After a three-year reign, New York University is no longer the No. 1 dream school for college-bound kids. Harvard, Princeton and Stanford are all ahead of it. Even Columbia dropped two spots. New York is over. [NYP]
Yesterday’s New York University panel about celebrity gossip and its players, sponsored by The Atlantic magazine and aptly titled “The Britney Show,” brought together heavyweights like Page Six’s Richard Johnson, Star’s Bonnie Fuller, and X17’s Brandy and François Navarre, who were kind enough to leave their six million dollar Pacific Palisades home to hang in the city.
Johnson shot himself in the foot when he called celebrity blogs “parasites,” accusing them of not “generat[ing] their own news stories,” which is amusing since Page Six wouldn’t get through the day without lifting items from many of these bottom-feeding blogs, and the brand’s own effort at competing with them failed after just three months.
And the always quotable Brandy Navarre, who is building a cache of Miley Cyrus photos in the hopes she becomes the next trainwreck poptart, admits her agency is “trying to get the shots before they go into rehab.”
And that’s when her God complex shines through: “Mr. Navarre suggested that a pack of paparazzi may have been able to prevent John Lennon’s murder in 1980; Ms. Navarre said photos of partying starlets have sometimes spurred their families to get professional help,” reports AdAge.
And the little matter of X17’s own photogs allegedly brutally assaulting individuals to within an inch of their life? Well, so long as they’re not celebrities, preventing their murders isn’t really the Navarres’ concern.
Concerned about the future of books after all those faux memoirs? Don’t be! NYU students, who are the future of every creative profession, are still scrambling over each other for literary fame.
Or at least they will be, judging by the crowd at last night’s “Agents, Editors and Writers! Oh My!,” a panel discussion on that magical Oz, the land of publishing. We made Intern Anastasia attend.
The talking heads included an agent, a couple of editors, and one “screenwriter” who has, like, two credits on IMDB. Most of what they said was super-obvious, like, “It takes us a long time to get to the slush pile” and “Chick lit is hard to sell right now.”
Finally, someone mentioned the elephant in the room: How had JamesFreyJTLeroyMargaretJones affected what they choose to publish?
Claudia Cross, Sterling Lord Literistic agent and Amy Sedaris impersonator candidate, claimed those faux memoirists hadn’t affected her job much. “It’s hard to sell a memoir to begin with. As an agent, if I see a beautifully-written memoir I think I can sell, I’m not going to do any fact-checking. I would trust the editor’s legal department with that.”
A Random House editor, Stephanie Lane, explained they “usually go through three edits, and each one gets more expensive,” adding, “We won’t publish anything incorrect—that we know of.” The pasty, bearded crowd (note: only the males were bearded) laughed.
Clad in black-framed glasses that all literary types must wear to get their I’m a Literary Type Card, Marion Wrenn, editor of lit mag Painted Bride, pointed out “Tobias Wolff started This Boy’s Life with ‘Memory has its own story to tell,’ which sort of let him off the hook.”
From our mailbag: “In my Media Studies class [at NYU] this morning, the professor asked, “How many of you know who Matt Drudge is?” Total silence. Then he asked, “How many of you DON’T know who Matt Drudge is?” Practically every hand in the 300-person class shot up. So it looks like NYU students don’t read The Drudge Report, or New York
Magazine.”
Take that, Serena Torrey.
• Hey, know what your morning commute has been missing? A giant, somewhat-terrifying shark hologram! And a clean pair of shorts.
• Nation’s largest university to become even larger. Seriously, quit taking over our city, NYU.
• What’s grosser than a 69 year old having sex? A 69 year old having sex with a mother and her daughter in an crappy airport motel.
• Hey, douchebag—the way it works is, you set the flaming bag of dog poo on fire. Not the actual dog.
We’re pretty sure we had to link to this, since we’re on the list, we use NYU j-schoolers as interns, and NYU’s j-school invites us to speak to j-schoolers sometimes.
• Letting “the girls” get some fresh air is so in right now. Meanwhile, referring to a woman’s breasts as “the girls” is—and always will be—totally lame.
