This stuff.

Obama’s problem with trickle-down economics is that “it doesn’t work.” (USA Today)

Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo and lawmakers have agreed to let the “millionaire tax cuts” expire, reducing the budget shortfall to $1.5 billion. (NYT)

But, the problems for the 1% don’t end there. Sometimes, it’s tough to realize that she’s just not that into you until after sending that 1,615 word email. (Observer)

Steve Hartshorne, friend of the accused St. A’s former Alumni President Walter Perry, fires back against the allegations. (GoNOMAD)

Kubrick’s photography from his teenage years of New York (including shots of Columbia and then-university President Eisenhower) has been released, set to be auctioned off in the near future. (HuffPo)

Graph via Wikimedia Commons

Looks like fun, don't it?

The only man to hold a degree in enigmatology (study of puzzles) makes sure you have a new puzzle in the New York Times every day. (The Atlantic)

Joan Snitzer, a Barnard art prof, opened up a new art exhibition. It contains jigsaw boxes, and is itself is a puzzle. (Spectator)

The high school class of ’11 seem to have been more than usually puzzled by their SATs—the scores in all three categories fell, and reading and writing hit an all time low. Maybe they should go to school a little more often. (WSJ, NYT)

Obama has been more than a little puzzled about how to fix our floundering economy, and he’s starting to get a little pissed that no one will listen to him. (Reuters)

Puzzle: Where in Manhattan can you find room for 600 bicycle rental stations and 10,000 bikes? Answer: A new city-wide bikeshare, coming this summer. (NYT)

And maybe it’s a good thing that your mom plays Bejeweled all the time on her outdated flip phone. The gemstone puzzle game may be the reason she always remembers when you forget to call. (Popcap)

Good use of a rainy day from Wikimedia Commons

It's not Halloween yet, you say? Then how do you explain this grab bag of political updates...?

• Obama’s new (angsty!) video encourages us to “get the facts.” We’re feeling a back-of-the-envelope calculation coming on… [NYMag]
• The New York Post and Fox have dusted off their anti-Columbia headlines from 2007, after learning that the Columbia International Relations Council and Association was invited to dinner with the Iranian president. No word yet on whether the invitation was reciprocated with a John Jay guest pass. [NYPost, Fox]
• Republican Rep. Bob Turner is the new representative for New York’s 9th Congressional district (in Queens), last represented by Democrat Anthony Weiner. Meanwhile, former Harvard professor Elizabeth Warren announced she’ll run for Senate in Massachusetts. [NYT, Atlantic Wire]
• Even Weezy (<3) is weighing in on the conversation, with comments about Republican primary race. [Vibe]

Clever costume ideas via Wikimedia Commons.

Halcyon days.

In the last 48 hours, the US has received a specific, credible, but unconfirmed threat of a terror attack this Sunday, on the 9/11 anniversary. Moreover, a survey by the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia revealed that Americans have a false sense of security, and that in the event of a disaster, more than half of families have no emergency plan. (WSJ)

CAVA reflects on their reactions to September 11, 2001. (Spec)

Obama urged legislators last night to pass a new stimulus designed for job-creation specifically through cuts in public salaries and tax breaks and hiring holiydays for small businesses. Here’s to ya, 2011! (NYTimes)

Continuing their enduring quest to own everything—ever—Google has unexpectedly purchased Zagat, those little red things you used to read reviews in. (Dealbook)

A USDA study has reported that 2.5 million New Yorkers cannot afford enough food at some point in the year. So seriously, guys, John Jay isn’t that bad. (Gothamist)

Image from Flickr/ZagatBuzz

Biggest news of the week?

The end of Girl Scout cookie season always comes too soon. This is your last week to stock up Samoas. (Village Voice)

It’s also Bird Week! Naturally, elegant photos of our avian affiliates flood the NYC blogosphere. Keep a lookout for our own nearest and dearest. (City Room)

Is PR beating out newsrooms? This is one of ProPublica’s best stories of the week, which they kindly shared with Columbia Journalism Review. (ProPublica, CJR).

Best thing this Grenadian immigrant’s heard all week is that he’s actually been a citizen for ten years. (NYDaily News)

This week in assassinations: how Obama kept the bin Laden operation secret. PrezOb is planning on visiting Ground Zero on Thursday. (Slate, Daily Intel)

Prince Charles is planning on meeting with Obama in Washington today. Any chance the world will be over the Royal Wedding by the end of the week? Unfortunately, probably not. (CNN, The Daily Beast)

The launch of the space shuttle Endeavour has been pushed to next week, at the earliest. (PC)

In Bwog’s opinion, the second best Girl Scout cookie via Wikimedia

Cheers to a fairly successful effort to get Obama on campus, in some capacity. Though smaller in scope than some endeavors, ESC 2014 t-shirts do at least get the job done. Silly engineers, Obama went to the College! OR DID HE…?

