Maybe you made some new friends at your internship or job over the summer, how nice for you. Professor to the Stars Jeffrey Sachs has made some new best friends and oh, they are awesome. Here's our Jeff Sachs (right) with famous people John Mayer (he of smoldering stare on the left), and Jennifer Aniston (center), hanging out and probably talking about sustainable development and Brad Pitt and the like. Scholarly journal Us Weekly reports that the photo was taken at dinner for Sachs' Millennium Promise project.

Oh, and just for good measure there's a photo thrown in of Sachs with old friend Angelina Jolie, who is neither famous nor good-looking enough to merit a larger photo.

For SEAS Class Day speaker engineering is the new liberal arts.

FaCU, SGB funding meetings should be open to all.

The New Harlem, its a happening place.

The mayor of Brigadoon bids farewell.

Gandhi scholar to hang it up after 40 years of teaching the same course.

Jeffrey Sachs goes back to the future.

Jeff Sachs reads the news and checks his email, after the jump. Slacking off on laptops during lectures -- professors: they're just like us!

Jeffrey Sachs was on the Daily Show last night to promote his new book, Common Wealth, in what turns out to be the least entertaining Daily Show interview ever. It's repetitive and vague; Sachs says we all must work together to fix the world's problems, Stewart asks which problems we must solve, Sachs then names about 5 problems and says we must work together to fix them, etc. Stewart concludes the interview with an awkward, nonsensical joke about Poland and then it's all over. Like it never even happened.

In which Bwog Lecture Hop Editor Pierce Stanley ventures into the cavernous confines of Low Library to corroborate the commotion sparked by last night's launch of Columbia's newest journal of Sustainable Development, Consilience.

As the beat of African drums flittered through the four corners of Low Library last night, a diverse score of Columbia students, professors, affiliates, and members of the general public mingled heartily beneath the hallowed dome in anticipation of what would prove to be the next installment of the Jeffrey Sachs extravaganza. One could even say that a general sense of consilience filled Low last night, as a diverse group of people came together to celebrate that very principle, the unifying of knowledge and information across many disciplines to create a coherent framework for the better understanding of the study of Sustainable Development. With the mood as lighthearted as the drumbeats and a tangible sense of optimism pervading the lecture hall, the launch of the highly billed Journal of Sustainable Development, Consilience, did not disappoint. Nor did the keynote address given by one lectern-suave and gratuitously adored poverty-swashbuckler come up short.

Sustainable development loving John Legend fan Jeffrey Sachs and incredibly wealthy person Jeff Flug were recently photographed at Tom's Restaurant for an article on CNN.com about the faces of philanthropy. Faces aside, we're actually more drawn to Flug's hand, which appears disturbingly huge. "Like his commitment to charity!" observed a Bwog contributor.

The article points out that since the Jeffs joined forces, "the two have raised more than $100 million from donors like George Soros - who recently pledged $50." George Soros: underwhelming, miserly billionaire? Or copy error? We report, you decide.

- JNW

Akeel Bilgrami inspired Bwogger Justin Vlasits to pontificate on the differences between undergraduate and graduate education

John Legend and Jeffrey Sachs teamed up to slow-jam against poverty

Shapiro out, Spar in

We also learned about the baller after-party of the Poverty Action Tour

Barnard might have discovered another way of knowing

The Greek scene: Not all fun and games. Just mostly fun and games

Phi Beta Kappa was announced and subsequently stalked

Homeboy Jeffrey Sachs's love-fest, more commonly referred to as the Show Me: Poverty Action Tour, continued last night in Lerner Cinema, striking a far less harmonious chord than the previous night's concert. While Monday's kick-off event offered a serenade by none other than the Grammy award winning singer-songwriter John Legend who sang "Show Me," a piece written in response to his qualms about witnessing poverty in Tanzanian villages, Tuesday's event entitled New Directions: Critical Interpretations of Sustainable Development left the music behind in order to pack a more somber and academic punch.

Indeed, the event served as a forum for an all-star cast of professors and activists to suggest alternatives and criticisms to Sachs's approach to sustainable development. While the previous night's festivities were merely an homage to Sachs's work in the field of economic development, Tuesday's event offered an opportunity to rethink the current strategies of sustainable development and offer serious criticism of the anti-poverty movement (Sachs is arguably the most dominant voice in this field).

Tonight Roone was witness to what at first appears like quite the odd couple: Columbia economist Jeff Sachs and Grammy winner John Legend. And no, Jeff was not there for a duet. These formidable giants of academia and entertainment were brought together by an ambitious goal: to eliminate global poverty.

