Author Archives: Ava Kofman

To stabilize Newhallville, Neighborhood Housing Services pioneered a strategy called the “cluster approach” that buys and renovates groups of contiguous houses simultaneously. But for a long time, nobody reached out at all.

When praising Elizabeth Bishop, the poet James Merrill wrote, “… The unpretentiousness of her form is very appealing… The way her whole oeuvre is on the scale of a human life; there is no oracular amplification, she doesn’t go about on stilts to make her vision wider. She doesn’t need that. She’s wise and humane enough as it is.” This praise is equally true of Sarah Ruhl, one of today’s most celebrated and strikingly original playwrights, and it is especially applicable to her newest work, “Dear Elizabeth,” which is currently in its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater through December 22. The brief summary provided on the poster states that “Dear Elizabeth” is “a play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again.” Which is also to say: “Dear Elizabeth” is the story of the sympathetic and lively connection of two of this century’s greatest poetic minds. WKND corresponded with Ruhl, alas by phone not post, as she took the train into New Haven to attend the play’s afternoon rehearsal.

Time is not often on the side of remembrance. Fighting against temptation towards silence, the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies has been central in pioneering the processes of recording, researching, theorizing and preserving audiovisual testimonial materials. This year marks the archive’s 30th anniversary at Yale. The collection is home to 4,500 testimonies that have »

There was once a race of carefree woods-loving giants. At some point in Scandinavian mythology, these giants, called trolls, turned into imp-sized remnants of their former adventurous selves and moved from the woods into caves underground. In recent centuries, the evolutionary gap between malicious and benevolent troll species has only widened, with the latter nearing »

Through constructing elaborate sets, as in films, Gregory Crewdson ART ’88 photographs scenes of mourning and melancholy. Despite, or perhaps because of, his use of sublime twilight, Crewdson captures the surreal just below the suburban surface. Crewdson speaks about David Lynch as one of his major influences. And one can feel a lot like Jeffrey »

“But let me not be understood as admitting, even by implication, that the existing relations between the two races in the slaveholding States is an evil,” John C. Calhoun 1804 argued on the U.S. Senate floor in 1837. “Far otherwise, I hold [slavery] to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to »

For a talk about “The Future of the Book,” the Historical Library within the Cushing/Whitney Medical Library — part Victorian study, part evil-Swiss-scientist chalet — with high wooden ceilings, dark velvet curtains and a balcony of dusty books, acts as a room of speaking corpses. In the evening of Monday, Jan. 30, John Collins ’91, »

James Jesus Angleton ’41, breeder of rare orchids and disputably a paranoiac, founded and edited the short-lived but reputable literary magazine, Furioso, during his time as an undergraduate at Yale. Beginning a series of enthusiastic correspondences with Ezra Pound after the two met in Italy during the summer of 1938, Angleton published Pound’s poems along »

Capitalizing on the success of simulations like Guitar Hero and Rock Band, the recently launched mainstream game Rocksmith actually teaches you guitar as you play it. And the pedagogy uniquely emphasized by games — learning by doing — develops concurrently with the player’s growing skill in a way that traditional textbook learning does not. “In »

Technology failed us. Dictation died. GarageBand died. Microsoft Word died. But the words of Henry Finder ’86, the editorial director of The New Yorker since 1997, still came through to Backstage. WEEKEND caught up with Finder on the way to his Branford Master’s Tea shortly after he visited Professor Fred Strebeigh’s English 454 class. Finder »

Last week’s article, the first in a series about video games at Yale, pointed out that in the last decade video games have evolved from a “media non grata” to a popular, radical and challenging new art form. And yet, at an institution that tends towards the cerebral, video games receive almost no scholarly attention. »

Simon Jarvis’ work demands new thought all the time. This was the claim made in the invitation and introduction to the reading of his poetry on Nov. 2 in LC 311, and it proved true. Jarvis is a professor of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Robinson College, literary scholar, poet and »