The sounds emanating from Professor Sarah Weiss’s laptop are difficult to describe. “It’s like water droplets being played,” she says, referring to the bell-like timbre of the tuned drums. “And then there’s this squeaky little oboe-type thing, and then there’s this mainland, Southeast Asian tiny cymbaline,” she adds, speeding up her description (and...
Professor William Summers reads the label on the box in front of him: “‘Erotic Love Piggy’?” Judging by the smiling cartoon piglet on the box’s front, it indeed contains a raunchy, inflatable farm animal. “See, animals are a big thing,” he posits. Professor Summers and I are at V.I.P., “Very Intimate Pleasures,” in Orange, Conn., and he is teaching me...
For someone known on campus as “the Toad’s DJ,” Thomas “DJ Action” Jackson is fairly unassuming. When asked what exactly it is he does, he says, “I just show the hell up.” But he does a whole lot more than that. Walking into the Black Bear Saloon on the corner of Temple and Crown, a pub with thick wooden tables and an old-fashioned style, I found him...
Freshmen are often the culprits. Streaming into Old Campus every fall, they bring wireless routers in the hope of setting up wireless networks in their suites. Little do they know: every single one could beget rogue Wi-Fi. In many places at Yale (Old Campus, the Branford dorm room in which I’m writing this), the internet may be accessed only through wired networks...
“Are you playing it on purpose?” A customer raises an eyebrow at the ABBA music vibrating through the stacks at Labyrinth Books. Don Hackett, Labyrinth’s coursebook manager, responds goodnaturedly: “We don’t try to tell anyone that they can’t play something.” At the stereo behind the cash registers where Yalies empty their pockets purchasing reading lists...
On the second floor of the Yale Collection of Musical Instruments, there’s a sign that reads: “Please do not sit or play on instruments.” But today, I am doing both. Squatting on a low stool, I play a Chopin Nocturne on an Erard piano built in Paris, circa 1881. The Erard was the last model to be in vogue before Steinway standardized the modern grand piano with its...
Ben Polak has made four rolls of the die, circumnavigated the board once, and he’s already lost 75 dollars. This game theorist has convinced me that it’s going to take more than game prowess to win at life. And we’re just playing Monopoly. It’s four o’clock on a Thursday and the advent of the weekend has us taking a break around the familiar Milton Bradley...
On a rainy Thursday in early November, over four hundred students crowded into the chairs, tables, and windowsills of the Trumbull Dining Hall. All eyes were on a small woman with short gray hair hovering near the piano at the front of the room. Microphone in hand, children’s author Lois Lowry answered questions and waxed philosophical on everything from homeland...
As students’ casual chatter wafts among the photos and cozy furniture of the Timothy Dwight master’s office, it is not immediately apparent that this is the residence of a self-described “mambo man.” Master T — TD Master Robert Thompson — is often said to be “high on life.” More often than not, music is what gets him there. An art history professor who...
It’s hard to imagine a residential college dean balancing on his hands and chin, his legs raised unsupported behind him in mayurasana, or “peacock pose.” But Dean Hugh Flick of Silliman College pulls it off almost effortlessly. Three times a week, he exchanges his desk chair for a yoga mat and lifts into his best peacock pose. Sometimes the flowing poses of the sun...
