Call it an "Edge mentality." It was a kind of dishonesty, and I feel awful about it now. But that's the driving force behind the contents of Inside Edge. Its editors are trying not to look like total geeks--and to them, being smart is being geeky. So when they write copy, they pretend to be stupid.

"Hooking up with your best friend's girl-friend," begins a list of Edge Man activities beside the subscription order form. "Getting drunk on a Wednesday afternoon... Ditching work to watch the game with your buds. Playing beer pong 'till dawn." This isn't a to-do list--it's a fantasy. Inside Edge writers will play out their fantasies in magazine copy, but not in real life. They'll throw away a question or two, but they'll never blow their A's.

In short, there's nothing Machiavellian about Inside Edge. Hsu says that if the magazine has a "message" at all, it is public service. Inside Edge urges its readers to use condoms and to stay away from drugs. Hsu explains that the traditional media doesn't relay these ideas successfully. But readers will listen to the Inside Edge editors. "They trust us," Hsu says. "At least they can relate to us."

Beyond that, Hsu's "position" is nonexistent. On final clubs, the closest things Harvard has to bastions of Edge Men, Hsu has only this to say: "I don't like the fact that they're exclusionatory."

"Exclusionatory?" Hsu uses the word again and again. This guy isn't slick--ne's just earnest. Is he an Edge Man? "Most definitely," he says. "But I'm also a Harvard Man. I'm also a New Jersey Man. I'm also a Community Service Guy."

Struggling to define the term, Hsu says that "everyone is an Edge Man deep inside." If he were thinking academically, he might say that the Edge Man represents the id. But Hsu isn't thinking academically. In fact, he's barely thinking at all.

Students who fear Inside Edge proliferation should keep worrying. The premiere issue, according to Hsu, sold out in Harvard Square and the state of New Jersey, and had to be re-ordered in some European countries. It has already raked in at least 5000 reader response forms and 1000 subscription orders.

But this is not a case of the advancing enemy. The campus furor over Inside Edge is just another example of Harvard taking itself too seriously. The "best and the brightest," as Perspective so arrogantly puts it, are susceptible to the same peer pressures as everyone else. Most kids who buy Inside Edge are probably just as insecure, and just as innocuous, as the kids who write it. A real-life Edge Man would be too drunk to read.

These fledgling magazine publishers are kids trying to act cool--not masterminds propagating evil on the scale of Sodom and Gomorrah. And if the good-natured guys in Eliot would never dream of doing what they print as "entertainment," maybe folks outside the Ivory Tower will take Inside Edge with a pillar of salt.