Just as college students, blessed these days with email accounts, now have the temerity to email their professors, they seem equally eager to approach any publication with listed email addresses to ask for help on their term papers. (Here at Gawker, our recent requests have been from students in Prof. John Mohr's sociology class at UCSB who wish to perform content analyses on our posts, and, yes, kiddies, feel free.) But, while such requests are commonplace, one recently sent to a handful of editors at The Wall Street Journal, and now circulating within the paper, stands out:

The op-ed page of today's Times no doubt brings heartbreak to some 3,799 college students nationwide; Nick Kristof's column carries the news that he has picked someone else to go on a free trip to Africa with him this summer. The lucky winner? 23-year-old Casey Parks, of Jackson, Miss. Casey, a graduate j-student at the University of Missouri, won Kristof over with her tale of a hardscrabble youth and a desire to see the world. She wrote: "I saw my mother skip meals. I saw my father pawn everything he loved. I saw our cars repossessed. I never saw France or London." (Or, apparently, the merits of parallelism.) Casey's full essay is available on Kristof's website, along with essays by the other 12 vanquished finalists, including our own precocious Henry the Intern. But the best part on Kristof's site is the video clip of him calling Casey with the big news. You'd think a man who can swashbuckler through Africa and buy sex slaves' freedom in a single bound wouldn't seem quite so profoundly awkward when tasked with making a simple phone call.

We also got our hands on John Huey's staff memo announcing Rick Stengel's appointment as managing editor of Time, and, for the most part, it reads as a first-person version of the public press release. But there's one line, down near the bottom, the caught our eye:

Because several of you have asked, we checked in with Gawker's Cambridge correspondent for a definitive answer:

• Today in articles we feel like we keep reading: Air America set to lose NYC affiliate. [Mediaweek]
• While storm clouds perpetually hang over the rest of Time Inc., Real Simple lives it up in Laguna Beach. Where, apparently, the weather was lovely. [WWD]
• Shape EIC to take over Fitness. But first — damned noncompetes! — she'll be special-projects editor at More for three months. [NYP]
• Conde to launch site for teen girls featuring user-generated content. Users will then get town cars home. [BizWeek]
• Dartmouth Review turns 25, and conservatives run the country. Coincidence? Hardly. [NYSun]

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A University of Oregon alumnus — here! in the big city! in our very midst! — attended an alumni event the other night at which Today newsgal Ann Curry, a fellow Duck, spoke, and he presents a very good case for why little Annie didn't get the big chair when Katie decided to take her colon over to CBS:

Maybe we don't understand these things because we didn't go to an Ivy League school. But it would seem to us that the first part of getting yourself perceived as one of the cool kids — as a big front-of-Metro takeout in Saturday's Times explained a crew of Cornell kids is trying to do — would be to not have big front-of-Metro takeouts on how damn hard you're trying to become one of the cool kids.

"What Happened at Duke," by Susannah Meadows and Evan Thomas, Newsweek, today:

As if a beautiful day like today isn't enough to make you love the metro area, there's also this bit of tri-state pride: Reade Seligmann, at left, is from Essex Fells, N.J., and Collin Finnerty, at right, is from Garden City, Long Island. The two were charged earlier today with first-degree rape, first-degree forcible rape, and kidnapping. Finnerty, of course, was also charged with a terrible haircut.

"Dude, it's like we're watching ourselves watching ourselves watching ourselves watching... sweet."

We've always thought alleged funnyman Jimmy Fallon had little talent but a cute haircut. So we almost started to wonder whether this crazy email that showed up the other day actually had a point:

From an email sent to Columbia's job-recruiting email list with the subject "JPMorgan Recruiting Event for LGBT Students":

Nothing brings out the drunken college kids like the first vaguely warmer days of spring. (We drunken out-of-college kids drink proudly and consistently, heedless of weather.) So suddenly, here they are. And they're confusing us. To help us understand the folkways of this exotic tribe, we asked Gawker Mascot and amateur anthropologist Andrew Krucoff to don his trusty pith helmet, enlist earnest documentarian Nikola Tamindzic, and head to the remotest depths of the Central Village — the native habitat of this unusual people — to investigate. After the jump, his reports of beer pong, fake IDs, and the dreaded Look of Shame.

Published in yesterday's paper:

Yale had its "Blazers & Bling" party for young alumni two weeks ago, and clearly Harvard was feeling overshadowed. The solution? The Second Annual Harvard University Reunion Party, held last night at Marquee for "Class of 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 2001 Harvard grads," according to the website. And not just for them "Yes your significant other or close friends can sign up on the guest list and join the party, but friends of friends is a no-go." It thus seemed pleasantly both more elitist than the repulsive Yale shindig and also less pretentious, and so we asked a recent Harvard grad to attend and fill us in.

From an article today on a major revision to Janson, the definitive art-history textbook:

Perhaps a bit Lilly Pulitzer for February in town. But it seems that was sort of the point.

It's damned hard to find decent, interesting writing jobs these days, as we all know. And it's even hard for recent graduates of prestigious Ivy League schools.

When we heard this afternoon that controversial Harvard President Larry Summers announced he'll leave the university's top office at the end of the semester, we knew something significant had happened. Lacking any Ivy in our backgrounds, however, we also knew we'd never be able to make any sense of it. This is clearly the sort of thing one will be expected to know about when one travels in smarty-pants media-y circles in this city, and we realized we needed help. We turned to Gawker's I-Went-to-School-Near-Boston Correspondent — a Harvard grad of our acquaintance who wants to be called Magnus — to tell us, and you, what happened.