Hey kiddos,

It’s about time we sat down and had a talk. About commenting.

We want to hear from you. That’s why we have a comments section. Call us dreamers, but at launch we pictured it as a place for Ivy smartasses to shine. But lately … well, maybe it’s best to point to this recent Churchillian battle of wits, from an item about a rap song:

Brown kid says:
Cornell sucks, I say we purge them from the ivy league

Harvard2007 says:
Yale sucks, Whatev…

Bravo, really. Do you guys intern at Aaron Sorkin’s dialogue shop?

Yeah, okay, this is the Internet, and that’s par for the anonymous course. And yeah, we ain’t writing Shakespeare ourselves, neither. (Please never visit our ghastly July archives.) But it kills us that a lot of people are posting awesome comments, and getting lost in a sea of “ahahha says: Cornell is the worst ivy hahaha, better than brown and dartmouth, hahahahahhaha.”

So: By all means, be tasteless, be destructive, be vitriolic. Tear our ill-argued screeds to shreds. Just don’t be Fred.

For the record, we reserve the right to remove any comment that’s derogatory or patently offensive. (If you’re that uninspired, go here.) And we’re gonna try to comment more frequently ourselves, so it’s not just one-way yelling.

In conclusion, we’re not angry. Just disappointed. We’re die-hard behaviorists around here; we believe in positive reinforcement. That’s why we want to start giving brilliance its due with a new comments round-up at the end of every week. So go — sharpen your skewers, and prove those acceptance letters were deserved.