Last weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University—typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class—an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

In his spare time, New York Times writer Michael Winerip interviews kids who want to attend his alma mater, a little school up in Cambridge. In Sunday's Parenting column, he reveals that he's screened at least 40 kids—and exactly one student has gotten in. So why does he keep doing it? Why, because it makes him feel better about himself and his not-Harvard-material kids.

A familiar voice, and then a synthesizer [Bwog]

Who cares about anything besides real estate, IVF, and getting into prestigious exclusive colleges? Not New York, clearly. This week's inferiority-complex inducer is an article about the insane impossibility of getting into college, wherein crazily overqualified applicants are evaluated, then dismissed ("a red flag is the Ping Pong club" "it still puts him in the right range for a minority, socioeconomically disadvantaged student") by an expert: "Katherine Cohen, CEO and founder of IvyWise, a school-admissions consulting company."

Over at IvyGate, a deliberately non-scientific study reveals some stunning news: Top editors at top publications are not all Ivy League twats! In fact, the breakdown of IvyGate's (again, highly selective) investigation shows a slight edge to the non-Ivy crowd. Also, Conde Nast seems a safe bet if you've only got a G.E.D. Some fascinating stuff to parse here. Still, we can't help wondering about the titles they excluded: Where, for instance, did Jared Kushner go to school? The staff of 02138? We think we should be told.

• Coffee-chucking State Sen. Ada Smith also proficient at throwing phones. [NYDN]
• We're trying to think of something more embarrassing than plagiarizing Office Pirates for your MySpace blog. Maybe reading Office Pirates in the first place. Either way, a close run thing. [OP]
• Tom Friedman uses a bad word in his NYT column. Expect Maureen Dowd to try out "hot piece of twat" this weekend. [HuffPo]
• When it comes to rescuing American students, of course we'd save our bright young Ivy Leaguers first. There'll always be plenty more Rutgers grads to man the McDonald's. [ABC]
• Say goodbye to the man who invented the Philly cheesesteak. This is the other place: You can say goodbye in any language you want. [Philly.com]
• Eliot Spitzer goes after that all-important "your hippie dad" vote. [NYT]

• 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]

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.

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.

Hello! magazine reports that gangsta-rapping starlet Natalie Portman stopped by Columbia University on Monday to give an undergraduate lecture on counterterrorism. She went to Harvard, you know, which means she's in the position to educate the children of the lesser ivies on all matters of international import. Writes a student:

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

We were joking — sort of — when we suggested earlier that life at New York magazine is in fact just one big Ivy League reunion. Then this showed up in our inbox, sent out to the Princeton career network last week:

How fitting that Zachary Seward — the bright young thing who scooped everyone on former Harvard president Larry Summers' recent expatriation and scored a Wall Street Journal byline in the process — told New York reporter Ben Mathis-Lilley in today's issue that the media was really just "a big ivy league reunion." To wit, a young sapling fresh from Yale has taken Seward's insight to heart by using a classic "hey, we went to the same school" pitch on Rush & Molloy reporter and fellow Yalie Chris Rovzar. Now bow before the altar of sycophantic name-dropping and misplaced self-promotion, for we have found your king:

The new New York has a front-of-book squib covering the coverage of the recent ouster of Harvard president Larry Summers. The facts are this: The Crimson's Summers reporter, Zachary Seward, spent so much time covering the president he failed a class and was suspended; no longer a student he couldn't continue as the student paper's managing editor; but no hard feelings, instead he got a co-byline on the Wall Street Journal's Summers story, which scooped everyone else — including Seward's pals on the Crimson. Did Seward feel bad about competing against his fellow students? Not at all, he told New York's reporter, Ben Mathis-Lilley: "Isn't the media a big Ivy League reunion anyway?"

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.

As if lovely downtown New Haven wasn't enough to make you pleased as punch you spent four years someplace else, there's also this event listing making its way to some of Manhattan's more expensively educated inboxes: