April is not just Poetry Month, it's also Earth Awareness Month. W.M. Akers reports on NYU's valiant awareness-raising nude protest/celebration.

A civic-minded group of students took to the streets outside of the main NYU buildings today, exhibiting their bodies and their concern for the environment. Timing their small march to coincide with the gap in between the 11 AM and 12:30 PM classes, they made a circuit of six blocks several times, chanting and cheering in support of Earth Month.

They gathered at the east side of Washington Square a few minutes before noon to trade shirts, pants and brasseires for colorful war paint. Most of the men wore shorts and running shoes, while the women wore pants or athletic shorts and a bra or body paint. It was a few degrees too cold for comfortable nudity, and assorted nipples greeted the air cheerfully. Though they looked a bit silly, the participants had their message ready, as though they expected people to ask why they were running around topless.

The past week was also NYU's spring break, and our downtown diarist found himself on a cross-country sojourn to the City of Angels. He has since returned eastward with harrowing and enlightening tales of Southern California.

Probably we should all move to California. Not for the sun or a chance in Hollywood—if we wanted clear skies and hope we wouldn't have come to New York—but for LA's impossible size. To the students of NYU and Columbia, this unabashedly fake paradise could offer a dose of honesty. The city is hideous, yes, and any beauty or culture it may have had in the 1950s has been eaten away by the smog and covered up by plastic surgery. But its landscape of strip malls and concrete, punctuated almost ironically by the occasional bunch of palms, is infinite in a way that Manhattan isn't.

It's not so much a metropolis as a collection of medium sized cities, each washed out in its own way. Between the traffic and the town's size it takes forever to get anywhere, but as consolation most of the places one goes are as dull as sitting in the car. Hurrying is impossible, keeping the youth of the city from pretending that racing down the steps of the subway is the same as being an embattled hustler.

Our beloved NYU Diarist, in sickness and in health.

The Washington Square Duane Reade has run out of Airborne, that slightly suspect "Effervescent Health Formula" that brags it was invented by a teacher. Whether the stuff works or not—I'm unconvinced but take it anyway—it's cold season, and it's selling. [It doesn't work —Ed.] Classes have been two thirds full, truancy caused not by the brief spurts of nice weather, as was my first theory, but by a vicious illness that's causing we Violets to wilt. The Washington Square construction has proven useful, giving us deep pits that are an ideal final resting place for the dozens of bodies pouring out of Hayden Residence Hall every morning. The Square was originally a Potter's Field, the site of hangings as late as the 1820s, so it's nice to see that even in mass graves our freshmen have a taste for the retro.

NYU diarist W.M. Akers returns with ruminations on love below 14th street and why you should get in on the action.

From what I understand, the Columbia dating pool—men and women, straight and gay—is a shallow one. Your battlements keep you so well-contained that you bounce off them and into each other quickly, in a kind of sexual pinball that leaves most of the acceptable options exhausted by the end of freshman year. In the past I've found myself jealous of your closed social world, since it's necessary to have a close circle of friends in order to gossip properly, but the closed circles quickly run out of people to do gossip-worthy things with.

So if Valentine's Day didn't see you trapped in a suffocating dorm relationship, consider a little sexual tourism down to Washington Square. After all, no one at Columbia is impressed that you go to Columbia. But if you get the right brand of NYU student—or New School student, if you want things even easier—he or she should be perceptive enough to recognize your natural, well-projected superiority. The child of the Village will thrill to see your name appear on caller ID, for a descent from Morningside Heights is no less an occasion than an angel's coming down from Heaven. (And whether your descent is voluntary or, like that most beautiful angel's, forced, we below cannot tell.)

The latest installment from faithful NYU correspondent W.M. Akers, in which our diarist recites a history of the Square's chess-playing past.

The recently commenced construction on Washington Square has consumed the middle of the park, disrupting the walking and sitting that are so important a part of NYU life. But it has been arranged to skirt the park's chess tables which are the public face of the game on southern Manhattan. They are dominated by a crowd of regulars, mostly young to middle aged black men who, when not playing each other, play strangers willing to ante five dollars. This isn't quite hustling, but one should expect to lose. The cold thins the crowd during the winter, but last Sunday, weather-be-damned, one remained by a table, his pieces set up before him. His name was Simon, and he pointed to the muddy fields and tarnished footpaths of the Square as evidence that the construction is necessary.

NYU correspondent W.M. Akers signs off for the semester and reflects on a fall of frequenting coffee shops.

Loving Bwog,

Your correspondent writes today from miles above the earth, a better vantage than usual, but there's nothing to see worth recording. All I hear is the window seat droning of two passengers making friends behind me. They have declared that the antics of Lindsey Lohan are sickening and that teenagers shouldn't get pregnant or be having sex at all.

I am going home, but my thoughts are with those of you still at work. (They're not charitable thoughts, exactly, but you're on my mind.) NYU is keeping some of my colleagues until Friday, and I suspect they are as I saw them last, hunched and thirsty in the clear light of Think Coffee. Think, which is the most popular coffee shop around but has nothing special to recommend it. Joe, a few blocks west, has superb cappucino, while Mud has the best drip coffee known in the city. The century old Caffe Reggio plays host to most undergraduate coffee dates, since its low-light and uncomfortable chairs make one eager to slip into someone else's long-twin bed.

