I wanted to share a piece written by Marina Keegan, who graduated from Yale just days before she was killed in a car accident. As someone just two years my senior, her voice and message ring so powerfully as someone who is years beyond her age in wisdom and sincerity. I never knew her personally—and probably never would have—but even as a complete stranger, I can’t help but feel remorse that such a clear voice with so much ambition has been lost. RIP Marina. The article below was written for a special edition of the News distributed at the class of 2012’s commencement exercises last week.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life. What I’m grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I’m scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow and leave this place.

It’s not quite love and it’s not quite community; it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it’s four a.m. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

Yale is full of tiny circles we pull around ourselves. A cappella groups, sports teams, houses, societies, clubs. These tiny groups that make us feel loved and safe and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers — partner-less, tired, awake. We won’t have those next year. We won’t live on the same block as all our friends. We won’t have a bunch of group-texts.

This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse – I’m scared of losing this web we’re in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves…” “if I’d…” “wish I’d…”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lay alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out – that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

When we came to Yale, there was this sense of possibility. This immense and indefinable potential energy – and it’s easy to feel like that’s slipped away. We never had to choose and suddenly we’ve had to. Some of us have focused ourselves. Some of us know exactly what we want and are on the path to get it; already going to med school, working at the perfect NGO, doing research. To you I say both congratulations and you suck.

For most of us, however, we’re somewhat lost in this sea of liberal arts. Not quite sure what road we’re on and whether we should have taken it. If only I had majored in biology…if only I’d gotten involved in journalism as a freshman…if only I’d thought to apply for this or for that…

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

In the heart of a winter Friday night my freshman year, I was dazed and confused when I got a call from my friends to meet them at EST EST EST. Dazedly and confusedly, I began trudging to SSS, probably the point on campus farthest away. Remarkably, it wasn’t until I arrived at the door that I questioned how and why exactly my friends were partying in Yale’s administrative building. Of course, they weren’t. But it was cold and my ID somehow worked so I went inside SSS to pull out my phone. It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I’d say that’s how I feel at Yale. How I feel right now. Here. With all of you. In love, impressed, humbled, scared. And we don’t have to lose that.

We’re in this together, 2012. Let’s make something happen to this world.

Chen Guangcheng arrived in the US on Sunday, May 20th. That day, trending articles in China included the victory of a Chinese hurdler, an explosion in Hunan Province, and a rebuttal on China “aggressively modernizing” its military.

Searching for Chen Guangcheng’s full name on Sina’s Weibo brought up no results. In one post, Hu Xijin, the editor of the Global Times, referred to the blind activist only by his last name, writing, “Today, Chen and his family have already taken an American airplane to New York. It makes people feel regret and sign that in China today this is the only way to solve his problem.”

“The silence about Mr. Chen spoke volumes — but so did this: on CCTV, China’s lead broadcaster, a weekly news show anchored by the popular Bai Yansong, featured a long report on offensive behavior by foreigners in China. It showed video of an apparent assault by a British tourist on a Chinese woman, and the tourist’s subsequent beating at the hands of passersby, in an incident that has caused a storm of controversy and led to online calls to throw out ‘foreign trash.’

“…Yang Rui, a well-known host on CCTV’s English channel, deepened the controversy last week when he apparently posted this on his Weibo account: ‘People who can’t find jobs in the U.S. and Europe come to China to grab our money, engage in human trafficking and spread deceitful lies to encourage emigration,’ The Atlantic reported.

“The police in Beijing last week initiated a 100-day campaign to ‘clean out’ foreigners who break immigration, residency or work rules, setting up a special telephone hotline for Beijingers to report suspects.

“The campaign, which a police notice said was targeted at ‘Three No’ foreigners (those who break immigration, residency or work rules) is accompanied by an image of a clenched fist, which can be viewed on the Beijing police’s microblog site.”

The trouble is that China holds much financial power over the U.S., despite the tangled relationship between the two countries. Both economies would suffer if China began closing off their economy to Americans…but perhaps not as much for China, who has been acting friendly with Germany.

A few gems:

1.Remember your sporting endeavors in college, be it intramural or Division one? Keep playing. Join the company softball team. Play soccer in the park. Sometimes, there’s no better way to network and make new friends.

