Author Archives: Natasha Thondavadi

Amale Andraos and Dan Wood are the principal architects at WORKac, a New York-based architecture firm known for its cutting-edge urban designs incorporating nature into the life of cities. On Thursday, Andraos and Wood spoke at the School of Architecture about their architectural philosophy, discussing both their academic contributions and their building projects. Entitled “Nature-City,” »

Born to a Jewish family in Iran in the mid-sixties, Roya Hakakian fled to the United States in 1985 on political asylum. She has since become well known as a Persian poet and an Iranian-American journalist, publishing essays in prominent newspapers and a memoir in addition to working on several television news programs. Her latest »

I have a confession. I can’t count the times when, listening to a song with a pumping beat and trying to stay awake through those last 100 lines of Latin, I have just wanted to get up, flail my arms around and dance. Let’s not lie, I do this all the time. It’s obviously one »

Food reviews about Miya’s tend to have common themes. One such trope goes something like “yeah, it’s totally great that you can get some healthy brown rice and pieces of vegetable for three bucks, but no one likes those ‘weird rolls.’” These seemingly unnatural, not quite-sushi dishes get a lot of hate from those turned »

I’ve always been the kind of girl who can transition from Lucretius to Cosmo within the same hour. So when, tired from a day of seminar, I’m confronted with the opportunity to go to a “talk” and take advantage of one of our university’s numerous extracurricular intellectual offerings, my brain automatically places high stakes on »

Q. When I first saw this course title, I was intrigued but a little confused. How do you explain something like attraction? What exactly is this class about? A. I like to say what it isn’t: a self-help class. I’m not going to solve anyone’s personal relationship problems. The class is about the empirical work »

The works of Shakespeare and Western literary culture are inextricably linked. This is understood as fact by any Yale student: How often do we all endure lectures on the Western canon? But it is less obvious that Shakespeare could resonate just as deeply in the East. “Shakespeare Wallah,” a 1965 film directed by James Ivory »

Urban legend holds that in the era of our grandfathers, the Game was a different place. Where today we have tailgating, beer and barbecues, they had restaurants, cocktails and fancy dates. If we’re to take the social reminisces of JD Salinger’s “Franny” seriously, football games put a stamp of permanence on relationships with the same »

You’ve got mail. And of course, it’s from Ronnell. I still remember my first Ronnell Higgins email (or at least, my Gmail does). It was August 29, 2010, Camp Yale freshman year and classes hadn’t even started. This was the first alert for me and my newly minted classmates about the goings-on outside of Old »

What do the Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen and small-scale, sustainable farming have in common? Food Day New Haven, the local, grassroots version of a national campaign started by the Center for Science and Public Interest, seeks to unite such different food issues into a common dialogue. Organized by Yale students Susannah Albert-Chandhok ’14, Connor Bell »

“Vannakkam,” my Tamil teacher greets each of the four students in our class as we enter a small basement room of the Center for Language Study every day. So much about the scene is strange — the really comfortable armchairs arranged in a circle, the sound of retroflex consonants, produced by flicking the tongue against »

Stephen Feigenbaum ’12 is a classical composer. He has many accolades, such as the ASCAP Young Composer Award. He has received fellowships to the Bowdoin International Music Festival and the Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. His compositions have been performed at the Green Room in San Francisco, Lincoln Center in New York, and in cities across »