“Regretfully they tell us, but firmly they compel us To say goodbye to you. So long, farewell, Auf wiedersehen, adieu – Adieu, adieu, to yieu and yieu and yieu.”

And that’s all she wrote.

Thank you so much for reading The Spin this semester. When the blog returns August 30 I will no longer be its editor. Next semester, I’m leaving my warm, comfortable home at 4015 Walnut Street for the far away land of Belgium. I hope it’s worth it.

But The Spin is moving up in the world. "http://www.dailypennsylvanian.com/user/index.cfm?event=displayAuthorProfile&authorid=2413484" target="_blank">Ali Jackson, a former columnist, will be the next spunkier, funnier Spinster-in-chief. Adam Goodman, also a Spring 2007 columnist, will join Ali in the mighty Ed Page office, taking the indomitable Ms. Tillman’s role as Editorial Page Editor. This San Diego coup of the fully DC metro-area opinion office was fate. It’s not the first time this pair has collaborated — Ali and Adam are both from Southern California and were co-editors of the La Jolla Country Day Palette in high school. But that’s not all this pair has in common. They are also both pimps of opinion journalism and will most definitely bring the Opinion section to new heights (at the very least because they have a combined 21 inches of additional editor on Zoe and me.)

Speaking of Zoe, I’d like to take a minute to acknowledge her work as Editorial Page Editor. Zoe is an obscenely talented journalist and manager. I can’t wait for the day when I pick up The Washington Post and see her byline on the lead story — there is no doubt in my mind that it will come. Our collaboration and friendship have been the biggest rewards of my work this semester as has getting to know the rest of members of the crazy capable 123rd.

I’d also like to thank Dan, Blogsbe, Evan, Camille, John, Simeon, Sarah, James, Elizabeth, SteinZ, and Sharon for putting up with me for the last four months. It has been my sincere pleasure to work with and get to know y’all. If you guys had 1/3 as much fun as I did, this semester was a success. You da best!

Okay, this is starting to look like an Oscar speech and I, afterall, did not win an Oscar — I just edited a blog. So…

Siegel, out!

PS: Check back in a few weeks for information on applying to be a columnist or blogger for Fall 2007.

Thanks for the memories!

Even though the primary elections for Philadelphia’s next mayor will occur after graduation, when Penn, Philadelphia, and finals are a mere memory for most students, they are still critically important to Penn. No, really…I promise.

There is a special election feature in today’s print edition of the DP which includes information on the issues and candidates, polls, and the DP Opinion Board’s endorsements. The Spin wanted in on the action.

All five Democratic mayoral campaigns were contacted to submit posts to the blog. Four of the five — all but Chaka Fattah’s campaign — responded. The posts went up, in alphabetical order, at 9am. The links and multimedia included were submitted by the campaigns.

Enjoy the feature and remember to vote in the primary on May 15.

The DP Opinion Board endorsed Michael Nutter for Mayor.

Reform is finally at hand in Philadelphia. For years, we have worked and hoped for it –only to be disappointed and forced to wait for the next election.

This time, you can cast a vote for real change in our city the kind of change that will transform City government from a constant source of embarrassment to a point of pride. We have labored for so long under the weight of corrosive attitudes, defeated expectations, and arrogant arrangements among self-dealing insiders. This can end — and it will, if you vote for me.

For fifteen years on City Council, I have treated my time in your government as an opportunity and obligation to confront our City’s toughest challenges. I established the City’s first independent Ethics Board, started the first limits on political contributions, and revolutionized how city contracts are awarded. I led the charge and took the heat for establishing and sustaining a schedule of significant reductions in our wage and business taxes, while preserving essential municipal services. And I put 100 new police officers — scheduled to hit the streets this summer — in last year’s City budget, when others tried to zero out police hires.

In the State and Congressional legislatures are powerful Philadelphians who are in a unique position to deliver the resources we need to address challenges such as decaying infrastructure and entrenched poverty. But those higher levels of government need a capable local partner. I am the only person running for Mayor with significant experience in Philadelphia government. I came into City Council in the same election that brought Ed Rendell into the Mayor’s Office, and I was a part of the government that solved the fiscal crisis of 1991-92.