On an unrelated note, here is a picture of Obama as a pirate. Adorbs.

Fox-worthy newsflash: Obama is actually an African pirate.

Photo by Jennifer Silvestre

Follow President Obama's lead

You are invited to watch the State of the Union Address with CPU, the “only non-partisan group on campus,” and eat their free pizza. From them: Loud cheers, snarky comments, and polite applause are all welcome.

Stop by tonight from 9:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m at the Lerner Piano Lounge.

A good chunk of the Columbia JSchool faculty has signed a letter to Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder claiming that the recent publication of diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is “protected by the First Amendment.” The faculty looks back a few decades and points out that “as a historical matter, government overreaction to publication of leaked material in the press has always been more damaging to American democracy than the leaks themselves.” Letter after the jump. Read more…

Columbia all-star Professor Jeffrey Sachs tells us why we should make the “conscious pursuit of happiness the Ninth Millennium Goal.” The key, he argues, is equilibrium. (NYT)

House votes 333-79 to censure Harlem Rep. Charles Rangel for numerous ethics violations. (HuffPo)

The U.S. unemployment rate rises to 9.8%. (Bloomberg)

Creepy Disney town Celebration, FL sees its first homicide. (Gawker)

Obama celebrates Hanukkah with Michael Oren, CC ’77, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, LAW ’59, and Elena Kagan. (LA Times)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Open (read: gender-neutral) housing at CU–it could happen! (Spec)

This is a bed bug.

Columbia Professor Marc Lamont Hill is suing a Philadelphia police officer in a civil rights lawsuit. Though the police have yet to comment, Bwog suspects that, like Bill O’Reilly, the police officer may have thought Professor Hill looked a bit like a cocaine dealer. (ABC News)

The bed bugs’ newest target? The Met Opera House. Is nothing sacred anymore?! (Gothamist)

Some people never learn. A man botches a bank robbery one day after finishing a 22-year sentence in federal prison. (Gawker)

Young voters giver President Obama a piece of their mind. (NYPost)

Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The leader himself

A former Columbia biology Ph.D. candidate’s lawsuit against the city for wrongful prosecution has been thrown out. He had previously been charged with the kidnapping and rape of a Barnard student. (WSJ)

Columbia’s history program ranks first in a tricky-to-follow ranking of Ph.D. programs by the National Research Council. (Inside Higher Ed)

Gothamist loves Batenawi (But then who doesn’t?).

Mayor Mike is proposing a $1.5 billion plan to reduce sewage flow into the city’s sewer systems. The pro-sewage-in-the-streets lobby has yet to respond. (NYT)

Monday was Family Day, as proclaimed by the consistent research-producing National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University, and by President Barack Obama. Did you know where your family was? (CASA, WhiteHouse.gov)

THE KITCHEN WHERE OBAMA ATE FOOD!!!! Photo via citi-habitats.com

In need of summer housing? Re-thinking that Schapiro walk-through? Rent Obama’s former apartment on 109th between Amsterdam and Columbus. Yessiree: Apartment 3E in 142 West 109th Street is available, and will cost you $1,900 a month, a pretty steep increase from our Commander in Chief’s 1981 rent: $360. Gentrification is a thing!

As David Remnick reported (and told Bwog!) in his recent Obama biography, The Bridge: “the apartment’s charms included spotty heat, irregular hot water, and a railroad-flat layout. They adjusted, using the showers at the Columbia gym and camping out for long hours in Butler library.” Citi-Habitats, which has the listing, describes the apartment a little differently: “PRESIDENT OBAMA LIVED HERE AND YOU CAN TOO !!!Central Park ! Yes just few steps from central Park is this great two bedrooms for only $1900. The unit features hardwood floors,exposed brick, nice bathroom, high ceilings, big windows.”

Peruse pictures and video of the apartment, and call Dalila Bella, the luckiest broker in Manhattan this week, for a tour.

Photo via wikimedia

This Wednesday, SIPA and the J-school invited authors of Game Change John Heilemann and Mark Halperin to discuss their book about the 2008 presidential campaign in light of the upcoming election season. Bwog’s Political Lit Bureau Chief Rebecca Newman reports.

