While working on The Crimson, Harvard’s student newspaper, I heard someone talking about a sophomore named Mark Zuckerberg who had been summoned before Harvard’s ‘Ad Board,’ the university’s disciplinary body, to face accusations of breaching security, violating copyrights and infringing individual privacy.

Days earlier, Zuckerberg had hacked into the student photo directories of nine of Harvard’s twelve Houses (Harvard’s equivalent to the Oxbridge colleges) and used the information to create a website called Facemash.com, a take-off on a popular webpage called ‘Hot or Not?’ which enabled users to compare the attractiveness of two randomly selected students. In less than a day, the number of hits on the site quadrupled to give a total of 22,000, but Zuckerberg was forced to take the site down in response to outrage expressed by certain students and university administrators.

The Ad Board had already forced two friends of mine to leave Harvard. Zuckerberg was not so unlucky, and in spite of violating Harvard copyright and infringing on student privacy, he was let off with a warning.

Following the publicity that he gained from Facemash, three seniors approached Zuckerberg to see if he would do the coding for a social networking site for Harvard students that they had been working on, called Harvard Connection. Two of the seniors, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, were Olympic-level rowers from Greenwich, CT and members of the Porcellian, Harvard’s most secretive and exclusive finals club.

The third, Divya Narendra, was a former tennis teammate of mine from our high school in Queens, NY. From our perspective as high school students, Harvard seemed to possess an unattainable mystique. Upon arriving, that mystique disappeared, and was replaced by an anxious need to stay relevant among peers who were, in one way or another, going to run the world. I reacted to this pressure by attempting to ignore it, while Divya shed his wardrobe for Brooks Brothers, J Press and hopes of making a name for himself on Wall Street.

Zuckerberg agreed informally to take the job, but soon after decided to build a site of his own and stopped returning calls from Divya and the Winklevosses. A few months later, in early February, Zuckerberg launched the thefacebook.com, a site based on the popular social networking site Friendster that anyone with a Harvard e-mail address could join.

By the end of the month, the site grew to include a number of other Ivy League schools, and now, six years later, counts one in every fourteen people on the planet as a member. Zuckerberg is history’s youngest self-made billionaire, and the Winklevosses (who were at Christ Church last year doing an MBA) and Divya have, since the beginning, been litigating against Zuckerberg in an attempt to claim a piece of the spoils.

In November 2006, during a trip back to Cambridge for the Harvard-Yale game, I ran into Divya at a party at the Spee, one of Harvard’s finals clubs. This was a time when much of the Harvard community viewed Zuckerberg as a legend. It was shortly after a feature article in the New Yorker had come out which recounted the origins of Facebook, including his lawsuit against Zuckerberg. We reminisced about people we knew in common, and he seemed happy to be talking about something other than the lawsuit.

A couple of years ago, Facebook agreed to a $65 million settlement with the Winklevosses and Divya. It’s not clear, though, how much of that the three actually pocketed after legal fees, taxes, and an alleged overvaluation of the stock component of the initial settlement. Not enough, apparently, since the three have gone back to the courtroom.
To guess from Divya’s Facebook profile (it seems that even he, and now the twins as well, could not forego what has become the necessity of having one), things are going better than they were back in 2006. He is featured as a minor but significant character in The Social Network, and has even posted pictures from the movie’s premier at the New York Harvard Club.

When I go to watch The Social Network on Friday, I expect that there will be something surreal about seeing the Harvard of my undergraduate experience recreated as the backdrop to a contest amongst America’s young “power elite.” And if I experience any emotional reaction to the film at all, it will be with uneasy pangs of something that can’t quite be called nostalgia.

The first track on Kings Of Leon’s new album is called ‘The End’. If the band named it as such to indicate a rejection of their last album’s highly polished sound, it’s a misnomer. KOL certainly go for a scrappier aesthetic in ‘Come Around Sundown’; their laughter at the end of ‘Back Down South’ evokes the image of an impromptu gig in front of a gaggle of rough rednecks, somewhere in a smoky bar in the band’s native Tennessee. The song’s faux-spontaneity is almost convincing, but then it ends and you’re left to ponder that mysterious laughter at its close.

