Current

In the Spring Issue...

Current — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 22:24:44 GMT

Cover Story

Ready or Not, Here They Come: Nine college students you don't know, but will. For now they're walking amongst us on campus but pretty soon they'll be making it big time.

Other Features

The Smarter Sex?: More females are applying to college, and with better GPAs, than their male peers. What that's doing to the gender ratio and how college admissions officers are reacting.

Bring Out the Body Paint: These college sports fans take their loyalty to the extreme. A look at some of the intense traditions and why college basketball provokes such madness.

Columns
Your Opinions, Your words

Relationships: One co-ed is determined to take things from BF to BFF, no matter how long it takes.

Health: Why we should take over-the-counter painkillers with a heavy dose of caution.

Sports: A look at what it's like to be made immortal by college basketball video games.

Trends: Reflections on struggles with those indie scenesters you love to hate..even if you're sort of one of them.

Clipfile
Current's quick takes on the news you care about

Drinking and politicking...Thesuperdelegate we relate to...Celeb campaign endorsements...LGBTQ sanctuary on Jesuit ground...Solving the English Major's Dilemma...Forget the credit card - charge it to my cellphone...Avoiding the textbook price hike...Professors' paychecks going to the 2008 election...Dr. Money!health care debate...Presidential firsts...A precursor to Watergate...Remember Legends of the Hidden Temple? We do too!...Taking Facebook stalking to a new level...Don't be that guy... cures your wallet woes...Explaining the

Interview

Amy Poehler is mad rich.

Backspin
Arts & culture, both highbrow and low

Fashion: Even ad campaigns play the race card.

Kick those ankle boots to the curb.

Film: Donnie Darko's wormhole isn't as farfetched as you think

Books: Some summer reading you'll actually enjoy

Book picks from Sunil Gulati, an econ prof and president of the U.S. Soccer Federation

Bloggers talk books

Music: An indie band from North Carolina gets national fame.

With no vocals, they have plenty of dance appeal.

Two 13-year olds with a dream keep on rocking, seven years later.

Food & Drink: A summer drink with a college price tag.

Mo's Bacon Bar looks like it's right up Homer's alley.

Gaming: Dive into the primordial ooze with "Spore."

Catfighting From on High

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

by Isia Jasiewicz // Princeton University
with Kiki Von Glinow // New York University and Adrienne Jeffries // William & Mary College

College admissions officers have an estrogen problem. No, we’re not talking about them battling hot flashes or mood swings. This problem is a more recent one: colleges have too many female applicants, and they’re not quite sure how to handle all the girl power.

It’s not just that more women are applying to college than in earlier generations or that more women are applying than their male peers (although both of those are true). They’re also applying with stronger resumes and GPAs, resulting in a highly competitive playing field for female applicants. While our mothers fought against sexist assumptions of their gender’s inferiority, women today face an additional challenge: with some colleges struggling to find enough well-qualified males to maintain a 50-50 gender balance, there could be more rejection letters for accomplished girls.

Along with geographic and ethnic diversity, admissions officers try to construct a gender-balanced class, says Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions at Kenyon College in Ohio. And although most schools have shied away from attempting formal admissions policies giving preferential treatment to males, the desire to maintain gender balance may prompt schools to be stingier in mailing out fat envelopes to female applicants.

At Kenyon, for instance, more than 55 percent of applicants are female—a figure that Britz says is striking, especially considering that the school was a men’s college until 1969. Since gender balance is a consideration in its admissions process, Kenyon might hesitate to accept females with middling test scores, Britz says, in favor of males with the same scores who have the added benefit of lending the college greater gender diversity.

Kenyon is not the only school facing an estrogen-loaded applicant pool; women nationwide are matriculating at significantly higher rates than males. Out of all the undergraduates in the country in 2003, only 42 percent were male, according to a 2006 report on gender equity in higher education published by the American Council on Education Center for Policy Analysis. That means that for every male in college in 2003, there were about 1.4 female classmates. Education policy makers and academics predict that the proportion of women to men in college will reach 60-40 within the next decade, says Jerry Jacobs, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennyslvania.

It should come as no surprise, then, that gender disparity is a hot topic among admissions officers—and some of them have even taken big steps toward reducing it.

The most noteworthy example is an experimental program at Towson University in Maryland. Admissions officers there had noticed a trend among their applicants, which Director of Undergraduate Admissions Louise Shulack says has been observed nationwide: male students tend to have slightly higher test scores relative to their female peers, while women generally have stronger GPAs. So in an effort to equalize the gender ratio, they instituted the Academic Special Admissions Program (ASAP) in the fall of 2005, which accepted students with slightly higher SAT scores but lower GPAs than the average scores of Towson’s student body, thus giving an advantage to a specific type of applicant, usually male. Ultimately ASAP proved unsuccessful, and the university canceled the program this fall due to a lower-than-average retention rate among its students. The students admitted in ASAP were less able to handle the demands of college coursework, Shulack says.

Some students at Towson think the university may have done better not introducing ASAP at all. Junior Justin Westphal says he thinks admissions should be based solely on merit, and gender should play no role: “If there’s a girl and a guy both applying to college and the girl does better, she certainly deserves to get in. If the guy were to get in just for being a guy, that would make no sense at all,” he says. Westphal, a digital art and design major, says that his classes are “definitely female dominated” and that his conversations with students in other departments indicate that the gender imbalance is consistent throughout the university.

Most students at Towson are used to the fact that the school attracts more females, says William Logan, a senior mathematics and economics major there. Logan says that even in his upper level math courses, which traditionally have been dominated by men, there are plenty of female students, though not as many as in the general education courses he took as a freshman.

“I don’t think gender balance makes that much of a difference in the classroom,” Logan says, explaining that he observed no difference between his learning habits in a female-dominated class versus a more evenly proportioned one. “I don’t see it as a detriment at all that there are more female students,” he adds.

