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Add to the list of Princeton undergraduate start-ups: FuLumail.com, an anonymous email server launched this year by sophomores Ash Egan and Jason Adleberg and junior Bobby Grogan.

After a brief hiatus during which the site was closed for reconstruction, FuLumail is once again up and running, allowing users to continue their slew of anonymous communication in the form of brief textual messages, now with the feature of adding photos and videos.

“What we envision … is a sort of news feed/message board where people can post whatever they’d like about whom or whatever they’d like, with a ratings system and a flagging system in place to moderate content,” said FuLu creator Ash Egan.

These young entrepreneurs have harnessed the whirlwind of emotions that thrives on a college campus and created a catalyst through which we can finally confess our most secret sentiments without fear of revelation.

Bobby

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madlib_02

Coming to an eating club near you

Good news for all of you who are 1) somewhat hiphop-inclined, and 2) looking for some hope to keep you afloat in these trying pre-Dean’s Date times. Madlib, one of the finest producers alive, will be performing at Terrace on Tuesday night.  A Madlib beat is an odd specimen, radiating the hazy warmth of vinyl, constantly teetering on the verge of a groove before twitching and fracturing and meandering away to explore some other musical thought. He often eschews the typical hook-verse-hook template in favor of weirder, looser song structures, all the while sampling voraciously and multiculturally. Sometimes he raps, too. Maybe we’ll hear some of that at Terrace, but his beats alone will be more than enough to satisfy. Maddeningly prolific, he’s dropped tape after tape of instrumentals (see especially his jazz-inflected stuff), but he might be best known for his collaborations with rappers. Most recently with Freddie Gibbs, most mainstreamly with Mos Def, and probably best of all with MF Doom — their brainchild, Madvillainy, ranks among the top rap records of the last decade, and every time my stomach sinks with the dread of Tuesday 5 PM I just think about prospect of hearing some of those beats live. Hear the flute loop on this song and know that everything will be okay:

Opening acts Shigeto and Dabyre are sure to impress as well. Terrace sets are hard to predict, but I can’t imagine Madlib himself will go on anytime before 12:40 or so. Go listen.

A great 60s-tastic shot of Nassau Hall. (photo from www.princeton.edu)

A great 60s-tastic shot of Nassau Hall. (photo from www.princeton.edu)

As of this afternoon, Princeton has offered 726 students spots in the Class of 2016 from a 3,443-person applicant pool, the University announced at 3pm today.  It’s the first time Princeton has offered students the option of applying Early Action–meaning that admitted students are not contractually obligated to attend, and may apply to other schools for Regular Decision if they so choose–since 2006, when Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Virginia all simultaneously eliminated their Early Decision programs.  Harvard took 772 students for the Class of 2016 out of 4,245 applicants, with an acceptance rate of 18.2%, while Yale had an 18% dip in Early Action applications this year, due in part to Princeton and Harvard’s reinstated programs.

Jury’s still out on how many admitted students will matriculate, though Dean Janet Rapeleye has said that the accepted Early Action students should represent about a third of the year’s total admits.

To read more about Princeton’s Early Action pool for 2016, including a demographic breakdown for admitted students, click here.

From www.collegeessayorganizer.com

From www.collegeessayorganizer.com

A whopping 3547 students applied Early Action to Princeton this year, according to the Prince. That’s up from 2,275 Early Decision applicants in 2006 (Though this is not a fair comparison since Early Action is not binding and the number of high school graduates has risen since 2006).

As we all know from when we applied, Princeton has been without an Early Action or Early Decision Program since the 2007 application cycle, when it eliminated Early Decision in an effort to increase socio-economic diversity by making the application process more fair. At the time, President Tilghman told the Prince that “Early Decision was advantaging those who were already advantaged.” Harvard and UVa eliminated their Early programs around the same time.

All three reinstated Early programs last year, after it became clear that other Universities weren’t following suit and Princeton was losing students to other schools with Early programs. But the new program is non-binding, so that students can compare financial aid packages. Perhaps this is the best of both worlds — allowing students to pick Princeton as their first choice, relieving some applicants’ stress when they are admitted early, but not disadvantaging low SES students. Or perhaps this is just PR. What do you think?

