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.

The Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal has fired another salvo in their ongoing feud against Jester, claiming responsibility for the recent disappearance of 700 issues of the most recent Jester issue. They've placed the once-missing issues all over campus, and attached a message: "Jester Promotes Scientific Fallacies." The full-page manifesto contains many of the CUSJ grievances, a sampling of which can be found on the (truly crazy, and we're not sure if it's in a good or bad way) website the CUSJ missive directs readers to.

First among them: "The 'Liquid Issue' is clearly not made of LIQUID at all but rather PAPER, which is SOLID. Jester should be ashamed for misleading readers regarding states of matter."

Too far, or not far enough? Catelyn Liu reproduced CUSJ's damning allegations in full, featured after the jump.

The first issue of Eclectica Esoterica - the magazine that features your weirdest, wildest, and generally most interesting papers - is out. Bwog inaugurates the new publication with a customary quicking (since the magazine is in PDF format, all links point to the same source).

MF Doom, meet linguistics (p. 4)

Zen and the art of the...spiritually enlightening orgasm? (p. 8)

In nomine profit margin: saving souls, one bushel at a time (p. 21)

How I learned to stop protesting and love the crack of a whip - on my own back (p. 29)

FOB (Friend of Bwog) BW graphics editor, Tablet Editor-in-Chief, and all-around badass Jerone Hsu has a new project. Says he:

"There is a brand new publication at Columbia as of this semester. With any luck (and hopefully with your assistance), we can put together something quite unlike anything else that currently exists on campus.

The name for this small project is Eclectica Esoterica ("dub-E" or [EE] for short). With it, we hope to offer both the eclectic and the esoteric in the form of Columbia student papers.

Of course, we this means we need your papers. Badly."

Bwog encourages you to submit any academic paper you have written for a Columbia class (the weirder, the better, apparently) by January 30 (that's tomorrow!). eclecticaesoterica@gmail.com - make us proud, kids.

Our source sez:

The New Yorker poetry department receives over 1,000 submissions every week. Each of these is destined to be lovingly rejected by an intern, usually a Columbia grad student, with a carefully handwritten note. It's understandable then that sometimes things get backed up. Really backed up. According to one of the interns, there has been a box of unanswered submissions that have been languishing in the office since 2003. Like a girlfriend who's worn out her welcome, it just sits there, increasingly hard to ignore, but even harder to get rid of.

So it was with much fanfare that the interns were told that they were finally going to throw out the box. But first wouldn't they be so careful as to go through the submissions and remove all the self-addressed stamped envelopes? Why? To save the stamps, of course. Yes, the poetry editor of the New Yorker had her interns cut out each and every 37 cent stamp they could find, even though these stamps on their own were useless without a two cent supplement to compensate for the 2006 cost of postage.

Midway through their task she stopped them. Touched by the hand of reason? Of common human decency? "I just wanted to make sure...neither of you has a blog, right?"

The Midwest? Isn't that somewhere around Lincoln Center?

Saving the earth, one co-opted capitalist at a time.

Larry David--not funny enough to be Jewish.

SEEJies triumph, wish they could have barricaded Low.

Naked partiers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but the ability to pass each other normally on the sidewalk ever again.

You may have noticed the piles of glossy paper gracing newsstands in recent days. We in the publications world think alike, which means that Columbians have to stomach us all at once. Unfortunately, none of them have posted their current issues online, but Bwog thought it would give them some airtime anyway.

From Ad Hoc, we learn that David Plotz went to a better high school than you did, that administrators don't listen to students, and that Hurricanes are generally bad for education. After recovering from momentary blindness induced by The Columbia Science Review's shiny color explosion, and staring quizzically at some graphs and numbers, we find out that there are birds in New York City, and that humans are generally bad for generating hurricanes. The Birch tells us that small bits of land in Eastern Europe can be troublesome, that Russia is not a real democracy, and that Cyrillic characters are hard to read. And 116 reminds us that Spectator has a shitload of money. I mean, we kind of already knew that.