Westphal agrees. He says that although studying on a largely female campus makes it difficult to find male camaraderie, he—like most of his friends—isn’t bothered by being in a male minority. “I’m actually kind of pleased to hear that the gender balance is starting to tip in this direction,” he says. “I grew up with a single mom, and she always had to work really hard to break the glass ceiling in the workplace. So I think it’s interesting to see women coming out on top in education.”

Towson’s formal attempts to increase male enrollment appear to be the exception, not the rule, but other schools have also observed females “coming out on top” in their high school performance. Admissions directors from James Madison University, the University of Mary Washington, and Kenyon all say that their applicant pools reflect the same pattern that Towson admission officers noticed: females are applying to college with higher GPAs, while males tend to have slightly higher SAT scores.

Though reasons for the trend are unclear, Martin Wilder, vice president for enrollment and communications at UMW—where two-thirds of the applicant pool and the enrolled student body is female—suggests that the disparity points to male students with academic potential underachieving in high school. Wilder attributes the gender gap in GPAs to a difference in the relative maturity level of adolescent girls and boys. Girls tend to mature more quickly, which he says allows them to realize the importance of studying earlier on in their educational development. “It’s un-cool [among boys] to be too smart or too bookish,” he says. As a result, boys are less likely to hit the books and more likely to pull out the “dog-ate-my-homework” excuse, and their grades will suffer even if they’re perfectly capable of performing on a higher level academically.

Another explanation for the disparity in male and female GPAs comes from Michael Walsh, director of admissions at JMU, which was all-female until the ’70s and currently has a 60-40 female-to-male breakdown among enrolled students. Walsh attributes the trend in part to the influence of female high school teachers. Because they had to surpass their male peers when they were in school in order to get good jobs, they continue to put more pressure on girls today to get good grades, he says.

Yet the gender discrepancy admissions conundrum stems from more than teacher influence or social standards among students, says Jacobs, the University of Pennsylvania sociology professor. The crux of the problem for him is not in the differences in scores between males and females but the fact that more women are applying to college in the first place. And the explanation for the female applicant majority, he says, can be found at the intersection of gender and class. Among students from affluent backgrounds, the overwhelming majority—male and female alike—go to college, he explains. “Disparity between men and women will only begin to appear in groups where college access is not universal.”

This means that the gender disparity is most pronounced among students whose parents aren’t college-educated, or whose family’s finances won’t allow for all their children to go to college. In those cases, gender may help determine whether students go into the workforce after high school instead of off to college.

That might be more appealing to male students than to females, says Deb Thyng Schmidt, a senior adviser with AdmissionsConsultants, Inc., a firm that provides college counseling and application advice to high school students. Many well-paying blue-collar fields, from carpentry to car repair, remain male-dominated. As a result, men leaving high school might feel less pressure to go to college than females, who may feel less inclined to go into traditionally male workforces that don’t require college degrees, she says.

Whether or not the gender disparity trend will hold up may depend on the economy, says Fran Stage, a professor in New York Univeristy’s Steinhart School of Culture, Education and Human Development. Stage says the possibility of a recession over the next couple of years could make jobs scarcer—and, as a result, more male students may wish to receive degrees in order to add an edge to their resumes.

The future of gender disparity in higher education may also depend on the development of programs in colleges. Although Towson seems to be the only university that tried an explicit policy to favor males in the admissions process, many admissions officers are aware of the growing gender disparity and are debating ways to address it.

Much of that discussion comes out of liberal arts schools, which “don’t have the rah-rah athletic programs that many young men love, thus making the large state universities more attractive to young men,” Britz says. While boys tend to want televised football games and larger communities, girls may be more content to study in smaller towns like Gambier, Ohio, which is home to Kenyon and barely 2,000 residents. Schmidt says families may prefer to send their daughters to liberal arts schools in small communities, “where they’ll be more looked after.”

One approach that liberal arts schools can take to increase the number of male applications they receive, Schmidt says, is to market academic and extra-curricular activities that may be appealing to male students. Birmingham-Southern College and Shorter College (both of which have a student body with a male-to-female ratio of about 40-60), for instance, have both introduced new football programs with the goal of attracting males.

In general, though, schools seem reluctant to make moves designed to favor male applicants. Wilder, for instance, stresses the importance of “holistic review,” in which gender is just one of many factors considered in admissions decisions—which is an explanation we’re used to hearing from admissions counselors regarding race, but not necessarily gender, and certainly not favoring males.

Indeed, much of the rhetoric surrounding the question of whether to favor male applicants overlaps with the affirmative action debate. And, as with affirmative action for race, there’s a delicate line between encouraging diversity and giving unfair preferential treatment. Some colleges may steer clear of outright affirmative action policies for males to avoid legal ramifications.

Regardless of the legal situation, some say having a female majority might not be so problematic. Considering the relative strength and focus of female students at JMU, Walsh says he doesn’t see a compelling reason to maintain a 50-50 balance on campus. “I’ve heard people say we have to have a 50-50 split because if it’s 60-40, there aren’t enough people to date the women,” he says. “But women here tell me, ‘I’m here to get an education. I’m not here to get my Mrs.!’”

Indeed, it’s our mothers’ fight to earn BAs over “Mrs.”s that we have to thank for women’s current overrepresentation in higher education. And some, like College of William and Mary sophomore Jasmine Tutt, say we shouldn’t sacrifice the fruits of the feminist struggle just yet, even if it does mean that colleges become more female-dominated—like her own campus, which, according to university spokesman Brian Whitson, is about 63 percent female. The fight for gender equality, Tutt argues, should come before attempts to maintain gender balance on college campuses. “Since more and more women have started entering higher levels of education, the standards for achievement have increased,” Tutt says. “But looking outside of class, behind the numbers and test averages and GPAs, I would say that—socially—gender equality still has a long way to go.”

Isia Jasiewicz is a sophomore majoring in art history at Princeton University. She’s glad she got in despite being a girl.