• Mayor Bloomberg has visited 20 U.S. cities in the past 18 months. You know, it’s almost like he’s campaigning for something other than New York City mayor.
• Greedy Coney Island developer get slightly less greedy and agrees to rescind plans to build residential developments; local drug dealers rejoice.
• Apparently going to NYU is really expensive. Who knew??
• Meanwhile, it turns out fast food chains would prefer that you didn’t know how many Weight Watchers points a Big Mac is worth. [Answer: 30,000].
• Rats take a short break from terrorizing New York Times‘ staffers to make out like bandits at your friendly, neighborhood Pinkberry.
As we were browsing the internets for a leisurely, late-afternoon read, we came across this charming ode to New York University, whose campus-less doors are home to thousands of downtown trustafarians.
“Fuck NYU! It’s the rape of the landscape! That’s what NYU is doing to the East Village.” It’s 11 o’clock in the morning, a jackhammer is pounding in the background, and Michael Gallagher is having a conniption fit.
Best leid ever? Perhaps! Except, as it turns out, it’s just a boring article about some guy’s periodical store.
Ever wondered what it would be like to get hit on by Zach Braff? Why not find out for yourself!
Simply hop onto the 6 train, get off at Astor Place and head to the nearest NYU dive bar. Once there, it’s practically a given that the notoriously awkward pick-up artist will attempt to “woo” you, assuming you have a working pair of mammary glands.
So order yourself a cheap, watered down cocktail, park your ass at the bar and wait for the socially inept pick-up artist to strike with the cultivated full-body grope, or such winning lines as, “You have nice breasts.”
Because, as Radar reports, that whole sensitive-guy image Braff cultivated is pretty much a load of crap.
Apparently, in between ditching Seventeen magazine, grabbing bylines on Forbes.com and launching her own, extremely mysterious multimedia tween franchise, Atoosa Rubenstein has found time to stop in at NYU and share some of her journalistic insights.
Which, apparently, made quite the impression on the girls—and the (metrosexual) guys—who take “Digital Journalism” and have a vested interest in women’s magazines!
But don’t just take our word for it!
CONTINUED »
• Naomi Campbell: bringing saphron traffic-vests back, makes sanitation work fashionable.
• Three Long Islanders were apprehended on the Triborough Bridge with $4000 worth of coke…because they couldn’t pay the $4.50 toll.
• Cost of imaginary Second Avenue subway project increases by $54 million real dollars.
• “NYU is poisoning the culture of the Village.” Well, obviously.
• Police found 22 pounds of marijuana concealed in a spare tire. More surprising, however, was the 50 grams of coke that was stashed in the love handles/cankle regions.
The New York Times blog decides to weigh in on that NYU students’ “Find The Illegal Immigrant” rally/scavenger hunt, sponsored (of course!) by the NYU College Republicans.
And, from the looks of it, the Grey Lady has her panties all in a bunch.
And there you have it. The Times deems this giant publicity stunt as possibly racist, and “reminiscent of the white-students-only scholarship stunt” offered by Boston University’s College Republicans last Fall.
Now, why can’t those silly N.Y.U. kids quit all the pseudo-political theatrics, and go back to reading Nietzsche, eating ramen noodles and having mind-blowing pot-inspired epiphanies (and red hot library sex) like their Morningside Heights counterparts?
With Cathy Horn holding down the Fashion Week fort, the Styles had a chance to break out an article on their favorite topic: trends. And while we don’t normally hone in on the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, when Warren St. John pens an in-depth article on the status of Facebook (with the term TMI in the headline no less), we can’t help but be drawn in.
Facebook is changing the face of social networking, claims the piece, with the site’s additional newsfeed feature. The new “feed” documents all blog updates, friend adds, photo uploads, and just about every other open book feature available on Facebook, and sends that update to everyone in a member’s network. This is all truly fascinating and all, really, but what struck us as the “trend” in the piece was the discovery that there are actually people out there whose job it is to track these changes.
Those who study social networking sites say that users’ comfort with revealing intimate details about themselves comes in part from a perception that in the din of life online, there is a kind of privacy through anonymity …
“The issue isn’t transparency but scope,” said Clay Shirky, who teaches in the interactive telecommunications program at New York University. “People are willing to be transparent to friends, as long as they are in control. Facebook violated both of those conditions.”
