It is 2 a.m. early on a Sunday morning. A history major, a literature major and a psychology major stare intently at a laptop screen. The Gazelle website is down, and they’re going to fix it. “Maybe clear the cache?” the psychology major suggests. She has no idea what cache means, but it sounds like something the Information Technology department would say in this situation. “Refresh the page? Eat the cookies?”

They clear the cache, and then, because they don’t have any cookies, they eat the bread that the history major baked. But The Gazelle website is unmoved by their efforts. And so they resort to prayer. After 20 minutes of chanting, the literature major reaches out and tentatively clicks on the button that reads Publish. There is a moment of suspense as the page loads.

And then cries of joy erupt, as they fall to the ground weeping. It is 2:30 a.m., and the latest issue of The Gazelle is online. Hallelujah.

The next morning, I tell a friend that I stayed up late last night for The Gazelle — because you’re not really tired unless everyone knows that you’re tired — and then comes that inevitable question: “Why does it take so long to publish an issue?” I remember the tumult of emotions from the previous night — the fear, the bread, the joy — and I sigh. Nobody gets us.

All of us at The Gazelle agree that we’re misunderstood revolutionaries, and yet, we’re often faced with the irreverent question: “What exactly do you guys do?” I never have a good answer. “We … um … edit and … just edit and … stuff.” “Stuff?” “Yeah, like, edit and stuff.” At this point, the asker is convinced that The Gazelle is a front for nefarious activities, a sweatshop that manufactures counterfeit Faiza the Falcon memorabilia. They back away. “Would you like to write for us?” I ask. They walk faster. “We don’t operate as a sweatshop, pinky swear!” Now they’re running.

I’ve scared away 71 prospective writers to date, and this time, Editors-in-Chief Khadeeja and Connor have insisted that I put an end to it by explaining what we really do. And I’ve been banned from using the word stuff.

Like everything else at NYU Abu Dhabi, the budget doesn’t involve any real money. At The Gazelle, budgeting involves articles. Yes, we value your articles so much that we describe it using money metaphors. #JoinTheGazelle

Our desk editors — insider’s secret: they edit articles, not furniture — talk about which articles are confirmed to be published in the upcoming issue. And if an article is pushed to the next issue, they highlight it in yellow in our budget worksheet.

Pitch meetings are also scintillating. At pitch, desk editors, staff writers and freshmen who accidentally find themselves in E-238 while looking for the bathroom must suggest topics for articles. That’s why Khadeeja posts about pitch meetings on the NYUAD Student Life Facebook page every Saturday. Haven’t seen any of her posts? Come to pitch meetings on Saturdays at 5 p.m. in E-238 and write a rant about how Khadeeja’s posts never appear on your News Feed!

There are five stages of editing: mild enthusiasm, grief, despair, anger and slow death. The politically correct terms are copy editing, managing, desk editing, finalizing and copy chief-ing. We edit for content and grammar. An example of content editing is when our editors-in-chief see how I’ve described the five stages of editing, either they’ll fire me or they’ll delete it for unsubstantiated slander, unless I give them a good reason to keep it in.

We also edit for grammar, referring to a book called The Gazelle Style Guide, which teaches us how to edit with style – insider’s tip: it’s all about good posture – and also tells us how to stylize words that we use regularly, like shawarma. And yes, the Oxford comma is sacrilege.

We keep a Punishment Sheet, so when someone fails to correct an Oxford comma we put a strike against their name. If someone gets three strikes, we throw shoes at them. If someone gets four strikes, we form a ritualistic circle, feed them six marshmallows and sacrifice them to the Style Guide. It’s important to keep the style gods happy; we wouldn’t want to risk a grammar faux pas.

Editing is an elaborate task because an article has to be edited by at least five people before it can be published. It needs to be fact-checked and grammar-checked and we have to make sure that the author is fine with the edits we make before we publish. It takes time, but it is also immensely satisfying. Deleting an Oxford comma is like swatting a fly in mid-air. Evil, but fun.

We’re NYUAD's student publication, so obviously, we’re very intellectual people and we talk about current affairs a lot. As a team, we share many productive conversations as we sip on our coffees. In fact, I believe that the appropriate term for our discussions is Mad Bants.

Over the years, no topic of discussion has escaped our scrutiny as we’ve edited. These range from the philosophy of consciousness to Katy Perry, from an elaborate discussion about curse words to a debate about whether it is ethical to steal birthday cake without saying Happy Birthday first. Editing has so much more comedic value than you might think.

Or maybe we’re just nerds.

Admit it: You’d never read The Gazelle if not for all those pretty pictures. Without the pictures, The Gazelle is essentially just another reading for your Structures of Thought and Society Core curriculum course. So while we edit, our multimedia editors carefully create every illustration for our website. They’re polite enough to nod along to the terrible suggestions that the artistically impaired writers and editors give them, for example, Why don’t you draw a smiley face to represent happiness? They ignore the bad suggestions and make incredible graphics, giving our articles the illustrations that they deserve.

And as our multimedia editors depict written pieces in artistic form, our social media editor crafts every single article, including 1000-word articles like this one, into 158-character summaries for your reading pleasure: another great way in which The Gazelle differs from your Core curriculum readings.

I like to think that Ghost is a metaphor for our dissipating sense of place, time and being the longer we spend obsessing over the difference between words like practice and practise. But in reality, Ghost is the final stage before publishing. Once the articles are edited and the editors are keeling over, we copy the article into unpublished ghost templates. And then we click Publish, and then the website doesn’t publish, and then we cry and hit the increase brightness key, and sporadically, the U.S. dollar sign key until our web team comes to our rescue and refreshes the page for us.

And then, it is done. The issue is up, and we stumble to bed at 3 a.m., and security guards watch us as we stumble, quietly wondering if we’ve been engaging in any late-night nefarious activities, like making counterfeit Faiza memorabilia. The next morning you see our issue plastered across your Facebook feed — thanks to the painstaking efforts of our social media editor — along with Harambe memes and posts about chicken nuggets. But what you don’t see is the blood, sweat, tears, laughter and unbridled satisfaction that accompanied it in its incredible journey from the author to your laptop screen.

But there’s more — more than I could ever explain. There are the coffee runs, and Connor’s coconut water, and the mockery of continuous conditional sentence structures, and the joy of a job well done, and the chocolate hidden in the drawers, and the bonding over global leader problems, and throwbacks to the alterity of constructed cool, and there’s a group of people that knows so many secrets about each other, but what happens in E-238 stays in E-238.

Insider’s secret: We’re not a team, we’re a family.

And that’s why the word stuff is the only word that comes to mind when people ask me what we do at The Gazelle. We do so much. But most importantly, we have fun.