Illustration by Emmanuel Tavares // Parsons The New School of Design

**RELATED in CURRENT**
A 1957 Newsweek cover story looked at the trend of—gasp—ladies on college campuses!

A Sound Vision

Newsweek Interns — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

by Jennifer Pelly // Fordham University

Rescuing a kitten while on tour in Detroit may not be a particularly rock and roll thing to do, but don’t let that fool you: the New York City alt-rock four-piece Vision Through Sound is decidedly rock and roll. Even the kitten now has a taste for rock, says guitarist and front man Andrew Krolikowski, surrogate father to Monte Shakespeare Stardust (named after the guy whose floor the band slept on while touring in Michigan). “He’s a big Bob Dylan fan,” Krolikowski says.

Krolikowski, a junior at New York University studying education and American Sign Language, and drummer Mike Sarna, a junior at Hofstra studying history, were thirteen when they started VTS. For the most part their musical tastes differed, but their shared distaste for Blink 182 was enough of a bond to motivate their incessant practicing in Sarna’s garage and bedroom. “Mike and I were just happy not to be playing pop-punk,” Krolikowski says.

Just as their musical tastes differ, the two founding members have always disagreed on their visions of what the band should be. Krolikowski says that this tension is what has helped them develop their unique sound—their creative pop experiments manage to be both bizarre and refined, bringing color to one of music’s grayest areas with their catchy lyrics and dance-inducing melodies. This sound shines on their fourth release, Cheer Up Chap, Middle School Isn’t Everything (2006), which has lead to the guys’ developing a significant fan base on LI Long Island and throughout New York City.

Vision Through Sound has always been a four-piece group, but it took Sarna and Krolikowski a while to find permanent guitarists or bassists. Guitarist Fran Berkman, a 2006 Cornell grad with a degree in Human Development, joined in 2003. Berkman would come home to Long Island to practice and play gigs on weekends—the band would also head up to Cornell for shows, and still continues to do so. Two years after Berkman’s arrival, VTS picked up bassist Mike McManus, a longtime fan of the band and current freshman studying theatre at Hunter College in NYC. Since the band’s beginning in 2001, the songwriting process has become far more collaborative; Krolikowski used to write the majority of the music, but now Berkman also contributes significantly.

The guys’ eclectic personalities heighten the band’s unique qualities. “Honestly, we’re all a bunch of freaks,” Krolikowski says. The guys have been known to distribute containers of bubbles at their shows, and show up on stage in three-piece suits with Converse or quirky vintage hippie-age threads.

The guys like the fact that their musical tastes differ radically, with an assortment of favorite artists including The Beatles, The Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Neil Young and Led Zeppelin. Krolikowski says that they don’t try to sound like any particular group: “What we write is just organically what happens when we play together.” There is a distinct air of Vonnegut-esque humor that surrounds VTS’s music. One of their newest songs, “Millipedes,” refers directly to lines from the beginning of Slaughter House Five.

Krolikowski also explained that although many bands today cite The Smiths as an influence, most of them don’t catch the epic group’s “absurdly dark sense of humor,” which is something VTS has embraced. “I guess our philosophy is that, yeah, life isn’t all great all the time, but what the hell—we’re going to have a good time and dance and try to find some beauty,” Krolikowski said. These good times are paired with a serious perspective towards their work. Although the guys all work at odd jobs (Fran subs at a high school and Andrew docks boats at NYC’s South Street Seaport), they all hope to one day make the band their full time careers.

After the shows are over and the dance parties and sing-alongs cease, the guys of VTS find deeper reasons to remain dedicated to what they do. “I just feel like the whole point is to make people feel that they are not alone,” says Krolikowski of the band’s music. “That there is something utterly human that we all have in common and that we could all take part in.”

Website: www.myspace.com/visionthroughsound

Vanguard 2008

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:30:00 GMT

Don't you just hate when you hear about someone doing ridiculously impressive things, and then you meet her and not only is she accomplished but she's also charming and fun and has it all together, and then you find out that she's your age? Doesn't it make you feel kind of like a pathetic waste of space?

Yeah, us too. And that's how we felt putting together this issue. (You'll notice we didn't select any hot student journalists—just too close to home.)

For Vanguard 2008, we pulled together a daunting bunch of up-and-comers in nine fields, but the truth is there are hundreds more of these rising stars out there. You might share a bathroom with one: the next e.e. cummings or Will Ferrell; our future president or the person who's gonna cure cancer.

We know we only scratched the surface with this year's Vanguard, so tell us about who we're missing, and your nominee could be feature in our online Vanguard. But for now, just read through our picks and try not to feel too inferior.

Pop Starlet: Kate Voegele

Diplomat: Johnny Lin

Actress: Shareeka Epps

Filmmaker: David D. Burstein

Inventor: Maria Luckyanova

Tycoon: Kamran Munshi

Athlete: Alicia Sacramone

Peacemaker: Stephanie Nyombayire

Scientist: Max Schroeder

Three years ago we picked 15 college students for our first College Vanguard issue, and warned you that these young all-stars were people to watch in the coming years. But in case you lost track of them, here’s an update on what a few of these elite up-and-comers have been up to since Current deemed them Vanguard-worthy.

Vanguard Olympic Hopeful

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Alicia Sacramone, 20
Brown University

by David Tao // Harvard

For many athletes, competing before a crowd of thousands is an intimidating prospect—flashes and loud cheering can throw off even the most stone-cold competitors. For American gymnast and Olympic hopeful Alicia Sacramone, letting the crowd rattle her simply isn’t an option, even when the spectators number in the billions.

“You don’t think about them when you’re competing,” she says. “You only think about what you have to do.”

Sacramone is no stranger to pressure. At 20, she’s a veteran in a sport where most athletes are barely old enough to drive. Though she is currently taking time off from Brown to focus on training for the Olympics, Sacramone spent her freshman year balancing a full course load with competing on a college gymnastic team (almost unprecedented in the world of elite women’s gymnastics, where Olympic hopefuls typically put off college to focus exclusively on training) and dominating her international competition.

This dual commitment was a balancing act every bit as complicated and treacherous as the beam she traverses in practice every day. Usually relaxed, Sacramone recalls her time pulling double-duty with an exasperated groan, recounting how she “lived on caffeine.”

