For those of you who missed the general campus uproar, there was fake edition of the Hustler yesterday, on Feb. 5 with the headline "Goodbye Greek Life." For those of who read it, here is some more information about it.
As we confessed in the Verdict, the Slant was responsible for the prank. After our last issue, we had to switch printers and the day of the week on which we were coming out. (We’re going to be coming out on Thursdays now.) Since change was in the air anyway, we decided to do something dramatic. After a staff member tossed out the prospect of a fake Hustler, the ideas started flowing and the Huslter was born.
We chose the “Goodbye Greek” angle because we felt it was outrageous enough to catch everyone’s eyes but not too ridiculous for most people to immediately ignore. And as several of the Greeks on staff pointed out, there is a real fear on campus for something like this to happen. All we had to do was carefully play on the Greek community’s fears and we’d have widespread panic.
To be honest, here was how I envisioned it: people pick up copies, freak out for five to 10 minutes, catch onto it and then everyone laughs hysterically. On the campus as a whole, it would cause controversy for about one day. That’s roughly how it turned out. However, I did receive a ton of stories about how different people reacted to the Huslter:
“My dorm was up in arms this morning. Femme chaos.”
“Friend saw sorority girls crying”
“U guys got me at first with the newspaper… until I read Thes Lant on the Rites of Spring line-up.”
“A girl in my Russian class is calling her dad to talk about transferring.”
“There was audible shrieking in Branscomb and I even saw one girl in Starbucks crying.”
So who knew ahead of time? Well, first I got permission from the Chris Carroll, the head of VSC. He just insisted that the Slant needed to be more honest than for the last fake Hustler (see the “Remembering ‘Gee Dead’” article in yesterday’s fake Hustler). Next, I got the Hustler templates from Matt Radford, the talented designer behind the Hustler and Versus. Finally, I approached and received articles from a few renegade Hustler staff writers. Other than that, no one outside of our staff knew ahead of time — including Sydney Wilmer, the editor-in-chief.
Since the Huslter is technically a satirical edition of the Slant, many people have been asking me what is “real” in it. The interviews with Wyatt and Fabiani were real; they partly knew what was happening. All the Friday Spice news blurbs are true; we rewrote them and attributed them to the APA to avoid infringing the copyright of the Associated Press. The crossword puzzle is solvable, even if the Sudoku isn’t. The “Gee Dead” article is accurate. (Well, as far as I can tell — I wasn’t on campus when this happened, either). Everything else is fabricated. Also, for a fun time, try figuring out how many clues we provided; I count around 20.
That’s all folks. I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone for their kind words and the lack of death threats; I have received more than enough compliments on this issue to completely swell my ego. Thanks for your thanks.
As a final plug, feel free to stop by the Slant meetings on Tuesday nights at 8 p.m. in Buttrick 312 or visit us online at theslant.net.
Brendan Alviani
Junior
Peabody College
 
