Author Archives: Roger Low

It’s always good to be reminded, every now and then, of how much the rest of the country hates Yale. This point was driven home over spring break when the first thing my parents, family and friends all wanted to ask me about was whether I’d yet taken a seminar with the ex-Taliban official. Apparently, »

People seem to find endless entertainment in watching the mighty fall from grace for doing something stupid. The country had a good chortle at Trent Lott’s expense when he inadvertently endorsed segregation and promptly lost his job. The late-night comedians seem intent on milking Dick Cheney’s shooting mishap for some time to come. And the »

People repeat themselves. It’s annoying as hell, but it’s a fact of life. Professors like to return to the same tired points and same overused examples in their lectures. Lovers like to try the same tricks in bed. Even newspaper columnists, normally creatures practically perfect in every way, have an annoying tendency to return over »

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Have you ever had a moment when it suddenly, finally and tragically dawned on you that, however much you may love your significant other, he or she is simply never going to change enough for you to stay together? I’m afraid I may be reaching that point with the Democrats. To root for the Democrats »

Without exaggeration, of all the races I’ve followed closely, I have never seen an upset as unexpected as the victory scored here by Nick Shalek over Rebecca Livengood in the Ward 1 aldermanic contest last week. I can hear the groans. “Why is Low writing about the Ward 1 race?” you mutter over your cereal. »

A great battle, arguably the climactic domestic political battle of the entire Bush presidency, is brewing in Washington. And before we at Yale march eagerly into the fray along with the rest of the country, we need to stop for just a moment to think about what we are doing. John Roberts and Harriet Miers, »

To hear Yalies tell it, the two candidates running for the post of Ward 1 alderman are an extraordinary duo. I am told Nick Shalek is a closet neo-conservative who has been secretly recruited, financed and even bribed by the Yale Corporation. Rebecca Livengood, the sitting Ward 1 Alderwoman, is apparently not just a stooge »

As a diplomatic rule of thumb, I tend to think it’s a good idea for presidents to appoint ambassadors who don’t despise the foreign country to which they are sent. It would be a generally lousy idea, for instance, to send a raging anti-Semite to our embassy in Israel, a zealous China-phobe to Beijing or »

Have you ever watched 5-year-old boys play together? Some cheap plastic car lies abandoned on the ground while the happy tots run around and ignore it, until one kid decides to pick it up. At which point, every 5-year-old in sight decides he wants the car as well, and pandemonium ensues as the placid schoolyard »

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is so vast, and the wounds it inflicted on us so fresh, that I am a little more hesitant than some on this page have been to draw any overtly political lessons from it. It is so easy for we Yalies, sitting in our beautifully sunny courtyards, to shake our »

The seemingly free-wheeling task that I have been assigned for this column — imparting some gem of valuable upperclassman advice to the arriving class of 2009 — is no easy feat, if only because at this moment the poor Class of 2009 is being water-hosed with unsolicited advice. As our freshmen attempt to modestly unload »