While Sachs is no neophyte when it comes to tackling problems of global consequence (being a special adviser to the UN Secretary General and all) but Legend's recent world tours prompted his investigation into what he could do to end poverty in many of the places he visited. The result: the Show Me Campaign, aimed at permanently lifting the village of Mbola, Tanzania, from poverty with $1.5 million invested in seven key agricultural, educational and public health initiatives, in conjunction with Millennium Promise, an organization that helps villages all across Sub-Saharan Africa. Photos follow the jump.

Poverty-hating concert-goers have already begun lining up for Jeffrey Sachs' and John Legend's totally bitchin' "Poverty Action Tour." Check back with Bwog for continued updates, we have a staffer embedded in Roone who will be covering the event in detail. CTV (channel 37) will also be airing the event live.

In which Bwog staffer Armin Rosen sits in on a peaceful disagreement over peace.

If you thought Ahmadinemania offered Columbians the best oratorical fireworks of the year, then you, dear reader, clearly weren't at the Satow room for today's Peace in Darfur conference. A mid-afternoon speech by anthro professor Mahmood Mamdani (whose Major Debates in the Study of Africa is building a well-deserved reputation as one of the best undergraduate classes out there--even though it's only been offered twice) managed to overshadow an early-morning showdown between UN Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad and Econ professor-to-the-stars Jeffery Sachs. Disagreeing over whether to put $2.6 billion into peacekeepers or sustainable development projects is one thing. Inflicting a disbelieving sense of shock upon a room of Save Darfur activists, Darfuri expats and human rights scholars...well that's why you come to Columbia, right?

Of the many provocative claims the African studies czar made during a 20-minute, almost totally extemporaneous speech, two would prove particularly contentious. Firstly, he argued that the security situation had stabilized in Darfur and that advocacy groups like Save Darfur were spreading a "fiction" of an increasingly intense genocide. "Why was this fiction continuing?" he asked. "Did these groups want more donations...was it part of a political agenda? I don't know."

And secondly, he argued that the international legal framework presented an illegitimate form of prosecuting war crimes in Africa, and that the international community's concept of "justice as retribution" prioritized revenge over peace. For Paul Van Zyl, the one-time executive secretary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa (a country whose justice-free model of conflict resolution Mamdani had just held up as an example for Darfur) and speaker on an earlier panel, this postulation of a peace-justice binary couldn't be allowed to slide. In the popular parlance, shit was about to escalate.

Wish you were in Paris right now? Bwog foreign correspondent Sumaiya Ahmed reports on Columbia's big weekend in the City of Lights.

This weekend, Columbia students in Paris were treated to another sort of World Leaders Forum organized by the Columbia Alumni Association. The three day affair included Nobel laureate and 7th Secretary-General of the United Nations Kofi Annan as the keynote speaker, as well as Columbia professors Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, David J. Helfand, and President Lee C. Bollinger.

Saturday featured a full day of panels on globalization, arts, and the media at La Bourse, the historic site of the Paris Stock Exchange. The first panel, "A Critical Look at Today's Media" touched on a number of issues, such as how journalism has changed under the Bush administration. The moderator, Graduate School of Journalism Dean Nicholas Lemann described the current administration as "post-modernists of the right" who refuse to trust journalists, and recalled that Karl Rove had once written to a colleague that "the press is just another interest group."

1) Finding the Columbia search engine less efficient than manually locating wanted pages? Google through all of the columbia.edu pages here. It works like a dream.

2) Cents and insensitivity: Moneycontrol India asks whether Indian students may be deterred from studying in the U.S. following the massacre at Virginia Tech. Columbia's cited.

3) The beacon of hope and UN Millenium Villages frontman, Jeff Sachs, may be drinking from a quarter-full glass. In this BBC lecture, the future looks bleak.

4) CUAssassins...is over! The Commissioners write, "The game lasted a whopping 55 days, but congratulations are in order for team C-Unit for coming in first place, team OB GYN Kenobi for coming in second place, and Agent MCPants of the team C-Unit for assassinating 17 of the rest of you."

If you read our February issue, you'd have heard of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change, a group of blue chips that has been meeting for the last two years to come up with some sort of statement on what do about our warming world. Last Tuesday, they came out with their joint statement, which has been garnering a lot of low-level press around the world. The statement itself is nothing to get your knickers in a knot over; mostly the conventional wisdom of what needs to happen that's been out there for years, with lukewarm verbs like "provide," "support," and "encourage." (Meanwhile, these guys are saying the same thing, but less delicately.) The list of groups endorsing is about half the size of those participating in the process--Ford, Google, and Wal-Mart are conspicuously absent. But many of those who didn't sign as organizations have added their names as individuals, and now you can too! An e-mail went out on the ABC listserv asking students to get on the bandwagon. And chuck your car keys on your way out.

- LBD