As Horace Mann is a famous "prep" school, the students are now "preparing" for heated and ridiculous political correctness fights they will have at college.

Apparently, "former SBP and current comedian Scott Rogowsky '03" got a laugh at the assembly by saying the word "bazongas." Which led, naturally, to a wonderful op-ed in The Horace Mann Record by student and Assembly Committee member Leah Byland about how this reveals a misogynist double-standard. We quote: "If I were to bring up 'bazonga' cancer in my biology class, I'd probably be sent out of the room." Yes, well, that's a facile analogy because any rational person would agree that certain expressions are more or less appropriate based on context and audience and also HA HA HA HA "'BAZONGA' CANCER."

In the following issue, well, jeez. There was "Editor's Take: On 'Bazongas'" And then "Editor's Take: On the Editorial." And then a letter to the editor from a member of the English department praising Leah's "inspired outrage" and damning the anonymous editors who dared defend "bazongas." There is also a news story on the whole outrage. It is delightful. From a distance. A great distance.

Hello, editor Nick Gerad:

Moreover, the speech as a whole was deliberately written to be absurd. A large portion of it was dedicated to describing a Freemason-esque secret society of former SBPs that controls major worldwide corporations. Rogowsky spent a significant portion of his stage time describing massive, to-the-death street melees between students and sewer monsters called "grawl dogs."

What? Also, why won't anyone tell us if Charles Stam was involved?

They file a long report from some of the tonier campuses: Collegiate, Nightingale-Bamford, Spence, Horace Mann. Those are the typical snooty affairs, with preening about success mingling strangely with a pretense that these are just regular kids being sent off to regular places. Actress Kerry Washington, an alumna, spoke at Spence, while the Ethical Culture Fieldston School (up in Riverdale) grads got a special treat: Will Ferrell. Meredith Vieira's kid was graduating so she called in a favor. Some of the students, however, were not so amused with the funnyman's antics:

He suggested that perhaps a member of the graduating class could go on to be the first black president, except that that had already been done.

"He totally missed the punch line!" said Victoria Goldman, author of the perennially popular Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, there to support her graduating nephew. "He should have said that someone here will be the first Jewish president! He just fell flat."

Oh, you've been served Ferrell.

Our favorite anecdote from the They're Rich and You're Not Roundup, though, was that of the student speakers at lefty Brooklyn Heights haven St. Ann's:

"It can be an orgy, because, after all, the St. Ann's ethos has always been uninhibited, experimental, gratifying and incestuous," she told the audience, before offering that perhaps the best adjective to describe her education was "delicious!"

Another speaker, Sam Sullivan, a student of poetry, said some very romantic things about "enchanted gardens" and "childish frolic" and the importance of "fantasy!"

"Before anyone in the so-called real world has a chance to fool us, the gardeners, the graduates, into believing that our lives are about power or money or anything else equally mind-numbing," he warned, "let us go out and just be, because only good can come from that. In the real real world, there is nothing, but love."

Mr. Sullivan then pulled out a guitar and led those gathered in a swaying, earnest rendition of ABBA's Dancing Queen.

Later that evening, the students would be headed to a rented after-party in a loft-the secret address was texted to graduates around 11 p.m.-where they would celebrate their commencement with ironic beer like Miller High Life and Busch; sweaty grinding; and privately hired security guards. The after-after-party was at Dumbo Park, where the graduates traditionally watch the sunrise.

Makes you want to cry, doesn't it?

One final thing that we like to think about: Wouldn't it be creepy if the article's author Irina Aleksander—already kind of a creep (but it's her job!) for lurking around a bunch of high school graduations, a single grownass adult—started seeing the same people at different ceremonies? If there was a club or cult of attending prep school graduations? That would have been a real story.

Ah well. Congrats, you little fuckers.

This morning the school sent an e-mail out to parents and students, saying that the closure was due to "an unusually-high number of student absences, the majority of which have been related to flu-like symptoms, including several confirmed cases of Influenza A, but not Swine Flu."

Just when you think the Great Swine Flu Panic of '09 is dead, it rears its porky head again. One NYC school employee has already died from the disease. But he was a public school assistant principal. Now that one of our fair city's most expensive bastions of trust fundee sequestering has fallen prey to the Panic, there is simply no telling how many calls to the mayor's office from corporate titans will result, or how many seeds of trauma for future book deals will be planted in fertile young minds. The nightmare has returned.

