Author Archives: Jared Malsin

Walking under Phelps Gate I always get the sense of passing from one world to another, from the open expanse of the New Haven Green to the ancient, fortress-like beauty of Old Campus. Yesterday, the feeling was acute. I was coming from a demonstration for immigrant rights, a spirited embodiment of New Haven’s civil society. »

One reason I am proud to be a resident of New Haven is that this city is leading the nation in embracing its immigrant population, documented and undocumented. The police department has adopted a policy that prohibits them from asking crime victims about their immigration status. City Hall sponsored workshops this year to help undocumented »

Last week, three Yale students were arrested for setting fire to an American flag hanging from someone else’s front porch. The rest of Yale wearily braced for the backlash from the right-wing pundits, who predictably trumpeted the incident as a confirmation of their fantasy of elite, academic support for anti-American terrorism. The flag-burning incident was »

What solemnity must have forced the choice of Newsweek columnist Fareed Zakaria as Class Day speaker. Picking an intellectual like Zakaria is a change in tone from the unbearable lightness of last year’s ceremonies, when Anderson Cooper managed to joke about the Rwandan genocide and his time hosting the reality TV show “The Mole” in »

Something is missing in the debate about the war in Iraq. The discussion in the Congress and on the airwaves focuses on troop levels: whether to escalate the war, hold the current level of roughly 140,000 troops steady, or withdraw U.S. troops altogether. On one level, this makes sense. With 3,000 dead soldiers and more »

I have some distressing news. We, the campus media, are failing you. In the wake of the disastrous failure of the national press corps to hold the Bush administration accountable for its lies concerning Iraq’s WMD and links to terrorism, the campus press is showing its own inability to hold our own administration, that is, »

The Corporation Room in Woodbridge Hall is a place few Yale students ever go. Looming over the massive wood table and elegant white molding is a painting of Elihu Yale, portrayed dressed in his 18th-century best. Kneeling before him is an African slave in chains and a metal collar. The painting’s location makes it both »

Hours after police shot a UCLA student with an electroshock gun, or Taser, students across the country watched the YouTube video in which Mostafa Tabatabainejad shrieked and writhed on the ground. “This is your Patriot Act. This is your … abuse of power,” he cried, as the police shot him several more times. Tabatabainejad’s crime »

And who cares, anyway? That was the question posed by an article that appeared in this paper last Friday (“Eli activists: boxed in by apathy?,” 11/3). The story raised the question of why more students don’t seem to want to be involved in activism. The perplexing suggestion of this article is that the problem lies »

Last month, the program on Ethics, Politics and Economics and the Whitney Humanities Center hosted a conference at Yale titled “Hannah Arendt at One Hundred: Crises of Our Republics.” Scholars from around the world were present, and even a handful of undergraduates turned out. For this gathering of philosophers and intellectual historians, the tone of »

The standard form of political discourse since Sept. 11, 2001 is a giant, tangled Debate Concerning the Middle East. Sept. 11 is what brought our generation into the political sphere. The violence of that day gave birth to the shaken world we know. This coming October will mark another violent anniversary: five nonstop years of »

“Thousands of young white men have converged on Cronulla Beach in Sydney, Australia, and attacked people of Arab and Mediterranean background.” This news lede actually appeared in the BBC last December. The race riots in Australia were alarming, to be sure, but where was the global sense of shock and alarm that has prevailed in »