The king of procrastination tools, facebook.com, has a new feature called Pulse, which compares the most commonly listed preferences at your school to those of the rest of the facebook community. As a consumer and sometime mocker of popular culture as well as an anthropologist and (let's face it) a Yale snob, I was fascinated by this.

Music:
How mainstream Yale am I? The Beatles topped the Eli list, which also contained my listed favorites Radiohead, Dylan, U2 and the Shins. Also, I like all the other bands on the list. While I was actually suprised how much overlap there was with the pooled schools list - where are the rappers? - the differences still spoke volumes. Incubus, Green Day and Sublime...are we in 1998? And who's Fall Out Boy?

Movies:
Once again, I am so Yale. LOTR took the top spot, only making 8th on the combined list. These lists had fairly little in common. Most notable was the absence of raunchy or dumb comedy on the Yale list: Zoolander may be stupider than Wedding Crashers, Old School,Anchorman, and Napoleon Dynamite, but it's Yale's only preferred laugh-fest other than Office Space, which made both lists and should not be grouped with the aforementioned films. What makes Zoolander so appealing to Yalies? Is it the mockery of stupid, beautiful people? Hmm.

T.V.:
Woah! Suddenly the playing field is equalized. And of course, not owning a TV or watching it that much when I did own one, I'm a little left out in this category. I'm shocked that The Daily Show only came in 8th on Yale's list, but not that it didn't register in mainstream America. Why do we all watch the same TV but not the same movies?

Books:
Ah, literature - Yale's chance to demonstrate our intellectual tastes by selecting, um, Harry Potter as our favorite read. These lists differ surprisingly little, with the notable exceptions of The Bible as No. 3 on the collective list, and Yale's slight bent towards classics (Austen, Heller, Dostoyevsky) at the expense of light fare like Angels and Demons and The Notebook. Interestingly, Tolkien shows up on the masses list but not Yale's, despite the former's enthusiasm for the movies.

Clubs and Organizations:
This is not really a category in which valid comparisons can be made, since most college groups go by school-specific acronyms. But the lists are telling nonetheless, especially the national one. Frighteningly, College Republicans ranks eight spots higher than College Democrats. And at the top of the list is the job "Lifeguard." Who knew?


Hometowns:
Finally, I understand. The Yale list couldn't have surprised me less. But to think that Houston is number one on the whole facebook and L.A. is only number 10...now I see where all those Will Ferrell fans are coming from.

Eye-opening. My tastes in general ran so similarly to the rest of the Yale student body that I couldn't conceive of any other world. Certainly not a world where The Bible, The Notebook, and the lifeguard rule the school, and Bob Dylan and Jon Stewart are obscurities. I feel bad for them. But I feel worse for the country.