current managing editor Bharat Ayyar.  Meanwhile, Skull and Bones kept it presidential, welcoming Yale College Council president Rich Tao along with current publisher of the Yale Record, Nozlee Samadzadeh-Hadidi.

The Pundits' announcement is hot on the heels of Rumpus's publication of the graduating class of 2009 society members list. Regarding our mistake in framing that coverage, we hope you commenters will cheer up now that we've covered everything. After all, this shit's supposed to be secret, right?

After the jump, the original email from the Pundits and a video of a slow loris getting tickled.

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Yale's Rumpus magazine recently published the full list of secret society inductees for 2009. These future-leaders-of-the-world hopefuls join a league of will-never-really-be-leaders-of-the-world Yale alums plus George W. Bush. Meanwhile, nobody outside of New Haven gives a shit after that Joshua Jackson movie showed how whack secret societies are anyways.

The lists may or may not be correct, but Google doesn't care. The only name we actually recognized immediately was Andrew Mangino, former Yale Daily News editor-in-chief who is now a Scroll and Key member, again. (Wonder if he applied...and too bad he's not a Boner...) Since he was on last year's list, this  seems confusing. Smells like journalistic integrity, nevertheless.

After the jump, the absurdly long list of tap-ees and the trailer to aforementioned Joshua Jackson movie. The list is really effing long. Do the Elis really need 32 secret societies? Do we have a little complex, Yale?

Correction: Kind commenters have let me know that Rumpus publishes the list of graduating members, so obvious that Mangino is on both. We still don't care.

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The YDN reported yesterday that gender-neutral housing would continue NOT to be offered in the Yale residential college system next year. While the Elis busted out their intergalactic decision-making body, the "Council of Masters," the University wanted further study before implementing what would have been a college-wide housing policy to allow mixed-gender rooming groups, a change that the University believes has only existed on smaller scales at other schools. The policy is particularly relevant to the LGBT community who have long fought for gender-neutral rights on campuses nationwide.

To make matters worse, Harvard already solved the scale issue a couple years ago by allowing students to apply for gender-neutral housing on a case by case basis. Last year, students were also given the option to select "transgender" on housing forms, one further step towards transparency in the process. Likewise, Brown implemented a pilot-program in 2008 that expanded a 2003 program and now allows about a third of non-freshman rooms to be gender-neutral. Cornell, Dartmouth, and Penn have all had comparable programs in place since 2007.

So what gives, Yale? Everyone thought you guys were open-minded and stuff, but now you're starting to come off as a bit of a bigot about all this issue. (Oh, and Princeton, too.) Read student respones and sign up for the sleep-in after the jump.

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Headached and frostbitten, Harvard students are still trying to figure out what went wrong. Another year of heightened party restrictions and generally pitiful party behavior in Cambridge proves once again that even though Harvard outscored Yale in The Game, Yale still scores more in general. Harvard kids managed to screw up their own pep rally by getting too rambunctious during a Girl Talk concert. To boot, Crimeds botched the 40-year-old Crimson-YDN pigskin challenge by failing to show up to the game. They even refused to open the doors of 14 Plympton St to let the Elis in for a drink.

The Crimson Crazies can blame the Boston Police Department for cutting this year's tailgate short, but the Girl Talk incident is unforgivably the fault of the fun-starved students who organized it. (Really, putting Greg Gillis on a flimsy stage with a PA system is like putting a hungry tiger in a preschool playground.) Meanwhile, the hope that ever-tightening restrictions in Boston and Cambridge might pull the focus back to the football also turns out to be a bit bogus. From the looks of it, there are just as many police officers on the field as gridiron giants. For all the buzz and hullaballoo, this year's 125th anniversary of The Game succeeds, yet again, in stirring more nostalgia than cocktails.

Check out some pictures from the festivities along with B-list celebrity gossip after the jump.

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Last Thursday, the Yale Daily News rained insulting (and aged) statistics onto the campus's crowd of Obama supporters. The title of YDN staffer Divya Subrahmanyam's article alone could reap the scorn of anyone who's ever worked on a campaign:  "Double take: Months of canvassing, 430 votes to show for it?" The article goes on to calculate the underwhelming performance of Yale for Obama workers according to a 2002 formula by Yale political scientists Donald Green and Alan Gerber.

