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…  

Bwog occasionally likes to sit in on CCSC meetings, just for kicks. Things of note: – The meeting commenced with a furious marshmallow fight, during which Bwog nearly got beaned while tapping away in the audience. President Flaxman had to bang his shoe on the table to halt the crossfire. –  George Krebs, on the […]

It’s not as if this joke hasn’t been made before, but Bwog thinks that CPR has pulled it off pretty well in its new T-shirt design. Although, admittedly, the bar has been set pretty low. Available here!  

Behold Surgam, the literary magazine of the Philolexian Society. It was scheduled to come out in February, we hear, but the mail room lost it, so here’s a PDF. (All the links are the same.) A timely shoutout to decorum and sangria (pg. 1) Sapphic? (pg. 6-7) Rushdie’s wife is pretty hot, isn’t she (pg. […]