Although she hasn’t yet officially qualified for the women’s national team that will compete at the Beijing Summer Olympics, she is expected to make the team once she finishes qualifying rounds this June. There’s already talk of making Sacramone, who is known for her ability to motivate and encourage younger teammates, the U.S. team captain.

“It’s a really big honor to feel that people have enough faith and trust in me to think that I can lead the team as their captain,” says Sacramone.

Success in Beijing would accentuate an already impressive career. Sacramone began training for gymnastics at age 8, shortly after the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, where the American women’s gymnastics team took home its first-ever gold medal. Gail Sacramone, Alicia’s mother, hoped gymnastics would provide a good outlet for her daughter’s athletic drive, a task where previous sports, including soccer and dance, had failed. “I started her in dance, but this kid had so much energy I needed to channel it somewhere else,” Gail Sacramone says.

Alicia quickly rose through the competitive ranks, placing well in the U.S. Classic junior competition. A bronze medal on the vault at Nationals in 2003 helped her secure a spot on the U.S. National gymnastic team. Sacramone, a perennial crowd favorite, combines an effervescent personality with world-class talent. Known especially for her skill in the floor exercise and vault, Sacramone holds multiple World Cup titles and claimed first in floor at the 2005 World Championships.

The 2007 World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany, perhaps Sacramone’s biggest challenge to date, highlighted her value as both an individual competitor and team leader. Her dynamic floor routine turned heads and secured the title for the U.S. over rival China, a team now eager to claim Olympic gold on home soil.

“We’re still the underdogs, even though we’re current world champions,” Sacramone says.

So, unlike most other promising college students who will probably reach their career peaks during middle-age, Sacramone’s make-or-break career moment is just weeks away. Countless hours in the gym, thousands of miles traveling to compete: it all comes down to two days at the world’s most famous athletic competition.

While Sacramone says she already has plans to pursue a career in fashion design after her athletic career ends, she’s not sure if she’ll be able to leave the sport entirely.

“I’ll probably still coach,” she says. “Gymnastics has been such a big part of my life that it would be weird to leave it high and dry after I’m done competing.”

For now, though, all Alicia Sacramone can do is train, stay healthy, and keep her eyes focused on the world’s biggest stage in Beijing.

Photo by John Goodman

Vanguard Inventor

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Maria Luckyanova, 21
MIT

by Dan Loeterman // University of Southern California

Coming up with clever answers to tricky questions is Maria Luckyanova's specialty. This engineering major isn't tempted by fancy robotics or complicated computing, the bells and whistles that often adorn inventions flowing from MIT's classrooms. She knows the answer to "How much does your invention cost?" is much less important than, "Does it work?"

"Being an engineer," she says, "what you get is a problem, and what you make is a solution."

Last year, when Luckyanova took an engineering class focused on the developing world, the problem was how to create a device that could be used to fit patients in rural parts of India with prosthetic limbs, without using electricity. The solution had to be simple, some sort of tool made of cheap materials that could be easily exported to poorer countries and remote areas. All that, and the device had to be used without a power source. It must have seemed a bit like the scene in "Apollo 13" when Ed Harris dumps a pile of tape, socks and coffee filters on a table and tells his engineers to make a CO2 filter.

"Our very initial prototype was this horrible gaudy construction," Luckyanova says. "The whole thing was terribly clunky and not that robust, but it worked."

The answer for Luckyanova and her team-three classmates and a graduate student mentor-utilized four bicycle pumps and two small wheels. To fit a prosthetic limb, technicians first need to make a mold of the body part that has been amputated, or the "residual limb." In poorer areas, the doctors can use a bag of sand to make mold of a patient's arm or leg. After placing the limb in a bag of sand, a pump, powered by a generator, sucks all of the air out of the bag, creating a perfect vacuum. When the limb is removed, the sand stays in place, as firm as a rock, and can be used to produce an exact replica of the residual limb and fit a prosthetic arm or leg.

But generators cost thousands of dollars to operate, and it's difficult to bring them to the highly rural areas where many patients live. The latest version of the device Luckyanova helped design allows patients or a technician to power the pumps by turning the wheels manually.

Last summer, Luckyanova and two of her team members traveled to India to meet with technicians from Jaipur Foot, one of the world's largest nonprofit organizations dedicated to making prosthetic limbs available to patients who can't afford them. At the Jaipur Foot clinics, Luckyanova and the others showed an early version of their device to doctors overwhelmed by the number of patients in need of limbs and frustrated by high electricity and plaster costs that prevented them from treating more patients outside the major cities. The trip was a major wakeup call for the group.

"Going there, it was sort of like getting hit with a brick wall," Luckyanova says.

The team was blown away by the experience, and they traveled to India again this past winter to demonstrate an updated model. The prosthetic technicians were so impressed that they want to start utilizing the devices in many of their clinics by this summer.

Luckyanova and her team haven't filed any patents, and they don't plan to. They haven't hired any consultants or had discussions with lawyers. Though marketing it might have seemed an obvious tactic to business majors, making money off the device was never an option for Luckyanova. She'd already solved her problem.

"Most of the people that come to them are dirt poor. You see every day 20 people leave these clinics and they can walk, and it's amazing. So making money off that never crossed our mind at all," she says.

Luckyanova isn't sure what she wants to do after she graduates. She's passionate about sustainable energy, an increasingly crucial (and lucrative) field of study. She sees coal plants popping up in China, inefficient solar and water technology, and an overabundance of pollution in developing countries-in short, a whole slew of problems waiting to be solved by some creative engineer. Fitting prosthetic limbs taught her how rewarding an experience like that can be.

"Working as a student, you don't expect anything you do to ever have any effect. Someone is always watching over you and correcting you, and you think there's nothing I can do that's new," she says. "In this case... there was nobody to tell us well that's a nice effort, now let the professionals do it."

Photo by Natasha Coleman // Harvard University

Porch Crawler

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

1 Liter Vodka
12 Cans Beer
1 Can Lemonade or Limeade Concentrate

With a taste that’s perfect for summer and a price tag suited for college, this drink is pleasantly potent and surprisingly delicious. So polish off that last exam, gather some friends, dump these makings into a cooler and declare it summertime.

