Author Archives: Noah Lawrence

If Halo 3 included a level where you go to Starbucks, it would look like the Bass Library Cafe. Every part of the room bears the uber-glossy sheen of computer animation. The floor of blue and beige marble tiles shines from wall to wall. The burgundy marble tables and wire chairs reflect the stark whiteness »

Sukkot is a little kid’s dream. For the week-long Jewish holiday, which starts tonight and whose name means “huts,” Jewish families build rustic, temporary huts in their backyards and on their porches. Families invite guests and relatives for meals in the sukkah, the hut. Some families even sleep in the sukkah. The experience recalls the »

This is usually illegal,” my Israeli cab driver said in Hebrew as we swung left onto an enormous, mostly deserted Jerusalem boulevard. “But it’s four in the morning. Nobody’s watching.” I didn’t even know what was illegal about the turn. Then again, at 4 a.m. I was in no state to process road signs in »

Freshman orientation lectures are like macaroni and cheese in the dining hall. They are hard to do well, but harder to do horribly. They leave one not upset, so much as vaguely numbed. But this rule, like all rules, has an exception: a truly awful orientation lecture in Woolsey Hall my freshman year, by a »

The first month of freshman fall gives an awfully skewed view of college. One of college’s sweetest joys is that no matter what challenges come — the struggle for an essay; the race for a job — we are always just a few minutes’ walk from good friends. A small campus frees us from commutes. »

No wonder we 20-somethings are so harrowed in finding jobs. Look how hard it is for 50-somethings. Forty-five partners were fired or demoted recently at Mayer, Brown, Rowe and Maw, a Chicago-based law firm. Partnership at a firm was “once considered as secure as tenure at a university,” the Chicago Tribune wrote. In our parents’ »

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. would not want us to miss him. “I am going to sue the … manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks!” Vonnegut wrote in the last of his 24 books, 2005’s “A Man Without a Country.” “Right on the package … [they] have promised to kill me. But now I »

Three millennia ago, the Jews stood at the Jordan River’s banks, about to return to the Promised Land. They must have been as scared and excited as we were the night before leaving for college. They were shepherds, nomads, many hardly older than we. Their leader, Moses, had died only a month before. Unsure of »

There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life,” Sherwood Anderson wrote in his 1919 novel, “Winesburg, Ohio.” Anderson added, “Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood.” Anderson would have loved Friday’s Master’s Tea with Hanson. In »

Here is one way to examine whether Yale should build two new residential colleges — a question that has taken center stage recently, with President Levin’s long-awaited official call to study the issue: How can Yale open its experience to more young people without changing the experience? Put differently: How can Yale expand its student »

Apparently, Yale is enmeshed in scandal. You wouldn’t know from the usual mix of problem sets and friendly dining hall lunches, but the Associated Press knows better. One of its headlines online last Friday read: “Steamy shower has Yale students in hot water.” Added Yahoo! News: “Yale in a lather over steamy showers.” Here, excerpted, »

With its pop graphics and tales of suburbia, Time magazine is the Andrew Lloyd Webber of journalism. The New York Times and The New Yorker will always outclass it in writing style and wisdom. But you can tell a lot about our culture by what our most-read newsmagazine thinks we want to read. Time offered »