Those who study social networking sites? Study them. We always knew New York University was progressive with it’s make-up-your-own-major stuff. But this “interactive communications” sounds like it might be an actual department at the school. Um, we just hope anyone who majors in that decides to minor in something that will help them get into law school.
When Information Becomes T.M.I. [Warren St. John, New York Times]
This just in: 15 students at University of Berkeley ate some cookies laced with pot and are now hallucinating and can’t breathe and shit.
What? We didn’t even think you could get into Berkeley without proving you could handle a couple weed filled pastries. NYU students continue to curse the fact that they are at this moment pulling bongs filled with schwag they had to freakin’ pay for.
Berkeley students who got sick may have eaten marijuana-laced cookies [Court TV]
• We weren’t actually aware that the “little hot dog” ever went out of style. [NYT]
• Who are these “urban people” trying to get into NYC clubs? What do they think this is, a city? [NYDN]
• It used to be so much easier to deal weed at NYU. Er, uh, so we hear. [Gothamist]
• Bruce Springsteen is totally a real New Yorker. He even hates the Post. [Rolling Stone]
• If NYC drivers would just stop for a nun every now and then, maybe we wouldn’t all be going to hell. [NYP]
• Just try to leave NYC today. Just try. [AP]
• The Brooklyn Bridge needs a make-over. It’s starting to look worse than Courtney Love. [NY Sun]
• NYU students pay a lot of money so that they will have the view from their dorm room the East Village residents had back in 1978. [NY Sun]
• Maybe it’s just that more disadvantaged people are dieting? [NYT]
• Considering all of New York is “gay friendly,” an Ancient Order of Hibernians museum would be pretty controversial anywhere on NYC soil. [NYDN]
• Maybe DUMBO was cool … but just about anything that was once edgy loses its allure after ending up in Vanity Fair. [DumboNYC]
• What do rich, young kids do in the summer? Well, when they aren’t running for Bryant Park, they have hot dog eating contests. (We’ll stick with our stoop browsing and hula hoop contests.) [NYO]
• NYU: not just the top party school, but also maintains a very high “gay point average.” [NYP]
• In hopes to get anyone to shop at her stores again, Ann Taylor starts fall Fashion Week early with a breast cancer awareness show. [FWD]
• Maybe if
• The best way to prevent yourself from getting famous? Steal Brandon Davis‘ jokes from four months ago. [TMZ]
• Jessica Beil has resorted to making out with chicks in order to get some attention in the gossip columns. [Gatecrasher]
• Only in Choire Sicha’s world does Jessica Coen + Noelle Hancock = Melissa Burkelhammer. (We could, however, see Jessica Joffe coming from that equation.) [NYO]
• It’s not really the legs or the hair or the skin that makes Heidi Klum so friggin’ lucky. It’s that every time she says something really stupid, she can blame her German accent. [WWD]
• Today is Boy George’s day. [AP]
• What a great homecoming: Stepping off the plane and into handcuffs. [NYT]
• A proposal for metal detectors in New York movie theaters is laughed at, just like the box office numbres for Basic Instinct II. [NYSun]
• Taking bribes as police commissioner? Just pay it back and it’s water under the bridge … or every A1 newspaper headline. [AP]
• Vendors are being robbed by the city, so they protest. But they still need their money, so it’s right back to handing out food to those NYU kids and tourists. [MetroNY]
• A boat collides with a barge and two fishermen go missing. Which causes us to have great concern — about where we’ll get our shrimp. [WABC]
• The first openly lesbian Playboy playmate gets in a police altercation in Chelsea. Just another day for the NYPD. [NYDN]
• Remember that NYU student who set up a fake hedge fund and ended up on the cover of New York magazine? Yeah, he’s gonna fry now. [NYT]
• Why on earth do we even let Ann Coulter enter our city? [YouTube]
• Dreams of an enormous downtown apartment get crushed by email keys of one blog reader. [Gawker]
• Summer has officially begun! Shakespear in the Park has launched in all its ridiculously long line and hippie picnic glory. [Gothamist]
Editorial Director
