Author Archives: Sam Lasman

This is shocking, so brace yourself. I used to go to Harvard. Yes, proud and multigenerational Yaleman that I am, I made the ultimate betrayal. I’m the Benedict Arnold of higher education, the Ivy League Iscariot. I took classes amongst those bland red bricks, ate at various cheap eateries around the Square, rode the T, »

I had a lot of nightmares as a kid. Given that this was more or less the only traumatic thing I had to deal with as a small suburban child, I invested quite a lot of worry in it. I fretted constantly about how exactly I would confront the nightly visitations of ghouls, sharks, and »

I have a confession to make. I have never been to the Burrito Cart. That’s right. Never. I’ve never been to either of them, but for the purposes of this column I’ll focus on my relationship with Tijuana Taco Company, the one on the north-east corner of the intersection of Elm and York, the “TJ” »

While huddled under an archway this past Tuesday night, thoroughly wind-blown and sodden, some of my fellow juniors and I had a conversation with a police officer who had been posted under that archway, presumably to deter people like us from doing anything much crazier than standing there and looking silly. After pointing out that »

Whenever things get really sad, when the smog-blackened snow seeps into my socks and the wind blisters my face and G-Heav charges me a cruel extra dollar for my egg and jalapeño on a morning when I have an oral presentation on a movie I haven’t watched in a foreign language I don’t speak, I »

There’s nothing quite like a hockey game to make me realize how big Yale is. Here’s this giant stadium, this vast, seething mass of puffy-jacketed student life, and I know — maybe three of these people? It’s like reading a book in Croatian. “Aha!” I might say, were I to read such a book. “Hamburger. »

It’s that time again: The holiday season is nothing but a distant memory, and winter’s cold indifference weighs heavily on all our souls. WEEKEND got staff photographer Brianne Bowen to capture in images the ineffable sorrow of our time, then asked Sam Lasman and Peter Damrosch to write some heart-wrenchingly poetic captions. They gave us »

Can people please stop apologizing for Chanukah? Yes, I KNOW it’s “not actually the Jewish equivalent of Christmas” and that “American Jews just make it an important holiday so their kids don’t feel left out in December.” I KNOW it doesn’t have a very sound scriptural basis. I KNOW it celebrates an obscure military victory »

Every year, around the post-midterm blues, I begin feeling like I’m in France. Not just because I’m surrounded by impossibly svelte people in scarves who spend their time carbo-loading and wondering condescendingly, “What is existence?” And not just because our campus towers take on a Gallic flavor against autumnal skies. Rather, it’s because in the »

Shopping period has its darker side for the Yale theater community. In a perverse and dystopian re-imagining of the daytime flow between Luce and Labyrinth, Marvin Chun and Shelly Kagan, we scurry to overlooked common rooms and basement bunkers, following scrawled paper signs and propped doorways. Under unflattering fluorescent, we peddle our dubious charms to »