CHAPEL HILL, NC–Missing since he descended into the labyrinth in search of his Physics 118 class on Wednesday morning, freshman Jason Morris was found dead late yesterday evening deep in the Phillips Hall basement. Campus Police say the gored and partially devoured student was slain by the minotaur that prowls the math and physics building’s unfathomable maze of corridors.

Graduate student Jarvis Nichols discovered the youth’s lifeless body behind a mass spectrometer.

“New students have a hard time finding their way around [Phillips Hall]” he said, “and every year a few of them are killed by the minotaur that roams around down here.”

Physics and Astronomy Chair Chris Clemens explained how the minotaur came to be.

“Back in the age of men and myth,” he said, “James Ross McDonald, Kenan Professor of Physics emeritus and pioneer of impedance spectroscopy, ruled over this department with pomp and daring. Good fortune was upon him until his fair wife Pasiphae had a perverse love affair with a bull from the computer science department and bore its child.

James Ross MacDonald, who banished the minotaur.

“When Professor McDonald saw the half-man half-beast that sprang from her womb, he was aghast,” Clemens continued. “But he knew that he could not kill the fruit of his own wife’s loins, and so he commissioned the brilliant engineer Dade A. Lutz, who had been banished to Chapel Hill from N.C. State, to construct a palace of corridors so complex that, once inside of it, the creature could never escape.

“The minotaur has been imprisoned there ever since,” he said, “and every year his feasts claim seven young men and seven young women, all of them virgins and pre-med students, who dared venture into Phillips Hall. [Morris] was the first one this time.”

Director of Public Safety Jeff McCracken said that the minotaur, which is rumored to have nearly completed theses in both quantum gravity theory and partial differential equations, poses no threat to those outside of Phillips Hall. He said, however, that he “cannot guarantee the safe return” of students already taking math or physics courses in Phillips, many of whom have not been seen by friends and loved ones since first entering the building.

At press time, Todd Austell, an undergraduate advisor and professor in the Department of Chemistry, the kingdom adjacent to Phillips, had descended into the labyrinth trailing a string from the entrance, saying he would lead out remaining pre-meds and strike down the minotaur.

CHAPEL HILL, NC—This weekend the Campus Y will partner with UNC’s Equestrian Team to co-sponsor high horse lessons for all UNC students at the Apex Equestrian Center.

“It’s an opportunity to do what we do best,” said Campus Y Co-President Shelia Turzen. “Get way up on an incredibly high horse.”

The event, Turzen said, is vital to the Campus Y’s mission.

“For years, the Campus Y has been working to truly change our communities through social innovation and justice, taking on the problems that our society all too often ignores,” she said. “Pluralism needs to be–

“Woooah Bessy!” she cried, gripping the reigns of her own high horse, which had reared up beneath her. “Calm down now, girl–or whatever your gender identity may be. You’re safe here.”

Christopher Pendacone, president of UNC’s Equestrian Team, shared similar sentiments.

“We like getting on horses too,” he said.

For the event, UNC’s Equestrian Team’s most experienced riders will help students mount horses that stand up to nearly 25 hands in height. Once participants are in the saddle, Campus Y officers will guide them in rhetoric befitting their new position.

“We have two goals for the lessons,” said Sierra Blanche, one of UNCE’s veteran competitors. “The first will be to get our riders up onto the high horses, then it will be the Campus Y Cabinet’s job to teach the riders how to treat their peers who are still on the ground.”

According to Campus Y Co-President Mark Ruddy, beginning riders will start off with the smaller Shetland Pony and will be instructed to make a series of only mildly pretentious statements to other non-Campus Y students, just to get a feel for being in the saddle.

“On the ponies, we’ll get them started with some outbursts about gentrification and white privilege,” said Ruddy, “and then move on to the complicit role we all play in global racism even by choosing to attend this university.”

As riders progress to larger steeds, Campus-Y Cabinet members will teach them how to look at non-Campus Y students from lofty equine heights.