Here is the full email Thomas Kelly, the head of the school, sent out to now fully panicking parents:

Dear Horace Mann Parents,

After a great deal of thought and a thorough review of the information, following regular dismissal today, all divisions will be closed for the remainder of the week: from Wednesday, May 20th through Monday, May 25th. We have been monitoring an unusually-high number of student absences, the majority of which have been related to flu-like symptoms, including several confirmed cases of Influenza A, but none of Swine Flu.

In consultation with the NYC Department of Health & Mental Hygiene, we determined that it is in our best interest to temporarily close School and reopen on Tuesday, May 26th.

As of this afternoon, all after-school and evening activities are canceled, and there will be no late buses. All campuses will be closed to students, parents and employees while our Maintenance and Cleaning Departments work to ready to the School for next week. We will share additional information pertaining to our decision to close and the implementation of our virtual school plan in a special issue of Across the Divisions you will receive this evening.

While some of you may be inclined to pick up your child(ren) immediately upon reading this email, as a parent and Head of School I respectfully request that you allow the day to conclude in a normal fashion. Administration, faculty, and staff are prepared to discuss this matter with the student body in developmentally-appropriate ways prior to today's dismissal.

Your support at this time is greatly appreciated, and I look forward to seeing everyone back on campus next Tuesday.

Sincerely,

Tom

[Riverdale Ramblings, NYT]

He's especially angry that his political views have been caricatured. He says he's conservative fiscally but is a social moderate ("I support civil unions").

Unrelated: Stam's hero is fellow Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn.

We all remember Stam, right? New York Magazine introduced us to the kid last year, when he was a senior at the prestigious and completely insufferable prep school. The story was about how all the little shits at that miserable school basically ran the asylum, along with their terrible parents.

The worst of the worst was Stam, an ambitious little jerk who waged his own culture wars against teachers who dared try to make him care about minorities. His self-admitted personal hero: Roy Cohn.

But then he got into Columbia, and one might then assume that he'd be done terrorizing the staff of his high school. Because, seriously kid, get over it. It was high school.

But no! With student body elections coming up, Stam decided to write the aforementioned 2,000 word letter to his high school newspaper, because he's apparently the biggest loser in the world. And when the paper didn't print his letter, he didn't, say, buy some 40s and get drunk and forget about it and maybe have some casual unprotected sex with someone, like a normal college student. No, instead he emailed everyone at Horace Mann, from his Columbia email address in case this was not sad enough already, to complain of censorship. Because when your high school student paper doesn't print a lengthy, rambling, ranty letter sent by a former student, that is what first amendment attorneys call "the censorship."

We'll reprint here like one-quarter of the entire email, just so you get an idea of how amazingly self-involved and hilarious it is:

Preface: This letter was submitted to The Record's editorial board last week. After hearing no reply from them for 30 hours, I phoned the stupub and was informed that they would not be running my letter. At no time did a member of the board inform me of their decision and they refused to discuss their rationale for censoring me. The fact that they did not tell me the grounds for denying the letter can only lead me to think that there was no actual debate over the letter; I can only conclude that there was no vote and that the editorial board never had a say in the matter. Usually when students object to the content of a submitted letter they contact the author with their specific quibbles or provide a reason for the exclusion of the letter. I thus believe that the faculty advisor simply refused to print the letter on principle and the reason I didn't hear a justification was because there was no actual debate on the substance of my submission. Of course the editor denied this, but that is only a measure intended save face and to preserve the illusion that they are real journalists and have say over their content. In addition to being lied to, I was even told that it in the newspaper industry less than 1% of submitted letters are printed; I did not know The Record received such a high volume of letters so at least I feel better about getting shafted. Or perhaps the board did vote (I still doubt this) and they voted in favor of suppressing the truth. If this is the case, the students of the school ought to take the paper to task, as excluding information because it is politically inconvenient to one's agenda is quite subversive and far more disgraceful than being censored by your advisor. It is now clear that the students do not have a forum where they can share openly ideas without censorship and I believe The Record no longer serves its purpose as a student newspaper.