Hey, future class of 2015:

Decision Date (March 30) for Princeton and other major universities is drawing ever closer.

So, how are you feeling? Maybe you think you’re already set thanks to a good legacy background or some killer athletic prowess. Or maybe you’ll be sitting at your computer in four days, nail-bitingly paranoid: what if my school tells me I’m accepted but then realizes they rejected me? You mean like University of Delaware’s computer glitch this year? Or the colossal mishap of University of California, San Diego that affected 29,000 applicants?

Oops, yeah, don’t think about that.

Maybe you found some spelling mistakes in your college apps (personal story). Maybe your parents are already suing your pre-school for ruining your chances of getting into an Ivy League school.

But I’m here to tell you that it’s going to be okay. Take a deep breath. Do yourself a favor and don’t log on to College Confidential forums for a while.

And if it helps, the Princeton Tiger knows how you feel:

Savor your victory while you can, Harvard. We're coming for you Saturday.

Savor your victory while you can, Harvard. We're coming for you Saturday.

Classic Ivy League sports debate that no one actually plans on answering: Who is Princeton’s rival?

Some Tiger fans cling firmly to the geographical convenience of the supposed Penn-Princeton rivalry. Back in 2006, a columnist from the Daily Pennsylvanian noted that the rival stems almost exclusively from the two schools’ dominance of Ivy League basketball. But this year, Penn was just an obstacle standing in the way of the Tigers’ Ivy League run — the men beat the Quakers handily to force the one-game playoff against Harvard, and the women (who continue their ridiculously dominant streak, stretching all the way back to last season) absolutely trounced Penn in their final game of the regular season, 78-27 (no, that’s not a typo; it’s a 51 point win).

Aspirational sports fans, meanwhile, will tell you our rivals are Harvard and Yale, although neither school seems particularly interested in us. In a recent Deadspin article , a Harvard fan complained about choice of Yale as a “neutral site,” noting, “How is Harvard having to play at their fiercest rival’s court, where “neutral” fans that show up will automatically root against Harvard?” (Fair point, although the obvious counter would seem to be, everyone hates Harvard, so no where outside of Cambridge could ever be “neutral”.)

But this winter season, the games where we had the most to lose, and the contests we really cared about winning, were against Crimson athletes. And (here’s the shift), it seemed like this season, Harvard cared about us, too.

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Recently, bloggers have gotten ahold of President John F. Kennedy’s old college application essays, and boy, were standards different back then.

EDIT: JFK’s Harvard essay reads like this: (Source)

“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I felt that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, as I have felt that it is not just another college but is a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a “Harvard man” is an enviable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope I shall attain.”

But wait… they found his application essay to Princeton was nearly identical.

Hey now, cut the late Mr. President some slack. It’s not like we all didn’t do a little tweaking on our Common App. (”Sure, Yale’s my top choice…”) On the other hand, he only spent 6 weeks at Princeton before going to Harvard.

Critics argue that if Kennedy applied today, he would not have been admitted to an Ivy League school with these essays. But honestly, if JFK could reapply knowing everything we do today, wouldn’t his essay be entitled “How I’m Going to Become a Pimpin’ Ladykiller/President of the United States Before My Untimely Assassination That Will Go Down in History as a Government Conspiracy”?

That’s what I called mine.

Moral of the story to Princeton students aspiring for elected office: guard your college apps.

If Goldman Sachs released tables of the best Ivy League universities at making money, Princeton would come second. (This is based on absolutely no analysis of the following figures.)

PRINCO, the Princeton University Investment Co., announced annual returns of 14.7 percent for the fiscal year of 2010 today. After last year’s return of -23.5 percent and this year’s big turnaround, Princeton’s endowment currently stands at $14.4 billion. Annualized returns for the past decade amount to 7.9 percent.

