The New York Times is collaborating with not us NYU Journalism School on a new news platform, covering the East Village. (Yahoo)

In a bizarre twist to the recruitment video phenomenon, Tufts now offers the option to applicants to submit videos to YouTube as part of their application. (NYT)

A Columbia student on Survivor! (CBS)

The ever-popular History of the City of New York class’s midnight bike ride could be threatened by new biking legislation. (Spec)

PrezBo knows about free speech. (Chronicle)

Image via Simpleology.com

Paterson may have been dumped by the White House, but he’s sticking with it nonetheless (and he’s not backing Bloomberg) (NYT; NY Daily News).

Various Barnard departments are working to carve up the Vag–sorry–the Diana (Spec). 

Park(ing) Day takes over park(ing) spaces for all that’s good and green (Spec). 

NYC might boast the Best Burger Of All Time, but, according to the Guardian, New Haven, CT, is the home of the world’s tastiest pizza.  Suuuure (Gothamist).

-The Uptown Local Team

Columbia’s Ultimate Frisbee (the sport is also called Ultimate) team Uptown Local gained some national cred this past weekend, finishing an impressive fourth in regional competition.

The team‘s meteoric rise began the weekend of April 18th when they surprised the competition in Sectionals. Though the team was the 8th seed out of 15 competitors, they won six straight games, losing to first-place Vassar by only two points. But if you think about it, Ultimate Frisbee must be to hippie Vassar kids what cynicism is to Columbians, so it was an understandable loss. Rebounding from the Vassar game, the Columbia team beat the College of New Jersey, which, as our governor knows, loses because its in New Jersey, to place second. Vassar and Columbia then headed to Regionals, beating out NYU and Princeton, which aside from outdoing Yale, are the best things a Columbia team can do. Read more…

The next Hu Jintao may be on campus right now.

A delegation of China’s top university student body presidents is visiting New York this weekend to wrap up an Ivy Council-sponsored global leadership summit.

Called the All-China Students’ Federation, what makes this group particularly important is its close ties to China’s leadership structure. Members of the ACSF are groomed for top spots in the Chinese Communist Party following graduation, and we mean top spots — both presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are alumni.

The ACSF delegation has spent the past week visiting charming Boston, historic Providence, and regrettable New Haven. They’ve been meeting with other student groups, business leaders, and politicians along the way.

Today, though, they’ll be touring Manhattan, no doubt having airbrushed T-shirts made, grabbing photos with the Naked Cowboy, and hopefully buying a few souvenir Treasury bills.

Two years ago, we at Bwog lost the U.S. News and World Report‘s “Paper Trail” blog’s Best [Campus] Alternative Media Outlet poll to Wesleyan after some crotchety commenters lampooned their granola-eating ways and they retaliated en masse. We lost last year, too.

This year, we have another foe: Yale. That’s right, now you have the chance to reject them.

What makes this battle even more worth fighting is that the Yale blog is based out of one single residential college. That’s like a blog for Wien (albeit a beautiful, wonderful Wien with its own library and cafeteria) winning this whole contest. Egregious. And while we lower our lances at Yale, we also set our sights at Penn State. You may have an undergrad population of six million, but we have the fervor to best you.

Vote now, vote on multiple computers, whatever it takes. You have until midnight on February 17th. Do it for Bwog, because we’d do it for you.

The Columbia men’s basketball team defeated Yale 53-42 Friday night, ending the Bulldog’s five-game winning streak that had them tied for the lead in Ivy League play.

It wasn’t a graceful win, but after whittling away a 9-point halftime deficit, the Lions surged late in the second half on a 14-3 run to keep the Bulldogs at bay. Defense was the key factor in giving the Lions an edge, and combined with a strong presence at the free throw line, Columbia turned Yale’s 23% second-half field goal percentage into the opening it needed to take the win.

Senior Jason Miller led the Lions with 16 points and 11 rebounds, followed by junior Patrick Foley’s 12 points and freshman Noruwa Agho’s 10.

The Lions are now 1-2 in the Ivy League and host Brown tonight at 7:00 in Levien Gym.

Say hello to the first member of the class of 2013: Blake Lively, from TV’s Gossip Girl program.  There she is on the right, looking studious.

Lively mentioned in a recent interview to W magazine that she’d like to take classes here, at “Yale”, one day a week. Apparently, “the possibility of attending Columbia University one day a week was a motivating factor behind accepting the role on the show, which is shot in New York.”

