Author Archives: Alexis Wolff

Elizabeth Carothers ’01 froze when she first set sight on Yale’s massive Collegiate Gothic creations four years ago. She stood gazing with wide eyes and a dropped jaw, reacting to Yale’s towering structures she observed in a “blinded state of worship.” What Carothers didn’t notice was the extremely poor shape the buildings were actually in. »

From the beginning of his tenure in 1993, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. has made education a priority — and the results are beginning to show. New Haven students have shown significant improvement in standardized test scores, including a 138 percent increase in eighth graders’ scores. But Neil Malhotra ’02 still thinks New Haven schools are »

Budding scientist Haytham Hashem, 6, said he hopes to celebrate his own July 4 birthday with a cake that launches fireworks. As Haytham squirmed around Berkeley’s dining hall Saturday — too excited to eat brunch — his toothless grin showed that, at least for Haytham, Yale’s 300th birthday bash was just as explosive. Haytham visited »

Sitting inside his plastic booth on the corner of Elm and York streets, John Lynch smiled as he chatted with customer Will Schleyer ’04. For no extra charge, Lynch wrapped each of Schleyer’s two dozen daisies individually with white tissue paper. But looking over Schleyer’s shoulder, Lynch’s eyes fell upon a colorful collection of flowers »

When Jill Gray, an actress turned psychic fortune teller turned interpreter for the deaf, began her first Yale class five years ago, she never dreamed what a dent, or crater, it would leave on her checkbook. But by the end of her first summer session here, the Ohio native did not even have enough money »

The Y50K Entrepreneurship Competition Awards Gala was every bit as exciting as the Superman posters advertising it suggested, at least for the MEMStar and Elmseed Enterprise Fund teams, who emerged as winners. The Yale Entrepreneurial Society-sponsored contest is unlike most business-plan competitions. In addition to the standard for-profit category, it includes a social entrepreneurship category, »

David Dinkins, New York City’s first black mayor and a pioneer in the civil rights movement, addressed a disappointingly small crowd at a Yale Political Union meeting last night. Around 50 students sat in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall room 114, which seats almost 500, to hear Dinkins argue against racial profiling in a debate titled, “Resolved: The »

One rising sophomore and three rising juniors – including YCC associate Robbie Wilkins ’03, whom Yale College Council President Libby Smiley ’03 defeated in a run-off race last year – will vie to head the YCC. YCC treasurer Vidhya Prabhakaran ’03, Wilkins, and representatives Andrew Allison ’04 and Jack Snyder ’03 announced their candidacy for »

Those now-familiar blue and gold T-shirts have finally been retired to laundry hampers. The “I Agree With Dave” campaign culminated Friday with a rally on Cross Campus. The rally, a venture of six Yale Christian organizations, featured the testimony of Dave Farrell ’03, the face attached to a week-long campaign that organizers said was aimed »

Yale President Richard Levin announced at an open forum last night that he will support the Yale College Calendar Committee’s recommendation to cancel classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. He also said the University “certainly intends to do something” next fall to respond to Princeton and Harvard universities’ sweeping financial aid improvements. The podium »

Several small wooden tables were pushed together in the back corner of Gourmet Heaven’s upstairs eating area Saturday afternoon, and Evan Lepatner ’02 sat behind them with his hands folded like he meant business. “Westfield America doesn’t want [our mall] to be the kind of place where you just walk in to get a T-shirt »

At the beginning of a film on the advent of coeducation at Yale at the University Art Gallery’s lecture hall Tuesday night, photographs, paintings and statues of Yale men flashed across the screen, while the almost arrogantly masculine 1960s Yardbirds’ hit, “I’m a Man,” blared in the background. A news clip from WFSB/TV3 interrupted the »