Tag Archive: Alumni

  1. Elis more likely to show up on Times Weddings page

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    Ever wondered what it takes to make the New York Times Weddings page? A Yale degree sure seems to help.

    According to an article in the Atlantic, Yalies make up 5.8 percent of the wedding announcements, while Princeton and Harvard alumni comprised 3.6 percent and 9.4 percent of couples featured on the page, respectively.

    Numerous other traits seem to up a prospective subject from being featured in the Weddings section. If you…

    • have parents who come from Greenwich, Conn., you are 21 times more likely to be featured than the average American
    • work as a Congressional staffer, you are 75 times more likely to be featured than the average American
    • are marrying someone of the same sex, you are 74 times more likely to be featured than the average American
    • work at one of New York’s most elite law firms, you are 974 times more likely to be featured than the average American

    Each week, around 200 couples compete for the maximum of 40 spots available in the Weddings/Celebrations page.

  2. Guo ’09 makes splash with cons

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    Yale is accustomed to its graduates making waves. But for the last two years, one grad may have been making a few more waves than he should have.

    Jerry Guo ’09, a former Newsweek employee and the founder of Grouper, a real-life social networking business that sends random groups of customers to hot destinations around NYC, was recently called out by online dating industry giant Ignighter for pretending to do an interview for The Atlantic Monthly magazine in order to access the site’s secrets. And Ignighter isn’t the first to complain: Guo’s history of unusual tactics extends back much further than that. But according to a recent Betabeat article, the real issue lies not in Guo’s means and ends, but in the diversity of his experiences.

    “He was a strange egg, that’s for sure,” said a former staffer who worked with him, quoted in Betabeat’s article, entitled “How Newsweek’s Most Notorious Fellow got Caught Conning Silicon Valley.” “He would disappear for weeks at a time, then call up saying he had an interview with Hugo Chavez or pirates in Africa. Then he would be back at the office, I would see him sleeping under his desk. People joked he was a spy.”

    Newsweek’s two dozen filed complains regarding Mr. Guo demonstrate that, regardless of his activity, he does things his way. So it is with Grouper, which is running more smoothly than ever thanks to information garnered by Guo’s fake interview with Igniter executives.

    “Jerry is…I think the best word is irreverent,” Micheal Waxman ’09, Guo’s former Yale classmate turned business partner, told Betabeat. ““After all the crazy shit he has done, he’s lucky just to be alive.”

  3. Watch video of Levin and Fareed Zakaria

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    In typical Yale fashion, the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs marked its official opening Monday with an interview of one of today’s most prominent Yalies: journalist Fareed Zakaria ’86. University President Richard Levin called Zakaria, a former editor of Foreign Affairs and Newsweek International and now the host of CNN’s “Fareed Zakaria GPS” and editor-at-large at Time, “perhaps the best informed, most articulate, most incisive television interviewer in the area of national and international affairs.”

    Watch the full interview above, and read tomorrow’s News for more information on what’s to come for the International Studies program.

  4. Gwathmey ‘poured his heart and soul’ into A&A, Goldberger says

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    loria.jpg

    In an interview with the News yesterday, the dean of the School of Architecture, Robert A.M. Stern ARC ’65, argued that criticism of the Loria Center for the History of Art, the recent work of his late friend Charles Gwathmey ARC ’62, will lessen over time. In an essay posted to the Web site of The New Yorker, Paul Goldberger ’72, the magazine’s architecture critic, also weighs in:

    Toward the end of his career, he poured his heart and soul into a non-residential commission he cherished, the restoration and expansion of the Art and Architecture Building at Yale, by his teacher Paul Rudolph. The Rudolph building is an impossibly difficult neo-Brutalist masterpiece from 1963, and Gwathmey made it look better than it has in forty years. His addition is smart and well planned on the inside, and too complex and overwrought on the outside. It tells you all you need to know about its architect, who couldn’t bring himself to sit quietly beside his mentor. Gwathmey paid loving homage to Rudolph in the restoration, and then he wanted to get into the ring with him. I don’t think he was trying to show his teacher up. He just worried about what it would look like if he didn’t assert himself. He never wanted anyone to think that he didn’t have the right stuff.

    Read the full appraisal — in which Goldberger calls Gwathmey “the architecture world’s Norman Mailer, with the same bravado, the same raw talent, and the same career-long anxiety about whether he could continue to equal his spectacular first performance” — by clicking here.