To Heilemann and Halperin, Game Change is and always has been about the characters. The two authors wanted to write a book about the presidential campaign’s drama and significance, but books that cover strategy and a timeline of events are rarely a commercially viable enterprise – especially in an election so thoroughly covered by the media. So instead, they decided to create a narrative work that reads like a novel, but whose drama, twists and turns, and relationships are all real, and revolve around the main contenders for the position of 44^th President of the United States.

There was one rule Heilemann and Halperin stuck to when writing Game Change: “If it’s not interesting, it’s not going into the book.” This wasn’t very hard to do. Heilemann describes the effect that a presidential election has on the relationships between the people involved as similar to a “meat grinder/flash incinerator.” The two journalists took testimonials from over 200 people who shared stories from the campaign trail, covering the hidden drama, the character flaws and the real egos seen after the cameras stopped rolling.

Read more…

Photo via amazon.com

The Bridge, New Yorker Editor David Remnick‘s much-anticipated, 672-page biography on our favorite reluctant alum, Barack Obama, hit stores today. Bwog chatted with Remnick this afternoon about Obama’s years in Morningside. His takeaway: “I think his Columbia years were decisive. In fact, he says so himself at one point: it is the place where he got serious about himself and the world. He led a fairly solitary life in a range of not-great apartments. Not many people remember him because of that…”

Beyond his 2005 interview with Columbia College Today, and his 1983 student magazine article, The Bridge includes a fair amount of previously untold information about Obama’s time at Columbia. Here’s what we learned:

• According to Phil Boerner, Obama’s roommate, friend and fellow transfer, Obama transferred from Occidental to CU because: “we [Boerner and Obama] felt like we were in a groove and we wanted life to be more difficult…Obama used to tell his friends that he wanted to go somewhere where the weather was cold and miserable so that he would be forced to spend his days indoors reading.”
• Obama took a a course on modern fiction with the late fabled Edward Said. He was underwhelmed. Remnick writes, “And yet Said’s theoretical approach left Obama cold. ‘My whole thing, and Barack had a similar view, was that we would rather read Shakespeare’s plays than the criticism,’ Boerner said. ‘Said was more interested in the literary theory, which didn’t appeal to Barack or me.’ Obama referred to Said as a ‘flake.’”
• “In his spare time,” Remnick relates, “Obama wandered around the city, taking in Sunday services at Abyssinian Baptist Church, a socialist conference at Cooper Union, African cultural affairs in Brooklyn and Harlem, jazz at the West End. He took long walks and runs in Riverside Park and Central Park. He shopped at the Strand downtown and Papyrus and the other bookstores around the Columbia campus.”
• Obama lived at 142 West 109th and Amsterdam with Boerner. Their monthly rent was $360. Remnick writes that, “the apartment’s charms included spotty heat, irregular hot water, and a railroad-flat layout. They adjusted, using the showers at the Columbia gym and camping out for long hours in Butler library.” Um, POTUS…they’re just like us!
• Obama “…I will tell you that I think I had a hunger to shape the world in some way, to make the world a better place, that was triggered around the time I transferred from Occidental to Columbia…And so there’s this period of time where I move to New York and go to Columbia, where I pull in and wrestle with that stuff, and do a lot of writing and a lot of reading and a lot of thinking and a lot of walking through Central Park. And somehow I emerge on the other side of that ready and eager to take a chance in what is a pretty unlikely venture: moving to Chicago and becoming an organizer. So I would say that’s a moment in which I gain a seriousness of purpose that I had lacked before…” So, what’s up class day speaker 2011?

Photo via Wikipedia

While much of the hubbub in Washington in recent days has centered on the passage of the healthcare bill, students have yet another reason to celebrate: the passage of a bill set to thoroughly reform the student loan system. The Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act will, in effect, remove the middleman from the student loan process. Basically, students will take out loans directly from the government, not large banks and lenders like Sallie Mae. It’s all in more detail here. Suffice it to say that President Obama is “pretty stoked.”*

*Not a direct quote.

What does this mean for Columbia students? Glad you asked! In an email sent yesterday, Dean of Financial Aid Daniel Barkowitz laid out the details:

This morning, President Obama signed a reconciliation bill that significantly reforms the processing of federal loans and grants for students. In light of this legislation, Columbia University will transition to the Federal Direct Student Loan Program beginning with the 2010-2011 academic year. Read more…