“It’s sort of a blank, confused stare,” said cabinet-member Teegan Colmbs. “You want them to know that you’re disappointed by their apathy, and that they should be disappointed, too.”

This is the first year that the Campus Y will make lessons available to students not on the Campus Y’s Exec Board, which frequently uses the equestrian team’s high horses on its retreats.

“As a board, we could not be more excited about opening up high horse lessons to the student body,” said Ruddy. “It will be so refreshing to see even just a few other socially conscious, liberally oriented activists riding around on tall, beautiful American Dream Drafts and fighting for worldwide economic justice through locally nucleated, pan-cultural partnerships.”

To build anticipation for the event, the Campus Y’s Development Committee will be riding a number of its highest horses onto campus this Friday at 3 p.m.

“Our plan is to drum up some publicity for the lessons while protesting the environmental threat posed by the number of carbon-emitting news vans in Ferguson over the past few weeks,” said committee-member Suraj Patel. “It’s a problem that’s really been neglected by the masses.”

“We’re going to see if we can get the horses to spit on women in sororities,” said committee-member Derek Winston.

If the event is a success, UNC’s student-run radio station WXYC plans to teach students how to listen to music from on top of high horses, too.

CHAPEL HILL, NC— Sophomore Vicente Jimenez “VJ” Rodriguez, has reportedly dropped The Dark Knight as his favorite film after declaring a Comparative Literature major. The news came as a shock to his high school friends, with whom he has watched Christopher Nolan’s 2008 blockbuster countless times.

According to Rodriguez, the sudden shift in taste came midway through his CMPL 143 “Intro to Global Cinema” recitation, when his graduate TA remarked, during a discussion of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Passenger, that “traditional Hollywood blockbusters fail to interrogate the ideological implications of the medium.”

Even as he was knowingly nodding and pursing his lips like his classmates around him, Rodriguez panicked. In the same moment, he swiftly and silently dismissed The Dark Knight from his affection.

After his recitation, Rodriguez said that among The Dark Knight‘s many now-glaring flaws is its failure to take the opportunity during the Joker’s interrogation scene to acknowledge the complicity of film in capitalist mythmaking .

“Of course we couldn’t sympathize with the Joker,” he said. “But even the basic patterns of shot and counter-shot propose a narrative order to the world that the Joker rejects. I can’t believe I didn’t notice such an artistic lapse.”

Our reporters caught up with Rodriguez in his Cobb dorm room amid hasty removal of his The Dark Knight poster.

“Opening my eyes to the deficiencies of mainstream cinema has been a challenge,” he admitted as he browsed Jean-Luc Godard’s Wikipedia page, “but once I realized that the extensive use of CGI to create Gotham’s cityscape was a mask for the poverty of Christopher’s Nolan’s aesthetic vision, I couldn’t care less whether or not Batman made it in time to save Rachel.”

Rodriguez has yet to announce a new favorite movie, but after a cursory examination of the syllabi of his film classes, he suggested that The Bicycle Thieves or “something by Ingmar Bergman” were promising candidates.

“The long takes and slow pacing of Italian Neorealism really satiate me in a way that the polished banter of Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox never could,” he said. “I don’t watch movies to be entertained. Not anymore.”

Kevin Grummond, a long-time friend, said that he understood Rodriguez’s decision.

“VJ was always a huge Dark Knight fan,” he said. “But I guess Batman’s the hero that VJ deserves, just not the one he needs right now.”

CHALEL HILL, NC—Surreptitiously studying their phenotypes from behind his notebook while they looked over the syllabus he had just handed out, graduate student Stephen Palmer began his semester long evaluation of the reproductive fitness of the undergraduates in his Biology 201 Ecology and Evolution recitation section, especially Heather, whom the researcher and teaching assistant described as “a total f’ing babe.”

Palmer, who focuses, in his lab, on traits conducive to sexual reproduction in Drosophila melanogaster and, in his classroom, on similar traits in undergraduates, began his study as students filed into recitation. Noting females with pelvic spans conducive to crowning many healthy offspring and breasts portending the capacity to produce nutrient-rich milk needed to ensure large, powerful progeny, he soon identified sophomore biology major Heather Brooks as an outlier in the 3:00 pm Tuesday population.

