Coffee correspondent Downing Bray brings you another spot to get your daily jolt in style. V-Bar 225 Sullivan Street (between W. 3rd and Bleecker) A coffee shop by day and a wine and beer bar by night, Vbar is as mysterious as its name – I cannot for the life of me figure out what […]

On the Lerner ramps right now: Greenpeace’s student network brings you green-frosted cupcakes, green apples, green-tinted rice crispies, and lots of green love as part of its Green My Apple campaign–because good things can always get better. 

ESC upset that people who have to run campaigns claim credit for achievements For the sadly Macless among us  They’re coming, for reals  DOWN WITH FOX (polite version)  Columbia is 75% snobs, then? Chris gets Kerouac envy  Bonus: From an e-mail sent to us last night… “Too bad you are such a bunch of immature, […]

First-year Class Council candidate (and incumbent President) Mark Modesitt is going through some rough times. He has been accused of being  a “rapist” in that most literally indelible of media – Sharpie marker on his dorm room door. Modesitt (as will be revealed in a Spec article Wednesday morning) has contacted Public Safety to launch […]

Remember Project Athena, the promised Columbia wiki that was supposed to revolutionize campus life? Right, “barely” was our response, too. That is, until a mysterious i-banker IMed Bwog with the tantalizing info: Project Athena was online, and hosted off campus. We were quickly directed to wikicu.com, the slightly less sonorous realization of the project. While most of the […]

It’s like Columbia Day over on Manhattan’s favorite gossip site. Now we’re elitist for complaining? (oh, and Ivygate‘s got video). Tasti rival moves in! Bwog misses Soupman. We’ve been trying to avoid this one, but since so many of you seem to think it’s newsworthy (seriously, stop e-mailing us about it), Matt Sanchez has been […]

Gary Shteyngart wrote his first successful novel, The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, during his senior year at Oberlin, and again embraced his Russian immigrant status with a second, Absurdistan. Only in his thirties, he’s now an adjunct professor in the MFA Writing Program. Dena Yago tracked him down to chat. So how has your class been this semester? […]

Spec is only running Monday and Wednesday on this sunny, gloriously action-packed midterm week. So in the absence of our usual morning recap, we present this motley roundup of completely unrelated miscellany… Behold the latest email from the CC ’09 class council, proving to seniors, perhaps, that they don’t have it so bad. The missive begins […]

If you’ve been oblivious to the many attention-grabbing efforts on campus (the chalked stairs in Hamilton are a nice touch), you may not have heard about the SCEG/Postcrypt gallery show going on right now, “Expanding Perspectives: West Harlem,” which opened Friday in the basement of St. Paul’s and features art by both Columbia students and […]

One of our more distinguished alumni (excerpted): “I’m a liar and a cheat and a thief and the ultimate manipulator. … I tell lies every day, man,” the 40-year-old actor says in the February issue of Men’s Journal magazine. “And when I say I’m phenomenally manipulative, I am.”   Fox, who is now starring opposite […]

It’s Matthew Fox, of Lost fame. We hope this is a joke. (Though some of you commenters in the other thread seemed prescient…) A genuine teevee celebrity! Chris Szabla reports: “The general mood among seniors: either appalled, or wondering if Quigley and Chait were playing an extended joke. Even the video montage of headshots from the likes […]

The New York Times Magazine covers sex publications, marking the eighteenth time in as many years Bwog has read about H-Bomb; interestingly, the aforementioned Harvard publication was granted college funding, unlike, say, Columbia’s Outlet. No mention of sex pieces in non-sexual college publications? Following in the footsteps of our favorite “explicitly, absolutely, without a doubt […]

Blades on campus After raising the level of machete-related campus chatter to an all-time high last Friday, Spec cruelly crushed our Indiana Jones dreams with a correction today. “According to a statement issued Friday by Columbia’s office of public affairs—the first since the incident—the door was opened by a handyman under police supervision with a […]

Columbia College Dean Austin Quigley is hosting a senior class reception tonight at 5:30 in Lerner’s Satw Room. The event announcement mentions a “SUPER SECRET-HUGE-AMAZING announcement at 6:00pm sharp,” which, Bwog hears, is the identity of the 2007 Class Day speaker. We’re hoping for a speaker who’s a bit more Tony Kushner than John McCain […]

City Council: Freshmen belong at Columbia Cottage, not 1020. Separate, but equal? OFFCAMPUSFLEX OFFCAMPUSFLEX OFFCAMPUSFLEX! Because you can’t dress in drag for Yom Kippur…