Aleksey Vayner, the Yale graduate who became famous for a video résumé titled “Impossible is Nothing,” has died, according to several sources. An email sent by a friend of Vayner’s to a small group of people at Yale confirmed his death, and a woman claiming to be his niece recently posted a notice about him on Twitter.

Today a spokeswoman for the New York City Medical Examiner confirmed to IvyGate that a 29-year-old man matching Vayner’s description, under the name of Alex Stone, died on the morning of January 19 in Queens, New York. The spokeswoman indicated that the cause of death has yet to be determined.

Sometime after moving to New York, Vayner began using the name Alex Stone, and according to Queens County court records, officially changed his name in April 2012.

An email circulating among his friends said that a memorial service was likely to be held on Saturday, January 26, in New York.

Update: Gawker has confirmed Vayner’s death.

Update: Vice’s Alex Pasternak, who interviewed Vayner last spring, has published a remembrance.

A former child pageant contestant (a successful one, it seems) claiming to be a Yale prefrosh—or maybe it’s the other way around—has posted an Ask Me Anything thread on Reddit.

Says this prefrosh: “I know this combination seems impossible but it’s not.”

Seriously? Impossible is nothing.

Although you don’t have to know ancient Greek to get into Harvard these days, some people have trouble making the cut. But what happens when those individuals think demonstrating their cult-like zeal and devotion to the place is the super-shiny golden ticket to acceptance? Bad news, that’s what. First, there was “Harvard, Please.” And now, waitlisted Harvard applicant Grace Oberhofer is unwisely taking lessons from a page out of Aleksey Vayner’s book.

Not a completely bad song (despite the whole shrieking thing), but she probably should have brushed-up on IvyGate in order to come up with some more entertaining Harvard references. (You know she was running out of them when she had to affirm she’d never pee on John Harvard’s statue.) And maybe she shouldn’t have made it public. For one thing, even if she does get in, she will now FOREVER be known as that pre-frosh who made a slightly creepy and overly impassioned plea to be admitted to Harvard, exemplifying how a competitive admissions process turns people into raving, singing lunatics.

Quick question, Grace: How do the colleges that actually admitted you feel about the fact that you think a desperate video plea was a better alternative to attending their institutions? And how is Harvard going to feel, PR-wise, about admitting someone who calls it a “school that intimidates the average fool?”

Perhaps, though, the joke here is that she’s a legacy who got waitlisted. Maybe Ivies don’t just admit legacies with impunity. Maybe just the really wealthy ones?

The Ivies are filled with talented people – one might be a former CIA child-spy, maybe a Hollywood star pretending to be a student, and then there are the shitty authors. Some just have impenetrable penetrators.

Like Zach Bornstein and Nikolos Gonzales, both Brown ’12. While in Prague this semester, they devoted some time to sampling the local beverages and making this video:

The two sat down with IvyGate (via Skype) for a brief (and exclusive!!!) interview about their new hit single. The pair thought of the idea for the song after a friend of theirs went missing.

He was gone for a while and nobody knew where he was, and we were worried he had gotten knifed in the dick.

Coincidentally, the knifing of dicks is also the subject of a Czech fairy tale. And a family tradition for Bornstein. Readers will be glad to know that Bornstein’s member is recovering. “We’re making amends,” he told IG. They will also be glad to know that there will be a sequel, a full-length feature film.

Gonzales and Bronstein have a couple of tips for any guy out there looking to increase their penis power. Surprisingly Gonzalez advised,

“Don’t knife it!”

Bornstein explained,

The blood is what makes it tough.

However, some of it is just natural anyways. The power “has been in my family for generations,” Bornstein said. It has been in Gonzales’s for only one however.

One final piece of advice from Bornstein:

If I could say one thing to all the fans out there: just don’t be cynical. Be a nice person and good things will happen to you.

In other words, you won’t get knifed in the dick.

OK, this is just getting ridiculous. Remember when we told you two weeks ago about Yale PiPhi CoCo Pannell and her dogged quest to elect Mitch Daniels president in 2012? (She even had a Super Bowl ad!) Well, she and the other young libertarians at Students for Daniels are pulling out all stops, it seems. They made another ad, this one featuring none other than noted insane person Jimmy McMillan, otherwise known as “The Rent is Too Damn High” guy.

I could be wrong, but isn’t someone who’s famous for being balls deep in crazy probably a poor choice for political mascot? It looks like Governor Daniels agrees, since he went on a radio show and made it very clear that he has no earthly idea who those damn kids are. He softened the blow by saying he was glad that young people care about the deficit, or whatever. Except we really don’t. All we care about are kitschy internet memes we can send to our friends on Facebook. (Exhibit A below.)

Anyway, CoCo doesn’t really do all that much here, just spouts one terrible slogan then nods agreeably the rest of the time. McMillan is the clear star of this production, and he makes the most of it — mainly by being nigh unintelligible throughout.

