Author Archives: Michael Pomeranz

Soon the senior class will proceed through Memorial Gate into city life and the quotidian logic it employs. The Gothic architecture and cultivated courtyards we will leave behind freed us for some time from the demands, fashions and expectations of life outside our gates. The strange traditions we employed make sense only according to Yale’s »

I have a confession to make: I like local newspapers. Go ahead, read your neatly formatted, instantly re-loading, online Wall Street Journal. Smile smugly at the well-typeset stories appropriately concerned but not excessively worried about international developments. Know what’s going on in Brussels and Turtle Bay. Approve of the conveniently monotonous op-eds, except for the »

Early-morning rowers push boats along the water; bleary grad students erase graphs; adult New Haveners catch buses to work. But Silliman College is quiet in the early morning. The sun shines on a cool courtyard. Georgian brick blocks downtown, rival Timothy Dwight and Science Hill. A Gothic castle protects us from the commerce of College »

I loved Mory’s. I loved the wooden tables carved with the initials of generations of drunken Yalies. I loved the photos of lettermen, hokey but happy, smiling while sitting on their fake versions of the Yale Fence. I loved stumbling, after Green or Purple Cups filled with God-knows-what, into the “Harvard room” and finding some »

More than a million pilgrims journeyed to Washington, D.C., to watch President Barack Obama assume the heavy burden borne by the leader of the free world. More than a million people sat on the Mall. The Great Emancipator watched their backs, Washington’s monumental obelisk stood guard over them and they faced the Greco-Roman Capitol, where »

College Street is quiet on Tuesday nights. So crying and screaming from a window hailed my ear as I approached Phelps Gate one Tuesday night not long ago. “Twenty! Nineteen! Eighteen!” they shouted. Fifteen seconds later: “Three! Two! One!” More screams. More crying. Hysterics. CNN had just called the election. About half a dozen election »

Walking into Yorkside on Monday night, wet and weary, a senior saddened by midterm mania, I found on the TV a bit of my lost soul: the World Series. Like millions of my fellow Americans, I love the World Series. Everyone loves the World Series as much as everyone loves anything in this increasingly fragmented »

Andrew Mangino, we hardly knew thee. Empowered as I have been by the Oldest College Daily’s outgoing board — “Pomeranz” was, quite literally, the last word they ever wrote — I must reflect on the editors of the News: Who are they? Take Tom Kaplan, the new editor in chief. I think he lives in »

One of these morning you gon’ rise up singin’ Then you’ll spread your wings and you’ll take to the sky But til that morning there’s a-nothin’ can harm you So hush, little baby, don’ you cry —George Gershwin Last night I dreamt of Yale, New Haven church bells echoing the hour off Gothic nighttime walls »

Keith Ferrazzi is not a movie star. I am a movie star. Keith Ferrazzi is an expert on building relationships. He is a professional networker. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he is a Yalie. And the first lecture I attended at Yale not given by President Levin or Dean Salovey was by Keith Ferrazzi. The entire class of »

I want to apologize to professor Gilles Tarabout. I walked out on his “Indian Popular Religion” lecture not because I found the material boring or the theoretical approach incorrect, but because I had another appointment. Besides, I had more than a little on my mind. What class would complete my requirements? Would look good on »

Dean Salovey, I forgive you. I know, these days I am meant to call for your head. You limit speech. But you also kind of allow it. But you also really limit it! His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI came all the way from Rome, and you couldn’t even arrange for him to speak at Yale? »