The Weddings and Celebrations in the Sunday 'New York Times' are a textual analysis-rebuffing, context-free and statistically random series of events described objectively that have nothing to do with the fact that you're single and still using that one dirty towel after you shower. You HUMAN FILTH. Intern Alexis judges the vows.
Good news for middle-class and upper-middle-class children lucky enough to have been admitted to Harvard! That elite university is dramatically augmenting the amount of financial aid it gives such students—for example, a family making $120,000 would have to pay about $12,000 in tuition. But not everyone can afford to follow suit. "Only a handful of universities have anything even remotely close to Harvard's financial resources, and it was not clear how many could afford to follow. Yale tersely said in response only that it was planning an announcement next month on expanded financial aid." Burn! [NYT]
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is suing to have unflattering documents unearthed by Harvard-themed magazine 02138—including "Mr. Zuckerberg's handwritten application for admission to Harvard and an excerpt from an online journal he kept as a student that contains biting comments about himself and others" to be stricken from the Internet. This is the same dude who made billions from a website that allows you to let everyone in your friend network know when you are peeing. [NYT]
According to yesterday's Crimson, a crisis has been brewing up in Cambridge ever since Harvard computer labs upgraded to Microsoft Word 2007. Scared and confused students complain that the upgrade "has created incompatibility problems and is difficult to navigate."
02138, an independent magazine for Harvard alumni, has done an in-depth profile of Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg and the on-campus origins of Facebook. There's plenty on the lawsuit filed by the Winklevoss twins and ConnectU, the Facebook rival for which Zuckerberg did some programming work. But the magazine digs deeper and gets some tantalizing details. Did you know that Facebook cofounder Eduardo Saverin and Zuckerberg sparred over money, and Saverin is suing Zuckerberg for squeezing him out of the company? Or that fellow Harvard alums Sanjay Mavinkurve, Joe Jackson, and Victor Gao also did programming for ConnectU — and thereby might have a claim to the title of wannabe Facebook founders? Aaron Greenspan, whose HouseSystem social network may have inspired Zuckerberg, also makes an appearance. Zuckerberg didn't speak to the magazine for the story, but his response to Harvard's Administrative Board still rings true today.
Harvard's Pennypacker Freshman Dorm is undergoing a scabies epidemic! Scabies—you might know it better as "mange"—is when tiny tick-like critters embed themselves in your skin and lay eggs and give you a terrible rash that you can easily spread to your friends and neighbors by, say, "sharing a bed." This weekend the disgusting little mites were found nesting in three students, so the administration rounded up all the hall's residents and handed out topical cream and demanded they shower for once. Of course there will still be weeks of itching and infestation, even after the treatment, but on the plus side the health office is maybe doing everyone's laundry for free.
In recent Harvard graduates Greg Atwan and Evan Lushing's The Facebook Book, a chronicle of "the Facebook Generation" which sold last week to Abrams for around $50K, there should be an entire chapter about Harvard couple Daniel Hass and his lucky girlfriend Aleksandra Kuczmarska. Except there shouldn't be, because that book should not exist. Anyway, Daniel, like Modern Bride of the Year Heather Warnken before him, thinks the Internet should pay for his romantic fantasies.
This ad has already been deemed too douchey for Craigslist, but it is still apparently making the rounds at Harvard, from whence it (supposedly) emanated. "My final club has a reunion this fall, and my relationship of two years ended disastrously earlier this summer. I have an invitation for myself plus one, and am willing to show you a great time. It is a private party, in an extremely classy setting. There is no real way to describe how ornate the club is, but I guarantee that it will be the most upscale experience of your life." Oh, sign us up! But not so fast. This gentleman has some pretty stringent requirements.
Stanford has hopped aboard the Facebook application bandwagon with a new class: noted developer BJ Fogg and Facebook fanboy Dave McClure (who may not be employed by for Facebook but is awfully busy flacking the company) will be teaching "Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook." Although offered through the computer science department, the course appears more geared to business students. Pupils will be graded based on the number of users they can garner rather than quality of code, and there will be an event at the end of the course to pitch the applications to investors. Is it any surprise Facebook moved to the west coast and that Stanford leads Harvard in incubating technology companies? As VentureBeat notes, while Stanford jumps on the latest tech fad and offers students a chance to strike it rich, Harvard ironically had admonished Facebook's creator Mark Zuckerberg and shut down a precursor to the popular Facebook for privacy violations and political correctness concerns while he was a student.
Both a recent Page Six item and the Times' piece on the Hampton Classic horse show yesterday made heavy mention of CNN ranter Lou Dobb's daughter, Hillary, and her enrollment in a little school in Boston which was founded in 1636. As per Page Six, after winning $12,900 in prize money at the Classic (the girl loves to ride stallions!), Daddy Dobbs had something to say!