Prospective Ivy League students who are wondering whether the admissions officers actually read their essays (or whether they’ll catch that erudite, not-so subtle reference to Great Expectations) can now rest easier. Their essays will be scanned thoroughly — by a machine — with the aim of finding nasty dishonest kids who plagiarized and/or bought their admissions essays and feeding them to a purple prospie eater.

According to the Brown Daily Herald, Turnitin.com may soon be climbin’ in your Common App, snatching your essays up. The Common Application hasn’t yet implemented the system, which compares essays, personal statements, etc., to a database and prepares “similarity reports,” blah, blah, blah, the same thing it does in high school. It claims to ensure that only the best applicants are admitted, i.e. those who can “embellish” properly.

Apparently, the system was test-run in an “Ivy League Residency Program” *coughharvardcough* and found to be successful. (Just take a look at that article; it’s comforting to know your doctor with a prestigious M.D. may have plagiarized his admission essay. Now bend over and cough.)

Right now, the Ivies are mum on whether they’ll use it. Except when they’re vocal about how they’re not going to. Brown and Penn aren’t, the former because it’s the rebel thing to do, and the latter because cheating shows the kind of initiative that it takes in the corporate world (note to all prospies: Brown and Penn are way easier to get into now! Apply there in droves!) And Cornell, playing follow the leader, told this writer they would wait to see whether the CommonApp uses it before commenting.

Brown, still jealous that it doesn’t get Adam Wheelers and Aleksey Vayners, claims there is no need for it, while Penn’s Dean of Admissions stated that, as opposed to teenage applicants, a more mature (plagiarized) voice simply “says what we want to hear.” No that’s not a joke, he actually implied that most applicants to Ivy League schools weren’t trying to say what they think admissions officers want to hear.

Of course, this raises the question: if the Common App does use the system, don’t Brown and Penn kind of have to go along for the ride? Or will they drop the CommonApp? (Note to all pre-prospies: Brown and Penn will become a bitch to apply to, don’t apply there.)

Even if this happens, applicants found to be breaking the honor code will probably just get their applications taken out of the running, not eaten. Still, nothing is worse than the possibility of ending up in the non-Ivy abyss.

This post shows a 35% match with other articles and is marked “suspicious.”

The ad you see above is the first of the 2012 presidential election, according to Talking Points Memo. And what would you know! CoCo Pannell — former Yale College Council candidate for president, Pi Phi social chair and Yale Daily News multimedia editor — stars in it. In the ad, Pannell voices her support for Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (a.k.a. “My Man Mitch”) because he’s all about “FISCAL. RESPONSIBILITY.” (She says with the gravitas of a young Gretchen Carlson — Zing!)

The spot was produced by Students for Daniel, an organization with 37 chapters and based at Yale. The group bought up ad time in southern Iowa and New Hampshire during the NFL’s Pro Bowl. (Too bad nobody watches the Pro Bowl…)

CoCo was named one of Yale’s 50 most beautiful people by Rumpus last year. In an interview with the Yale rag she was all like, “I like my men strong and powerful and intimidating.” Which explains Daniels? Maybe? (I watched this YouTube video of the Indiana Governor to try and find out more, but was distracted by the sight of my reflection in his spit-shined pate.)

And there’s more! You remember the ridiculous Gossip Girl send-up orchestrated by Yale’s Pi Phi sorority last year? Yeah, she was in that, too.

So make of this what you will.

Self-proclaimed “sententious, crypto-tendentious, slightly pedantic” scamster Adam Wheeler has been described as the shy, quiet type, not one to boast in person about his falsified straight-A’s, book-deals, lecture-invitations, and sexual prowess. After all, he managed to fool a whole parade of supposed smart people at admissions offices and scholarship committees nationwide, outwit Harvard profs and fellow classmates, and successfully beat the shitty, shitty system that is the Ivy “meritocracy.” Allegedly, his high-school classmates liked him and his Cantab buddies thought he was swell: definitely not criminal mastermind material. A humble victor for sure.

But on paper, a different story: Wheeler’s flowery self-aggrandizement is pretty staggering… At least from an SAT Vocab section standpoint, far surpassing non-English-fluent Aleksey Vayner, Wheeler reaches into pure, Shakespearean megalomania. (For the record, despite claiming perfect stores, Wheeler only got a 1220 on his second SAT try). For example, in a letter sent to his fellow Harvard transfers in September 2007, Wheeler’s lexicon-breaking verbal vomit reaches a high pitch. From the Crimson:

My own, brief, assessment of my character is that I am sententious, crypto-tendentious, slightly pedantic with a streak of contrarianism, a fascination with any pedagogical approach to Shakespeare, and a decent sense of humor…[At MIT], I was, to put it poorly, suckled upon the teat of disdain. That being said (fortified by a reflexive snort), I was inspired therby [sic] to apply to Harvard, where the humanities, in short, are not, simpliciter, a source of opprobrium.

