Author Archives: Daniel Weisfield

Yale students are godless, flag-burning arsonists with no respect for liberty, freedom or the American way. If you lacked proof before, you have it now: In the wee hours on Tuesday morning, three Yale students allegedly burned an American flag hanging from a porch at a stranger’s house. The students — Said Hyder Akbar, Nikolaos »

The media has been all over the media this week. The good news is that this narcissism may be justified. On April 8, The New York Post reported allegations that Jared Paul Stern, one of the paper’s contributors, extorted $220,000 from a California billionaire in order to keep said billionaire’s dirty laundry off said paper’s »

Our generation needs a name. The slacker generation got their X. Our parents got their Boom. We’ve been preceded by the Silent Generation, the Beat Generation and somewhere deeper down those marble halls, the Greatest Generation. I’ve got a proposal for the narrow sample of kids currently attending Yale College. If you were born between »

If you want to know why President George W. Bush ’68 thinks it’s okay to wiretap U.S. citizens without a warrant, just ask a transfer student. I recently challenged Daniela Berman ’07, who transferred to Yale after her freshman year at Brandeis University, to tell me what her old school got right that Yale gets »

Is sexual immoderation the new marijuana? When my boss from a summer internship at the State Department was here in the late ’70s, the Branford College Council was fond of using official funds to purchase marijuana for shared consumption at social gatherings. Nowadays, red plastic cups are an ubiquitous part of the Yale experience; in »

The sun never sets on the Levin empire. In 2006, with the opening of a new Yale-in-Beijing program to complement the Elizabethan chic of Yale-in-London, Levin will become the first president in the history of the University to preside over campuses on three continents. And in 2005, when he wasn’t distracted by the pesky little »

Is spelling ability Yale’s new litmus test for social class? For my grandmother’s generation, teeth were a good enough giveaway. Access to orthodontics in this country is, like most things all-American, stratified. Unless a child’s parents are committed corporal integralists (Christian Scientist or otherwise), a crooked pair of pearly whites has, historically, been a humble »

In 1929, Robert Corwin, Yale’s admissions chairman, griped that the list of names of recently admitted students “reads like some of the ‘begat’ portions of the Old Testament and might easily be mistaken for a recent roll call at the Wailing Wall.” If only poor Corwin had had access to the digital search powers of »

It’s mid-October, the air is turning crisp, and a certain breed of undergraduate is already whispering about the application for “Studies in Grand Strategy.” The course, taught by Yale’s reigning triumvirate of international history gurus — Paul Kennedy, John Gaddis and Charles Hill — is a two-semester, interdisciplinary seminar intended to train an elite group »

If the Yale administration wants to do something to improve student life, I have a suggestion: Ban the townies from the computer clusters in CCL. Before the proselytizers of town-gown harmony start reaching for their pitchforks, allow me to present my case. It’s not my place to make value judgments on the average non-Yale-affiliated library »

A Yalie stole my skateboard last week. It was taken, on Friday night, from the Saybrook courtyard, where I had propped it against a wall as I conversed with friends during an outdoor cocktail party. My first instinct: Quick, blame a townie! Then, realizing that there were no Philistines lurking within the walled confines of »

I shopped Music 112 this week — “Listening to Music,” as it’s listed in the Blue Book, or “Clapping for Credit,” as it’s more often known — and, getting up after class, realized I’d never felt so deliciously guilty in the course of my Yale academic career. In the span of 50 minutes, I didn’t »