And just in case you cynics are about to write Lively off as another mindless celebrity — an anti-Franco, if you will — there’s this Revealing Insight in the following paragraph: “I probably have, like, 60 gorgeous bags. I have a closet with my really sharp, fancy, nice ones — the ones that go with my Valentino pumps, for example. And then I have a closet with the ones that are a little more rugged-feeling, the kind that go with my Belstaff motorcycle boots.”

Have fun in Lively’s LitHum class, Thirteens!

As some of our more movie-savvy readers have noticed, Hermione Granger (also known by the alias of “Emma Watson”) is currently touring the Ivy League, having already made stops at Harvard, Yale, and Brown (?), and provoking geeky analogies that Bwog certainly will not engage in. Though, just for the record, we would like to point out that Hermione’s crusade on behalf of house elves would fit right in here. Just saying…

Regardless, given that her partner in wizardry is currently parading around in the nude on Broadway, we would not be surprised if she visits our fair campus on her southbound Tour D’Ivy. We ask our dear readers to please keep a lookout for her, and let us know if she is spotted. Without your help, we might miss her: after all, she can apparate.

Columbians, ready yourselves: only 7 short days until the very campus you call home is featured on the greatest television show in the history of the world. Next Monday’s episode promises to be full of grand, sweeping shots of Earl and what looks like the Math Lawn, the only catch being that Columbia isn’t Columbia at all in Gossip Girl world: it’s Yale! 

The kids head up to “New Haven” (hey, Cecily von Ziegesar, if that is your real name, what’s wrong with Morningside Heights?) for a college weekend that the seizure-inducing preview touts is “worth the price of admission.” This seems a fair approximation— there will be a Skull & Bones kidnapping of some sort, bitchy glares galore, girls throwing things at each other, and a make out scene! Bwog thanks the CW for providing all obligatory snark in this post by actually naming the episode “New Haven Can Wait.” Here’s to hoping we can too.  

According to an article by everyone’s favorite authority on colleges, US News and World Report, Columbia was nipped ever so slightly by Harvard this year for the top honor of being the university whose name appears most in global print and electronic media.  Hey, at least we trounced the rest of the Ivies, as Yale, Princeton, and Cornell were the only other Ancient Eight schools to appear in the top ten.

Rounding out the report’s top five were Michigan, UC Berkeley, and Stanford.  For the rest of the results (as well as a different ranking for the number of appearances of liberal arts colleges in the media) check out this New York Times-evoking report courtesy of the Global Language Monitor.

Who knows, maybe this post will push us over the top! Or maybe not!

As a response to his own resignation, GSSC Vice President resigns.  

Presidents, presidents, presidents… and Shakira, Shakira! 

Endorsement… lol

Brinkley stepped down, and a cryptic PrezBo email followed

The NROTC debate continued, and a cryptic PrezBo email followed

McCain violated the number one rule of presidential debates: never wear a striped tie on camera. 

We enacted our revenge on Yale, as payback for summer’s Gossip Girl slight.

– WSL

Independent reports and Bwog tipsters have told us (xoxo) that the CW show/fashion plate “Gossip Girl” is currently filming near “Earl Hall.” For those of you hoping to catch some spoilers, the popular show is apparently only filming “exterior shots,” which normally do not include cast members. Still, it could include some B-roll footage of cast members and there are at least a few cast members present, so fans might have a shot at meeting them. It’s unclear how much longer they’ll be filming (or if this is the only time the show will be shooting here). We haven’t been able to snap any photos of famous celebrities (or the crew, we guess), but if you have any, send them along to bwog@columbia.edu and we’ll update the post to include them.

Photos from Just Jared, and fearless photojournalist Miram Schachter’s shots of the action — plus plot details! — after the jump.

Read more…

So this article has been making the rounds for about a month, but even un-breaking news is sometimes worth a read. Writing in the American Scholar, William Deresiewicz argues that this “elite” education we’re getting actually kind of sucks.

Roughly, he posits: the Ivies a) make it impossible for you to talk to people who aren’t like you; b) give you an inflated sense of your own self-worth; and c) narrow our definition of success to “achievement” and “leadership” rather than asking the “big questions.”

I guess you could characterize the piece as “controversial” — it probably served as something of a parting shot when Deresiewicz left Yale this year (although his earlier defense of professor-student erotic tension had already raised some eyebrows). But it’s nothing new. The complaints that ring true — the collapse of solitude, the tyranny of specialization — have been hashed over before, and this time come infused with the self-righteousness of a defector condemning his former regime.

Read more…