Harvard reject David Remnick clearly has no beef with that university, because this week's New Yorker is chock-full of Harvard kids! Of course there's '07 Simon "son of Frank" Rich's Shouts 'n' Murmurs. There's also Louisa Thomas (Harvard 04!), who's the daughter of Newsweek's Evan Thomas (he's Harvard '70-something!)—she just completed a stint as Remnick's assistant, and got a Talk of the Town published this week. But there's more! Zach Kanin, has a cartoon this week—he's on staff now, and he was president of the Harvard Lampoon the year before Simon Rich was. That's so neato.
If you're a "confident, witty writer and hard-nosed researcher" who hasn't yet firmed up your summer unpaid career advancement plans, take heart! "One part-time editorial internship is still available this summer at 02138, the new independent magazine for Harvard alumni," per their ad on Craigslist. But lest you think it'll be all confident, witty fluff pieces (like, say, profiling alumni-on-alumna Loves), 02138 wants to make sure you're aware that "while the magazine does not shy away from gossip and guilty pleasures, the heart of 02138 is stringently executed investigative journalism." Like the Spring issue's piece on the Harvard Hubris Hall of Fame, which details alumni downfalls (remember that Kaayva thing?) The full ad follows, in case your nose is feeling hard (up) enough to consider applying.
"I found The Sex Diaries thoroughly entertaining, but I was disappointed by your omission of a critical Manhattan dweller: the college student," writes Lena Chen to, and in, New York mag. "My friends and I were inspired to take a page from your book and start weeklong diaries of our own. After seven days of awkward dates, booty texts, and drunken hookups, we came to a conclusion: Harvard students are getting more play than New Yorkers." Well, sure, we'll buy that. What's a more powerful aphrodisiac than not having gotten any in high school? But Lena neglects to mention a crucial detail in her letter: she writes Sex and the Ivy, a sex blog full of insights like "Is it any wonder that of the guys I have hooked up with, the overwhelming majority are from this year's graduating class? It's not as if two-year's difference means terribly much but the difference, however minute, is enough." What's the real purpose of the letter, then? Perhaps Lena, though she's only a sophomore, is already spreading the word about where she'll be spreading her postgrad legs. Watch your back, Julia Allison!
April 23, 2007: "Business leader Bruce Wasserstein is this year's recipient of the Great Negotiator Award given by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School."
Harvard alums Simon Rich, Bridie Clark and Keith Gessen sat down with the Crimson recently to talk about their lives as literary figures making a living in the harsh marketplace that is life after Harvard. As the interviewer puts it: "You all write in very different styles. Simon, you chose humor, Bridie, chick lit, and Keith, well, I guess you're more of an intellectual voice." I guess! But all is not fun and games in the life of an intellectual voice. Keith, who is the most doable of the editors of n+1, which is the most important literary journal of our time, warns Simon "Frank Rich's son" Rich about the horrors of the criticism and conversation. "Wait 'til Gawker gets its filthy mitts on you," he says. "It's just strange, you know we live in a time when people can say whatever they want about you on the Internet and take no responsibility for it." Okay, Mr. Lit Theory, let's unpack that!
Award-winning novelist and memoirist Jamaica Kincaid, who couldn't countenance working for a New Yorker that had anything to do with Roseanne Barr, is now in a better place: visiting professor at Harvard. But what sort of undergrad does she hang with? According to our English Department sources up in Cambridge (don't laugh), Kincaid, author of Lucy and A Small Place, has agreed to spend the next academic year advising the senior thesis of Kaavya Viswanathan, non-author of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. For the benefit of whatever Harvard disciplinary committee overlooks creative-writing theses, let's get the obvious festivities started:
Let the Times have their Vows and the Post their... well, whatever they want to call it! Another publication has quietly muscled into the weddings announcement game—and the barrier to entry is much higher than either of those two rags. We're talking, of course, about 02138 magazine's online Loves column, which sporadically highlights a Harvard alum's nuptial bliss. Take Katherine Dowling, J.D. '98, and Marc Axelbaum's wedding in the Blue Ridge mountains. It's all so urban haute-bourgeois you could just die.
You know what's handy when going to work as an editor on the media beat at the New York Times? Having been pals in college with "future media stars" like Jeff Zucker! Oh, also, that college would be called "Harvard," a place that goes unnamed in today's in-house announcement of Jennifer Kingson's appointment as deputy media editor in the Biz section. Lil' Jeffy Zucker, now Prez and CEO of NBC, was back then the editor of the school paper, the Crimson, natch. Speaking of! We hear today's Harvard kids up at the Crimson just hired themselves an ombudsman! Hope they enjoy that.
In a shocking rejection of a centuries-old Masonic agreement, a woman is expected to be named president of Harvard this weekend, according to the Harvard Crimson. Drew Gilpin Faust will likely be the first woman to run Harvard, which is now surely sending shock waves through Harvard's eight privately-owned men-only finals clubs, those musty hang-outs where the dullest and richest gather to paddle each other. Harvard currently has an endowment of $26 billion, second in non-profit endowments only to Bill and Melinda Gates' foundation. That's enough money to pay the yearly tuition for 858,794 students—more than 500 years of freshmen. (And, apparently, freshwomen!)
