In the latest update into the case of Annie Le, the Yale graduate student whose body was discovered in the basement of Yale Medical School, officials have confirmed that Le was strangled to death:

According to a spokeswoman for Connecticut’s Chief Medical Examiner, Wayne Carver, Ms. Le died from 'traumatic asphyxia,' caused by 'neck compression.'

This is a reversal from the statement issued yesterday by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, which instead of releasing the cause of Le's death, stated

it would withhold that information indefinitely at the request of prosecutors. At the press conference, Lewis declined to comment on a report in The Hartford Courant that said Le died of asphyxiation.

This admission seems to suggest that the case is proceeding quickly, and is closer to identifying the perpetrator.

Losing a job sucks. It sucks more when it seems - as it does these days - to come from factors beyond your own control. But being unemployed only excuses you from so much, and for so long. Last week's installment of the Daily Intel's "sex diaries" made that point exceedingly clear.  The anonymous contributor is a 24-year-old female living in Murray Hill, an Ivy League graduate and unemployed ex-investment banker.

The beginning of her weeklong account begins when she wakes up and realizes that "its only noon", determines that it's too rainy to go outside, and orders delivery through SeamlessWeb. Maybe it's a little late, but why stress yourself when you've just been laid off, right? Wrong: "Since getting laid off (okay it's been six months now), life has been a cycle of drinking, boys, hangover, and Seamless."

That cycle, we learn, has been sustained in part by older men:

I am currently dating a few to finance my Manhattan meal plan. I promised myself the liquid diet, but not when you are having a free fabulous dinner at Del Posto. Mumble an excuse after dinner about not feeling well and having to call it an early night.

There's something savvy about the way our anonymous heroine manages to eat lavishly without a job, but there's also something pathetic about resorting to tactics used by aspiring trophy wives.

After the jump: the most embarrassing and pathetic incident of the week.

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In a bizarre alternate universe, one where giant alien robots masquerade as roadsters and fighter jets, and where non-banker Ivy League twerps inexplicably manage to land hot girlfriends, Penn and Princeton are not rivals separated by state lines and forty-five miles, but constituent parts of the same university:

Twenty seconds into the newest trailer for Transformers 2, viewers are treated to a sweeping aerial shot of Princeton's campus. Immediately after that, there's ground level footage of Penn's Quad. There the mother of Shia LaBeouf's character spins around in a circle and says, "Look at this place - I feel smarter already. Can you smell it?"

"Yeah," her husband replies, "smells like forty thousand dollars a year."

Actually, it's more like fifty thousand. And does anyone know why Michael Bay decided to film on two separate campuses? We were baffled last year, and we still are.

On Harvard Time, a weekly comedy news show at America's preeminent institution of higher learning, recently parodied a Harvard Admissions video directed at prospective students and their parents:

The footage from On Harvard Time's iteration is ripped directly from the dated "Experience Harvard" video; what changes in the parody is the text at the bottom of the screen. The result is subtly humorous: a line of librarians holding numbered placards outside the library has been modified to refer not to the number of books in the University's collection but the number of "Asians photographed on these steps."

Other highlights include: "Times you will read the Crimson": 1/ "Times it will be given to you":  14128. "Hours you'll spend on your application": 120/ "Seconds they'll spend reading it': 12.

In the Op-ed section of yesterday's Times, Mark Taylor - chair of Columbia's Religion Department - broke from the rank-and-file optimism of Ivy League academics on academia by asserting that "Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning." (For those who have been living under a rock for the past fifty years, in 2008, Forbes gave Detroit - a city saddled with crime and unemployment - the dubious distinction of being America's most miserable city).

We're guessing that this Benedict Arnold of a professor has tenure because his ideas, which include retrenching both doctoral-level education and academia as a whole, are unlikely to popular to many colleagues and administrators at Columbia, a place dredged in the virtues of a classical education. (Columbia College, as one example, continues to yoke its students to a stringent core curriculum).

The problem, Taylor explains, stretches back to Kant, who wrote in the late 18th century that to "handle the entire content of learning" professors should teach different subjects. This, he argues,

has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

More after the jump.

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• Cornell: Christian fellowship receives public protest over a gay member's removal from his leadership position.
• Columbia: If you're unemployed and lacking practical experience you should consider becoming a teacher.
• Dartmouth: Dean of the College's Office cites budget reductions as reason why it plans to end direct financial support to the Afro-American Society.
• Penn: The junior and senior class boards took measures to reduce hazing at Hey Day and - surprise, surprise - failed miserably.
• Princeton: Administrators have tried repeatedly to persuade their Ivy League counterparts to adopt grade deflation policies; Ivy League counterparts seem resigned to status quo.
• Yale: Layoffs continue in New Haven.

