Author Archives: Kristen Wright

The alto saxophonist John Handy once said that playing with the legendary jazz bassist Charles Mingus was like “walking around on eggshells.” Mingus, who wrote the 1957 “Haitian Fight Song” inspired by the Haitian Revolution liked to mix things up. Just as Handy — and many of Mingus’ other sidemen — fell into a groove »

Nationalism is alive and well at Yale. Why? Because Captain Freedom is here. The recent success of the men’s hockey team was remarkable, but I found myself more intrigued by one of their mascots. “Captain Freedom” is a Delta Kappa Epsilon brother (currently Tim Handlon ’10) who skates around Ingalls Rink, energizing hockey fans. His »

A month after the presidential Inauguration, public opinion and commercial metrics still deem Elizabeth Alexander’s ’84 “Praise Song for the Day” a failure. As the News reported Tuesday, the poem has only sold 6,000 copies. Graywolf Press, the poem’s publisher, originally printed 100,000 copies. “Praise Song” has sold even fewer copies than Maya Angelou’s 1993 »

Kathi Cordsen of Fullerton, Calif., is a Republican. And she is still a Bush supporter. Her support of George W. Bush ’68 may be surprising, considering that his approval rating hovers at 34 percent (after sliding into the twenties). His presidency has been characterized by a series of bumbling and incompetent moves and a cast »

A tool, in the meaning we Yale students commonly give the word, is a pathological and pretentious social climber. Writing pretentious editorials and generally being pretentious are signs one is a tool. A tool is also one who does not realize he or she is being used. And in a third meaning, tools are the »

I saw Daniel Beaty’s “Resurrection,” currently playing at Hartford Stage, with a class and, though I initially liked it, several of my classmates argued the play constitutes an offensive failure to depict the African-American experience. It centers around an ensemble cast of six African-American men, aged 10 to 60, each trying to sort through a »

The phrase “Shock and Awe” first appeared as the title of a 1996 National Defense University military doctrine by Harlan Ullman and James Wade. Most Americans know “shock and awe” as the initial bombing campaign of the Iraq War. However, “shock and awe” results when a politician combines the rhetoric of religion with the rhetoric »