NYU Correspondent W. M. Akers is back, with an explication of his school's own real estate woes, and why nobody cares.

Among the many hardships of the New York University student is a scarcity of abominations. We have no Manhattanville, no nooses, no Islamic tyrants, and while Columbia students get to moan about northward expansion like it's the new rape of Belgium, the best NYU gives us is the partial-dismantling of a holy building on 12th Street. The dorm we're building there will incorporate the facade of the architecturally insignificant old church, letting residents taste absolution as they step out to class. Tearing down handsome buildings to erect another gray pile is unfortunate, but not evil.

NYU simply lacks Columbia's muscle, meaning that we are acted upon as often as we act. Since 2003, community groups have raged against the Department of Parks and Recreation's proposed renovation of Washington Square Park, and NYU students have grinned blithely at their indignation. This week, the city approved the Department's plan, meaning that construction could begin as early as the new year.

Because being a liberal in Manhattan requires opposing anything constructed since the Empire State Building, I was confused to find that the plan is strangely sound. They have removed the cruel elements of the proposal—which included fencing out the homeless and smoothing down the three concrete nubs that are the only hills below 55th Street—meaning that the construction will amount to little more than tidying up. Even the city councilman who has led the opposition to the plan has come around, saying that the compromises are unprecedented.

W. M. Akers is at it again, this time telling us why our downtown rivals are just as tired as we are - even if they work much less.

In my film class this week we watched a three-and-a-half hour black-and-white movie, in Russian, that took place around 1400 AD. It was lovely, sure, but not thrilling, and 70 percent of the class slept for part of it. (Your correspondent, model of scholarship that he is, restricted himself to a modest ten-minute cat nap.) A boy to my left, who had perhaps just finished a government sponsored sleep deprivation experiment, was out for 175 of those 205 minutes, splayed in various poses across his desk and the two next to him. He shrouded his head with a sweatshirt for most of his Van Winkling, prompting the questions, "Why sign up for a class you can sleep through? What were you doing on a Tuesday night that left you in this state?" and "Can I come with you next Tuesday?" But it also made me wonder how students at a "selective" university can stand to doze so.

As my Columbian friends often remind me, you up at 116th work hard. Very, very hard, with the fervor of someone whose parents pay $50,000 a year for you to have the privilege. It's charming really, your work ethic, and even if it makes you unhappy now, somewhere down the line--when you make partner, secure tenure, or overthrow the government of Guatemala--you'll be satisfied that at 20 you worked yourself to exhaustion. Graduates of NYU's College of Arts and Sciences will, in between bowls of soup at the Bowery Mission, look back on Tuesday nights spent drinking down the street.

Bwog NYU correspondent W.M. Akers is back, this time with a few observations on how our neighbors to the south go out and get down.

Does Columbia have a "Sex and the City" problem? Girls at NYU, it seems, are still infatuated with the show, and those who go out regularly tend to fancy themselves as Carrie Bradshaw. Miranda was always my favorite--so sensible!--but I never see anyone dressed up in a power suit and bad teeth. Perhaps it is unfair to connect the habits of the NYU sorority crowd with a single TV show--it's possible they came upon their style as a group, convening around the start of the millenium to agree, "Okay, so it's a little black dress, high, badly bleached hair, and heels we can't quite walk in. We're wearing that three nights a week for the next decade." But they do as Carrie did, riding cabs to the coolest clubs, sipping designer cocktails and sharing anecdotes in a haze of post-feminism, which took the place of cigarettes years ago. Carrie, of course, was deft enough to enjoy both at once.

As every first week freshman knows, to have fun in New York one must spend $30 to walk into a loud room where they sell $11 drinks and help you get a $20 cab home. After a few weekends most freshmen--or at least their parents--notice that such fun abuses body and wallet, and begin socializing more conservatively. The onset of cold weather poses a unique problem for those students who continue to spend their weekends on steamy dance floors. If there is a coat check it probably costs extra, and God knows you won't look cute if you don't shed the fake mink before you start to shake your thighs.

Bwog met NYU student W.M. Akers at a bar one night, and found that his fair institution could use some explaining. They don't have a Core, a campus, or 250 years of academic elitism--but there are some (dubiously) redeeming qualities.

Territory
Columbia's Claremont dorm, two blocks from the 116th stop, is classified as "Extreme West of Campus," hyperbole that seems quaint to an NYU student. Though a few of us—mainly freshmen—actually live around on "campus," we have housing from 23rd Street to the Financial District. While Columbia expands through financial might, NYU's student body does that work for it. On Friday nights you can see flocks of stumbling blondes outside the sorority housing in Chinatown, while actors just let out of Studio step through Madison Square with songs on their lips. Call it soft power.

Population
Ever play the name game with people from other cities? "You're from Atlanta? Do you know Tom?" NYU students play that game with each other, and with similar success rates. There are some 18,000 undergrads here, and none of us know anyone. Did you have a hygiene accident in a dorm hallway last year? Don't worry, because outside of your tiny circle of disgusted friends, no one else knows about it. Go meet other people, and let your natural charm shine through. You'll have a fresh start in no time.