The next Mayor will face equal, if not greater, challenges. As a son of West Philadelphia who made it to Penn, I know how to overcome challenges. I have done it before, and I am prepared to do it again. I need your support on May 15 to get started.

Thank you

Editor’s note: Here is the link to Nutter’s campaign website.

People are curious about Tom Knox. After all, it’s a compelling story. He grew up in Philadelphia’s Abbotsford public housing, became a very successful businessman and eventually decided to run for mayor.

It wasn’t an easy childhood. Tom’s father was injured on the job, so Tom joined the Navy at 16 so he could send half his pay back to his family. Both his parents died within a few months after Tom got out of the Navy, so he was responsible for raising his three brothers. Tom started out as a door-to-door salesman and eventually started his own businesses and turning failing businesses around.

His career was so successful that in 1992, then-Mayor Ed Rendell asked Tom to help him clean up Philadelphia’s financial mess. Knox became Deputy Mayor for management and productivity, working for $1 a year. He left Rendell’s cabinet as soon as the budget was balanced, 18 months later.

During that time, Tom’s efforts helped to erase a quarter-billion dollar annual budget deficit, created a surplus, saved vital city services, and prevented a major tax hike.

Tom Knox hasn’t forgotten his roots. He worked his way out of poverty, created jobs, and helped Philadelphia tackle its massive budget deficit.
Now he wants to serve the families of Philadelphia again. Join Tom Knox in the fight for a better Philadelphia and help him turn Philadelphia around by ending the costly politics of pay-to-play.

Check out our campaign website (www.knoxforphilly.com.) Help take the “For Sale” sign off City Hall!

I was first elected to the Pennsylvania State House in 1980 when I was only 26 years old. I currently represent the 203rd District in Northwest Philadelphia, and during my time in the State House I have been a leader in creating legislation and initiatives for increasing job opportunities and economic development, improving quality education options for students and parents, and working to curb violence and improve public safety in our city.

Before becoming a State Representative, I attended the Community College of Philadelphia and La Salle University. After graduating college, I became a teacher in the Philadelphia School District and worked for the Urban League of Philadelphia as a community organizer prior to being elected to the State House.

One of my proudest achievements is the revitalization of Ogontz Avenue, a once forgotten neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia. Under my leadership, we successfully turned Ogontz Avenue into a safe community with a vibrant economy.

The young people in Philadelphia are vital to our city’s future, and as mayor I will work everyday to make sure that Philadelphia is a better city for our young people to live, work, and play in.

Editor’s note: for more information on Dwight Evans, check out Evans’ Facebook. and MySpace pages, Evans for Mayor’s latest commercial, and Dwight Evans’ End the Violence Campaign website.

With a deep resume and a focused vision for the city he has served his whole life, Bob Brady knows we don’t need 25-point plans and mountains of poll-tested policy papers to build a better future. His simple, straightforward agenda offers Philadelphia a unique opportunity for the community to choose a new direction and positive change.

Safer Streets

On day one of a Brady administration, we will begin to reclaim our streets. We will deploy 1,000 additional police officers, parole officers and truancy officers during the next four years, with the resources they need to get the job done.

The goal is to put more police into neighborhoods to respond faster to calls, target repeat offenders, and stop the violence. We will also create a cabinet-level position to coordinate faith-based initiatives among churches, mosques, and synagogues in support of community-based policing efforts and job-training programs.

Better Schools

On day one of a Brady administration, we will implement a comprehensive approach to hold everyone accountable.

We will use a series of report cards to let parents know which schools are succeeding and which are failing, as well as keeping schools, police, social service agencies, and the courts informed of the names of students who are not showing up for class and the parents responsible for them.

And once we’ve built accountability into our schools, Mayor Brady personally go to Harrisburg and Washington, D.C. to get the resources we need to lower class sizes, expand after-school programs, and return to you a generation of productive citizens who can turn our city around.