“I would fuck the shit out of her,” he noted mentally. 

While Palmer has not, with his undergraduates, undertaken numerical analysis as sophisticated as the Fisher’s linear discriminant function that he employs to distinguish Drosophila phenotypes, he has posited a simple 0-10 discriminant score or “hotness rating” that allows him to more easily communicate his findings to his peers, many of whom employ the metric in their own recitation sections. 

“I’ve got a few dimes this year,” he told fellow Ph.D. candidate Max Sherzer in the graduate student lounge.

Palmer also took note of Cooper Terman, the varsity lacrosse player and exercise & sports science major whose physiognomy–including his well-developed musculature, protruding Adam’s apple suggesting a dominant vocal call, and the wild-type appearance of his shaggy shoulder-length blonde hair–made him seem the recitation section’s most likely male to have his choice of mate, probably Heather.

However, he expressed his cautious optimism that under certain environmental pressures–such as “[needing] an A in Bio 201 to get into pharmacy school”–the population’s most fit female may instead choose to mate with a male typically seen as less fit, but whose position would be more advantageous to her than that of “some frat-boy meathead.” 

Palmer said that “only time will tell” if his hypothesis bears out, and he expressed hope that his detailed observational study would eventually give way to hands-on field work.

The graduate student concluded his recitation section by advising members of the class to “take advantage of [his] office hours,” which he announced would be from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. on Thursday nights.

“My door is always open,” he said.

CHAPEL HILL, NC–University of North Carolina undergraduate Business major Patrick Boeman told reporters Friday that he will spend most of his senior year fulfilling the Kenan-Flagler Business School’s alcoholism requirement. Boeman said that he expects be a mid- to high-functioning alcoholic before Spring Break of 2015, when all graduating seniors will be evaluated by their professors on their ability to drink recklessly and continuously.

“Kenan-Flagler knows the skills executives need to compete in today’s market, and they do everything they can to prepare us,” Boeman explained. “That’s why they put so much pressure on us to drink whenever possible.”

Boeman noted that it was hard to complete the alcoholism requirement during his first three years at Carolina because of his other academic obligations.

“I worked hard my freshman, sophomore and junior years,” he said. “I only went out three or four nights a week, and I rarely shotgunned beers. Sure, I learned how to puke and rally like a champ, but I still had a full schedule of school: like, twelve hours every semester. And they weren’t even all business classes. I had to take, like, Psych 101 or some bullshit.  Sure, I abused alcohol, but I wasn’t dependent on it.”

Now that Boeman has received a return offer from UBS, where he interned this summer, he expects to be able to devote his full attention to becoming an alcoholic.

“I had a lot to drink this summer, but they let me know that I had to step up my game if I wanted to work there again,” he said. “I mean I only got beer with lunch like twice a week.”

For this year, Boeman has developed a ritual to help him lose the battle against alcoholism–the disease that will haunt him for most of his adult life–as quickly as possible. After class, which, for him, lasts from twelve thirty to three on Tuesdays and Thursdays, he sits in the parlor of his fraternity house sipping on a tumbler of scotch while browsing Facebook, The Wall Street Journal, and Pornhub.com. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays he opens a six pack to finish before dinner, which is accompanied by wine or beer, depending on the occasion.

Evenings are less structured, but arguably the most important part of Boeman’s nascent dependency–a core element of the Kenan-Flagler education. While Boeman, like the majority of his WASP classmates, will spend almost every weeknight of his middle age “unwinding” with bourbon or gin, the business school cares less about the exact nature of the alcohol and more about the dangerous quantities in which it should be consumed.

“Now that I’ve got an offer,” he said, “I don’t mind buying multiple rounds at TOPO or ordering Patron in La Res, but I still enjoy crushing a Four Loko with my fraternity brothers. I have to set a good example for the younger guys.”

Boeman, who is swiftly approaching the first of the three DUIs he will accumulate in his life, thinks that being an alcoholic will help him in the business world.