Photo by JB Reed

Homer Simpson's Dream Food

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by Stephen Montemayor // University of Kansas

Move over Prius: Vosges Haut-Chocolat (www.vosgeschocolate.com) has created the ultimate hybrid: Mo’s Bacon Bar. It’s chocolate with bits of bacon and smoked salt inside. It’s wrong on so many levels, but that may be why it tastes so good.

Created to envoke that delicious brunch mishap when the syrup dribbles onto the bacon, Mo’s Bacon Bar shocks your tastebuds (and sense of normalcy) with its salty sweetness.This isn't the first twist Vosges has put on chocolate: its Red Fire bar features Mexican ancho and chipotle chilies and cinnamon infused with chocolate, and the Black Pearl bar is spiked with ginger, black sesame seeds and wasabi.

But it is Mo’s Bacon Bar, the company’s second best-selling product, that delivers smoky bacon and milky chocolate—two of the ultimate comfort foods—in one artful package. Its $7.50 price tag may be a bit steep for a candy bar but it’s all a matter of perspective: think of it instead as a hearty breakfast topped off with a sumptuous dessert.

If your intrigue outweighs the gross-out factor, visit Whole Foods Market or the company's website for your own Mo's bar and see if you’re read to add chocolate to the ranks of eggs, salad, burgers and sandwiches: foods that taste that much better with a little bacon.

This is Not a Syllabus

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by Olivia Scott // Georgetown University

In the academic shuffle of lengthy Russian novels, dense chemistry textbooks and convoluted philosophical prose, reading went from a pleasure to just another obstacle between you and your bed. Here are some picks to help you reclaim the joy of non-assigned reading this summer.

If you can’t remember the last time you laughed while reading something other than The Onion, Kurt Vonnegut’s “A Man Without a Country” is the cure. Published just two years before the author’s death, the 140-page almost-memoir delivers the irreverent and insightful revelations of a man who had long since stopped caring about public opinion. Complete with original drawings and instructions on how to live, it almost seems as if the ecentric Vonnegut is talking directly to the college-aged youth of the nation.
For the intellectual showoffs out there (hint: you yell out all the answers to “Jeopardy!” even if no one's in the room), take a look at what happens when A.J. Jacobs endeavors to read the whole encyclopedia. Formatted as mock entries from A-Z, “The Know-it-All” chronicles Jacobs’ year spent reading all 32 volumes of the 2002 Encyclopaedia Britannica (that's 33,000 pages) and his attempts to make good on his new knowledge in social and competitive settings.” A quick spoiler: turns out being academically arrogant has its pitfalls. Jacobs did a similar stunt a few years later when he wrote "The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.”

And if summer to you means baseball, check out Will Leitch’s “God Save the Fan.” After several years as a sports writer, Leitch became disillusioned with the current state of sports media (he compares ESPN to the Imperial Forces from “Star Wars”). In 2005 he created Deadspin.com, a blog run by Gawker media that’s designed to give true sports fans the news they want, without the corporate media angle. The same witty voice that has made Deadspin so popular also lights up this book, which is all new material and took Leitch only five months to write.

An Intelligently Designed Game

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by Marielle Messing // Syracuse University

Gamers and science nerds, rejoice. After three years of salivating over Internet rumors and 30-second trailers, EA Games has finally announced the date of the next Big Bang in gaming. “Spore,” the latest game from ”Sims”-genius Will Wright, will populate stores on Sept. 7 and is the first evolution simulation not made for the biology lab or classroom. You start off the game as a single-celled organism Pac-Manning your way through the primordial ooze. As your creature gives birth, you control new generations. The different organisms you eat dictate how much you grow, until your critter’s species is big enough to make the journey onto land. In the Creature Phase, your organism meets individuals from other species, fights for dominance, mates and explores. The Tribal Phase lets you control a small society of your species, which now has the brain power to use tools and develop a culture. Then, upgrade to the Civilization Phase and try to dominate the world, Risk-style. Finally, when you’ve exploited your planet to the fullest, rocket off to colonize other worlds in the Space Phase.

The social simulations are epic, but the best part of the game is sure to be the dynamic of what Wright calls a “massively single-player online game”: although you are not playing with other users across the Internet, you will be able to download their species and integrate them into your own world.

“Spore’s” gaming technology is top-tier and, wacky creative license aside, so is its science. Consistent with the theory of evolution, species evolve according to the traits you pick for previous generations. The game uses all the stuff you learned in Intro to Bio—competition, predation, fitness—and plenty of stuff you didn’t (like how to create a three-legged carebear with fangs).

And since it will be available in versions for the PC, Mac, Nintendo DS, Wii and iPhone, “Spore” proves that God complexes can come in any size.

Bloggers Talk Books

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by Katherine Evans // UNC-Chapel Hill

It's where new media meets old-school paper pages: the book blog. Below are some of our favorite spots to read people writing about reading. With any luck, you'll find some new picks for your Facebook profile before fall semester, because seriously, "The Kite Runner" is so 2003.

Blog of a Bookslut

A cheeky, comprehensive and very popular blog from Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief of the Bookslut website. Tons of book-related news and reviews of current literature.

The Old Hag

Writer and editor Lizzie Skurnick provides exuberat book reviews, "Speedreader" plot summaries and book-related contests. Check out the "Miscellany" sidebar for link to highfalutin articles that will help you impress (or draw the ire of) your classmates in that lit seminar.

The Elegant Variation

Okay, so the blog name is a little fussy, but we're talking about literature, aren't we? Writer Mark Sarvas provides interviews with writers, book reviews, lists of literary events and general insights on the writing life.

Critical Mass

From the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, a blog that focuses on techniques of literary criticism and the ins and outs of the publishing world. Look here also for interviews with up-and-coming writers.

We're friends forever, dammit.

