LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
At the end of every spring semester, Columbia has its glorious last hurrah. The weather suddenly turns nice. Half the population emerges from hibernation to tan on the lawns. Late-night classes stop finishing when it’s still dark outside. Every performing group puts on a show. Free food abounds as clubs attempt to spend unused funds.
Certainly term papers, exams, and job interviews hang over everyone in some combination. But they simply conspire to make the other aspects of being here seem even more evanescent. The compromise between self-indulgence and work becomes all the more difficult—and all the more satisfying.
We too are giving you our last hurrah of the semester. And we certainly hope it leaves you longing for our next issue as much as Columbia in May makes us yearn for Alma Mater during the summer. To that order, we bring you everything that makes us the best undergraduate magazine at Columbia.
We explain what is happening under your nose and never cared to know—until now. For instance, Christian Zhang investigates the Korean church that draws an armada of strollers to Lerner 5 every Sunday. Meg McCabe unravels the mysterious silver buttons that dot every building on campus.
Meanwhile, we give a just account of what’s up in Morningside Heights. Virginia Fu relates the present state of Columbia’s new Office of University Life. Mabel Taylor and Channing Prend tour the best and worst playgrounds in the neighborhood.
And of course, we bring you the assortment of columns that you know and love. We profile Haylin Belay and Luke Foster. In The Conversation, Kunal Jasty sits down with a crusader against Columbia’s ilk.
Then our feathered friend Blue J, who vanished near the Bermuda triangle nearly a decade ago, resurfaces thoroughly English.
Finally, Luca Marzorati and Torsten Odland duel over whether or not this is it.
I certainly hope it’s not.
— Daniel Stone
Transactions
ARRIVALS
Flower-filled Instagrams of campus
John Jay gates
Censorship
Course evaluation reminders
Game of Thrones
Dining hall “isolated incidents”
DEPARTURES
Young’s Fish Market
$35 eighths
Open lawns
The class of 2015
The L
Come Again?!
“All undergraduate and graduate Columbia students are required to partake in the Sexual Respect and Community Citizenship Initiative, or otherwise face the risk of diploma or registration holds. But what good are our efforts if we gladly attend a concert headlined by a charged sex offender, moshing and singing in unison to “I got girlies half naked that shit look like the grotto / How yo waist anorexic? And then yo ass is colossal?”
– Jason Eisner, Shira Becker, and Shelly Hafif in the Columbia Spectator
Correction: The article titled “Lerner’s Glass Ceiling” in the April issue of The Blue and White cited a statistic that only one member of CCSC was on financial aid. This was in fact a transmutation of the results of a retreat exercise in which council members were asked to self-identify their socioeconomic status. Only one student chose to describe themselves as being on financial aid, while others on financial aid instead used descriptors like “lower middle class” and “upper-lower class.”
Amendment: In the same issue, our Campus Character of Abby Abrams, BC ’15, referred to her by her first name, and other campus character, Julian NoiseCat, CC ’15, by his last name. This unintended oversight had the regrettable consequence of putting them on different footing. We shall not make the same mistake again.
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