“Bars are great places for networking, so drinking a lot can help you make valuable connections,” he said. “It can also dull the spiritual emptiness of a lifetime in the finance industry. If you think about it, alcohol is always a good investment.”

Dr. Frederick Carrutheurs, Kenan-Flagler’s Dean of Undergraduate Curriculum, said Boeman’s outlook reflects what he hopes all students learn from the business school.

“The values we teach here at Kenan-Flagler last a lifetime,” he said.

Boeman noted happily that he has been drinking even more than he anticipated and may finish the graduation requirement before Winter Break.

“I got three or four fifths of whisky just to have in my room this semester, but I’ve already finished one,” he explained. “If I keep on this pace, I’ll drink about a fifth every eight days, and that’s just when I’m drinking alone in my room.”

When asked if he had any other goals at UNC, Boeman said that he’d like to find a girl he could blame for his alcoholism when their marriage fell apart in twenty-five years.

Roommate #1: (walks into dorm to find large tarp on the floor)

Roommate #2: Hey, you’re back so soon, I didn’t…

#1: (sees video camera pointing towards roommate almost naked on tarp)

#2: I actually didn’t know you’d be back soon.

#1: (starts to leave)

#2: But, wait, no, you could actually help me out with this if you want to.

#1: (pauses, girlfriend of #2 walks in)

#2: Oh great Jen, you’re here, we can do this all together. (to #1) I think the people are going to love it. We’ve done one with Jen and me, and she got soaked, but I think people will respond even more with all three of us in it. My uncle encouraged me to do it. He says he just sits around watching them all day sometimes. It’s a lot of clean up afterward, sure, but tons of people watch these things now-a-days, especially if they are a little strange.

#1: (dumps bucket of ice on roommate’s head, cleans up)

#2: Want to go to Ram’s Head?

CHAPEL HILL, NC—Entering the restaurant jittery, bug eyed, and smirking, local anarchists descended upon the Franklin Street Chipotle last Monday, causing a minor disruption to the oppressing capitalist structure of the United States by refusing to follow the established order of Chipotle’s burrito line.

A wild-eyed Matt Green, president of the student anarchist club, the UNControllables, approached the Chipotle counter at approximately 6:35 pm Monday night and placed his visibly sweaty palms on the counter before ordering a half chicken, half barbacoa burrito. When asked whether he wanted white or brown rice, Green held eye contact with the Chiptole employee for a moment before replying, “green salsa and corn please,” then whispering “how do you like me now you corporate bitch?”

Angela Garten, the server at the time, looked at Green before sliding down the line, placing green salsa and corn onto the tortilla, then returning to her previous position in the serving station and asking, “white or brown rice?”

Green ordered white rice and extra black beans.

“Only time you’ll let those colors mixing in here, you fascists,” said the Greensboro native.

Mayhem escalated as the remaining anarchists, who had anxiously but politely waited their turn, reached the counter.

Josh Trainer, a philosophy major and treasurer of the UNControllables, added cheese between each step of the burrito-making process, white knuckles gripping a worn and dog-eared edition of William Godwin’s classic tract, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

Paying for his burrito with a combination of nickles and pennies, Trainer loudly encouraged the cashier to “send the fucking dogs if you don’t like it.”

Aaron Silver, whose black curly hair hung in greasy mats over the back of an UNControllables 2013-2014 club t-shirt that read “This is not a club sanctioned by the university,” caused further delay when he interrupted his order to ask the other young anarchists if they wanted a side of chips.

“Will anyone want to split them with me?” he asked his co-revolutionaries. “I don’t want to get them if nobody else wants them.”

The organization’s social chair, Samantha Roberts, elected not to press the small button labeled “Water” as she filled her cup from the lemonade dispenser, mouthing “stop me” at the cashier as lemonade spilled over her shaking hands.

After several sips, Roberts returned to the counter to order a Peach Izze.

The group, whose assault on Chipotle slowed the line for an estimated five to ten minutes, spent $64.73 before taxes.