Radar, the magazine for “smart people” who dabble in pop culture, has recently, in one fell swoop, both insulted and inspired starry-eyed Cornellians. A lot of people are up in arms, to say the least, about the magazine’s “unfavorable” ranking that dubs Cornell the runner-up to the “most overrated” college in America (Harvard took that honor… overachieving bastard), among other meanish things. Consider Sun columnist and possible crab person Tony Manfred, who decided the best way to rage against the rankings machine was to fight fire with fire: “Imagine dumb people trying to be smart, perverts trying to be sexually mature, bush-dwelling paparazzi giving journalism a try — this is Radar.”*
And then there’s those brave souls who have said pish posh to Radar’s snarky commentary and transcended petty adversity. Like blue-blooded** Eclipse (the supplementary section of the Sun that has been converted into a pull-out “magazine”) editor Leigha Kemmett, who embraced the magazine’s “unique and engaging content, content that [she] actually wanted to read” despite the fact that the issue she picked up was the one that slighted Cornell.
In any case, I’ll stop this crappy-trend-story-lede nonsense and cut to the chase, sort of: our feelings about Eclipse magazine. It wants to be like Radar, kind of? And the cover story, the unfortunately headlined “Rating the Rankings,” is basically a rumination upon the current status of Cornell’s rankings poo-poo (dropped from 12 to 14 in the U.S. News & World Report, the most overrated item in Radar).
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