This week’s Newsweek cover story is a piece on Barack Obama, CC ’83. Usually reticent to discuss his years at Alma Mater, Obama talks about his reasoning for transferring from Occidental College to Columbia, “By the end of that year at Occidental, I think I was starting to work it through, and I think part of the attraction of transferring was, it’s hard to remake yourself around people who have known you for a long time.”

The article also offers up positively juicy details on Obama’s life as a CCer: “He stopped drinking and partying, leading what he calls ‘a hermetic existence’ for two years. ‘When I look back on it, it was a pretty grim and humorless time that I went through.'”

Also featured prominently in the news this week is young Meghan McCain, fresh off a oddly discomforting GQ write-up. McCain, CC, ’07, is the subject of a long, equally odd Washington Post profile in which a fellow McCain Blogette writer calls her “really articulate.” That comment is followed mere paragraphs later by McCain’s admission that her dad’s campaign bus is “pimped out” and her concerns that”The blog is trying to keep it real, and trying to show how it really is, and I look like crap!”

And finally, The Blue and White’s very own former editor-in-chief and current Politico reporter Avi Zenilman, CC ’07, was mentioned in David Brooks’ latest New York Times Op-Ed.