Lower Taxes

On day one of a Brady administration, we will begin an aggressive campaign to eliminate the business privilege tax and cut the city wage tax.

The Brady agenda for fighting street violence and turning around our schools can only be achieved if our economy grows to provide more opportunity and jobs.

We will ask campaign chairman and friend, Jonathan Saidel, to lead this effort. The successful former city controller will be at Mayor Brady’s side every step of the way to reduce the tax burden that drives businesses and residents to move to the suburbs and beyond.

Hi Everybody,

Finals are approaching at a terrifying speed which means that the DP is finished with regular publication for the semester (your humble editors also have to “study”). But don’t curl up under your covers and weep just yet — The Spin will be back for one last hurrah on Wednesday. Don’t miss it!

Best,

Julie

A Virginia Tech student at Tuesday night’s candlelight vigil. (Taylor Howard/DP)

When I heard about the shootings, the first thing that came to mind was a Penn undergraduate’s response to a column I wrote last September on inadequate support for international students.

“I can tell you that I never before felt so lost as I did in the first semester here at Penn,” the student wrote in an e-mail. “I got depressed, clinically diagnosed…”

“None of the American students could understand how I felt, and I felt misunderstood in almost everything, jokes I said, my humor, my reasoning, etc. The other international students were busy with their own depressions save a few, but many students developed a barrier to these conversations as they are scared of being affected themselves. Also being at an Ivy, students hardly have enough time for themselves, rather than worrying about this international awkward kid that has nothing to offer for benefit.”

The student then said he had considered suicide — an “easier” route than the “torture” of having no one to talk to — before entering a program at CAPS, “which really saved me.”
Other isolated international students also wrote me. One wanted to read more about a case I cited — that of Sinedu Tadesse, a lonely Ethiopian student at Harvard who killed herself and her roommate in 1995 after she failed to connect with counselors on campus.

When I first read them, these e-mails confirmed my original notions: International students, who must acclimate both to a new culture and to the college environment, are at greatest risk of isolation on today’s campuses (which isn’t to say Cho Seung-Hui’s self-perpetuated alienation derived from being Korean; he had legally lived here since 1992 — though mostly among other immigrants in Centreville, Virginia — and was mentally ill).

Today, I reread the emails and think I should have taken every precaution and forwarded them to CAPS. Recent media coverage of Cho’s mental state has made us all rethink our past actions and ask two questions: What can I do to help? And could it happen here? But long after we stop asking, the answers will remain: It could happen here, but we can minimize the risk with certain steps.

Like reading Melanie Thernstrom’s Halfway Heaven, an insightful account of how Tadesse became excluded by Harvard’s preexisting social circles and slowly spiraled into a secluded delirium. Steps like revising the advising system so students actually have a faculty member with whom they feel comfortable talking.
Steps like plotting an actual course for students with “trouble getting acclimated.” Currently, a faculty resource guide tells advisers to refer such students to Penn Women’s Center, the English Language Programs Office and the Weingarten Learning Resources Center, among other groups.

That sounds like a very precise way to let a student fall through the cracks. And if I sound alarmist, it’s only because Penn’s sirens have been ringing for nearly 20 years: A 1989 study found that black Penn students leave school more often than others because they feel a “widespread sense of racial isolation.” At 12 percent of Penn’s population, international students may be the new isolated minority group.

It’s Microsoft!

Finally the School of Arts and Sciences made up its mind. A casual 72 days late. Microsoft won’t launch the new email system until the fall but having a reliable and efficient email service that can store more than 10 emails at a time is most definitely progress.

The service will offer all kinds of Microsoft goodies — blogging space, photo sharing, an online calendar and, unsurprisingly, a messenger service. AIM rules the US, and Microsoft wants a piece of the cookie with its very good Messenger Live service (widely used in Europe and Australia); but it’s like trying to oust Facebook — it ain’t never gonna happen.

But hidden away, deep in the text of the announcement email sent out yesterday, was a little gem, a savior for the modern student. We will be able to file-share, free from the tyrannical freedom swatter also known as the RIAA . And of course it’s slightly less self-righteous partner in crime, the MPAA.