    (Photo: Yale University)

  5. Two Kohs are better than one

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    thekohsaresoadorable.jpg

    Bored during your internship? Here’s something to add to your reading list: A profile of former Yale Law School Dean Harold Hongju Koh and his brother, Howard Koh ’73 MED ’77, that appeared in The Boston Globe today. The brothers are now, respectively, legal adviser in the Department of State and assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services.

    The whole article is worth reading, if only to find out that Harold Hongju Koh, who was once seen hoisting two Boston Red Sox World Series trophies in the Law School dining hall, will throw out the first pitch at Fenway Park on August 29. It is also worth reading because of the adorable photograph, above, that accompanies it.

  6. Bass ’82 launches second Web-only publication

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    Valley Sentinel

    As newspapers across the country continue to go bankrupt, Yale lecturer Paul Bass ’82 just launched a new media outlet for south-central Connecticut. But don’t look for this paper in print: Like the New Haven Independent, which Bass started in 2005, it is only available online.

    The Online Journalism Project, which is led by Bass, launched its second online-only newspaper, the Valley Independent Sentinel, this week. The Sentinel, employing two full-time reporters and freelance contributors, will cover news from Ansonia, Derby, Oxford, Seymour and Shelton. It is being financed by a $500,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.

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  7. Senate approves Koh. No, not that one.

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    harold.jpg howard1.jpg

    One of the above Kohs has been confirmed by the Senate. Guess which one! (Hint: The less controversial one.)

    The Senate voted Friday to approve the nomination of Howard Koh ’73 MED ’77 — pictured at right — for the position of assistant secretary for health in the Department of Health and Human Services, said Regan Lachapelle, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Koh will be the primary adviser to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius on matters relating to public health.

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  8. Miller: Sotomayor ‘a dedicated and serious young woman’

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    Before Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79 was nominated to the Supreme Court, she was a student at Princeton — and a classmate of Yale College Dean Mary Miller.

    Along with four other students, Sotomayor and Miller served on a student search committee for a new assistant dean of student affairs. Frustrated with the process, the group wrote a letter to the editor in the September 12, 1974, issue of The Daily Princetonian.

    In the letter, which can be read in full here, the students criticized the search’s focus on selecting a minority candidate and the vague role of the student committee. While Miller is white and Sotomayor is Latina, both were chosen because they are women, at a time when Princeton was largely male.

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  9. Recapping the Clinton visit

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    Hillary Clinton LAW '73

    Hillary Clinton’s LAW ’73 trip to New Haven on Monday created a veritable buzz.  (According to the New Haven Independent, she even got to enter through the otherwise locked L-Dub gate! Seriously! Celebrities…)

    Shortly after Commencement exercises ended around noon Monday, she headed to the Law School to celebrate with the class of 2009. Check the video out here, courtesy of the Law School. When Acting Dean Kate Stith introduced Clinton in the courtyard of the Law School, the crowd of several hundred students and their guests gave the former first lady a standing ovation.

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  10. Eli snags Treasury post

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    Neal Wolin

    Another Yale alumnus has joined the Obama administration, this time with a prominent gig in the Treasury Department.

    The Senate confirmed Neal Wolin ’83 LAW ’88 as deputy treasury secretary, the number two official to Secretary Timothy Geithner, on Tuesday. Wolin, who was named deputy assistant to President Obama and deputy counsel to the president for economic policy in February, is a veteran of the department, having served as both general counsel and deputy general counsel.

    “Neal brings a deep knowledge of the Treasury Department and strong managerial experience in both the private and public sectors,” Geithner said Monday, according to Agence France Presse. “I look forward to working closely with Neal at this critical moment in our nation’s history.”

  11. Old dean, new title

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    Harold Attridge, Yale Divinity School Dean

    A $5 million gift has given Divinity School Dean Harold Attridge a new title: the Henry L. Slack Dean of Yale Divinity School.

    The new endowed deanship was created by Robert McNeil Jr. ’36 in honor of his grandfather, a leader of the Congregational Church in Connecticut who graduated from the Divinity School in 1877.

    The donation comes at a time when the Divinity School has been struggling to meet its fundraising targets and expand its financial aid offerings. As of March, contributions to the school’s annual fund, which is earmarked directly for financial aid, were down nearly 20 percent compared to the 2008 fiscal year.

    (Photo: Yale Divinity School)