Are you aware that rats "big enough to put saddles on" are currently streaming out of Harvard University's secret underground science experiment cave, in record numbers? We thought you should know.
Well, Barack Obama does. And Tim Geithner. But no one else. Not one other person on god's green earth likes Lawrence H. Summers. Which is why all the Summers income documents were dumped on Friday.
According to financially troubled magazine US News & World Report, the best college in the world is financially troubled Harvard, whose endowment has "suffered investment losses of at least 22% in the first four months of the school's fiscal year," according to the Wall Street Journal. Turns out all those colleges investing in real estate and private equity and commodities was only a brilliant idea for like ten years. This is a loss of $8 billion! So now the endowment is only like $29 billion. Is the Ivy League too big to fail?
Hey Ivy League students, did you think that the walls of the Ivory Tower would shelter you from this global financial crisis? Figured you'd be able to continue pulling in your financial aid and frolicking in your school's brand new buildings full of fancy professors who teach one class per year and spend the rest of the time writing little-read books? Think again! Because it looks like even the mighty Harvard is losing billions in the current market downturn. More billions than you might expect:
Two whole years have hurried their way by since last we saw "scandalous" images of Rose Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy and granddaughter of John Fitzgerald. Back in 2006, our former sister site Wonkette posted wine 'n hookah partaking photos of the then-18, Obama-supporting Harvard student (hello, past Pareene!) Now, in the still of the afternoon, someone has sent us more photos, from sources unknown! In which the heiress to the great mantle of the American Democratic Party gets jiggy in various poses! Some are dated from two years ago, others are not dated at all. Cobble together your own timeline, as we've gone against Luke Russert's wishes and posted a gallery after the jump.
A Harvard degree seems practically required at Facebook these days; founder Mark Zuckerberg never finished his, but COO Sheryl Sandberg and top flack Elliot Schrage have theirs. Newly hired general counsel Ted Ullyot, the veteran of several legal scandals while serving in the Bush Administration, has one, too. But we noticed something curious: Reports of his hire at Facebook had him graduating Harvard in 1989. Past employers, like Time Warner and Kirkland & Ellis say he graduated in 1990. I called up Harvard's news office and asked which one it was. It's complicated.Ullyot was a "member of the class of 1989," a Harvard employee told me, but he did not get his degree until 1990. He graduated magna cum laude, but the delay seems curious. Especially since Ullyot's dad, James Ullyot, is a prominent Harvard graduate himself, and is now president of the Harvard Alumni Association. Harvard, like all Ivy League colleges, strives to make room for influential graduates' children. Even more curious: Ullyot was two classes behind Sandberg, who graduated — on time, as best we can tell — in 1991. But Sandberg's husband, former Yahoo executive Dave Goldberg, was in the class of '89 with Ullyot. Could that be the connection that landed him the job? If so, just more proof that Harvard connections pay off.
Everyone's forgetting to pay their taxes these days—from gay club Mr. Black to every celeb (especially Wesley Snipes) to private men-only Harvard clubs. Don't they know that you can conveniently pay your taxes online? It's easy! Notice a pattern here: it's men who are bad at paying their taxes. [Crimson]
A week after suspicion arose that Emma Watson is plotting a European jailbreak for four years of college in the States, the Harry Potter co-star was spotted touring Harvard on Wednesday. True to its celeb news mission, the Harvard Crimson today passed along all the specifics about young Hermione's Cambridge sojourn, right down to the architectural flourishes that generations of university officials had been preparing for her visit since 1874:
Ray Soifer, a top-rated banking analyst based in Arizona, has an explanation for the crisis gripping the stock market: Blame Harvard! Soifer has long studied the proportion of Harvard MBAs who pursue careers in finance; when more than 3 in 10 head for Wall Street, it's time for investors to sell, he says. The implication: Harvard MBAs, in aggregate, subtract value. Alas, his study comes out once a year, so it's no use to short-term investors. But we'd love to know what Soifer would find if he studied the correlation of Harvard MBAs heading to the Valley with venture-capital returns. The results would be edifying — especially for investors in Facebook, whose Harvard dropout CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, is currently guided by COO Sheryl Sandberg, Harvard Business School '95. (Photo by Harvard Business School)
ConnectU cofounders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss lost control of ConnectU, their also-ran social network, in the settlement of a lawsuit with Facebook CEO mark Zuckerberg. And they finished last in their Olympic rowing final. But they just got some good news! A short film the pair executive-produced (read: paid for) has won a slot at the New York City Shorts Festival. First Bass, a treacly story directed by fellow Harvard grad Phil Hodges, features a young bassist who ditches rehearsal to run off to a Chicago Cubs game. It looks like a typical "calling-card film," the kind of flicks Hollywood wannabes produce to get a foot in the door to the entertainment industry. The five- to six-figure budgets are usually funded by wealthy family and friends. The best part is this little tidbit from Tyler's bio:
Hey there, proud parents of exceptional teens, you can end your search for a learning experience that does justice to your child's special gifts RIGHT NOW because the new US News & World Report is up on the internet and they've found the place: Harvard University! And just how did the trusty trustees of Cambridge manage to nab the top spot away from Her RoyalHighness Academy Princeton* — on that shoestring endowment of theirs? The answer will enliven your loamy loins!By reducing average class size! Now a full 3/4 of Harvard undergraduate classes have fewer than 20 students. And you know what that means: more classes taught in intimate settings by younger instructors no doubt hungrier for brain sex. (I have anecdotal evidence of this, even. Earlier this year I met a young aspiring journalist from Harvard named Lena Chen, and she was traveling [to Julia Allison's house, in fact!] with an ex-teaching assistant in tow. I am pretty sure they were having traditional non-brain sex!) Now that you know that here is some information: it is the 25th anniversary of the journalism world's most pointlessly controversial listicle and still I am pretty sure Gawker has done the only actually funny (and crowdsourced) alternative ranking. Internet people, please put rub your A+ school for B student educated brains together and think us up a new concept. Unsafest Safety Schools? Fairly ridiculous names? *Ahem, Princeton would like you to know they still hold the top spot in several categories of the Princeton Review and also are beloved by Black Enterprise magazine despite that angry thesis penned by that alumni association Judas Michelle Obama. Vote For America's Most Annoying Liberal Arts College College & University Rankings Library Eating And Shopping In Cambridge [WWD] Campus Squirrel Listings
Yesterday some kid named "Stephany" born in the nineties wrote a Facebook message to fellow members of Princeton Class of 2012, and now we have her picture. (There's another after the jump!) Inspired by its imagery (ripped condoms! bloody lips!) but also by its flawed underlying assumption that anyone gives a shit where you went to college, we crafted our own letter, to all the young people who ever went to college, as part of what we plan to make a regular feature, Tough Love. Dear Young Folks, you know that saying "We don't care about the young folks?" Of course you do, you're young! But it's not really true. I care deeply about Kids Today, especially since it has started to come to my realization that everyone in Generation X hates you! I mean, even if we actually love you, we hate your blog, that you pretend you know everything even as it so rarely seems to occur to you that there is stuff you can't learn on Google, that you have so much misplaced self-confidence, and that when something makes you insecure we get the sense it is the first time you ever felt insecure about that thing and that makes us feel old.
