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.

We never intended for the recent news of a student’s death to make it into the opinion pages of this newspaper. While the information was disseminated quite responsibly by the news section — including details about the spread of H1N1 and how the virus may have lead to the student’s untimely death — we felt that any commentary should have been left to those who knew him.