Author Archives: James Cersonsky

Last Monday Mayor John DeStefano Jr. spoke to the Yale College Democrats about education reform, discussing, among much else, the city’s relationship with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the reconstitution of stagnant schools and the looming fulfillment of the New Haven Promise, the city’s program to help local students pay for college. Talk of »

Consider this: There’s a Democratic primary for the Ward 22 aldermanic election on Sept. 15, and you live in one of the four residential colleges located in the ward. If you want to vote, you have to re-register from your home district to New Haven. But, as a student, you ask yourself: Am I qualified »

I wish there were more homeless people for me to run into in front of Gourmet Heaven at 3 a.m. asking me to buy them hamburgers. Really, I do. It’d be great. More people homeless, requesting hamburgers. Sure, right now I co-direct Shelter Now, a grass-roots political action and community organizing coalition whose goal is »

The conscience of a conservative, as Barry Goldwater wrote, revolves around a single, seemingly elegant question: “Are we maximizing freedom?” Goldwater’s framing of conservatism as conscience, as psychology, is both perceptive and useful. Ideology is something one can — and must — psychologically deconstruct. Consciences breed first principles, and politics enforce them. While Congress may »

DeStefanomania? DeStefanation? John the Vote? The name of our Commander in Chief makes for much better portmanteaux and calls to action. But, as I learned at this year’s State of the City address, Mayor John DeStefano Jr. sure knows how to Barack a crowd. I’d like to think I’m normally pretty critical — especially toward »

In the fall, the Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project and a host of other campus organizations joined together to raise over $30,000 to help keep the New Haven Overflow Shelter open just a few months longer over the winter. For those few months, 125 men — some mentally ill, many slighted by a lack »