Breitbart’s not done yet.  He is having so much fun he now wants to take down the “institutional left,” and he believes this will happen “within the next three weeks”:

He might be referring to his appearance on former Congressman (and radio personality!) Ernest Istook’s Harvard Institute of Politics study group, “Propaganda in American Politics.”  Breitbart is scheduled to be a guest speaker next week, which falls within the deadline he gave on a Fox News show that attracts more viewers at 3AM than CNN at 8PM.

This is a must-not-miss event.  What better way to take down the institutional left than to corrupt influence the minds of young Harvard intellectuals who will lead the institutions?  It worked for Peggy Noonan.

(EDIT:  Didn’t happen.  Some anti-global warming guy came instead.  The institutional left survives.)

[Media Matters via Gawker]

The Harvard Foundation and the Office for the Arts at Harvard are different entities, but wouldn’t it make sense — given that the OAH and concert organizers are using the arts to promote aid for Haiti — to donate at least part of the concert proceeds to Jean’s Yele Haiti organization?

The money will go to Partners most likely because its co-founder is Harvard professor Paul Farmer, a graduate from the med school.  Or perhaps it’s due to the increasing amount of negative information coming out about Jean’s foundation.

Give Jean the voice, not the money?

Hopefully the Harvard Foundation will not have to regret its choice.

Class Day: CNN’s  Christiane Amanpour.   (General feeling in our circles:  “Several seniors expressed ambivalence about the choice—a sentiment that may stem from a lack of recognition of Amanpour’s name among some individuals.”  Let’s hope her speech is a good one.)

As serious blogger-journalists with clearly nothing better to do with our time, we did not want to jump to conclusions when rumors surfaced that Conan was running into trouble with The Tonight Show and that NBC Universal President and CEO Jeffrey Zucker was considering another late-night shift. After all, both are men of integrity (maybe one more than the other) working in a high-stakes business.  They can’t let collegiate animosities interfere, right?

Not.

Given how the situation has unfolded in the last week, we believe the latest fight over The Tonight Show can now be explained using a Harvard paradigm.  Here is how it goes:

Conan and Zucker both went to Harvard at roughly the same time and lived in Mather House, an undergraduate dormitory for upperclassmen that was “designed by the same firm that built Hitler’s bunker.”  Mather is also known for its plans to take over the student body.  On top of that, Conan, president of the The Harvard Lampoon, and Zucker, president of The Harvard Crimson, are destined to be mortal enemies in an eternal struggle for world domination.  Or something like that.  If NBC wants drama at 10, why not develop a show based on a Conan-Zucker rivalry in college?  (only if Coco and the Chin fails, of course).  It could even be dramedy.

We believe The Harvard Lampoon may be scheming something in Conan’s name.  Stay tuned.

PS:  Let the record show that your editors reside in Mather, are part of the vast Mather conspiracy, and may or may not be members of The Harvard Lampoon and/or The Harvard Crimson.

PPS:  Edit: Addendum: Vanity Fair knows what’s going on.

Alive

Harvard FML: Based on the popular FML, the Harvard Voice designed this site to give students on campus (or abroad, MIT, Wellesley, and occasionally other Ivy League schools) a way to communicate their woes anonymously.  One author at the Bostonist believes that the website’s topics are bland and not indicative of true FML moments.  If you search long enough, however, you will find that Harvard FML houses posts about loneliness and social anxiety that go beyond MLIA “mediocrity.”  The user comments range from empathy to outright meanness, so I think that the site captures the spirit of the Harvard community well.

I Saw You Harvard: Depending on your viewpoint, this website serves as the manifestation of our stalker-creeper fantasies OR as a chance to let that special person know that there is someone in the Harvard universe (hopefully) who cares about him or her.  It’s also great for telling people–in a general manner, of course–that their opera singing sucks or that you saw them eating boogers when they thought no one was watching.  Like Harvard FML, this website is moderated, so the posts never get too risqué.

Lifeline

Bored At Lamont:  The most controversial social website at Harvard, post-Mark Zuckerberg.  The name comes from Lamont library, a place that serves as a general hub for undergraduates who wish to do academic research, study, or fantasize about the person sitting next to them.  Given the apparent lack of moderators, at its height this site became 4chan meets emo meets craigslist. Most posts were about racism (racist), elitism (elitist), sexual orientation/hookups, and depression.  It was unavailable for some time and it has not reached anywhere near its former glory since its return.  Now you know about it.  Make the magic happen.