To The Horace Mann Community,
After reading last week's editorial I am compelled to respond and not only defend our current student leaders but also to implore the student body to make an educated decision in the upcoming SBP election. The Record's attack on Rafi and Malik in last week's issue was malicious, polemical, and vindictive. This paper has had it in for our SBP/VP from the second they were elected, as was the case during my presidency when the paper willfully deceived me on multiple occasions in an attempt to sabotage a referendum that was in the best interest of the school. That is because The Record board, not our student leaders, is out of touch with the rest of their classmates; they are elitists, have an inflated view of the importance of their own work, and have contempt for the average student. The members of this paper's editorial board are as ill suited to write about their constituents as Ronald Reagan would be if he were appointed to the staff of Pravda. I am left with no other choice but to conclude that The Record believes the students are unenlightened, having not been vetted/canonized by elders of yore (ie past board members of this august institution), should not be afforded basic rights, and should instead submissively bend down and surrender to the will of an increasingly wild, out of control, and destructive administration which seems bent on taking any positive, student empowering institution at this school and tearing it to shreds.

It goes on like that for like five more lengthy paragraphs. This poor kid. We'd almost feel bad for him if he wasn't everything that's wrong with kids today.

"Last year at the end of school, literally days before finals, the 8th graders (now 9th graders) got themselves into some more Facebook trouble. If you've ever seen the 'Ginger' episode of South Park [about how redheaded children are evil], they made a group/event entitled "International Smack A Ginger Day", and 3 out of the 4 administrators of the group got expelled (I think the fourth is still around, not sure).

It's been pretty big, people have been upset, and everyone who was in the event got either on probation or suspended. At last count, before the page got taken down by one of the admins, it had about 40 or so Horace Mann kids, according to the teachers at the assembly. Also, on the day it was set to be, there was "additional security".. aka cops up and down the street. Overexaggerating?"

Huh. Anybody have more anonymous information? Let us have it! And don't go around smacking gingers, kids.

Although, if you think about it—how many gingers do we know that have been elected to public office or run major corporations? Not many...

Sometimes it can be sad to be newsworthy. Sorry, Charlie!

Oh, but what about school head Thomas Kelly, the guy who fired Andrew Trees and Mr. Janice Minn? Turns out, he's a bit of a schmuck.

Tom Kelly was selected to run Horace Mann by the school's board, over the protest of the school's staff. He came from a public school background, and had done admirable work with mentally handicapped kids, but he also allowed a construction companies to dump their toxic garbage all over school grounds.

Here are the dumps in question. Kelly justified this by pointing out that the companies were nice enough to place brand-new athletic fields on top of the landfills. Critics counter that these fields will give the kids cancer and also they are illegal. The State of New York closed the fields and the taxpayers were stuck with the bill for cleaning them up.

Here's a fun factoid: the toxicity of the fields was revealed the same fall that Kelly started at Horace Mann. Then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is a Horace Mann alum. His wife Silda is on the board of trustees—and was on the search committee that picked Kelly.

Spitzer only sued one of the three towns that took the cancerous construction garbage through illegal no-bid contracts. It was Eastchester, not Kelly's town of Valhalla. Take from that what you will!

In 2006, the Valhalla field finally reopened, mostly safe for use. Mostly.

The soil was analyzed for PCBs, pesticides, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and volatile organic compounds. Most chemicals for which testing was performed were not detected in the soil, according to the DEC. But of the chemicals that were detected, most fell below state safety guidelines.

Levels of PAHs above state guidelines were found only in sample TP-7, which was the soil taken from the steep slope on the western side of the athletic field, facing Columbus Avenue. In that sample, the DEC acknowledged that levels of PAHs exceeded state guidelines, but concluded that "routine exposure to soil on the slope is probably unlikely." The agency noted that the District should maintain the grass cover on the slope to further reduce the potential for exposure.

(During Kelly's Horace Mann tenure, the school got artificial turf for its athletic field, which is not located on top of a cancerous dump.)

The Alligator Sunglasses Lady

This mysterious lady is a Horace Mann trustee. Her daughter started the offensive Facebook group that caught the attention of history teacher Peter Sheehy. So, naturally, one day she marched up to Sheehy and teacher Danielle McGuire (the target of the Facebook group) and had an insane argument with McGuire about how the teacher invaded the daughter's privacy and read daughter's secret journal by browsing the public Facebook group the daughter started. Then alligator sunglasses woman accused the teacher of calling another kid a Nazi, which almost got the teacher fired, even though it didn't happen. So—let's meet Alligator Sunglasses Lady!

