Author Archives: Yuval Ben-David

As the specter of final exams confronts me with my spectacular ignorance, I find it healthy to take the occasional inventory of the little wisdoms Yale has taught me.

In two weeks, I’ll hit the obscure, awkward age of 19 — a little above adult, a step below maturity — and yet, I’ll have lived 19 times, at least, died 19 times, at least, to feel a bit above the whole birthday hoopla.

I’d like to say that “The Twins Would Like to Say” is, to say the least, awesome.

Opera: that classically entwined genre that shrieks at you from a high, high pedestal. One hundred-and-twenty DS’ers bursting into song. Harold Bloom on acid. Opera lumbers towards you from five centuries’ distance, chasing after extinct categories of love and tragedy. If you’ve ever heard diplomats talk about borders, that’s how opera talks about love: Endless quibbles, a neurotic push-and-shove. How gracefully, then, “Castor et Pollux” annoys you.

Somewhere in the family tree of Carrie Bradshaw and Lena Dunham sits Rebecca Dana ’04, the author of the recently released “Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde,” former senior correspondent for The Daily Beast and former editor in chief of the Yale Daily News.

Satires were meant to be written with knives. Is it surprising, then — or troublingly unsurprising — that the device of a knife (long, stainless steel, serrated edge) acts as the central support of “January Joiner,” the self-styled “weight loss horror comedy” now playing at the Long Wharf Theatre?

The application process for the Yale Women's Organization scholarship is not especially arduous. But first, Yale employees need to be aware of its existence

Last week, Paul Goldberger ’72 won the National Building Museum’s 14th annual Vincent Scully Prize — as good as it gets in his field — for his life-long work as an architecture critic, first at The New York Times (where he won a Pulitzer in 1984) and, until last year, at The New Yorker, where he wrote the magazine’s “Sky Line” column. These days, he serves as a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and lectures at The New School in New York, where he holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture. Goldberger’s most recent book, “Why Architecture Matters,” was released by Yale University Press in 2009. Goldberger caught up with WEEKEND and riffed on his former pro- fessor, campus buildings and the contemporary constituency for architecture.

It’s a good thing I had my ID at the theater last night because an usher asked me for it at the door. It took me a good long while to figure out that this little bureaucratic trip-up was an extension of the performance — not exactly street art, but foyer art, if you will »

There’s a number in “Spring Awakening” called “Totally Fucked,” and though this production isn’t totally fucked — no, not totally — it bears some resemblance to the song’s lyrics, which go, “Blah blah blah blah.” Don’t get me wrong; this is a thrilling musical. It’s also just one damn thing after another. Instead of “The »

Here are the animals I saw last night at the Zoo: penguin piñatas, a caterpillar doll, some stuffed quadrupeds I couldn’t quite identify and — yes, even though they wouldn’t they like me to say it — some beastly computer science students, communing with the animal spirits of the 38 multiprocessors with names like “ladybug” »

A few years back, when I hit puberty, my dad put a copy of “Portnoy’s Complaint” in my hands. That’s the Philip Roth book, you’ll remember, that “put the id back in yid.” Neil Simon took that project seriously, and “Lost in Yonkers” — his 1991 Pulitzer Prize winning play — takes a circumcision-scalpel to »