Well, there goes the tale of the gutsy populist, breaking into the Ivory Tower. On the contrary, seems as if Wheeler has enough pretension running through his veins to rightfully earn a spot at any Ivy, all trickery aside.

But not, as it happens, at The New Republic, to which Wheeler applied for an internship and, unfortunately for his lawyer, sent his resume. Yes, the number of prizes are obviously impossible and the fakery seems really, really obvious, but what really struck us was the resume’s intense, well… Ivy-ness. The Crimson’s done a thorough fact-or-lack-thereof-checking here, but in keeping with the above, see our favorite sections below and note how many of them could have easily appeared in any given reading assignment or boring section discussion. First off, his fake lectures were all carbon copies of those delivered by a real Harvard professor, James R. Russell:

“From Parthia to Robin Hood: The Armenian Version of the Epic of the Blind Man’s Son (Köroghlu)”

“Black Milk and the Stairway to Heaven: Bedros Tourian, Paul Celan, and Anselm Kiefer”

“The Rime of the Book of the Dove: Zoroastrian Cosmology, Armenian Heresiology, and the Russian Novel”

Then there’s his manuscript descriptions, which read like totally normal course-catalogue entries/Anthropology department lecture notes… at least at Yale:

Critical work that has attempted to explain the experience of geographical and textual space in modern writing has focused predominantly on the map as an analytical tool of orientation that makes formal writing structures legible…By restoring the experience of disorientation, I argue that getting lost becomes a radical discourse that reflects back to us how we orient ourselves—what we pay attention to as we move through physical space and how we construe meaning as we move through a text from page to page…

Accordingly, each of the texts that I examine betrays an awareness of writing as a spatial activity and space as a scripted category. The critical topographies that these writers created are maps of ideology, figural territories within which social conflict and political antagonism are put into play.

If anything, this guy has mastered the art of imitation. This is exactly the kind of pseudo-intellectual, effectively contentless, buzzword-laden Humanities bullshit that the Academy thrives upon. Just throw in a couple of “isms,” Derrida references, and journal citations, and you’ve got a doctoral-candidate leading seminar discussion as a successful TA. He just played the part too well.

Yes, the loquacious and devious Adam Wheeler presents us with quite a pickle. He’s learned our language, mastered our ways, and taken the self-promotion and ambition that we’re all groomed for  – yes, all — to its natural conclusion. He’s all of us through a funhouse mirror, all of our most Ivy-tacular characteristics amplified to monstrous proportions.

If it walks like an Ivy student, talks like an Ivy student then it is, without a doubt, an Ivy student. Go home folks, there’s nothing to see here.

Like a real life version of Leonardo DiCaprio’s insufferable character in the insufferable movie Catch Me if You Can, the insufferable Adam Wheeler has burst onto the scene, making Aleksey Vayner seem like small potatoes and Goldman look good.

Wheeler fabricated grades, rec letters and — *nostalgia bomb* — published books in a mad Ivory Tower infiltration scheme. Shooting for the big leagues, he BS-ed his way into Rhodes and Fulbright scholarship applications as well as thousands of dollars in Harvard grant money (endowment stewardship FTW).

It gets worse. Unlike his affirmative-acted and last-name-legacized peers, Wheeler definitely doesn’t deserve to be at Harvard at all; he made up his high school credentials too.

Now the Big Liar On Campus has to contend with 20 criminal charges and will probably have to fabricate a pretty good legal degree. Wheeler’s story — a testament to the analytical prowess of admissions offices and scholarship committees coast-to-coast — is currently lighting up the internets, with comment pages boiling over with anti-Ivy vitriol.

On our part, we’ll cover the story as it develops. So far, we’ve got an alleged tale of his expulsion from Bowdoin of all places, for academic dishonesty, and the fact that many people think he’s hot.

Readers: some of you must have known the guy. Give us the scoop, anonymity guaranteed.

Every now and again, we over here at IvyGate — purely in the interests of town-criership and good fun — repost some juicy nugget of self-promotional multimedia, fresh from the minds of uppity Ivy League resume-hounds. Then, for reasons unbeknownst to us, after these videos — which were created for the express purpose of exposure, marketing, back-slapping etc. — go online, receive ten-thousand-or-so viewer eyeballs, and subsequently rebound across the web, their creators inexplicably pull the content! (and threaten to sue us! whoa!).

We graciously gave Vayner’s video resume the attention it deserved; he pulled the footage and called the lawyers! Now tons of people know about the controversy, but have never even seen the masterwork that sparked it… Oh, and we helped the Pi Phi video reach national renown; they took it offline! Honestly, it all smacks of ingratitude to one’s fellow man/blogger…  All we’re trying to do is spread the good word!

And, with that in mind, we’re pleased to present two of our all-time Ivy Video Faves, back online after languishing for far too long. Happy viewing after the jump!

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