Her name is Wendy Siegel. She's on the right. Her husband is Stephen B. Siegel, chairman of Global Brokerage for CB Richard Ellis.

"Jeffrey Robbins"

This is the little boy who harrassed Danielle McGuire for being a liberal who tried to talk about minorities in class, which upset young Robbins very much. He accused McGuire of calling him a "Nazi" and even claimed to have a tape. Of course, he didn't. His personal hero is Horace Mann alum Roy Cohn, though one wonders if he knows about the closet queer thing. The spoiled little shit also ended up class president! According to a tipster, the charming young Upper East Sider has two doctor parents, got early acceptance to Columbia, and recently "cancelled a meeting of the women's issues group at HM because he didn't like them." Here he is in the Horace Mann yearbook!

Confidential to Columbia: this kid? Really?

This week's Horace Mann controversy involves Facebook. Students were using the semi-public, pseudo-private space to attack their teachers. And even though seeing a teacher running errands is a perverse (and often etc.) experience, Horace Mann teachers are people, too, and were quite offended to be called "bitches" online.

Of course, parents, who are paying over $29,000 a year to send their precious and precocious little tykes to Horace Mann, were equally offended by the teachers' touchiness. Facebook is private space, they claimed. And we're not paying you to have an opinion, we're paying you to get our kid into Yale. And in the fall out after Academy X, the satirical novel about an unnamed private school by Horace Mann teacher Andrew Trees, parents were also annoyed that Trees got away with publicly mocking the school while students (customers) were getting chastised for "blowing off steam" online.

And in the end, the kids could do whatever they want. They kid who started the most offensive Facebook group was recently elected class president. That should help his chances with Princeton. The school itself had no comment through their P.R. agent.

(Another option for concerned parents is to not send their kids to a school with a P.R. agent.)

Tom Kelly, Horace Mann's Head of School, said, according to the complaint, that Trees was terminated because of the book, not because of job performance—although he had previously told Trees that he "personally enjoyed" the book and that its publication would not interfere with his employment there.

In the filing, Trees claims that Horace Mann didn't obey its own due process policies involved in the firing of an employee.

The document says:

In an unfortunate example of life imitating art, Defendant Horace Mann embarked on a smear campaign against Plaintiff Trees as punishment for writing Academy X (before firing him), just as the fictional protagonist of Academy X was a teacher persecuted by a corrupt school administration because of his refusal to play along with the school's kowtowing to wealthy parents and their "by any means necessary" attitude toward college admissions for their progeny.

The teacher, David Berenson (whose brother, Alex Berenson, is a reporter on the New York Times Business desk), wrote The Tutor a couple years ago. Coincidentally, he also happens to tutor a whole bunch of HM students on the side. Convenient! "The school, interestingly, is not firing this guy but choosing to ignore it," a source tells us.

Berenson also worked for four years in Los Angeles "tutoring rich kids," as his bio on a Dartmouth alumni website reports—so maybe it's not all about Horace Mann. Still, Berenson teaches in the same department—history—that Trees did. Is the school simply loathe to bring on more embarrassing scrutiny? Or will it be forced to fire Berenson as well? Or rehire Trees?

Dartmouth Alumni in Entertainment and Media: Motion Picture [Dartmouth]

Teachers To Leave School: Dr. Andrew Trees [HM Record Online]

Dear Editor,

We were shocked and disappointed that the Horace Mann school would dismiss a faculty member for writing a novel, and we applaud the many Horace Mann students who courageously and thoughtfully protested this action and advocated for academic freedom. This shows Horace Mann students at their finest.

We believe that academic freedom should be the cornerstone of an educational institution. In our own work and in our classrooms, we strive to create an environment where students and faculty are free to think critically. We believe this is crucial not just for our schools but for our country. As the Horace Mann student petition stated, "democracy is a primary ethical value that [can] be promoted and protected best through an educational system that respects academic freedom." We agree that a free and democratic society demands actively engaged citizens who are willing to question the world around them.

Given Horace Mann's reputation, we believed that the school would consider academic freedom a principle to be celebrated, rather than an action to be punished. Restrictions on academic freedom invariably have chilling effects. We can only imagine the impact this will have on the entire community at Horace Mann and the various ways it will now hinder the school's efforts to provide a free and challenging intellectual environment.

