Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night and Cypresses have been drawing crowds of up to 1,200 a day to the Yale University Art Gallery since the iconic paintings’ arrival on June 15, museum security guards said. The exhibits run until Sept. 7.

The venerable Harold Bloom, 78, is alive and well — and teaching. The noted literary critic was spotted standing outside his Shakespeare seminar while the shoppers wrote timed essays to apply. Asked why students should still study Shakespeare, Bloom replied, “because who else is there?”

Because their own convention wasn’t fun enough, the Yale College Democrats hosted an impromptu Palin-watching party Wednesday night. Let’s just say that the embattled Alaska governor got a slightly different reception than a certain Illinois senator.

Ah, freshmen. Overheard next to the Bass Library pavilion: “Hey, do you know where W-L-H is?”

More than 100 eager students showed up to Woolsey Hall at 1 p.m. yesterday for John Gaddis’ famed class “Cold War,” only to find that the class was in fact meeting in the Law School Auditorium. The glitch was, in fact, thanks to a mistake on the OCS Web site. (So take it up with them.)

Meanwhile, the Pundits seized on the confusion to offload more than 100 phony syllabi on Cold War enthusiasts.

Three New Haven public schools were chosen to be part of the USDA Fresh Food and Vegetable Program, which will give students fresh and dried fruits and vegetables, as well as healthy-eating lessons, during the course of the school day.

Yale history professor Ivo Banac helped ignite an uproar in Croatia recently when he defended the country’s pro-Nazi singer Mario Perkovic Thompson in a letter to British newspaper The Guardian. Banac, president of Croatian human rights group The Helsinki Committee, said Thompson did not deserve to be banned from performing for his political views, prompting two members of the committee to resign in protest.

At Tuesday’s Board of Aldermen meeting, city leaders voted to make purchasing spray paint illegal for those under age 18.

Students with too much to do and too little time, take note. Yale School of Medicine research indicates that monitoring activity in some areas of the brain can predict when individuals are best equipped to multitask.

THIS DAY IN YALE HISTORY 1942 The first available photographs reveal the devastating damage to the Yale-in-China facilities from fires set by Japanese troops.

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