Author Archives: Rebecca Dana

One year ago this morning, from a yellow Harkness Tower window, Kenneth Shevlin ’03 didn’t notice the smoke rising in the distance. That afternoon, he learned the tiny cloud was the twin towers of the World Trade Center turned to dust and smoke. That night, he found out a friend was on American Airlines Flight »

Next week, Ames Brown ’02 will bring Reality to Davenport College. Today, M&M Mars Inc. will bring the 80,000 individually wrapped Starburst Brand Original Flavor Fruit Chews he requires in order to do so. Brown’s specific brand of “Reality,” as financed by the Davenport Sudler Fund, is an “intellectual journey to the sad reality of »

Four score and two years ago, as the legend goes, the gentlemen of two rival residential colleges took time away from their studies to engage in a little healthy Bacchanalian competition. Hallowed, alongside countless time-honored traditions, the small drinking contest grew into a larger gathering and into the annals of Yale lore. There is Society. »

The tennis ball-colored posters were stamped and hung. The campaign lollipops sat wrapped and waiting in boxes. The table tents had been pitched. Yale College Council hopefuls rose early Monday morning, ready to spend the first day of the last week of classes on Cross Campus, handing out fliers, putting their $40 of “innovative spending »

Call them Ishmael — all 45 of them — or, better yet, call them amateur whalers with senior essays due in a week. Call it procrastination or one of hundreds of crackpot ideas hatched in a freshman suite in Bingham Hall. Or call it the oral literary tradition rekindled by a fire in the Trumbull »

When Pete Lalich sat down to write Maya Lin’s Yale recommendation in 1976, he was almost positive she’d get in. Lin ’81 ARC ’86 had been a solid student in his world history and American government classes — outstanding, he wrote on the form — and she came from a creative, academic family. Clearly, he »

Early in the morning on Halloween 1999, Branford College senior Gregory Norris was drunk, wandering around Union Station without any Yale identification, according to the New Haven police who found him there. He checked into Yale-New Haven Hospital for detoxification at 5:10 a.m., checked out at 2:25 p.m., and was never seen alive again. At »

Popular opinion about collegiate mental health lately is that there is no difference between competitive and noncompetitive schools, between Yale and the rest of the world. Indeed, roughly 800 to 1,000 University of Connecticut students used university-provided therapy last year, according to the school’s Student Mental Services spokeswoman. The number of Yale undergraduates who visited »

Most likely, the experience of mental health care at Yale these days cannot be summed up by a single anorexic’s story. It is a complicated scene of unprecedented demand on a limited system, where one-sixth of the University’s population is triaged and treated in an arguably model college health care facility. It is many anonymous »

It’s 3:30 p.m. on the third floor of University Health Services and despite the prescription rush downstairs, the patients here manage to stagger the seating: empty chair, someone staring at the rainbow-colored patchwork mural, empty chair, someone else reading an old Newsweek, empty chair. The room is full of thick carpeting and muffled voices; it »

At Toad’s Place Sunday afternoon, the stage was lit green and pink, the subwoofers set to low. And if the booty cam were still in operation, it would have caught an intercollegiate festival of tushes dancing to the Klez Dispensers in town from Princeton. Or the Yarmulkazi from Brown. It was Klezmerpalooza 2002, the fourth »

Before settling on purple paper and her name in bold, Valerie Klokow ’02 wanted the poster for her talk to have a little rhetoric and two xeroxed photographs. The first was to be a picture of her: a standard looking Yalie with green plastic-framed glasses and a short auburn bob. The second was to be »