"College students today enter a low hook-up culture when they leave the classroom," warns Harvard professor Harvey Mansfield in his WSJ review of the newest overwrought book about college kids fucking. "In case you don't know, a hook-up is a brief sexual encounter between two partners who don't necessarily know each other before and who don't necessarily want to know each other after." Sounds costly. "And it's free." Well, that's a bonus! "The sort of transient sex that once was available to men only for money can now be had, without paying, from college women - as long as the man is a fellow student and minimally artful about his approach." Good lord, is that new? I don't remember that. "If he is thwarted in one overture, he may try another with a reasonable prospect of success." That, sadly, is just the intro paragraph.

"The storied Ivy League institution—where the Pulitzer-winning author received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering —has purchased a treasure trove of books, papers and letters relating to Mailer from his longtime mistress, Carole Mallory, including X-rated descriptions of their red-hot bedroom sessions. 'There's a 20-page sex scene from an unpublished memoir I wrote called Making Love With Norman,' Mallory told Page Six. 'It's very steamy. Norman was a real man and he knew what he was doing.'" [Page Six]

In this excerpt from Harvard alumnus Aaron Greenspan's book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era, Greenspan gives an example of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg copying a feature idea from Greenspan's own Harvard project, HouseSystem.

Aaron Greenspan's Authoritas, a self-published history of his time at Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg, is full of passages the Facebook founder would rather you not read. In this excerpt, Greenspan recounts the moment when, as a member of Harvard's Student Entrepreneurship Council and creator of the
HouseSystem Face Book, he met a supersecretive wantrepreneur named Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook lawyers want to bar Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard chum of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, from marketing his new book, Authoritas: One Student's Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era. Their rationale: It uses the company's trademarked name improperly in the title. But their real goal is surely quashing Greenspan's story. In this excerpt from Greenspan's tell-all, the author argues that Zuckerberg stole the name Facebook from Greenspan's creation, HouseSystem.

Facebook Chat launched in beta earlier this week, available first to students at Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT— schools known for their brilliant graduates who go out and change the world. Or at least make a lot of money. Or write nasty things about the people who do. Also: Harvard, Stanford, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT were the first schools to make Facebook popular, having been the first networks allowed access Mark Zuckerberg's creation. So we have that to thank them for too. Harvard's Alexander Konrad begins to earn our forgiveness, panning the new feature in the Crimson.

Earlier this week, a mysterious figure known only as "Commander McBragg" sent us a thrilling true account of the day Hillary Clinton's heroism saved his life. Today, a seedier tale of the underbelly of Harvard Law.

I remember back at Harvard Law in 1990 where Barack and I were putting the finishing touches on the latest Law Review up on the shabby-but-venerable second floor of Gannett House. Back in those days, you didn't need to shiver outside to have a cigarette and I could see the thin tendrils of smoke curl up around his face as he took another drag. Normally, he'd just go back to his spotless little basement apartment in Somerville after we closed up and I'd go back to my hellhole. I couldn't understand how he found the time to keep his damn place so clean. Anyway, the Review was in the can for the month, and I felt like celebrating. I pulled the little baggie from the coin pocket of my Levi's, undid the twisty-tie, and shook out enough for a couple of rails. I never touched the stuff while working, but after the day was done anything goes, especially after we'd just put the Review to bed.

The Harvard Lampoon's soon-to-be-released April parody issue (click to enlarge) features none other than Harvard Lampoon Woman of the Year Paris Hilton! Not as good as the 1972 Cosmo parody, but still decent. When will those overeducated scamps stop with the humor and get down to business? [Faded Youth Blog]

So last night we ran an email from an anonymous correspondent who was outraged because Harvard is not admitting any transfer students, including her, for two years. The sad thing put in "hard work, blood, sweat and tears," including filling out eight applications, and was still facing a shameful life at a lesser Ivy, or perhaps (horror!) outside the League entirely. Her email was filled with palpable outrage and Gawker commenters felt her pain, though probably not in the way she intended. Now the would-be transfer has written in to say she has "worked hard throughout my life," including working a full-time job to pay her way through school. Then she said something about "the lifestyle seems to have its perks," which all of a sudden makes her seem less sympathetic again and maybe rich? Anyway, she was a reasonably good sport about the whole thing in the email, which we've reprinted after the jump.

Imagine you're an aspiring plutocrat, attending a top college that is, shamefully, not Harvard. Horrified at the thought of being second-tier aristocracy for the rest of your life - Brown? Penn? Seriously? - you work as hard as you've ever worked in your pampered life to try to transfer in to the to that most crimson of Ivy League schools. You write eight admissions essays and mummy and daddy even finance a "leave of absence" from school so you don't earn too many credits and lose your transfer eligibility. Then you find out that, horror of horrors, Harvard won't be taking you or any other social climbers for another two years, i.e. the rest of your college career. Ha ha, the whole nation would laugh at you, and that's what's happening now to people like the following sad tipster, who wrote in about her "hard work, blood, sweat and tears," as though she were a field worker or Iraq veteran or something:

Harvard University had data on 10,000 graduate-school applicants stolen from a hacked server and posted on BitTorrent. 6,600 students had their birthdates, Social Security numbers, addresses, phone numbers and more released. Don't worry, though. The university is paying for identity theft protection for all affected students. "Protecting personal information is something Harvard takes seriously, and we are truly sorry for the inconvenience and concern this incident may cause." Not serious enough to keep from getting hacked, though. Whatever. The University of Chicago would never let this crap happen. Even better? The file was posted on The Pirate Bay in February. What took you so long to make a statement, guv'nors?

