Props to the Yale Herald for being the first college publication to get an interview with Aleksey Vayner. Too bad they left their spine on the mantelpiece next to their keys that day. Here's a snippet:

YH: One endeavor your résumé mentions is Vayner Capital Management, a business that you reportedly created. Could you describe this business?

AV: We're a limited liability corporation, based in New York.

YH: Is that all you can say about it on the record?

AV: Yes.

Now that, folks, is what we call a follow-up question. The piece is so hard-hitting the byline is blank; no one on staff seems to want to take credit for it. Keep on sluggin', guys.

You want your first time to be memorable, and damn, Yale Herald, we're not going to be able to forget this if we try. Our first negative review is in, and holy God, does Cally Fiedorek tear us a new one:

In its attempt to dismantle the Ivy monolith, the blog identifies each individual school with a sort of Lamarckian sameness, rarely looking to the world outside to qualify its scathing distinctions between Brown-educated dilettante and Princetonian master of the universe. It is essentially one extended "How many [insert name of Ivy League school here] students does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" joke, serving up all the usual banalities of feigned self-deprecation.

As pans go, Fiedoreck's is a tour de force. Well written, carefully organized and irrefutably argued, it's the kind of slap that doesn't just sting -- it makes everyone in the bar turn to look at you as the slapper makes a great exit. Oh, and ice water gets dumped in your lap, too.

It gears itself towards the anecdotal fluff that just happens to fall upon illustrious grounds-but its root in any clearly delineated or easily mockable Ivy ideology is too tenuous to be effective or even humorous.

Ouch! Okay, that one cut a little close to the bone. But it's fine, we're big boys, we can take i--

In attempting to differentiate the privileged mass through petty caricature, mostly founded not on knowledge so much as on the nebulous workings of stereotype, the site forgets its own unimportance.

Jesus, we get it already! Cut it out, Cally, for the love of--

In refusing to apply these facile stereotypes to themselves IvyGate bloggers signal either a certain self-awareness, or a hypocrisy far more worthy of ridicule than anything found on their webpage.

Alright, we're ready, can someone please kick out the ladder?

Hey, Yale Herald guys -- congrats on the mention in the education issue of the New Yorker! We think.

Is that a good or bad thing? Eh, Sarah Raymond can probably use it to get laid at a lit mag party. Meanwhile, our friend Duke Obsrvr landed this quote in the same issue's long piece on the Duke maybe-rape scandal:

A sharp-eyed campus social critic, the widely read anonymous blogger known as DukeObsrvr, summed up the men's lacrosse team's place in the social hierarchy this way: "Let's not kid ourselves, what frat doesn't hate these fuckers? The lacrostitute is a notch higher on the social scale than the 'frat slut.' And dammit that's something worth fighting over."

So, yeah, maybe not so illustrious a week for the student writer set.