Author Archives: Rebecca Dana

Outside Yale Station there once was a green and white bumper sticker that read, “if you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” Given the cost of some reading lists this semester, literal-minded Yalies might have considered giving ignorance a shot. And for those enrolled in Yale College’s most expensive courses, the prices of texts are »

On the second floor of the Hall of Graduate Studies lies an academic graveyard. It holds more than three years of unrecovered seminar papers, more than 1,000 buried blue books, a catacomb of final thoughts outside the History Department office. There are the unanswered questions for further study, (“Do you think the nature of violence »

According to its holder, U.S. patent number 6,256,800 is going to revolutionize Western civilization. Made of “powder coated” tubular steel, it sells for $85 plus $13 shipping and handling over the Internet. The inventor is Jonathan Isbit, a member of Yale’s Class of 1972 who left school one semester short of graduation. The product is »

The Ivy League’s oldest undergraduate degree-granting program of its discipline, Yale’s African American Studies department is starting its fourth semester this spring. Begun amid high tensions about the appreciation of cultural studies on campus, the department has settled to the quiet task of recruiting faculty and students while another conflict over a university president’s perceived »

Last year, Professor Abbas Amanat taught a survey course of Middle Eastern history with 120 enrolled students. Yesterday, at a class he designed after Sept. 11 because of a perceived heightened academic interest in the Islamic world, there were 75 leftover syllabi on a table at the front of Luce 101 and empty seats in »

Blockbuster Video wants you to make it a historically-vindicating, land-of-the-free-and-home-of-the-brave loving, Josh Hartnet-heartthrobbing, Harrison Ford-style night. So the store has alphabetized a list of suggested two-day rentals. Today, 60 years after Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor, Blockbuster has chosen to commemorate the event by releasing not only the critically-panned feature film for rent, but also »

For his year off before college, Avi Perry ’05 was half-Israeli ascetic, half-America cowboy. The first six months of the year he spent at a yeshiva connected to Jerusalem by a single, winding road that was often closed because of people throwing rocks at cars. He prayed twice a day, studied Talmudic law from 5:30 »

Work for the military police at Tweed-New Haven Airport was light, despite the Thanksgiving rush. At this sleepy New Haven airport, where petitions to open gates three and four lay half-signed in the lobby, the fatigues were mostly there for decoration over the holiday. Daniel Stone, a truck driver from Meriden and a member of »

The rules for the first annual Yale Angler’s Journal Swedish fish eating contest were mostly practical: One: 25 fish per person per round, must be consumed fully in one minute. Two: No chipmunking (that is, hiding fish in your cheeks). Three: No deliberate puking, and as for inadvertent puking, make it clean. Held in 102 »

The laughter was syncopated along with the music. Serge Lang calls it a natural rhythm: 100 in a room for 30 hesitating, chuckling and then shaking, letting loose the belly laughs everyone expected. Lang presided, patting his nose with a handkerchief and running his fingers down the chocolate strips of his velvet Renaissance doublet. Occasionally, »

Erin Emily Dwyer likes the sound of her first two names. She should; she picked them herself 10 months ago. Eleven months ago, she was a man. Last January — a month after she stopped being a he called Neil — the recently named Erin Emily filed a discrimination complaint against Yale, claiming 15 years »

Jacqueline Farber ’03 cares about your testicles. And as a coordinator of Yale’s Peer Health Educators, she spent thousands of University dollars to make sure you care about them too. Monday, maintenance workers on Old Campus and in residential colleges were given thousands of laminated self-examination instructions to hang on students’ showerheads. Now keeping your »