Yeah, cool, a nice chunk of change, whatever. But what bugs me is that Columbia posted returns of 17.3 percent (albeit on a $6.5 billion sum). At least we beat Harvard (11.4 percent increase to $27.4 billion) and Yale (8.9 percent increase to $16.7 billion).

Does that mean we can start getting more free stuff/study breaks/Lawnparties?

quincyfire.blogspot.com

quincyfire.blogspot.com

Apparently our campus has become a lot more sexually healthy over the past year. The Trojan Sexual Health Report Card, created by Trojan® condoms, Sperling’s BestPlaces and Rock the Vote, is an annual ranking of sexual health at American colleges and universities. Last year Princeton ranked 61st. This year we rocketed up to 8th.

So what makes a school sexually healthy? A recent Prince column suggested that there is sexual harassment on the Street. And fellow New Jersey school Rutgers is ranked as the 9th most sexually healthy university — but a gay Rutgers student recently committed suicide after his roommate streamed a video of him having sex. It appears that sexual harassment and homophobia are not considered in the rankings.  What is?

Sperling’s BestPlaces assigned each college or university a GPA based on scoring from 12 categories. See the categories after the jump:

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UPDATE: After some discussion, we decided that our judgments were rather more unsophisticated and flippantly worded than we think desirable.  For example: We should probably make it clear that IvyGate doesn’t hate Princeton.  And we don’t hate IvyGate.  And BLOG WARS!!! are, like, totally lame.

I used to really like IvyGate.

Now, I won’t go so far as a lot of people who say “it sucks now.” I mean, I still read it, but it’s just not what it used to be. You might remember their coverage of Aleksey Vayner (still one of the more hilarious things to happen at an Ivy in recent history), or their coverage of pre-frosh Facebook groups. Just, lately, it seems it’s lost that spark, or that particular cheeky wit that used to really pull me in.

Or it could just be that the whole thing reads like a Yale playbook.

Alex Klein, a Yale sophomore who’s one of the site’s current editors, reports on even the most minute of Yalie news. It’s understandable we’re going to get in-depth coverage from a school an editor attends, but the fact remains that not everyone’s down to read the Yale elections’ nitty-gritty. (Also: Something about gnomes, half of which I don’t understand.)

So I kind of miss the good ol’ days of the Gate, because the Princeton coverage has been, let’s face it, a little disappointing lately. Like, after the Lawnparties acts’ announcement, IvyGate threw up this short post:

The Undergraduate Student Whatever over at Princeton just announced that none other than Jimmy Fallon’s backing band will be performing, next Sunday, at an event called… “Lawnparties.” At a club called… “Quadrangle.”

I’m not sure what this “means” but something “tells” me it’s being “sarcastic” without any indication “why.” Does IvyGate hate Princeton? I think IvyGate hates Princeton.

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http://2bars3stars.com/

Maybe you will be in the National Mall in Washington D.C., demanding a comprehensive climate bill from Congress?

We know, we know, Princeton students are apathetic. But this is easy. All you have to do is email DJ Judd ‘12 at djudd@princeton.edu by midnight tonight. Princeton SURGE has organized a bus to D.C. and all Princeton students are welcome to sign up to tag along.

This Thursday was the 40th anniversary of the original Earth Day, when 20 million Americans flocked to streets across the nation to demand environmental legislation from Congress. Partially because of this public pressure, Congress created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and passed the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and Endangered Species Act.

In hope of reclaiming that energy, the Earth Day Network has organized a massive rally for tomorrow. With a climate bill already in the works, this may be the push Congress needs to pass strong legislation.

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Students are gonna have to pay more to feed this guy.

Students are gonna have to pay more to feed this guy.

Yale students have always complained about how their financial aid pales in comparison to Princeton and Harvard’s.

In late February, they announced a 4.8% increase in tuition, and to compensate, they added a 10% increase in financial aid expenditures and guaranteed parents of students on aid would not receive any hike in the tuition bill.

It was all an effort to make Yale more appealing to antsy pre-frosh. But it left everyone wondering… what’s the catch?

A February 25 opinion piece in the Yale Daily News cut to the chase:

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