Author Archives: Akbar Ahmed

Celebrity classes make their mark each shopping period, attracting hundreds of Yalies into cramped classrooms. This year, one course in particular has firmly established itself as the coolest kid on the playground (eat your heart out, Marvin Chun). Eager students (over 100) assaulted the first session en masse despite the 18-student cap. Is this a »

She smiled at me across the cafe table. The setting Parisian sun illuminated the slight wrinkles around her mouth. My mother’s best friend, a Pakistani who’s lived in Paris since the 1970s, seemed somehow vindicated by the July 1 reports that the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn was coming undone. That afternoon, the hotel maid who »

This is most definitely not the kind of peacock your mom pointed out to you at the zoo. But the colors are just as lustrous, the grace as palpable and the pulsating, essential life as evident. “Peacock,” going up this weekend, is the latest show by The Bad Romantics — an organization known to dazzle, »

His eyes are wide. His outfit is perfect — all black with a splash of white. He oozes ambition, but nervousness is an inimitable part of the mix. He is 18 and on the brink of taking on an overwhelming, unforgiving world that promises either fame beyond measure or a spot in the gutter. Basically, »

There comes a time in every young boy’s life when he has to bite the bullet and encounter the ghosts of his former household staff. When this happens, it’s often best accompanied by music. “The Turn of the Screw,” the Opera Theater of Yale College’s Winter Mainstage, captures all this in a rather more somber »

“New Work from New York” is the Cabaret’s holiday gift to Yale. The two-day event will feature Waterwell, a New York-based theater company, and glam-rock band Bambï on Friday and Pulitzer Prize nominee Eisa Davis, a playwright, actor and singer/songwriter on Saturday. WEEKEND sat down to discuss the show with the Cabaret’s Associate Producer, Jake »

For Ava Socik ’12, Cuba means “salsa groups playing, domino games on the street, the cigars [and] the beaches,” and her Sudler-funded photography exhibition now up in the Morse College Gallery, “Cuba: Rum, Cigars, and Old American Cars!” shows us all this and more. Walk into the space, and you feel like you’re inside a »

Rabbits beckon to her. Her mother upbraids her. Her changing identity confounds her. Alice is, above all, a victim in “Phantomwise,” the Yale University Dramatic Assocation’s Fall Experimental production. Written by veteran Dramat member Oren Stevens ’11, “Phantomwise” leaves the viewer with a head spinning as fast as Alice does when she falls down the »