The Fling Headliner Was Revealed Via 'Penn News Today' Email Last Week, But No One Noticed

If the Fling headliner is released via Penn News Today and nobody reads the email, did it ever really happen?

Penn students have been forced to grapple with this question after reports indicated that long-awaited news of the 2017 Fling performers, Zedd and Tinashe, was accidentally leaked in a university-wide Penn News Today email sent out last Monday. The problem? Nobody actually opened it.

“When we realized what had happened, we were absolutely mortified,” a spokesperson for the Office of University Communications said. “Thankfully we didn't have to worry about the news spreading, due to our extremely low readership.”

The university estimates that approximately zero of the email’s 25,000+ recipients actually accessed the leaked information, despite the fact that no damage control measures were taken to conceal it. Many students immediately deleted the message from their inbox with no intention of ever opening it. 

Sophomore Jessica Hans was frustrated that she missed the opportunity to find out who was headlining before the official announcement was made. “By the time someone told me the Fling performer was accidentally sent out in Penn News Today, I already moved the email to spam, then moved it to trash, then clicked ‘Delete forever.’ It’s kind of a ritual I do every morning. It helps me de-stress. But the joke’s on me, because now I’m even more stressed that I missed out on the big news.”

We at Under the Button dot com sent our top investigators to recover last Monday’s email, but were met with similar disappointment: by that night, every last Penn News Today email had been permanently deleted by those who received it.

Despite the missed opportunity to be the first to know the Fling headliner, consensus among the students reveals few regrets. “If I had to go back in time and do it all over again,” said Hans, “I’d probably still delete the Penn News Today email. It’s not worth having it clutter my mailbox.”