Yale's Obama faction was not pleased. The flurry of disgruntled comments on the article can pretty much be summed up with phrases like "I'm overwhelmingly disappointed by Divya's article," "And your point is????," or "What a terrible, thoughtless, and irrelevant article." Others point out the YDN's hypocrisy in undermining the efforts of some when the paper celebrated the work of canvassers in Virginia the day before. But Nathan Tek '09 has a point:

just because it makes you feel bad doesn't mean the research is bad or that the article is incorrect. grow up, Dems.

None of which stopped Yale for Change, which sent out a passive-aggressive group email including the word "appalled," accusing YDN of destroying democracy and freedom as we know it, and demanding an apology:

The paper never covered our efforts on election day, only here, an article that demeans our work. It says nothing of the overall ground operation of the campaign. It denigrates civic engagement.  It ran a news analysis piece without running the news.  There are any number of problems that I have with the story, and I imagine the same is true for most of you.  ...  We asked [YDN editor] Tom [Kaplan] to issue an apology, but he refused.

So goes this now classic yet always tired battle pitting poor reporting by Ivy dailies against the soft-shelled emotions of students. Check out Yale for Change's email and some good ol' fashioned fact-checking after the jump.

Last week, my co-editor Robyn waxed on about the awesomeness of Alexander Dominitz's "95 Theses," a parody (and a marked improvement on) Jay-Z's "99 Problems". This week I bring you Max Lanman's "Brangelina", a tongue-in-cheek commentary on the rising popularity of celebrity adoptions.

According to the Yale Daily News, Lanman - who is a junior at Yale - read an story entitled "Brangelina" in People, and it "amused Lanman so much that he was compelled to write a song, and after that, direct a music video." The music video has catchy backing beats, high production values, and features copious amounts of semi-disturbing pelvic thrusts.

Is "Brangelina" better than "95 Theses"? Yalies, readers: weigh in!

• Columbia: "'Rooster’s breakfast' is Slovenian slang for 'early morning sex.'"
• Columbia: Madonna Constantine demonstrates inability to cut losses.
• Harvard: Oh Harvard kids, so goddamn worldly.
• Yale: Would you believe these kids and their hats?
• Princeton: Construction workers go overboard trying to take Princeton's gobs of money.
• Dartmouth: "An officer assigned to detail a Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority event at Everything But Anchovies arrested an underage male who brought liquor in a cup to the event." Gin and anchovies -- busted.
• Penn: Hillary Clinton owes everyone money.

Aliza Shvarts, she of the miscarriage art that caused such a stir at Yale a few months back, has been hiding out since April, even declining to come to graduation. But for everyone who hoped that her fifteen minutes were up, bad news.

Shvarts is back on the art scene, and not at any old two-bit gallery. No, she will present a piece at London's Tate Modern this weekend. Considering that the Tate is also home to skull-encrusting, shark-pickling Damien Hirst's cow and calf carcasses, it sounds like a great match!

Shvarts was invited by Seth Kim-Cohen, a Yale art history professor and curator of the event. The Tate is calling it "an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners," but a spokesperson was quick to emphasize that Shvarts' piece is "not going to be in the Tate gallery. Nothing is on display." (Translation: "No abortion art, please. We're British.") Read the rest of this entry »

We saw this YDN headine:

For Senior, Abortion a Medium for Art, Political Discourse

And thought the headline editor made a humorously inappropriate mistake. But then we read this:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

So- wait a- holy shi-

The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting.

Schvarts will then project recorded videos onto the four sides of the cube. These videos, captured on a VHS camcorder, will show her experiencing miscarriages in her bathrooom tub, she said. Similar videos will be projected onto the walls of the room.

I think I saw this, once. In a horrible, horrible nightmare.

If L'Affaire Papaya is any indicator, Shvarts should think about getting a security detail for her dorm. Drudge Report linked to the article, and you know what they say: First Drudge, then the blogosphere, then psychotic right-wing militiamen with websites hosted on Angelfire. Due to sudden influx of Drudge-related traffic, YDN's website is periodically going down. So, until YDN stabilizes, we're running the full article and a li'l more commentary after the jump. Oh, and in case you're wondering:

Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself.

Well, at least she has a sense of modesty.

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