This roughness, however, is just a symptom of nasty growing pains; all in all, KOL are handling success well. This is no Youth And Young Manhood; but better a band that evolves than one stuck in the mire of its former glory.

The band retain their signature sound in ‘Radioactive’: Caleb’s faintly hoarse whine, the soaring guitar line and the incessant drumming are all present and correct. ‘Pony Up’, with its optimistic melodies and play-in-the-sand beach vibe, is almost fun. And in songs like ‘The Face’, KOL work their magic, albeit of a less frenetic, less rockabilly kind: with its combination of beautiful lyricism and haunting melody, the song is reminiscent of ‘Milk’. This album may sound better in an arena than in a basement, but KOL still manage to excite in a way that only they can.

It’s just gone four o’clock on Wednesday afternoon when I walk into the O2 Academy’s kitchenette for a chat with Conor O’Brien. He sits up from his stretched-out repose on a small leather sofa, slips a hand under a purple beanie to rub at his hat-hair, and places a half-chewed piece of gum politely on the table. He’s tired. The band that he fronts, Villagers, have travelled up to Oxford after selling out the London Scala the night before – ‘a heavy night,’ he admits.

The last year has seen Villagers’ stock rise rapidly. The band enjoyed near-universal acclaim for their Mercury Prize-nominated first LP, Becoming A Jackal, and have been touring the world ever since its release. O’Brien talks of the nomination with endearing modesty: ‘It was…cool. I never know what to say to things like that. It was an honour, I guess, and I felt surprised – I wasn’t expecting it.’ He confesses he felt ‘awkward’ during the ceremony, performing his token song before leaving – perhaps unsurprisingly – empty-handed.
‘I was proud of it,’ he says of the album. ‘I thought it was good when I finished it. I wasn’t doing it for expectations or critical reactions or anything. I imagined the reactions of people standing in front of me when I was singing, and I was imagining a reciprocal thing between the audience and the band’. When the band perform, O’Brien’s youthful Irish twang and mesmerising narratives generate a glass-like aura that commands silence from the audience; to shatter it would be sacrilegious. He has a penchant for carving whole songs out of routine, everyday material (a bus breaking down, a car ride home) – for writing ‘like a child’, as he puts it. Is it really so easy for him to find inspiration? ‘I like things that explore the little universes inside each person as they’re doing the dishes or whatever. It’s the unsaid conversations that don’t really happen… a song is something that says that, you know?’.

As for influences, O’Brien places great emphasis on Hermann Hesse’s ‘Narcissus And Goldmund’: ‘I was kind of copying it [on Becoming A Jackal]. I wanted to make an album version of that book. That was the main influence in terms of themes.’ Among musicians, he cites Neil Young, Randy Newman, and even Nina Simone – whose raconteur style he evokes on ‘To Be Counted Among Men’, so as to give credibility to the ‘rather preposterous lyrics.’

The band’s evening performance is exceptional in every way; but O’Brien’s solo recitals are what really puts me under a spell. A fully acoustic rendition of ‘Ship Of Promises’ sounds better
than the original, if not as tempestuous. ‘Twenty-Seven Strangers’ holds every listener in rapt attention throughout its duration,
while two brand new songs – ‘Memoirs’ and the haunting, odyssean ‘Cecilia’ – indicate the direction in which O’Brien’s songwriting talent is rapidly progressing.

But despite my prompting, he’s loath to talk about a new album just yet. ‘We’re probably touring through till April, but I might take January off to write’, he says shyly. A pause, then: ‘I’m
just writing the whole time, whatever happens. I’ll probably feel, at some stage, like getting it recorded, but I don’t feel like it right now.’