We were told yesterday that as part of the “Penn Live” service we will have access to “FolderShare, a private peer-to-peer network that allows users to synchronize files between multiple devices and share files with other student users” without fear of retribution from the University of some external organization.

Files up to 2GB can be shared. That’s a lot. An episode of Lost is approximately 350MB. A movie is rarely more than 1GB. A music album is usually under 100MB. My entire photo collection, which is extensive and covers the last four years of my life, is only just over 2GB. FolderShare will allow us to swap media across the entire campus, untraceable by freedom-crushing organizations and without the risk of being sent a subpoena or a threatening letter. No more $4000 fines on this campus. No more unnecessary intimidation here.

And let’s not forget how much easier this will make group work. No more attachment-laden emails being sent back and forth endlessly — FolderShare will sync your files instantly.

Fileshare is not quite the Limewire/Kazaa/BitTorrent service you can get globally online. We won’t have access to millions of the latest films, TV shows, chart music and computer software. But we will have access to each other. And in a college of nearly 20,000 students, that’s some considerable. It’s free and it’s ours.

Other schools across North America have had similar setups for some time. Penn has now joined the march towards the free sharing of media and I congratulate those responsible.

File sharing is the future. The sooner the RIAA and MPAA realize that the better. For them and for us.

It’s been just under a century since The Young Pitcher hit bookshelves. The novel, written by Penn alum and then-best selling author Zane Grey, was one of the most popular novels of its day.

The highly autobiographical novel tells the story of a young man who wins his way to recognition in college thanks to his pitching skills. In one section, the young man is running from upperclassmen:

The bronze-haired soph was half-way up the steps. His followers, 12 or more, were climbing after him. Then a line of others stretched all the way to College Hall

Hmm, sound familiar?

That’s because The Young Pitcher takes place at Wayne College, a thinly vieled University of Pennsylvania. To this day, it is still “undoubtedly the best-selling novel ever set on the Penn campus, thinly disguised though it was,” according to the Pennsylvania Gazette.

But the novel was just one of the first high-profile references to Penn in pop culture. Since 1911, and especially in recent years, the number of references to Penn in pop culture has skyrocketed.

The Young Pitcher may be most famous novel set at Penn, but the best-selling Lovely Bones (2002) didn’t make any attempts to hide Penn’s real name. The novel, sadly, describes a young woman who is brutally raped and murdered, but then watches her friends and relatives go on with their lives.

Her boyfriend’s situation sounds pretty familiar:

By the time he packed his bags for Penn, he had committed so many words and their definitions to memory that I grew worried. … When he unpacked inside Hill House dormitory, my picture fell on the floor beside his bed.

Yet, it’s not just books. Penn’s also had its share of television and movie references. Penn surely has a friend in M. Night Shyamalan, who has mentioned Penn or made it a setting for a number of his films. Unbreakable was clearly set at Penn and West Philly, and Franklin Field is clearly the location for the movie’s football scene. Bruce Willis plays a security guard at “the university,” but he wears a FSU cap.

Shyamalan’s The Village was even more explicit:

He’s even an American History professor (my major)! I probably would have been in his class, you know, if it were real life and not a movie. Rumor is M. Night was also a huge fan of the floor-to-ceiling urinals in Franklin Field. And more recently, Penn was also named a couple times in the final season of The West Wing.

In one scene, Democratic presidential candidate Matthew Santos gives a speech at college, with “University of Pennsylvania” shown as the setting. And in another:

It seems Penn is doing pretty well getting its name out there. I couldn’t track a DVD down, but It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia throws out Penn at least every couple episodes (see Dennis and Dee talking about taking psych at Penn, they mention Penn specifically earlier that ep). It may not really be helping if people are still thinking the shows are talking about Penn State, but every little bit helps.

Did I miss a Penn pop culture reference? Be sure to throw a comment up — I tried to collect as many as I could find, but it ain’t exactly easy.