Via our editor for Asia John Koppisch:

5. Look for your first job in Asia. Economies are booming and companies are often desperate for educated and skilled job seekers. English-speaking cities such as Hong Kong and Singapore, especially, have almost no unemployment and quickly absorb anyone qualified who lands on their shores. Often you can get hired by a Western company, quickly get promoted because of the fast growth, and then after a few years move back to the States with that company.

Daniel Fisher, our expert on the world of law, says:

6. Pick where you want to work and take any job you can get there. Smart people will rise in any organization.

Via our expert on Anonymous, Parmy Olson:

7. Be annoyingly proactive to land your first job. Don’t just send a CV, but follow up with a phone call, and give the person that answers examples of how you will actually help their organization. This requires doing some extra work but is worth it in the end.

9. Don’t worry about not knowing what you want to do. This is very normal and means you are human. You may not know for sure till you are 30 or even 40, but ensure that indecisiveness doesn’t stop you from trying different jobs. Your career is a journey, so enjoy the experience of learning new things and meeting new people.

Tech writer Connie Guglielmo offers advice on maximizing your LinkedIn profile:

10. Customize your URL on LinkedIn. LinkedIn will automatically assign you a URL, which is random and has nothing to do with your name necessarily. Click on Edit profile, then, Public profile. In the right-hand column, select Your URL and type in a URL that reflects who you are.

11. LinkedIn Keywords: Keywords are how recruiters do job searches. Understand what keywords you should be using to describe yourself.

12. Don’t exaggerate your credentials on your resume or on LinkedIn. Ask Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson about the downsides of that.

Recent grad Miguel Morales on landing your dream job:

13. Go out for drinks with friends, even when you don’t want to. Your dream job isn’t going to fly through your bedroom window. Chances are it’s coming from one of your friends.

Via Ashlea Ebeling and Deborah Jacobs who cover the complex world of tax and personal finance:

14. Once you have earnings, start saving for retirement through an employer-based 401(k) account and/or an individual retirement account (a Roth IRA or a traditional IRA). For 2012, you can sock away up to $17,000 into a 401(k) and up to $5,000 into an IRA.

15. If you can, make your 401(k) contributions Roth IRA-style rather than traditional. When you withdraw the money in retirement (many, many years from now) you will not have to pay income tax on it. So you get many years of tax-free appreciation.

16. Don’t go to law school unless you really think you will love being a lawyer. If you’re not sure, work as a paralegal for a couple of years to get a better idea of what lawyers really do.

Practical advice from robots expert Alex Knapp:

17. Open your wallet. Take out your credit cards. Now cut them up and never use them again. You’ll thank me in ten years.

From privacy reporter Kashmir Hill:

19. …Now is a good time to check the privacy settings on your various social networking accounts to make sure your party pictures are available to ‘Friends’ eyes only. Prospective employers will be Googling you and checking you out on Facebook so make sure you know what they’ll find.

21. Do take control of your digital footprint. Blog. Set up a LinkedIn page. Lock down the Twitter account for your name. Make sure the majority of the content that pops up when someone Googles you is content you create and control.

22. And please, I beg you, put a Google alert on your name.

Our data expert Jon Bruner advises you to get with the program:

23. Learn how to program. Even if you skipped any class that involved numbers in college, you should still be able to pick up the basics of a scripting language like Python. Programming ability will make your work easier, and it’ll also help you understand the way the world around you works. Code Academy is a place to start.

Some of our Forbes followers also had advice for new grads:

Anne Mattis tweets:

24. Read. Read as much as you can. It will make you a better writer, a better speaker, and more interesting.

Heather Taylor tweets:

27. Get business cards printed for yourself. You have no idea how handy (and impressive) they’ll be for working in your favor.

Laura McHugh tweets:

28. Get on LinkedIn and have your profs write recommendations for you before you graduate. Start blogging.

Sophia Bera tweets:

29. Always live below your means. Start saving for emergencies & retirement now. Sign up for a Budget Plan. (Mint.com is a nice place to start.)

