A recent applicant to Yale College, seeking to signal her intellectual seriousness and devotion to study, used her college essay to boast that once while speaking to an especially admired French teacher in high school, she urinated on herself rather than break off intellectual conversation in order to go to the bathroom. The pressure to broadcast accomplishment so pervades elite college culture that students give the practice names—for example, Stanford’s “Duck Syndrome,” chosen on account of the contrast between a duck’s smooth glide when viewed from above water and the frantically churning
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