With nearly the entire student body locked up now in finals or the library, you may have forgotten that we live in quite the dangerous city! While tipster Alex Weinberg was able to stand on Ruggles in GTA IV, Columbia sociology professor turned underworld expert Sudhir Venkatesh noted in Slate that the first person shooter bears close resemblance to actual life on Chicago's South Side, where he studied social trends in drug dealing, gang-leading and prostitution with Freakonomist Steven Levitt. He also suggests improvements, including the option of being able to run over his book publishers.

The city is not just killing urban youth, but also innocent red-tailed eyases! Cityroom, after first reporting the existence of three hawk babies in our beloved Riverside Park, now tells us that it seems like they have died. Only one corpse has been found, but a local birder said that cause of death is most likely poisonous food, which would have probably killed all three hawk chicks. We are still not sure what relationship these 81^st Streeters have with Hawkmadinejad, but they are probably related to our Hero.

-JJV

Tipster and video game enthusiast Nick Camp directs Bwog's attention to the new Grand Theft Auto IV, specifically the Varsity Heights neighborhood of Liberty City. Buildings eerily similar to Low, Butler, and Hamilton are located just off Ivy Drive—there's even a College Walk.

Bwog daily editor Paul Barndt pointed out that this homage to Alma Mater is much more accurate than Columbia's representation in the Spiderman games, "where Low is like 15 feet tall." Bwog contributor and resident GTAIV expert Alex Weinberg was kind enough to snap some screen shots as "he" stood on "Ruggles" with a sniper.

Aerial shot (featuring a helicopter!) after the jump.

Bwog has just been alerted to some curious news. It seems that the bastion of journalistic integrity that is the New York Sun ran a very informative piece about CU by a certain Columbia Alum and Republican District Leader Christopher Lanzillotti.

According to this article, it was almost precisely two score years ago when a group of renegade students overtook some buildings of this very campus (urinating out of windows) and protested commencement with "loud rock music" and used "intoxicating substances." It's a good thing that none of this tomfoolery persisted on campus! Lanzillotti seems relatively pleased that the campus was able to overcome this "tumultuous" time and now student activism is no longer an important part of campus life. Apparently, we have been tamed!

-JJV

In non-housing-selection related news, this week's New Yorker has a piece by Jane Kramer (it's not online, but you can read an excerpt here -- and an interesting critique of the piece here) about Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. In truth, it's something of a misrepresentation to say that the piece is about El-Haj, as it ranges in focus from discussing MEALAC's history of controversy to examining the tenure process's relationship to politics. But it is interesting and worth a read, if only because it's the most we've heard out of press-averse Abu El-Haj following the ordeal of her tenure process in the fall.

If you're looking for a piece that will outline Abu El-Haj's argument, explain her methods of analysis and interpretation, and provide excerpts of her very dense book "Facts on the Ground", this isn't it. (If you are, the Current did so subjectively last fall.) While Kramer meanders in this direction, what she's mainly interested in is how one academic's tenure process turned into an online firestorm of misinformation and vilification that often said more about Columbia's Jewish community and faculty than Abu El-Haj's work.

The AP is reporting that a suspect, a 13-year-old boy, has been arrested regarding the death of Columbia grad student Minghui Yu. He is reportedly being charged with second-degree manslaughter, but his name has not been released.

UPDATE (1:15 PM): According to The Daily News and Gothamist, the police now suspect that the boys who assaulted Yu did not intend to mug him. From the DN: "We don't believe it was robbery," a police source said. "It was some sort of altercation." The DN also has a witness saying that the 13 year old boasted "Look what I do to this one" before attacking Yu.
The NY Post reports that "Yu struggled with at least one of the teens, who punched him in the face, while the other kept watch, witnesses told police."
The police are still searching for the second teenager.

UPDATE (1:40 PM): The New York Times has a story up now, highlighting Yu's involvement in the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. Quote from the article: "'This area is very dangerous,' said Hyun Kim, a Columbia graduate student...'It could happen to anyone living in this area.'"