Dylan Pask tweets:

30. Don’t let the ‘real world’ shock you, be humble & persistent. You may not start by doing what you love, but you’ll get there.

If you can plow through the cheese, there’s some good information here on how to be a more confident and effective presenter.

T. Mills Kelly is a professor at George Mason University who teaches an undergrad course called, “Lying About the Past”. Four years ago, his students researched and fabricated a tantalizing Wikipedia page about an “Edward Owens”, which got past Wiki’s editors and went viral in the online community. When it was revealed that it was all a hoax, some people laughed it off. Others were pissed, like the founder of Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, who pegged it as “digital vandalism”.

What Kelly’s project exposed was a weakness of Wiki that’s often glanced over: it operates on a “presumption of good will”. Anyone can edit or contribute to a Wiki article, from good-hearted contributors to kids who just want to mess with others. I looked up “sharks” one day and in the middle of the article were two huge paragraphs dedicated to talking about shark defecation (detailed descriptions of shark poo). Wiki has nearly four million articles in English alone, making it almost impossible to weed out all of these “inaccuracies”.

This past spring semester, Kelly offered the class once more, announcing to the internet community, “Consider yourself warned—twice.”

This time around, Kelly’s class decided “not to create false Wikipedia entries. Instead, it used a slightly more insidious stratagem, creating or expanding Wikipedia articles on a strictly factual basis, and then using their own websites to stitch together these truthful claims into elaborate hoaxes.

“One group took its inspiration from the fact that the original Star-Spangled Banner had been sewn on the floor of Brown’s Brewery in Baltimore…They crafted a tale of discovering the old recipe used by Brown’s to make its brews, registered BeerOf1812.com, built a Wikipedia page for the brewery, and tweeted out the tale on their Twitter feed. No one suspected a thing. In fact, hardly anyone even noticed…

“The second group settled on the story of serial killer Joe Scafe. Using newspaper databases, they identified four actual women murdered in New York City from 1895 to 1897, victims of broadly similar crimes. They created Wikipedia articles for the victims, carefully following the rules of the site. They concocted an elaborate story of discovery, and fabricated images of the trunk’s contents. Then, the class prepared to spring its surprise on an unsuspecting world. A student posing as Lisa Quinn logged into Reddit, the popular social news website, and posed an eye-catching question: ‘Opinions please, Reddit. Do you think my ‘Uncle’ Joe was just weird or possibly a serial killer?’

“The post quickly gained an audience…

“But it took just twenty-six minutes for a redditor to call foul, noting the Wikipedia entries’ recent vintage. Others were quick to pile on, deconstructing the entire tale. The faded newspaper pages looked artificially aged. The Wikipedia articles had been posted and edited by a small group of new users. Finding documents in an old steamer trunk sounded too convenient. And why had Lisa been savvy enough to ask Reddit, but not enough to Google the names and find the Wikipedia entries on her own? The hoax took months to plan but just minutes to fail.”

Why did Kelly’s internet hoax succeed in 2008, but not in 2012?

One answer lies in the innate structure of the various online communities:

- “Wikipedia has a weak community, but centralizes the exchange of information. It has a small number of extremely active editors, but participation is declining, and most users feel little ownership of the content. And although everyone views the same information, edits take place on a separate page, and discussions of reliability on another, insulating ordinary users from any doubts that might be expressed.

- “Facebook…has strong communities but decentralizes the exchange of information. Friends are quite likely to share content and to correct mistakes, but those corrections won’t reach other users sharing or viewing the same content.

- Reddit builds its strong community around the centralized exchange of information. Discussion isn’t a separate activity but the sine qua non of the site. When one user voiced doubts, others saw the comment and quickly piled on.

“But another, more compelling answer, has to do with trust. Kelly’s students…built their stories out of small, compelling details to give them a veneer of veracity…Most of us assess arguments, at least initially, by assessing those who make them. Kelly’s students built blogs with strong first-person voices, and hit back hard at skeptics. Those inclined to doubt the stories were forced to doubt their authors. They inserted articles into Wikipedia, trading on the credibility of that site.