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Or at least that's what Daniela Bloch keeps telling her ex.

by Daniela Bloch // Northwestern University

It’s right before Thanksgiving when I dial his number. He’s in Pennsylvania when I, safely nestled under a fleece in Chicago, call it quits. I can’t do this anymore, I say. It’s not you, it’s me. But let’s still be friends, great friends. From bf to bff, k? Nothing will change.

He offers some juicy expletives; I shed some tears. But just like little kids believe that a bunny on growth hormones hides eggs in the garden to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection, I believed I could do it: I would make my ex my best friend.

Maybe being friends was all we were cut out for, anyway. That's how it started in high school, before he became the Bleek to my Juno (minus the pregnancy).After a flirty senior year culminated in a drunken night, we finally decided to couple up. It was a rocky, horrible, right-before-graduation relationship (you know, the ones that end as soon as you purchase your extra-long twin sheets). He wanted to go to college unattached, so we split (still friends, of course), and I headed to Northwestern, ready to move on.

The feelings never fully disappeared on either side, though, and the summer after freshman year we decided to stop half-assing it and start dating, the long-distance way. We wrote emails and talked on the phone; we spent weekends and breaks together. It wasn't easy but we were crazy in love (like Beyonce and Jay-Z, but white and nerdy). We fell hard. And it was great. It seemed we’d never break up.

For a while.

Post honeymoon months, the relationship got rocky again. And after two months abroad in Beijing, my resentment and annoyance had cooled into apathy. I was neither attracted to nor in love with him anymore. When I ended it, I decided to test out a theory I’d been nurturing since my parents’ divorce: if you care about your friend enough to date him, what’s to stop you from being friends once it’s over?

Although furious about the break-up, he agreed that we should remain close friends. Now we just needed some ground rules. We already knew each other’s dirty little secrets—he knew that my boobs were glorified mosquito bites and that I cried at the sight of road kill. I knew that his toes were inexplicably hairy and that he left his cereal bowls all over the apartment, festering in stale milk and soggy cornflakes. We’d seen it all at this point, I said. So let’s just embrace that and be friends who can joke about those intimate things that normal friends wouldn't know about each other.

We gave it a shot. For a month we talked about that vacation in Germany, our love for Barack Obama, how best to run the Chicago marathon in October. We saw "Sweeney Todd" over winter break (note: to each his own ticket price) and joked about my unhealthy obsession with Law & Order: SVU. Being friends with the ex was easy!

So I thought. He soon turned sour on the phone, wavering between anger and melancholy. He demanded we not talk about the past and keep things fluffy, ignoring our history: the countless fights and the misunderstandings, but also the good and sweet things.

The next day he called to apologize for getting upset and proposed that we should keep talking like before. We tried again. But as soon as I brought up some stupid story from prom, he flared up. I was getting tired of his emotional diatribes. I didn't get it, but it turns out neither did he: three months into our post-breakup friendship, he admitted that he’d been expecting a reconciliation. Now that it was clear we were through, he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to kiss me or kill me.

Since I’m (clearly) relationship-disabled, I turned to friends and family for advice on how to keep the friendship alive. They all said the same thing: you have to cut contact and live your own lives; grow up and apart before you can be friends again. Since my theory had failed, I followed their advice, and at the moment the ex and I aren't on speaking terms. Maybe I'm naïve, but I'm sure we'll be friends again. Until we’re both ready for that, though—without any lingering hopes of reviving our relationship—we can’t be much of anything.

I sometimes wonder what he’s doing. I imagine he’s throwing darts at my picture. I guess I would too if I were him. If it’s cathartic, I’ll even send him some more for targets. (I’m not photogenic anyway). Hey, may he even burn me in effigy if that’s what it takes. Because I will make this work. It may be a precarious mission, but being friends after breaking up is not impossible. It’s just not easy, either.

Daniela Bloch is a junior at Northwestern University. She can be found at FedEx, shipping pictures to the angry ex.

Gaming Gets Real

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

Kevin Scheitrum describes the surreal transformation of college athletes into video game characters.

They got it right, Shaun Wynn says. They got it right, from his jersey to the way he moved to his ability to stick on the guy he was guarding like bad credit—he was, after all, the America East Defender of the Year in 2004.

Yeah, they got it all right. Except for the afro.

They, the designers of EA Sports’ “March Madness 06” video game, gave Wynn—or, rather, a digital representation called SG #20—a little too much hair in that version. In the real 2005-06 season, Wynn, then a senior at Boston University, wore more of a short crop. But everything else checked out, he says.

Kevin Gardner, #31 at BU, was the model for this video game player.

“[Skill-wise] I think I’m okay, and if you just played with me I got better,” Wynn says of his on-screen alter-ego. “But some people got it bad—the whole haircut was messed up and they couldn’t hit a shot.”

Wynn, a guard who graduated in 2006, is just one of the thousands of college student-athletes who are rendered into a cluster of pixels to become video game characters, allowing them the surreal experience of controlling themselves on-screen.

Sure, role-playing games are everywhere. Games like Everquest, World of Warcraft and Second Life allow their millions of users to vacate their daily lives of limitations and ascend into the ranks of elves, charming politicians, red-carpet strutters and all sorts of higher order beings that bad genes or bad jeans have made unattainable on planet Earth. But sports games aren’t about escaping reality; rather, they aim to create a world identical to our own—to allow you to control a version of this reality rather than an alternate one. And as cool as it can be to play youself in a game that mimics your life, the effect is a strange, occasionally uncomfortable dynamic between the creators and the created.

“You’re just exposed to the world. The designers can do what they want,” Wynn says. “What if they don’t do it well?”

For the designers, re-casting reality poses a challenge in many ways more formidable than crafting fiction. You can’t call a bluff on an elf’s crossbow accuracy from outside 60 meters, but when your virtual team has a 6-foot-10, 287-pound motel of a center, he’d better play like a guy his size actually would. More, he’d better play like that particular guy actually would. The consumers, and there are a ton of them (the video game industry pulled in almost $18 billion of revenue in 2007, according to Variety), demand that these games reflect the reality that they can watch on TV.