In this week's issue of the New Yorker, staff writer Margaret Talbot penned a lengthy piece about the "underground world of 'neuroenhancing' drugs". (Whether or not the use of cognitive stimulants - especially on college campuses - is "underground" is up for debate; I'd say from my own experience it was hardly hush-hush, but I digress.)

Stories on students using drugs like Adderall and Ritalin have been the yawn-inducing fodder of rags both on and off-campus for years now, and yet none have given the issues at play as much consideration as Talbot has in "Brain Drain."

While the piece does not focus solely on "neuroenhancers" and their use by students, the story opens and ends on a recently graduated Harvard student under the alias of "Alex". According to Talbot, Alex - who is "skinny and bearded...[and who] looked like the lead singer in an indie band" (and yet apparently has not relocated to Brooklyn) - took drugs in college in order to balance his school and extracurricular commitments with an apparently ravishing weekend social life.

More after the jump.

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The ruinous state of our economy has done little to deter this year's batch of Ivy aspirants; for the class of 2013, acceptances rates fell at six of the eight Ivy League schools.

Harvard and Yale solidified their positions as the toughest schools to get into, at 7% and 7.5%, respectively, though the school formerly known as the College of New Jersey - while maintaining its third place position - slid, much to the dismay of some prestige-hungry Princetonians,  precipitously close to its proletarian New York City peer.

If we had to hazard a guess, we'd say the general rise in applications to the Ivy League may be owed in part to its constituents' sizable endowments and commitment to need-blind financial aid; in marked contrast, several other selective colleges and universities - including Colby and Oberlin - are, according to the New York Times, looking more favorably on wealthier applicants as they make admissions decisions this year."

Perhaps the decrease in selectivity at both Princeton and Penn is due to the fact that they are,  or rather have been, traditional feeders into Wall Street - a Wall Street that is no longer as glamorous as it was a few years before. If that yawn-inducing class on financial derivatives or corporate valuation isn't going to net you that super sweet 100-hour a week gig at Lehman Brothers or Bear Stearns you might as well learn hot boxing 101 and take creative writing classes pass/fail at Brown.

Minor YouTube celebrity and shameless self-promoter Aleksey Vayner went to Yale. Georgetown Law student - (really?) - and plagiarist Kaavya Viswanathan went to Harvard. Resident at New York Presbyterian/ Columbia Hospital Matt McCarthy went to Yale and then Harvard Medical School, so he certainly edges out his infamous Ivy peers for prestige, and with the release of "Odd Man Out", his error-ridden memoir about his year pitching for a minor league baseball team, he may top - or at least match - both Viswanathan and Vayner for deception.

A few days ago, The New York Times reported that "Odd Man Out" - which delves into the particulars of "playing with racist, steroids-taking teammates, pitching for a profane, unbalanced manager and observing obscene behavior and speech" - contains evidence of "wide-ranging errors and misquotations":

Several times in the book, which he devotes mostly to the antics of libidinous teammates and his manic manager, Tom Kotchman, McCarthy directly quotes people stating incorrect facts about their own lives and tells detailed (and mostly unflattering) stories about teammates who were in fact not on his team at the time. The book's more outrageous scenes could not be independently corroborated or disproved; several teammates who were present said in interviews that they were exaggerated or simply untrue.

Is there a listing for "selective hearing" in the DSM-IV? More after the jump.

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Controversy is brewing around Skull and Bones, the laughably un-secret secret society par excellence at Yale. Descendants of Geronimo, the 19th century Apache warrior, are suing the shadowy senior club for allegedly stealing the remains of their ancestor in 1918, and for keeping it at their New Haven tomb ever since.

MSNBC writes that

According to lore, members of Skull and Bones — including former President George W. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush — dug up his grave when a group of Army volunteers from Yale was stationed at the fort during World War I, taking his skull and some of his bones.

The skull evidently now sits in a glass display nicknamed, well, "Geronimo." Those tapped might even have to kiss the contested skull to join the super-secret society.This rumor has gained more traction in recent years, since in 2005

Yale historian Marc Wortman discovered a letter written in 1918 from one Skull and Bones member to another that seemed to lend validity to the tale. The letter, sent to F. Trubee Davison by Winter Mead, said Geronimo's skull and other remains were taken from the leader's burial site, along with several pieces of tack for a horse. 'The skull of the worthy Geronimo the Terrible, exhumed from its tomb at Fort Sill by your club and Knight Haffuer, is now safe inside the T — together with is well worn femurs, bit and saddle horn,' Mead wrote.

Read what the Geronimo family thinks after the jump.

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