Raise your hand if you’ve ever been personally victimized by 34th Street Magazine.
Yes, this was on the back of our Fling tanks. But it’s also something that’s been on our minds a lot lately. As authors of Street’s most controversial weekly feature—the Round Up—we feel the need to address some of the concerns you have raised about our content. We’ve read your emails, seen your Facebook statuses, overheard you on Locust. And we’re not here to apologize or make excuses for what we write. We’re here to offer you, our readers, some insight. We’re here to call on those raised hands.
The Round Up is a thing people love to hate. You don’t find harm in reading about the antics of your classmates—that is, until you find yourself or your friends bolded on Page Three. We get that. No one wants to relive their mistakes in print, ourselves included. But there’s a silver lining to being featured in something like the Round Up. For one, we’ll never identify you by name. We won’t slut–shame you or make overarching generalizations like you’ll find on Collegiate ACB or other anonymous forums. In past incarnations of the Round Up, students were called out by first and last name or very descriptive identifiers. We don’t do that. At least, we try not to. In the past, we’ve been too specific with some of our jabs, and we regret it. There’s a way to inform without insulting, and we’re trying damn hard to do it.
Let’s face it: we’re all snobs. We spend our days tucked away in this Ivy League institution, preparing ourselves for success. As we struggle through midterms and interviews, it’s comforting to know that, at the end of the day, we can say we graduated from the prestigious University of Pennsylvania. But you know what? We fuck up. We fuck up badly. We get drunk and we sleep with the wrong people and we pee in the wrong places and we use the wrong ID at Smoke's. We’re so smart, but we’re so dumb. We all are.
So we write about it. We put together this weekly column of shame to remind ourselves that we’re imperfect. No matter what our Ivy League degree may say, we are all humans. And that’s what the Round Up says.
Much like our flawed selves, the Round Up suffers from its own shortcomings. The way we obtain gossip is less than ideal; sometimes, we resort to texting our friends or asking around the DP office for the weekend scoop. Not only does that narrow our pool of information, it can also lead to inconsistencies and errors. We want everything in the Round Up to be true (with some snarky commentary and bad puns). We try to verify everything we can, but we can do better. Looking forward, we’re getting a new website and, along with it, a suggestion box. We’re hoping you’ll take advantage of it. This is as much your Round Up as it is ours.
People say that gossip tears us apart, but we’ve found that it can do the opposite. In this big, bad university filled with sex, drugs and stress, we can stop every Thursday and laugh at each other, together. Maybe you know who we’re talking about, or maybe you don’t, but that’s not the point. We live in our respective Penn bubbles, but the Round Up is one big inside joke that we’re all in on.
Ducklings, it’s been a crazy fucking year—but it’s been our year. Can’t wait to get fucked up with you—and fuck up with you—in the fall.
