This cultural tolerance of bullshit is hardly a surprise, given the admissions process at a place like Yale. Come on, don't look at me like that. You all remember the days of résumé-padding that led up to your getting that big blue envelope in the mail: helping your friends with their calculus homework became "Volunteer Tutoring"; playing percussion in a school play so you could go to a cast party and flirt with a cute actor made you part of a "High School Orchestra"; maybe you even enrolled at a Community College course because the easy A you'd earn in Intro Psych would count for an extra point in your GPA. Whatever. The point is that a little bending of the truth isn't foreign territory to a lot of students who're trying to get into a competitive university like this one.

Vayner just took things too far. Okay, Vayner took things way too far. Okay, Vayner took things farther, and in more creative ways, than most of us could dream. Point taken. Clearly the guy's got a problem-they don't call it pathological lying for nothing, and there's a pretty intense pathology at work here-but the point is that, in a sense, he was continuing to "play the game" that everyone knows, recognizes, and tolerates, even though everyone knows that it's bullshit.

The depressing part is that, in the case of college admissions, Vayner's act worked. (Okay, I don't know that for certain-I haven't seen his admission file-but one can only imagine what kinds of extracurriculars wound up in that little grid of his.) Admissions Officers are so constantly bombarded by bullshit that their radars are overloaded, and every once in a while somebody nuts slips through. That's awful, if you think about it: what you've actually done matters far less in our little world than what you can say you've done, especially if your claims can't be refuted. And who you actually are … well, that matters even less.

Which brings me to my final thought on the matter: Aleksey Vayner may be a perfectly nice guy. I don't really know him, and most of us who've spent the week reading up on his dishonest ploys don't really know him either. My only experience of him was when he (somehow) convinced our Eastern Philosophy professor to let him screen a movie on the last day of our class (a treatise on Zen Buddhism featuring b-roll of Vayner performing various physical feats of questionable veracity). He struck me as a giant toolbox then, but who really knows? Maybe nobody does … and either way, we should cut the guy some slack. He has a problem and doesn't deserve to be raked over the coals by every two-bit jokester who has nothing better to do than troll the internet looking for people to feel superior to.