Updated: Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 4:16pm
On Monday, the New Haven Board of Education terminated its food-service contract with the notorious firm Aramark and decided instead to run all food services in-house. Parents, workers, teachers and public-school students have fiercely criticized the company for putting profits before kids by serving poor-quality food and cultivating bad labor-management relations...
A week ago, before I began my afternoon trek back up Prospect Street and the hill that literally elevates the Divinity School above the rest of the University, I stopped off at the Law School to hear Harvard professor Michael Sandel deliver a lecture on the ethics of human genetic engineering. Sandel’s book on the subject, published last year, is entitled “The Case...
Deep down inside, you know that using corn ethanol as fuel must be good for the environment. Picture the process by which fossil fuels are produced: the refinery fires, the black sludge, the billowing acrid smoke and intolerable heat. Now think of a field of corn, their green stalks swaying languidly under a perfect sapphire sky. It is unfathomable to me that anyone who...
As professionals working closely on Cuban foreign policy and human rights, we were dismayed to read Michael Fernandez’s column “In Cuba, a self-sustaining, repressive machine (still)” 4/25. While rightly condemning the Castro regime’s violations of fundamental liberties, the piece perpetuates a series of myths about Cuba’s past and present that do more harm than...
Dean Salovey, I forgive you. I know, these days I am meant to call for your head. You limit speech. But you also kind of allow it. But you also really limit it! His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI came all the way from Rome, and you couldn’t even arrange for him to speak at Yale? He has some pertinent things to say about religion. Perhaps you would have if the Holy Father...
When I was five, I once ran toward our barnlike garage between the vegetable gardens. I was a sickly kid, but every step I took was a spring into the air, not a triumph over weakness but somehow as natural as the string beans themselves. Maybe this last assertion about why I was so elated is a screen memory. I don’t know, but it’s been a constant throughout my life...
It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine who to believe in the controversy surrounding Aliza Shvarts’ art project. On the one hand, the projects’ status as “performance art” means that Shvarts might feel justified in constructing and disseminating a fictional narrative with respect to the activities implicated in the project. Indeed, in comparing the...
Last Friday, the News ran a story about Aliza Shvarts’ senior art project. For her project, Shvarts claims to have inseminated herself repeatedly and then used herbal drugs to induce miscarriages, the video of which she hoped to project onto a plastic cube smeared with a mixture of Vaseline and miscarriage blood. This has generated controversy. As a person who has...
I was shocked and appalled when I opened the News yesterday. After Monday’s call for Peter Salovey to step down for his “hypocrisy,” I expected to find the entire newspaper comprised of guest columns and letters to the editor in defense of that noblest of mustachioed deans. Although I had planned in this space to pen a column that would simultaneously chastise...