Sean O’Brien, producer of the "March Madness" series, heads a team charged with replicating a portion of the world, using ratings based on real-life performance to recreate the skill set and abilities of these digital athletes. Not that they’re re-creating the daily lives of these players—as yet, there are no ratings for a proclivity for Taco Bell or tattoos—but O’Brien’s team must find a way to make these on-screen ballers evoke the real-life college ones that inspire them.

In other words, they have the same task that’s driven historians to isolation and journalists to bourbon: to pin down reality.

To make things even trickier, the designers’ hands are tied by NCAA amateur bylaws that prohibit the use of players’ names or likenesses for promotional purposes. Players are most frequently represented by their position, jersey number and one of a few generic faces roughly spanning the gradient of skin tone and bone structure. Thus, its their ratings (speed, inside and outside shooting ability, ball handling acumen) and animation (dribbling and shooting style, hairdos) that provide the main means of recognition. And those bits had better be done right: "We have really sophisticated consumers that know what they want," O'Brien says. If you screw something up, you hear about it."

Games have come a long way from “Madden ’92,” where the ambulance for injured players would drive onto the field and actually hit others players, scattering them like street cones. That wouldn’t fly anymore. To satisfy gamers today, O’Brien says, “You’d have to show the wheels turning, the sirens, the players congregating. It’d have to be this big scripted scene—[the injured player] would have to wave to the fans to say he’s okay.”

To achieve ultimate realism, the “March Madness” team has developed a formula that takes into account players’ stats, like shooting percentage, rebounds, and steals, then compounds them with a number of variables such as games played and strength of the team’s conference . The team also works with experts such as ESPN’s Doug Gottlieb, who went to the NCAA Tournament three times with Oklahoma State, for player appraisals and solicits information about players, arenas, fans and traditions from sports information directors from across the U.S.

Two members of the “MM08” team have player authenticity as their sole responsibility, while a number of other staffers chip in to make sure that no one is letting team allegiance or personal preference get in the way of objectivity. Then, countless hours of testing—“we focus-test the crap out of our products,” O’Brien says—ensure that these digital players resemble as closely as they possibly can their living counterparts.

Of course, some players slip through. There is a hierarchy based on the amount of time users typically spend playing with a team that determines how much attention each team gets, not that any teams are entirely disregarded. Duke, a dynasty, gets more attention than, say, New Jersey Institute of Technology, O’Brien says. Because of the number of players (326 teams in the game, an average of 12 players on each roster), O’Brien says, there are “gonna be some anomalies.”

Including the occasional misplaced afro.

Except for the hairstyle, though, Wynn’s ratings were pretty dead-on, according to the former Terrier. That’s the norm, O’Brien says—he doesn’t hear a whole lot of complaints from the real athletes. (Except for the time when O’Brien was working on “NBA Live,” and Mike Bibby, then with the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies, came over to the studios to plead his case that he could throw down more than just a “weak one-handed dunk,” O’Brien recalls).

For many other players, though, being included in a game is a small sign they’ve made it. At least initially. “I thought it was the coolest thing to be in the game,” says a current sophomore player who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of NCAA compliance concerns. “Then I realized I was awful. It wasn’t as cool.”

That player scored almost 10 points a game in his freshman season. But that prowess didn’t translate onto the screen. Since the games are generally released early in the actual season, or even before, the designers didn’t have this player’s college stats yet when they built his video game counterpart, accounting for the avatar’s bumbling benchwarming.

Another current player, a junior who also asked to remain anonymous for NCAA compliance, says it was a “dream come true” to be in the game, joking that regardless of his rankings, he had his video game doppelganger take every open shot he had on the court. But after he missed two years because of injuries, his ratings in the game dropped, hard. “The shots don’t really go in anymore,” he says.
But he says it's still “an honor” to be in the game, even if the rim isn’t as generous as it used to be.

The games give more than just an ego trip (or a punch in the stomach). For schools like BU, which receives only regional media attention before the NCAA Tournament, if they even make it that far, the games offer players and teams a way to get their names out beyond their corner of America. “I remember a particular instance when some kid said he beat the game and said I was the MVP of the NCAA Tournament,” says Kevin Gardner, Wynn's former teammate at BU (pictured, sort of, at left). “For me it was real flattering. It was really good to see BU basketball represented like that.”

But here’s where things get weird. Millions of people play these games, which, for players like Gardner, means pairs and pairs and pairs of thumbs controlling every movement of this version of you. And you’ve got zero say in how a kid in Des Moines or a Sig Ep brother at Delaware manipulates you. “It’s something to think about,” Wynn says, “how much you’re open to the world...It’s kinda strange, they’re controlling me.”

Despite the creepy factor, Wynn says it's worth it. "I guess it’s something you can brag about and tell your kids about later, get the archives and say ‘There’s me, I did something.’”

Kevin Scheitrum graduated from BU in May. He lives in NYC in an apartment that can hold exactly one bed, one TV and one Xbox 360. Two of them are broken.

Watch Out Fellas!

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

A 1957 Newsweek cover story looked at the trend of—gasp—ladies on college campuses! But fear not; these beauties manage to stay fetching and marriage-oriented, even with all that fancy college learnin’. Here’s Newsweek’s take on two of them:

Nanci Browning is 18 and a member of this fall’s sophomore class at Santa Barbara College of the University of California. Born in Santa Barbara and graduated from its high school, she quite naturally chose the local liberal arts college. Also, Nanci’s father is a professor of music at UCSB.

Nanci (“You’ll die about how it’s spelled—our family is a bunch of individualists”) is a psychology major. Even in high school, she recalls, “girls came to me with their problems about boys. Believe me, the mind is a fascinating thing.”

Poised and adult for her age, Nanci has no boy problems herself. She has been engaged for nine months to Ron Robertson, 18, who will enter either UCLA or UCSB this fall.

A member of Kappa Alpha Theta sorority, Nanci’s “favorite pastime” is eating—chocolate sundaes and milkshakes, and banana splits; 5-foot-2, she weighs only 94 pounds.
Nanci’s ambition: To help delinquent children and marry Ron.

