We called them "the most annoying liberal arts school in the U.S." And then, boy, they sure showed us!

n+1—the most important literary journal of your slightly younger brother's time—is making a pamphlet for college freshpeoples! This one is, say the editors, "about what we wish we'd known when we were college freshman, and what books we wish we'd read. 'What We Should Have Known.' Is that too cumbersome? We'll be slipping it under the doors of incoming first-years at select universities this September. Really." Mmm, "select" universities. (Good youngster recruitment technique! Just like the free Times Select for college emails!) Anyway, not having been to no college, I'm mystified by what this pamphlet might contain. How to sleep in class—or sleep around in class? Advice to skip Chinua Achebe for Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o? Illustrations of scabies v. crabs?

Today, the Times' Tina Kelley (where's the color war story, btw?) investigates a new phenomenon on the suburban New Jersey kids' birthday party circuit. Seems that some parents, whether through genuine altruism or in preparation for their kids to sit on the board of the Children's Aid Society in 20 years, have started asking people to donate to charities—of their kids' choice!—instead of giving them presents. Little Gavin Brown, for example, chose the Cranford Fire Department for the $240 he got for his fourth birthday. Aww! How cute! But some people aren't so enamored of the trend. People like Miss Manners.

Hello there, liberal arts college grad! Until we started doing this monumental search for annoying colleges, we had no idea so many of you lurked among us, spreading your pansexual, drug-experimenting, free-thinking ways so insidiously! When this all began, we were just looking for a college we could generically insert into posts that made fun of Williamsburg residents, since Oberlin was getting tired. In our search, early favorites Bard, Vassar, and surprise write-in Swarthmore (general impression: everyone's really smart, but still really annoying) all soon fell to the towering giants of Liberal Arts College Annoyingness: Wesleyan and Sarah Lawrence. And that's where our death match came in, and why we've finally decided to bestow an honorary degree on one, very special, Liberal Arts College. It's one that is near and dear to all of your hearts, we're sure. And that college is...

"Why do so many young people today have an inflated sense of entitlement? And who's to blame? The list of suspects is long, and includes the state of California, Burger King, FedEx, MTV — and parents, especially parents." [WSJ]

Today Pocket Change, this weird email newsletter that we somehow get, ranks Manhattan's private schools by price. (They don't include Horace Mann—$27,350, or Spence—circa $22,000, or York Prep—circa $23,000, or even Nightingale-Bamford, and who goes there, also around $23,000. Also they left out our far-away favorite, Bi Country Gay School Rye Country Day School, which is $25,650 for 11th and 12th grade.) But Dalton is the clear winner; after Fieldston, the rest on their list all look like also-rans for the poor.

He's a sartorial Ryan Seacrest, a developmental Ferris Bueller, a professional Carlton Banks. (Not up on twentysomethings' media icons? That's the "American Idol" host, the truant Matthew Broderick movie hero, and the overeager Will Smith sidekick in "Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.") At once a hipster and a climber, he is all nonchalance and expectation. He is new, he is annoying, and he and his female counterparts are invading corporate offices across America.

Reporters in New York City have some of the world's greatest human interest stories right in their metaphorical back yard (so few of them actually have back yards). And yet they often write their stories like stereotypical students at a j-school surrounded by cornfields, tossing off story after story in what those who follow the situation say is a disturbing and dangerous epidemic of pieces about teenagers drinking. What's more, a 2007 city survey found that 28% of white reporters at the city's major papers had, within the month before the survey was taken, written the four or five stories in one session necessary to qualify as a "binge."

Why is the Boston Globe such a drag on New York Times Company earnings? Well: The rapid decline of print readers, shifts in regional demographics, the proliferation of alternate outlets from which information can be obtained. Also, probably stories like this one, about the kids today and their crazy low-hanging pants.

Alice Mathias, the Dartmouth senior who's blogging for the NYT, has a very interesting resum , especially for someone so young! Did you know that she won a research grant from Dartmouth for a project called "Neighbors of the Animal House: A Screenplay About the 'Girls Next Door'"? And her dad also went to Dartmouth, which is really sweet. She also wrote a bunch of columns ("Alice Unchained") for the Dartmouth paper before, come November, she didn't anymore. Let's take a gander.