“…Reddit prides itself on winnowing the wheat from the chaff. It relies on the collective judgment of its members, who click on arrows next to contributions, elevating insightful or interesting content, and demoting less worthy contributions. Even Mills says he was impressed by the way in which redditors “marshaled their collective bits of expert knowledge to arrive at a conclusion that was largely correct.” It’s tough to con Reddit.

…

“If there’s a simple lesson in all of this, it’s that hoaxes tend to thrive in communities which exhibit high levels of trust. But on the Internet, where identities are malleable and uncertain, we all might be well advised to err on the side of skepticism.”

…

Article originally posted in The Atlantic.

As Europe jogs toward its endgame, the euro could still be saved. But that would require major changes from European leaders.

——-

Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro — that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union — could come apart at the seams. We’re not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs — both economic and, arguably even more important, political — could be huge.

This doesn’t have to happen; the euro (or at least most of it) could still be saved. But this will require that European leaders, especially in Germany and at the European Central Bank, start acting very differently from the way they’ve acted these past few years. They need to stop moralizing and deal with reality; they need to stop temporizing and, for once, get ahead of the curve.

I wish I could say that I was optimistic.

The story so far: When the euro came into existence, there was a great wave of optimism in Europe, and that, it turned out, was the worst thing that could have happened. Money poured into Spain and other nations, which were now seen as safe investments; this flood of capital fueled huge housing bubbles and huge trade deficits. Then, with the financial crisis of 2008, the flood dried up, causing severe slumps in the very nations that had boomed before.

At that point, Europe’s lack of political union became a severe liability. Florida and Spain both had housing bubbles, but when Florida’s bubble burst, retirees could still count on getting their Social Security and Medicare checks from Washington. Spain receives no comparable support. So the burst bubble turned into a fiscal crisis, too.

Europe’s answer has been austerity: savage spending cuts in an attempt to reassure bond markets. Yet as any sensible economist could have told you (and we did, we did), these cuts deepened the depression in Europe’s troubled economies, which both further undermined investor confidence and led to growing political instability.

And now comes the moment of truth.

Greece is, for the moment, the focal point. Voters who are understandably angry at policies that have produced 22 percent unemployment - more than 50 percent among the young — turned on the parties enforcing those policies. And because the entire Greek political establishment was, in effect, bullied into endorsing a doomed economic orthodoxy, the result of voter revulsion has been rising power for extremists. Even if the polls are wrong and the governing coalition somehow ekes out a majority in the next round of voting, this game is basically up: Greece won’t, can’t pursue the policies that Germany and the European Central Bank are demanding.

So now what? Right now, Greece is experiencing what’s being called a “bank jog”; a somewhat slow-motion bank run, as more and more depositors pull out their cash in anticipation of a possible Greek exit from the euro. Europe’s central bank is, in effect, financing this bank run by lending Greece the necessary euros; if and (probably) when the central bank decides it can lend no more, Greece will be forced to abandon the euro and issue its own currency again.

This demonstration that the euro is, in fact, reversible would lead, in turn, to runs on Spanish and Italian banks. Once again the European Central Bank would have to choose whether to provide open-ended financing; if it were to say no, the euro as a whole would blow up.

Yet financing isn’t enough. Italy and, in particular, Spain must be offered hope — an economic environment in which they have some reasonable prospect of emerging from austerity and depression. Realistically, the only way to provide such an environment would be for the central bank to drop its obsession with price stability, to accept and indeed encourage several years of 3 percent or 4 percent inflation in Europe (and more than that in Germany).

Both the central bankers and the Germans hate this idea, but it’s the only plausible way the euro might be saved. For the past two-and-a-half years, European leaders have responded to crisis with half-measures that buy time, yet they have made no use of that time. Now time has run out.

So will Europe finally rise to the occasion? Let’s hope so — and not just because a euro breakup would have negative ripple effects throughout the world. For the biggest costs of European policy failure would probably be political.

Think of it this way: Failure of the euro would amount to a huge defeat for the broader European project, the attempt to bring peace, prosperity and democracy to a continent with a terrible history. It would also have much the same effect that the failure of austerity is having in Greece, discrediting the political mainstream and empowering extremists.

All of us, then, have a big stake in European success — yet it’s up to the Europeans themselves to deliver that success. The whole world is waiting to see whether they’re up to the task.