Author Archives: Dara Lind

Last Friday, the News’ View sounded the alarm regarding a “speech crisis” on Yale’s campus. Regardless of the nature of the “crisis,” a hotly contested issue in and of itself, I fear the News’ response­­­ ­— a 20 percent increase in opinion and editorial content due to an added page on Fridays, intended to “make »

Yesterday marked the kickoff of New Haven Solidarity Week, Yale’s contribution to the Elm City Resident Card program. It was also Guy Fawkes Day, celebrated on campus because of the film “V for Vendetta” — a glorification of terrorism in the face of an oppressive regime. Both events sparked an uncommonly favorable attitude on campus »

I spent enough time reading online message boards last week to come to this conclusion: most viewers of “America’s Next Top Model” think its producers made Tory Marshman ’09 look bad. What but unkind editing, they reasoned, could explain such absurdities as her question “I got into the top history program at Yale University and »

I’m glad my parents aren’t coming to Parents’ Weekend. As much as I envy my friends who are getting taken out to Ibiza on someone else’s tab, I wouldn’t want to spend hours calming my mother down after she heard about some of the crime and security issues this year has presented. The spate of »

My late-shopping-period course-selection anxiety disappeared during a moment in a seminar last week, upon hearing the second most insulting thing I’ve ever heard from a professor. After ascertaining (by the traditional show of hands) that everyone in the room had done the assigned reading, the professor attempted to spark a discussion by asking, “So … »

I don’t usually have a problem with nouns used as verbs, but I never want to hear the word “networking” again. In Washington, D.C., where I worked this summer, it was used incessantly, and always with a warm connotation. Once, a guest speaker for an audience of college interns used it as an icebreaker activity: »

We are frustrated and saddened by Dean Trachtenberg’s recent decision to ban the use of realistic stage weapons on campus. We believe that this decision, made in response to an incomprehensible tragedy, condemns our community for the discussions it is mature enough to handle. This act of petty censorship flies in the face of a »

Four Yale alumni may have competed for the presidency of the United States in 2004, but according to early “buzz,” only one Yale student will be competing for the presidency of the Yale College Council in 2007. That student, Zach Marks, represents the second example in recent months of a Yale-centric race with only one »

Last week, I was finally introduced to the music of the up-and-coming New York band Harlem Shakes, most of whose members are Yale ’06, and it reminded me of a Robert Frost poem. The comparison wasn’t artistic, but biographical. As I thought about how fantastic it was that this handful of Yalies decided to go »

When I first heard about the middle-school-themed “Crushes and Chaperones” dance held by the Committee for Campus-wide Activities last weekend, I smirked. No one would come, I thought, to such a lame event. Besides, wasn’t it funny that the only way the CCA could keep students from drinking was to evoke their nostalgia for simpler, »

Last Friday’s News’ View took a staple of passing conversation and reapplied it as a social observation: Students never have enough time to do all the things we want, and the choices we make about how to spend that time determine with which communities we identify ourselves. This issue of community is being raised on »

The question of “What’s your major?” is stock conversation filler at college, but it seems to be an exchange I’m having more often than usual lately, especially with fellow sophomores. After all, by this time next semester, all of us will have “declared” — evoking an image of a free agent giving a press conference, »