Matthew Shaffer
SHAFFER: Replacing “The Game”

Yale and Harvard administrators should meet this year and agree to cancel The Game for 2014. Instead, we’ll have a Yale-Harvard regatta, with men’s and women’s races on the Charles River the weekend before Thanksgiving.

SHAFFER: Dangerous conversations

My education was largely self-referential — that is, a recursive reflection on and defense of the value of a liberal-arts education itself. In my staff […]

9/11 Reflection: Matthew Shaffer

President George W. Bush, Davenport ’68, loved to say that “9/11 changed everything.” This is true on a micro-level, but less so on a macro. […]

Shaffer: Childhood, interrupted

NEW YORK — On Aug. 21, I finished moving in, and stared at my ceiling, and felt what I tried to feel after graduation when […]

Shaffer: Paradise lost

Everywhere I go people ask me what Yale is like. I always reply, “It’s paradise.” As I contemplate my imminent expulsion, the metaphor seems particularly […]

Shaffer: The Twins are coming

Satire is dead. Satire is dead and we have killed him. On Tuesday, the Ying Yang Twins are coming to Yale. I don’t know why […]

Shaffer: Poetry: Philosophy’s daddy

I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort studying and debating philosophy at Yale. But these endeavors have left me only with a belief […]

Shaffer: The world is porridge

God has a delicious sense of irony. The essay contest subject was globalization. And here, at the center of Manhattan, between the mahogany panels and […]

Shaffer: Psychoanalytic politics

Last week, The New York Times printed one editorial under three different names. Charles M. Blow has a degree in mass communications. It paid off […]

Shaffer: Too big still fails

Zak Newman ’13, says our new health care legislation will “increase competition,” “lower the government deficit,” and fulfill our “promise to the protection of life” […]

Shaffer: Beauty, irony, Gaga

“The genius of Gaga” was a good start, but Kathryn Olivarius ’11 doesn’t go far enough. She doesn’t appreciate Gaga like I do. Gaga changed […]