Author Archives: Amir Sharif

For the past semester, roughly 15 students in Yale College have been studying something rather out of the ordinary, academically-speaking: clubbing. The class, “Dance Music and Nightlife Culture in New York City,” has recently gotten the attention of several national news outlets, from Fox to the British Tabloid the Daily Mail. That’s why yesterday afternoon, »

Yalies, drop your faux-lokos. Rest your revelry. Put your pants back on. It’s time to get serious. It is my senior year and I really want my giant classmates on the football team to muscle to a win at this sacred, sacred game of ours. And I think I know why we have fallen short »

Are you thinking of going to India to find yourself? Congratulations. You are among a surprisingly large cohort of perplexed Yalies who probably read/saw “Eat, Pray, Love” and took it a bit too seriously. I’m not sure where you left yourself last, but let me guess: You are having difficulty answering any question for which »

I am not a Jew. I did not grow up in a Yiddish-speaking environment, which means I have only a faint grasp of the Yale Daily News’s unofficial second language. But in the past couple of months, I have grown intimately familiar with the most commonly used and flexibly defined Yiddish word: shvitz (a noun, »

There’s never been so much student drama at Yale, at least according to five student playwrights interviewed on campus. No, not the catty, reality-show kind of drama — at least that’s not what they said. Rather, they’re speaking of student plays: pieces acted, directed, produced and written by our bulldog classmates. WEEKEND caught up with »

It was once a house of brothers. Less than a year ago, 29 Whalley Ave. was the home of a handful of Yale men, brought together by a bond of fraternity. Here, amid the clutter and hole-punched walls of this simple four-story building, the men had gathered last winter around a television to play a »

Meet Jason Yamaguchi. Born in Hawaii, but raised in New Haven, the 37-year-old Yamaguchi has been living at the Duncan Hotel for two years now. SCENE found him yesterday manning the oldest hand-operated elevator in Connecticut at the hotel, his eyes glued to the screen of his phone. He sat down with us for a »

Of the handful of hotels in New Haven, the Duncan is easily the oldest. And it shows. Its lobby is decorated with black-and-white photos of Yale men in football uniforms, still in their original chipped frames. Its ceilings still feature tin moldings, decorated with small neoclassical flourishes, paneling and flaking chips of gold leaf. And »

Is it possible for interns to sue their employers? It’s a question that a lot of summer interns ask themselves, sometime between wiping the dried tears off their faces and brushing the beads of sweat off their brows. But this summer, aside from all the usual reasons to cry to a lawyer, I had something »

Last spring, on a balmy, sunny Friday afternoon, I got a very important phone call from my sister. She told me to find somewhere quiet and sit on something firm. I, anxious and excited, threw my bag on the lawn and sat in the Branford hammock. “Guess who can’t smile anymore,” she started, whispering the »

André Leon Talley beckoned us to perch on either side of him. He was sitting in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library before his Wednesday Master’s Tea, his Chado Ralph Rucci coat with images of dancers from Pina Bausch’s company (“not pornographic”) draped around him. Talley — who graces the Vogue masthead ­— is »

New Haven is home to a lot of weird societies. There are the College’s countless secret societies, there’s the Lawn Club, a Society of Model Engineers, the Board of Aldermen and the Angler’s Journal. And while little is publicly known about many of these societies, the one trustworthy guide to differentiating them all is that »