Carol Ceithaml (it’s pronounced SIGHT-ham-ell) at 20 has worked out quite a career at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. A senior this year, she is involved in so many activities that she has to tote an appointment book to keep on schedule. Nevertheless, Carol maintains a B average in the School of Speech, where she specializes in speech correction and audiology.

Of Czech descent, Carol graduated from Calumet High School in Chicago. Her father is a vice president of Stanford Rate and Data Service, Inc. By choice, she lives with her family in Wilmette. She worries about her weight—150—although she stands 5 feet 10 inches—and sees as many beaus as she can sandwich into her 8 a.m.-to-midnight days.

Carol never considered anything other than a co-ed school: “I’ve gone to school all my life with boys; I don’t see any reason to change. After all, you have to live with men all your life.”
Carol’s ambition: To marry by 25, maybe get a master’s degree.

**RELATED in CURRENT**
Isia Jasiewicz writes about women outnumbering and outperforming men in higher education: Is having girls on top necessarily a good thing?

Hipster Attack Revisited: Why I'm Scared of Brooklyn

Current — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 11:00:00 GMT

by Erin Geld // Cornell University

They had been waiting for me, those Brooklyn hipsters. I was the ideal victim: an eager beaver undergrad from upstate; an out-of-towner visiting Brooklyn, the coolest place in the world. Wide-eyed and guileless, with a tendency toward purple prose, I was perfect, plump and juicy prey for the sullen, skinny-jeaned people of that particular part of town. They licked their lips, gnashed their teeth and managed to chase me to California.

Here’s the story: I had been visiting friends who had just graduated and (according to e-mail directions) lived in one of the remoter parts of Brooklyn, West Bushwick. At the time, I had vague plans of moving there too, after I graduated, because that’s what everyone else at Cornell did. On a quick summer ’05 foray, I had liked the “squat old buildings, low-hanging sky, trees, strollers and quiet traffic instead of the overpowering skyscrapers and sweating asphalt of Manhattan,” as I later put it in the column I wrote for our student newspaper.

That weekend, I had fun partying, brunching and feeling the cultural edge, but come Sunday, the hipsters had overwhelmed me. There were just too many of them, staring at each other with practiced apathy and mild discomfort. What were they all doing there, lumped together? It made me nervous. At the very least, it was a good topic for the column due on Tuesday.

The day my Brooklyn column ran, it was picked up by the notoriously nasty Gawker.com, where it was TORN apart in its commenting section, a New York hipster hub. (You have to be pre-approved just for the right to comment, making it a bizarre online club.) A brief, rather neutral note about my piece was followed by an explosion of scathing retorts, such as: “Gag. Please DON’T move to BK. We don’t want you either.” It hurt. I took every mean comment to heart. In two years of writing easygoing columns about local demolition derbies and ratty old hotels, I had received a steady stream of sweet e-mails but never really made any waves. This tsunami of attention was utterly insane. I recently reviewed the comments, and as far as I can tell, what pissed these readers off was: 1) “West Bushwick,” as I had called my friends’ neighborhood, is apparently just some real-estate/hipster-neighborhood-renaming conspiracy that Insiders otherwise know as “East Williamsburg,” which, according to said Insiders, sucks. 2) I had, without a smidgen of irony, announced I was moving to Brooklyn because it was cool. Which is, obviously, a very uncool thing to do.

In the wake of the Gawker-hipster attack, I hated hipsters. My skin crawled at the mention of an obscure band-writer-artist. I sneered at keffiyehs and square rims. I grew my bangs out. Complained about their awkward parties. Started shopping at J.Crew again.

But I couldn’t do it for long. I worked at an on-campus cafe amid Art and Architecture students, took lots of writing workshops, ran a literary magazine full of one-line confessions and tiny doodles of chairs. All of my friends were hipsters! My favorite people in the world (acted like they) knew everything and looked awesome every day. Actually, I applaud the vanity of hipsters, their relish for their moment in fashion—day-glo plaid, careful shag and cut-off tag. Bless them for their meticulously put-together selves. It is they, the deliciously ridiculous, who will be remembered in the illustrated history texts and costume parties of the future. They will be our generation’s glorious testimony. It can’t be helped.

With this in mind, I even forgive the hipsters of Brooklyn a little. I’ve concluded that the Gawker incident was very strange and New Yorky, and I refuse to hold it against hipsters nationwide. You see, New Yorkers have a tendency to be territorial and possessive of their addresses, and out-of-towners get serious stink-eye. Moreover, few people are as obsessed with New York as recent arrivals, with their arms spread open, crying out: “Hellooo New York! You will be mine!” Brooklyn is a bunch of out-of-town kids trying very hard to blend in and stand out at the same time, so of course you’re going to end up with a lot of bitter phonies with a taste for online bullying.

So, I eschewed the Ithaca-to-Williamsburg trend and went west to San Francisco. It is, surprisingly, almost more packed with bandanna babies than Brooklyn. They lounge in Dolores Park with organic sandwiches and two-buck Chuck as if it were stale bagels and PBR on Bedford Avenue. They are similar: name-dropping obscure bands, writing novels “secretly” and being endearingly vain. But in the Mission’s sweet-smelling cloud of tolerance, hipsters are relaxed and just a bit more lovable. Being from somewhere else is a good thing. It’s expected, interesting. There’s no convenient Internet venue through which to pick on people, as they lick their own outsider wounds. Instead, people comment on restaurants and farmers’ markets. They’re usually nice. Helpful. Memories of 1967 still linger in the Bay Area, and people are a little goofy for my East Coast taste. But, thank God, they don’t take themselves very seriously—they’re way cool with being cool.

Erin graduated from Cornell last May and is now writing in San Francisco. She wants to stress that if you have a problem with her column, you shouldn't post mean things anonymously to some website; you should take the old-fashioned route and either e-mail her or send a letter to the editor.

**RELATED in CURRENT**
Molly Finkelstein combs the Vassar campus in search of the "True Hipster."

Illustration by Sylvia Park // Parsons The New School of Design