WABC TV and multiple student tipsters inform us that a grad student [not GS as previously reported] fleeing muggers at 122nd Street and Broadway was hit by a car and taken to St. Luke's with "severe head trauma." More on this as we get more information.

UPDATE (1:33 AM): Gothamist post reveals that the student was studying late in Butler before the incident. We now feel worse about this than we already did.

UPDATE (11:05 AM): The student, Minghui Yu, died last night at St. Luke's Hospital. The Daily News has the story in classic tabloid form (e.g. "The guy's body was twisted like a pretzel.") The Spec has it here. Bwog, for sorrow, hangs its head.

Update (1:19 PM): More coverage can be found here and here.

Bollinger's email after the jump

Several readers have tipped Bwog off that the cover story for this week's New York Times Magazine discusses transgender students, and centers specifically around Rey, a transgender student who enrolled at Barnard last year. The article takes a look at the treatment of transgender students at different universities--for instance, Wesleyan uses gender-neutral pronouns like "ze" and "hir"--as well as what it means to be transgender at a women's college.

Rey discusses his first week at Barnard, during which his room mate felt uncomfortable that she was "being asked to live with a man," after enrolling at a women's college. Rey and his parents met with Dean of the College Dorothy Denburg about the situation, and it was eventually decided that enrolling in the School of General Studies might be a better fit. Rey now describes himself as very happy after an awful first semester. The long-ish but incredibly interesting article can be read online in its entirety.

Also in the New York Times of Columbia-related interest is an article about everyone's favorite little-controversy-that-could Juicy Campus. The piece focuses on the aftermath of scandalous Juicy Campus posts regarding one student at Yale (who participated in an amateur pornographic film) and one at Baylor University (who was called a slut).

The recent attempts to "outlaw" the site at Pepperdine University were also mentioned, but ultimately the student leading the crusade against Juicy Campus expressed regret about drawing attention to it in the first place.

"Looking back, it was a mistake," said Austin Maness, a senior who wrote the resolution but now feels that it only increased students' awareness of Juicy Campus. "Curiosity killed the cat," he said, "and everyone started going to the site."

- JNW

Columbia students who stayed tuned after American Idol tonight were rewarded by this Fox 5 news teaser: "The cheating scandal at Columbia - the teacher at the center of the
storm, and the tough choice students are being forced to make." The Fox News affiliate ran a brief story, with both the usual (stock footage of college walk, picture of Wen Jin) and with the somewhat more interesting. One freshman engaged the reporter in this exchange:

STUDENT: "I think, because it's Columbia, people like to sensationalize the whole thing."

REPORTER: "So you're blaming it on us..."

STUDENT: [laughs] "Yeah, you guys."

Former student, University Professor, and provost Fritz Stern, 80, has just published a memoir called Five Germanys I Have Known, covered today in the Times Book Review. It's a good review, and when we find the time we plan on reading (or at least skimming) the book. But we think everyone should take a look at the photo the Times ran: Stern is the one on the left. The gentleman standing is his classmate, good friend, and co-chairman, in 1944, of Columbia's "Roosevelt for President," Allen Ginsberg. They're sitting in one of those benches on the eastern edge of Riverside Park, and that's gotta be something like 113th/114th Street behind them. Cool stuff!

In a school that boasts the country's most prolific overachievers and urges cutthroat competition, it is easy to become jaded.

Thank goodness small town papers exist to pat us on the back for a job well done. The Putnam County News and Recorder has recognized one of its proud residents, Terence Zaleski C'07 for making the Dean's list.

That one's going on the fridge!

-Thanks to Tanveer Ali for paying attention to Google's sponsored links.

Prestige-obsessed Columbians should be pleased to hear that 3 2 3 of the 5 most influential "idea-makers" in New York (as ranked by New York Magazine) work at Columbia!

Everyone else should at least get some morbid thrill to know that on said magazine's list of the 5 most influential New Yorkers in education, our own PresBo appears not.

Update: Adding to the irony, he did make the cut for real estate.

Update 2: Robert Thurman (Uma's dad) made it in religion.