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No one can ever pronounce February right, but everyone CAN eat free or dine trying.
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Firecream
8-10pm
Tech House Lounge, Harkness House

No organizations providing free food at their meetings? Tech House’s only response is CHALLENGE ACCEPTED. In a day rife with food-less events, the techies’ Firecream pwns hard. You bet we’ll be going to get hot s’mores and cool ice cream by some faux flames tonight. Reason enough to dub Harkness the most patriotic of Patriot’s Court? Yup.

Yet again, an admirable attempt by the Huffington Post to shame the entire Ivy League as a bloc has fallen short. In a new slideshow titled “Ivy-Leaguers Behaving Badly,” HuffPost College gives its readers a high-quality selection of recent clichéd college scandals — a falsified Rhodes Scholar application, hard drug deals, sexual assault and hazing all made the cut.

The Brown slide detailed what honestly might be the most sordid of the scandals among the Ancient Eight: a prostitution ring involving at least ten Brown students. Except that every other scandal had been from the past few years while the prostitution ring in question was broken up in 1986.

I would be angrier at the Huffington Post for trying to slip in a scandal from when my parents were in college if they hadn’t been so inept about it; HuffPost covered what one might consider a “scandal” at Brown all of a month ago and couldn’t be bothered to use it. So thank you, Ariana Huffington, for making Brown look so good. Scandal free since ’86!

Oh, and this:

Image via.

Sure, the plate might be the same beige ceramic and the slice might not look like anything special, but today the pizza artists at the Sharpe Refectory (in a moment of gourmet splendor, it sheds its Ratty nickname) have truly outdone themselves. BBQ Chicken Pizza premiered to little fanfare (not even a mention on the BDS site?) beyond the grease pen on the sneeze guard, but what it lacked in promotion, it more than made up for in taste. In fact, the pizza was so surprisingly yummy that my dining companion exclaimed with unbounded joy: “This might be one of best things the Ratty has ever done.” Three major components distinguish this pizza from the Ratty’s previous offerings:

1. Doneness: this might be the most perfectly cooked pie ever to come out of a salamander — the crust is super crispy, with bits of deliciously burnt cheese on the upper crust and a nice, brown undercarriage. In the toppings department, the chicken, cheese (possibly a mix of cheddar and mozzarella) and sauce on the body of the slice remained pleasantly warm but not too hot or overdone.
2. The Sauce: while you can definitely taste the corn syrup, the barbeque sauce is tangy, slightly spicy, and, while definitely lacking that familiar molasses taste, not too much worse than the pizzeria equivalent. Moreover, the sauce gets distributed like normal pizza sauce rather than in a spiral, so you get the BBQ flavor in each bite.
3. The Chicken: what really sets this Ratty pie apart from even the most revered pizza joints is the chicken-to-slice ratio. Not only are there a few large chunks of white meat on almost every slice, but the chicken is not unpleasantly dry or chewy like its Thayer St. counterparts at Nice Slice and Antonio’s.

If the Ratty continues to roll out new pizzas like these, we might have to add The Pizza Principle to our comprehensive list of meal plan taos. As far as we know, this bad boy is available through dinner — so don’t let it slip by you!

FemSex, Brown’s Female Sexuality Workshop, is holding info sessions this week for its spring semester workshop. The workshop requires that students attend an info session and fill out an application to be eligible, so make sure to attend if you are interested.  Info sessions are Wednesday (Feb 1) at 6:30 and Thursday (Feb 2) at 6:30 in Wilson 302. In order to learn a little bit more about our most intimate non-academic seminar, we spoke to Darcy Pinkerton, a FemSex facilitator.

What is FemSex?

I’ll respond with our mission statement:‪ The Female Sexuality Workshop is a 12-week not-for-credit workshop that aims to destigmatize and demystify female sexuality by providing comprehensive sex education in an inclusive, non-judgmental environment. We believe that sexuality can serve as a foundation for discussing power and privilege as they relate to the intersection of race, class, and gender. As part of our larger commitment to dismantling oppression, FemSex strives to deconstruct the powerful assumptions present in everyday language and to find non-violent alternatives… In an intentional space founded on reciprocal commitment and consent, participants can challenge their ideas, validate their experiences, and take ownership of their bodies, desires, and self-expression.

FemSex meets for two hours twice a week, either on Mon/Wed or Tues/Thurs. A FemSex section is composed of about 15 participants and 2 peer facilitators who have already taken the workshop. FemSex runs for 12 weeks throughout the semester, for a total of 23 classes, ranging from Privilege, Language & Identity to Body Image to Masturbation to Sex Toys to Communication & Consent.‪

Can guys do it?