Dead

The Harvard Idea Bank: A child of the economic crisis, this website was not a social network in the traditional sense.  Rather, it was a way for students, faculty, and staff to submit ideas for budget cuts.  The few legitimate proposals mainly focused on obvious, albeit relatively small, cases of energy waste, such as sprinklers going off during a rainstorm.  Enough joke posts made it past the censors so as to render the site useless.  These orly srsly posts included selling the Harvard Lampoon and getting rid of Dunster House, an undergraduate dorm.  I also posted a few jewels to see if I could make it past the censors.  The Idea Bank probably had no real effect on Harvard’s cost-cutting strategy.  As one of my professors told the class, Harvard’s decision to invest substantially in interest rate swaps meant that the elderly people who proctored exams in past years just could not do so anymore.  It did not matter if the proposal was part of the Harvard Idea Bank.  To be fair, in my case the exam process ran much better with the professor as the monitor.

A closer look:

It’s not strange for truthers to publicize their message on campus.  Every other week or so a guy sits outside the Science Center with a sign that reads “9/11 Truth Now.”  Sometimes people confront him, sometimes they listen, but often no one really cares.  What  is odd is that presumably some people have created a “Harvard Students for 9/11 Truth” group.  We are skeptic because there has been no word inside the various Harvard e-mail lists about this.  Then again, not everyone walks into Boylston Hall to put an ad on the main display board.

We will not be able to attend the meeting tomorrow to unravel this conspiracy within a conspiracy, as we are currently busy doing homework for Peggy Noonan’s class.  It doesn’t matter either way.  These students are doing it wrong.  Harvard is supposed to be the source of conspiracies, after all.  Maybe this group is part of a CIA inside job.

Uh-oh.

We predict an editorial in tomorrow’s Crimson about this.  But a quick Google search for “the crimson bradley smith” will yield an Op-Ed from 1994 where someone already discusses the matter.  The writer, Joanna Weiss, details why Smith’s ad was not run back then.  Weiss reminds:

The truth is, refusing to run an ad has nothing to do with promoting freedom of expression. A newspaper is not an open forum, like a street corner or an open kiosk. It’s a privately owned organization that sells its space. An advertisement, then, represents a business transaction–not a public statement.

And:

[Bradley Smith] sent out a second ad, this one more limited in subject and more innocuous in tone. It suggested that people rethink the Holocaust, but didn’t refute facts outright. . . And the main reason The Crimson decided against running the ad was the fact that it was hateful. We didn’t want to sell our space to print a hateful message, regardless of its exact wording.

Surely there are disagreements, right?

The decision to review ads often pits a newspaper’s editorial and business sides against each other. Each Holocaust ad would have given the Crimson more than 1,000 much-needed dollars. But the division isn’t always the same, with business aching to run the ad and editorial aching to quash it.

So did business win this time? Or did the advertisement just pass over the heads of enough people who would have otherwise said no?  Will tomorrow’s Crimson attempt to explain why it decided to run the ad?  Stay tuned.

EDIT: Tomorrow, the Crimson is going to publish a letter addressing the issue. You can find it here.

Lowell House. In Obamacolor.

Yesterday was move-in day for us Harvard College upperclassmen, and just a minute ago somebody dropped off at our door Harvard Student Agency’s premier publication, The Unofficial Guide to Life at Harvard, which is like a tourist guide for Harvard students, telling us about all the retail locations around the Square and the rest of Boston, etc. ad other handy information. Anywa, ythe cover image is a picture of Lowell House, in OBAMACOLOR. THAT’S NOT RACIAL TRANSCENDENCE!!!1

The first lecture of the statistical mechanics class featured a remarkable demonstration, which went like this: first we start with some hot water and ice cubes, which were transported to the hall from their respective sources in thermos bottles. The first step is to pour some hot water into a cup; then you dunk in some ice cubes. After a few minutes, the ice melts (don’t forget to take a vote on whether the ice will melt or grow in size). It was a barrel of laughs.

…and in news which is not particularly notable, goats steal cars in Africa. [AP/YAHOO]

We don’t even need to explain, just watch.  The one with the Santa hat is our hero and the NEXT PRESIDENT OF HARVARD’S UNDERGRADUATE COUNCIL: MICHAEL KOENIGS.

For the longest time I would often confuse Noah Webster with another promiment 19th century New Englander Daniel Webster, despite being well aware each Webster’s well-earned renoun. What I didn’t know was that Noah Webster studied at Yale. Of course, Rep. Webster is famously associated with Dartmouth for having represented his alma mater in Dartmouth College v. Woodward.

And not to be outdone, Harvard also has its own (ever so slightly less) famous Webster, Dr. John White Webster, professor of chemistry and geology, and an alumnus of the college. He murdered George Parkman, a leading Boston Brahmin, and hid the remaining parts in his laboratory, only to be exposed by the janitor. The trial, one of the earliest that took advantage of forensics (dental records), was a media spectable on the scale of O.J. Simpson. Webster was convicted and hanged, despite the protestations of the Boston elite who refused to give credence to the charges, and eventually PBS made a documentary about it all. [PBS]