The Times' "Editorial Notebook" section is the box on its Op-Ed page that invariably contains a pointless, grating rumination about life on the farm in Connecticut or something equally inapplicable to NYC life, written by someone who should be unemployed but is, instead, rich and a member of the Times editorial board. Today the section offers the opinions of a Harvard man. Kudos to the Times for luring an Ivy Leaguer into the dirty, ink-stained corridors of journalism! So what important topic is Philip M. Boffey, '58, so eager to explain to the nation? Harvard, of course!

Um, after 9/11 things got so completely awkward with Muslims. I mean, I'm not racist or anything like that at all. I love all religions. And if I saw a creepy Muslim on a plane and he kept going to the bathroom and praying, I would never even think "terrorist." God, I hope not. And by God, I'm not referring to any Judeo-Christian conception of an omniscient being, more like a general higher power that may or may not exist in possibly multiple forms. So, I'm totally with Harvard for banning men from their gym six times a week to accommodate female Muslims whose religion forbids them from exercising in front of the opposite sex. This country is all about making special adjustments to minority interest groups, not demanding that they adjust to our liberal status quo. And that's what makes me so proud to be an American. [Boston Herald]

Freakishly boyish FCC chairman Kevin Martin isn't exactly denying our earlier report that his commission was considering a "do-over" hearing on net neutrality. The first hearing, held at Harvard, dealt with regulations on what Internet service providers can do to privilege some kinds of Net traffic over others. It was marred by a seat-packing scandal: Comcast paid people to hold spots in line for Comcast employees who never showed up. A FCC representative gave News.com this unhelpful quote on the subject of a new hearing, which we've heard could be held at Stanford:

The FCC is considering holding a fresh hearing on net neutrality, with Comcast and Verizon again in attendance — and this time it may be at Stanford. The do-over comes after a mini-scandal erupted over the first hearing, held at Harvard; Comcast flacks confessed they'd paid people off the street to act as seatwarmers. Let this be a lesson to you all: If you're going to meddle in politics, do it skillfully enough not to get caught.

Former so-called Harvard Duchess Erica Birmingham sent us an email, in which she displayed remarkably good humor. She also sent, at our request, a non-beer pic! "Saw your post about me and that random (and admittedly bad) picture. I actually had no idea Julia Allison wanted me to come to her birthday party so thanks for letting me know! And, all it cost was some generic insults in a public forum. For the record, I know that article in The Crimson is pretty ridiculous, and I'm not quite the hero of the Gawker class, but I am surprised to generate so many page views." We asked her what she was up to these days, and she gave us an update!

We noticed that Julia Allison somehow dug up an old Crimson profile on Erica Birmingham, alumna/Duchess of Harvard, for whom Ivy life was "an all-pink, Champagne-drenched party of her own invention... She's a character, quite literally. She checks into hotels under the name Rosalind Connage, the debutante from F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'This Side of Paradise.' When she buys clothes online, she has her parcels delivered to "Duchess Erica Birmingham." And, her father is the former President of the Massachusetts Senate! All that and more, according to the article Allison dutifully re-posted to her blog, with the footnote, "ERICA: CONSIDER THIS AN OFFICIAL INVITE TO MY BIRTHDAY PARTY." Cute, but a tipster sent us a pic of young Erica in her heyday. Do you really want this girl at your party? We thought it was supposed to be a classy affair!

Paris Hilton seems to have been truly touched by her Woman of the Year award from the Harvard Lampoon, going to the trouble of writing down a speech, on a piece of paper, in advance, just like a fancy professor. Of course the result was mostly sub-literate nonsense like "an international icon meets countless people every day, and all you people came all these blocks just to see me," but she also said sweet things like "never in my wildest dreams did I imagine standing here." A week before the speech, the Lampoon had already told the Harvard Crimson that they hoped Paris "doesn't... start doing the math" and figure out she was well "down the list" of celebrities, way below Scarlett Johansson and Catherine Zeta Jones. But the joke was on the Lampoon. Find out why and see videos of Paris' very special speeches after the jump.

Editor & Publisher is reporting that Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, has endorsed Barack Obama and John McCain. The press says this is big news, because as everyone knows, Harvard students (and Ivy Leaguers overall) are much much smarter than everyone else. If you were backing the other guy, sadly, you're a moron.

Harvard students start small in experimenting with rapacious, vaguely illegal capitalism: making fake IDs! Listen, you can't blame the kid for trying. In a few years he'll be pulling stunts like this at some hedge fund and it'll all be totally legal, or at least protected by his future employer's kickass lawyers.