FemSex is open to people of all genders and sexualities, and we believe that having a diverse array of experiences and opinions represented in section is crucial to forming a learning space where we can hear from experiences that are not our own. I think anyone interested in FemSex should apply!  If sex ed in a safe, egalitarian space sounds good to you, we’d love to have you apply. [Read more →]

It’s shopping period, ladies and gents, and I’m taking this opportunity to plug my favorite subject: the environment! I’m of the opinion that everyone should take a class with the word “environment(al)” in the title by the time they’ve graduated. You don’t think that sounds reasonable? Well, I’ve been doing my research, and environmental studies does a pretty good job of making itself relevant to most departments in one way or another. Just to make it easier for all of you lovely non-concentrators, I’m compiling a list of classes in other departments that satisfy my personal environmental studies requirement for the Brown community — no excuses now! Shop ‘em while you can, and don’t forget to turn off the lights and grab your water bottles while you’re at it!

For the Politics, Policy & Economics Crowd: 

ECON1350: Environmental Economics and Policy
POLS1730: Environmental Politics in the United States
INTL1450: Political Economy of the Environment in Latin America
SCSO1720: Environmental Justice: Science and Political Economy of Environmental Health and Social Justice [Read more →]

“Yo Ush!  Whattup Kels!” In this beautiful duet between two of the biggest contemporary R&B artists in the world, R. Kelly and Usher realize, much to their chagrin, that they are in fact “messing around with the same damn girl.”  After a slew of on pitch realizations, the song concludes with some serious scheming between the soulful crooners and a final twist on par with that of Troll 2.  If you have a ton of time to kill today, check out R. Kelly’s 22-chapter rap-opera “Trapped in the Closet.”

Heated rhetoric. Pack mentalities. Buzzwords. Embarrassing gulfs between words and actions. Sound like Washington? According to a new study, it’s just you.

UCLA researchers, in a survey of college freshmen across the United States, found that all that squawking on behalf of liberal causes is actually just part of a trend indicating all talk, no walk… sigh. Among other findings reported in the Chronicle of Higher Ed,  71 percent of freshmen are in favor of same-sex marriage and almost half advocate marijuana legalization. In the realm of substantive activity, however, the freshmen falter. A paltry 6 percent planned to participate in political protests on campus. Moreover, results revealed a roughly 5 percent drop in student participation in campaigns at any level of government from previous years. Rather than spur political activity, the fictional travails of Leslie Knope and the Pawnee Parks Department have apparently only encouraged us to draw sophisticated parallels between Ron Swanson and an actual libertarian named Ron. Comments on the study’s significance after the jump. [Read more →]

Everyone knows Shopping Period can be a little stressful from time to time. Yes, these ten days of carefree, caution-to-the-wind class hopping are a hallmark of the (not so) New Curriculum. But who are we kidding? More often than not, shopping classes becomes a clusterfuck of epic proportions. We’re here to help – and so too is Jonah Kagan ’13.

With the help of girlfriend Liz Neu ’14, Jonah created bestofBrown.net, a new website that collects information from current students about their favorite classes at Brown. [Read more →]

Hip
YONAS - Midnight City
Symba - Winning Pt. II
Ryan Hemsworth ft. Deniro Ferrar and Shady Blaze - Faith in Something
Logic - Young Sinatra III
A$AP Rocky - Wassup
Cypress Hill and Rusko - Roll It, Light It

R&B
Frank Ocean - Voodoo

Reggae
Cris Cab ft. Mavado and Wyclef Jean - Rihanna’s Gun

Remix
Mr. Fogg (Bondax Remix) - Stay Out Of The Sun
Justice (Ruined by Rick Rubin) - On ‘n’ On

Electronic
Finally Boys - Lunar Lover
Pretty Lights - We Must Go On
Rollz - Capture Me

Indie/Rock/Other
Electric Guest - This Head I Hold
Yukon Blonde - Stairway
Brazilian Girls - Don’t Stop
Memoryhouse - Walk With Me
Races - Big Broom
Phantogram - When I’m Small
Andrew Bird - Eyeoneye
Dr. Dog - Lonesome [Read more →]

Either you’ve been living under a rock all break, or you’ve heard that there’s a black and white movie out there that is actually entertaining. This silent film is making a lot of noise as Oscar Night approaches. The Artist is the first English film by French writer/director Michel Hazanavicius and is nominated for 10 Oscars – including Best Picture. The Artist already won the Golden Globe; can they do it again?  Scoring a staggering 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, this may be the best film The Avon shows all semester.  Nothing feels more vintage than sitting in an old style theater, eating popcorn and watching a silent film.  Sounds like hipsta-heaven to me.

[Read more →]