Relaunching your niche magazine in this miserable market and dismal culture? Get legendary designer George Lois on board! He cannibalized his old Esquire work for Radar, and now he's lending his talents to pretend Harvard Alum mag 02138 (can't believe we got the name of the mag right on the first try, sigh). If it wasn't late Friday afternoon we'd mock up a funny photoshop here. But now YOU CAN'T MAKE US. Anyway Lois is still awesome and cantankerous so it will probably be good, unlike the rest of that miserable magazine. The relaunch cover story? "The Harvard 100, the magazines annual ranking of the top 100 living alumni. " [NYP]
Once in a rare while, an item comes along that embodies the entire cultural zeitgeist of a particular time and place. Ladies and gentlemen of the creative underclass, we have just such an item in our hands today. And it's up for sale to YOU, the public! The players in this strange saga: Harvard-educated literary it-boy and haughty heartbreaker Keith Gessen; Gawker, sworn enemy of literary culture and pimp of kittens; and a copy of Gessen's poorly reviewed but terribly important book, All The Sad Young Literary Men, with a very special twist. Here's the entire story of how this item came to be, and how you can-and must-buy it, in order to win the culture war and house the homeless:
You'll recall Harvard junior Lena Chen as one of our official compulsive oversharers. She's a sex blogger whose ex leaked naked pictures of her once. Now, in addition to the sex blog, she's got a more personal blog intended to correct the fact that Chen is "famous on the internet for all the wrong things." This makes it the perfect venue for pictures of... well, I'll just say it: of Chen right after getting "a facial." Demerits to Chen for posting the photo to the wrong blog, thus making it horribly oversharey. But points to the protocelebrity for the following: Releasing the sex pic herself so it can't be used against her; writing a brief caption that frames the picture as both more feminist and kinky than it appears; chipping away at the shame around a taboo sex act (end facial oppression!) and, most importantly, putting the fear of obsolescence into Julia Allison, the former Georgetown sex columnist now pulling down six figures as a Star editor at large. [Chicktionary]
The author of Bringing Down The House has signed a million-dollar-plus book deal for his memoir about Mark Zuckerberg and the other Facebook founders, according to a tip to Gawker. In the proposal, author Ben Mezrich claims that Zuckerberg and his friend Eduardo Saverin started Facebook to get into a secret society and, of course, to get laid. The book may not be the most rigorously factual account, as Mezrich's Bringing Down The House (the basis for the Kevin Spacey film 21) was debunked by the Boston Globe as "not a work of 'nonfiction' in any meaningful sense of the word." Also, our tipster claims Mezrich's only source was Saverin, whom Zuckerberg is now suing. Here are the juiciest (and previously unreported) details from the proposal.
For some reason we thought 02138—the annoyingly named pretend Harvard alumni magazine that proclaimed itself Vanity Fair for people who went to Harvard and wished to read a second, inferior Vanity Fair each month—had already been shuttered by Atlantic Media. Well, it's alive. Tiny, unknown Manhattan Media (they own the New York Press and some things you've never heard of) bought the magazine from Atlantic Media for an undisclosed price. The publisher will remain cofounder Bom Kim (for now), but Manhattan Media has decided to expand the brand into—wait for it—social networking. Then they will introduce new versions of the magazine for every other Ivy League school, because if there's a group of people who don't have enough media outlets to write for, it's Ivy grads. Amusingly, the Manhattan Media press release announcing the deal leaves out their only existing holding anyone remembers reading: the embarrassing second-string alt-weekly New York Press. That release after the jump, along with a selection from this week's Press "guest sex columnist." [NYT]
Former Dartmouth lecturer Priya Venkatesan, the woman who threatened to sue her students for being mean to her and not caring about post-modernism, is now a research associate at Northwestern. She'll definitely end up with plenty of material for her forthcoming book at NU, especially because the blog College On the Record has already published her email address and invited students to harass her. Venkatesan declined to speak with the Wall Street Journal when they wrote that terrible op-ed about the situation, saying she'd said all she needed to say to The Dartmouth Review (and boy, did she). And today, the Harvard Crimson weighed in!