Sincerely,

Edward Ayers

President of the University of Richmond (beginning July 2007); Buckner W. Clay Dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and Hugh P. Kelly Professor of History, University of Virginia; Recipient of the Bancroft Prize (2004), Albert J. Beveridge Award, and J. Willard Hurst Prize

Julian Bond

Professor, Department of History, University of Virginia; Chairman NAACP

Brian Balogh

Mayo Distinguished Teaching Professor of History; Co-Director American Political Development Program, University of Virginia

Eileen Boris

Professor and Hull Chair of Women's History and Affiliate Professor of History and Law and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Recipient of the Philip Taft Prize (1994)

William Chafe

Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of History; Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, Duke University;

Katherine Charron

Assistant Professor of History, North Carolina State University

Paul Clemens

Professor of History; Chair of History Department, Rutgers University

Andrew Cohen

Assistant Professor of History, Syracuse University

Stephen Cushman

Professor of English, University of Virginia

Victoria de Grazia (HM Parent 2002)

Professor of History, Columbia University

John Dittmer

Professor Emeritus of History, Depauw University; Recipient of the Bancroft Prize (1994), Lilliam Smith Book Award (1993), McLemore Prize (1995), and the Herbert Gutman Prize (1994)

Greg Dorr

Postdoctoral Associate, Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and Medicine. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jed Esty

Associate Professor of English, University of Illinois

Jon Earle

Associate Professor of History, University of Kansas; Ray Allen Billington Chair in U.S. History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library, 2006-2007

Ann Fabian (Former HM Parent)

Professor of American Studies and History, Chair of American Studies, Dean of Humanities, School of Arts and Sciences Rutgers University.

Eric Foner

DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University; President of the Society of American Historians (2006-2007); President, American Historical Association, 2000; President, Organization of American Historians, (1993-94); recipient of Los Angeles Times Book Award for History; Bancroft Prize; Parkman Prize; Lionel Trilling Award; Owsley Prize. Finalist, National Book Award; Finalist, National Book Critics' Circle Award

Susan Fraiman

Professor of English, University of Virginia

Joanne Freeman

Professor of History, Yale University

Scot French

Associate Professor of History, University of Virginia; Director of Virginia Center for Digital History

Paul Gaston

Professor Emeritus of Southern and Civil Rights History, University of Virginia

Gary Gallagher

John L. Nau III Professor in the History of the American Civil War, University of Virginia

Grace Hale

Associate Professor of History and American Studies, University of Virginia

Nancy Hewitt

Director, Institute for Research on Women; Professor of History, Rutgers University

Hugh Hochman

Associate Professor of French and Humanities, Reed College

Michael Holt

Williams Professor of History, University of Virginia

Woody Holton

Associate Professor of History, University of Richmond

Watson Jennison

Assistant Professor of History, University of North Carolina Greensboro

Stephen Kantrowitz

Associate Professor of History, University of Wisconsin

Temma Kaplan

Professor of History, Rutgers University

Peter Kastor

Assistant Professor of History; Assistant Professor of American Culture Studies, Washington University

Jennifer Klein

Associate Professor of History, Yale University; Recipient of the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians (2004); Recipient of the Hagley Prize (2004)

Juliette Landphair

Dean of Westhampton College, University of Richmond

Ann Lane

Professor of History and Women's Studies

Steven F. Lawson

Professor of History, Rutgers University

Susana Michele Lee

Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University

Adriane Lentz-Smith

Assistant Professor of History, Duke University

Marc Lerner (HM 1989)

Assistant Professor of History, University of Mississippi

Nicholas Lemann

Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism, Columbia University

Andrew Lewis

Visiting Assistant Professor of History, Hamilton College

Matt Lassiter

Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan

Nelson Lichtenstein

Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara; Recipient of the Philip Taft Prize (2003)

Danielle McGuire

Faculty, Horace Mann School

Allan Megill

Professor of History, University of Virginia; President, Journal of the History of Ideas

Paul Milazzo

Assistant Professor of History, Ohio University

Jennifer Morgan

Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University

Andrew Morris

Assistant Professor of History, Union College

Amy Morsman

Assistant Professor of History, Middlebury College

Jenry Morsman

Adjunct Professor of History, Middlebury College

Stephen M. Norris

Assistant Professor of History and Director of Film Studies, Miami University

James Oakes

Professor of History and Humanities Chair, Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Peter Onuf

Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor, University of Virginia

Rosalind Rosenberg

Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University; Executive Board of the Society of American Historians

Joshua Rothman

Associate Professor of History, University of Alabama

Anne Rubin

Associate Professor of History, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Winner of the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians

Reuel Schiller

Professor of Law, Hastings College of the Law, University of California

Peter Sheehy

Faculty, Horace Mann School

Herbert Sloan

Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College, Columbia University

Michael Socolow

Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism, University of Maine

Doug Smith

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow, 2006-2007; Assistant Professor of History, Occidental College

Emily Straus (HM 1991)

Assistant Professor of History, SUNY Fredonia

Alan Taylor

Professor of History, University of California at Davis; Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, Bancroft Prize, and Albert J. Beveridge Award (1996)

Scott Taylor

Assistant Professor of History, Siena College

Timothy Tyson (Book Day speaker and civil rights lecture at HM, 2005, 2006)

Senior Scholar, the Center for Documentary Studies, Duke University; Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture, Duke Divinity School; Adjunct Professor of American Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Philip Troutman

Assistant Professor of Writing, The George Washington University

Craig Werner (Keynote speaker for Book Day at HM, 2006)

Professor of Afro-American Studies, Chair of Integrated Liberal Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Was the book that Michiko Kakutani savaged for being unrealistic perhaps still a bit too realistic for some students or, as the headmaster in the novel calls them, "customers"? Here's how Michiko characterized the book's depiction of the place.

The school's cafeteria is a food court that includes sushi and a pizza oven; the school's deans cheerfully accept a host of excuses for plagiarism and cheating. "Leniency," John observes, "was in keeping with the philosophy of the school — let no revenue stream be interrupted." In the early pages of this novel Mr. Trees demonstrates inklings of a Kingsley Amis-like ability to extract humor from the travails of his hapless hero, but any hopes that the book might become a "Lucky Jim"-ish romp are soon squashed by his preposterous plot and John's tedious class rage at Caitlyn's parents and their ilk.

In his letter, Dr. Sheehy deplored "the termination of someone who has been described by his peers and the administration as a great teacher" and warned of the "chilling effect" that Dr. Trees' firing would have on "the open and free exchange of ideas that is crucial to a secure and healthy institution." Yes. Also, if Dr. Trees isn't reinstated, where will he glean material for a sequel?

While more typical downtown partiers, dressed in bohemian duds, are jockeying in the wee hours on Chrystie Street to be let into the Box, the preppy partiers head a few blocks west, where button-down shirts and penny loafers are not sneered at.

Mr. Cleary was perched at the bar on the restaurant level on a Thursday night with a Gaffel Kölsch beer in his hand. He met Tom Martignetti while spending his junior year abroad at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and said he was happy to be in a place where his kind was welcome. "For some people who see the pink shirts," the investment banker, 25, said, "they ostracize, they say it's uncool. But just because you went to Princeton doesn't mean you're a jerk."

Mr. Cleary, handsome if one considers Gary Sinese handsome, prefers meeting women in the street-level restaurant rather than in the noisier basement-level club, which usually starts hopping around 11:30 p.m., although both offer an excellent caliber of women, he said. "You don't meet girls here you want to hook up with once," he said. "You meet girls here you want to hook up with multiple times."

Clementine Crawford, 25, a Princeton graduate, rephrased that sentiment from a female perspective. "Women come here looking for their future husbands."

Ms. Crawford, who was born in South Africa and attended the private all-girls Ascham School in Sydney, Australia, before Princeton, sees Bar Martignetti as a typically American institution. "America's all about the sifting process, like fraternities and sororities," she said. She praised the doormen, the nightly sifters, for making her feel welcome, unlike the way she and her friends are treated at the "hipper" clubs. "There are doormen in N.Y.C. who make you feel like a criminal when you get out of the cab," she said.

This really brings the deleterious effects of the Iraq War home. But needless to say, we're out of our depths here — you'll have to wait for the Gawker weekday staff to make sense of it all. For now, here's a close-up of some of the "books" adorning 'Netti's downstairs "bar." What? Was Tangerine getting uppity? —Jon

Pink Shirts Welcome [NYT]
EARLIER: Douchebag Restaurant Hall of Fame Entrant: Bar Martignetti