When I was a freshman, I had a full-fledged mega-crush on IvyGateBlog.com. I thought it — and its editors — were the funniest and hottest shit ever. I’m talking banana phone levels of hilarious. I didn’t even know Chris Beam and Nick Summers (the founders), but I had these sort of creeper-esque fantasies about going to work for them, and becoming BFFs. And then, maybe one day we would all work at Slate together. In fact, the fame-whore in me would get excited whenever one of my articles made it onto Ragtime, even though it was rarely in a positive light.

The book and the Internet: One is old, staid and respected, the other’s young, sexy and rude. The new guy’s looking to knock the king down, and he’s looking good. Think Achilles vs. Agamemnon, Magic vs. Kareem, Happy vs. Shooter.

Suffer another analogy: Our adjustment to digital media has been like losing your virginity — fast, messy and painful. While legal issues surrounding music, movies and books have hardly been resolved, everyone’s pretty much in agreement now that the InterWeb is the image of the world.

Well, not really. But it’s getting damn close.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question. As a stickler for the written word and old fashioned journalism, I’ve been extremely hesitant to create a Twitter account, feeling that if I do, I’m giving into the enemy: social media. For traditional newshounds like myself, social media is the archenemy of journalism. It threatens the integrity of our work and our authority to report the news with legitimacy. Yet in light of Iran’s Twitter Revolution and the explosion of new users around the world, I figured Twitter deserved a thorough analysis before I dismissed it for good. Maybe this will help you decide if your Blackberry could use another application — Twitterberry — or if your e-mail inbox can afford yet another means of congestion.

Some issues to think about:

A front-page, above-the-fold story in the Sep. 21 issue of The Sun, “Undergrads May Teach FWS to Reduce Cost,” caused some distress; it turned out to be wrong. When a front-page story is not correct, a comprehensive look is worth the effort. A few factors were at play here, and The Sun has since taken steps to do right by its sources and its readers.

Taken at its face, the story seemed like a real scoop. With a foundering endowment and a call for spending cuts, departments across Cornell are making difficult decisions on a tighter budget; hypothetically, having undergraduates teach First-Year Writing Seminars might help reduce costs. It might also alleviate problems associated with a growing undergraduate population but a declining number of graduate students.

If you asked someone in the business of business, they would tell you that the business of books is in trouble. Readership is down, profits are way down and Internet retailers are massively screwing with traditional distribution models. The good news is that help is on the way. The bad news is that the savior of literature is Dan Brown.

If you fancy yourself cultivated, there’s a fair chance this suggestion has you all hot and bothered — and not in that good way, like when you read Danielle Steel. But calm down, I’m not suggesting that the guy should win the Pulitzer. Far from it. I fully recognize that Dan Brown sucks.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Department of German Studies commemorated the occasion by erecting a replica of a wall segment on the Arts Quad, and observant students found their friends wearing shirts with the slogan: “Freedom Without Walls.”

I might be going out on a limb here, but I don’t think the plural “Walls” was chosen by mistake.

“It’s also a political symbol,” said a professor quoted by this paper. “There are other walls separating people in this world. I just want people to reflect on the political divisions.”

The subtext becomes explicit on The Sun’s website, where an anonymous comment complains that the news story does not even mention “Israel’s Apartheid Wall.”

Do you know how expensive beef jerky is at Noyes? It’s not cheap. Actually it’s about $5, the same price as everything else at Noyes. Maybe their price scanner is broken, maybe they just like ripping me off. Either way, when I buy two types of beef jerky and spicy jalapeno chips for $15, it’s a special day for me. When I mix Evan Williams with Wegman’s brand cola, you know I’m gearing up for my special day. When I skip all my classes, it’s probably a day like any other. But it might be my special day.

On Tuesday, Sep. 15, the state of Ohio was set to execute Rommell Broom, a man convicted of raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl 25 years ago. After two hours of poking and prodding, however, the technicians were unable to find a suitable vein where they could administer the lethal injection. Regardless of the cause, the end result was that the execution attempt failed and Broom walked out of the chamber under his own power, still breathing the same oxygen as the rest of us, his execution postponed by one week.

On Monday, the Cornell International Affairs Review held a panel discussion entitled “Tehran Divided: Iran’s Presidential Election and Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy.” The discussion featured three professor panelists, each from the Near Eastern Studies department. The panelists were Prof. Ziad Fahmy, Prof. Iago Gocheleishvili and Prof. David Patel.

[Author’s note: I do not smoke — cigarettes or otherwise — nor have I ever. It is disgusting when my hair smells like an ashtray after standing next to people who smoke, and the cigarette butts that litter the entrance of my building are just as nasty. I also do not want to die of lung cancer.]

In this wonderful country of ours, I am guaranteed the right to the pursuit of happiness — and cigarettes make me happy. Given that I am a ripe 21-years-old, I should damn well be able to buy the cigarettes of my choice.