He showed up at her door, 3B, at 6:58 p.m. When he had promised over the phone that he would arrive at her apartment door promptly at 7 p.m.; she had not stopped to consider the good deal of wiliness that it would take him to properly get into her building, pass the buzzer and navigate the hallways to her difficult-to-find door, but as he stood in front of her with one disconcertingly vibrant pink carnation, she couldn’t help but wish she had worn her serrated headband for extra protection.

Before this evening, they had vaguely known each other through a mutual friend — had run into each other quite a few times at Starbucks, in bars, on the street — and had exchanged pleasant bouts of small talk, but never anything remarkably flirtatious or particularly arousing. In fact, she was the one who had technically made the first move, asked their mutual friend to hint that he should ask her on a date. She was bored of sitting with her coffee alone, and he always looked rather charming and presentable across the Starbucks table with his own latte, so she thought it might be a suitable match.

Given her maddened heartbeat as she heard him rap at her door, though it is unclear why she thought she could possibly be prepared for such an outing, especially when she hadn’t even done a thorough background check. So, just as she reached to open her door, she made a last-second decision to throw a large and chunky sweater over her otherwise moderately sexy ensemble.

As they walked down the stairs and across several blocks to their dining location (a small, but decently elegant diner that she had chosen specifically for its highly populated surroundings) the force of the wind barely budged her chastely armored body, but threatened to blow her carnation away on several occasions. The dinner was nice. Standard cordiality, slightly uncomfortable, but occasionally charming conversation; this made her wary. Whatever was to come, she needed to be prepared. As they lingered over coffee and a shared slice of subpar pecan pie, she grew increasingly on edge. Perhaps it was only her numerous precautionary layers, but she soon found herself sweating profusely.

After what seemed like a decade, the check arrived. He reached toward his pocket, and the panic that had been mounting inside her finally struck. He was pulling out a weapon. She knew she must beat him to it. Adrenaline coursed through her. She shoved her hand into the breast pocket of her jacket.

“I’ll pay.” She practically howled. He shriveled back with his jaw slacked, “I mean … um, OK … if you really want to … ”

“I do!,” she barked. “I mean, yes, I do, I really do want to pay.” He would not seduce her. Even over $6 Chardonnay.

I see you. Waking from a nap one afternoon, I tugged back my dark blue curtain to let in the light. But you filled my room instead:  the orange dresses some of you were wearing as you snapped group photos in your front yard, behind the closed gate, and the chandelier shining through the tan stones that cover your largest window.

I wish you were not the first thing I see when I wake up. I wish you were not the last thing I see before I lie down to sleep. I wish I didn’t stare into your always shut eyelids each time I rise up from downward dog on my yoga mat. You are at eye level with the windows of my bedroom, but you never make eye contact. What a poor neighbor.

I actually didn’t know about secret societies until a fellow pre-frosh pointed out the Skull and Bones tomb during Bulldog Days. I was amazed I hadn’t noticed it before. The imposing windowless building loomed over the street in a way that only something called a tomb would. But it fit into every other impression I was getting from Yale that week—large, impressive, elite.

My biggest fear was that Yale would make me think that I was large and impressive and elite. I didn’t realize it would make me feel so small, so much further from elite than I felt before I was associated with this school.

I didn’t notice any of the tombs until I did—and then they were all I saw. I was only a freshman, but secret societies already had me.

It wasn’t about getting in. It wasn’t about filling Sunday and Thursday nights. I realized that societies are not important for a rewarding senior year or affirming that you’ve done Yale right. It meant a lot to me that Marina Keegan ’12 was not tapped. I only met her a at a few meetings with the Dems and Occupy, but back home over every break, I would tell my old teachers and high school friends about how courageous she seemed. She was the coolest person I met my freshman year. I knew that if Marina wasn’t tapped, being tapped couldn’t be a valuation of one’s character.

But even Marina admitted, in a YDN op-ed, to feeling lame when she wasn’t tapped. Societies managed to make the coolest person I knew feel lame.

For me, it’s about the windows that I will not see inside. Any room is infinitely more tantalizing behind a locked door. And then the door cracks open just an inch and your heart leaps out of your chest.

Or at least, mine does. Every time I see the light on in Wolf’s Head. Every time I see someone parking a bike inside the Scroll and Key gate. That one time I passed Book and Snake on a run and saw a group snapping photos outside the open door and I lapped around the block twice because I just couldn’t look away.

I worry that it is only me. A few weeks ago, a Bonesman accidentally reply-all-ed a panlist, and hundreds of people got a glowing email meant for a tap. My jaw dropped. Wide-eyed and still buzzing in excitement, I brought the email up at lunch that day. No one really said much.

I was ashamed to have cared so strongly. But the door had cracked open. How were my friends not equally excited?

A fraction of Yale’s seniors are in secret societies. But societies are not just a part of the Yale experience for those seniors and they don’t just begin to matter during junior spring. Dotted across campus from York Street all the way to Whitney, societies loom over us for years before we have any chance to maybe be considered worthy of peeking inside.

The tombs are large, impressive, elite—but they remind us we are not. They act as a capstone to the Yale experience, but one that most of us won’t reach. Some of us will enter their doors. The rest will be left to feign nonchalance when we hear the howling of Wolves outside our windows and to pretend not to notice the gate opening for one scarce moment. There is no amount of times that repeating “Secret societies don’t matter” will make those words feel true.

Hungry? Broke? Desperate? Don’t worry – restaurant Week is here. WEEKEND explored 4 classy, popular and up-and-coming restaurants in New Haven and dished out what good deals and meals are out there. Masticating yet? (look it up, you philistine.)

Zinc

SCENE: Two highly under-qualified restaurant critics, EF and EB, enter Zinc. They are seated at a table. It is not the best table. In fact, it is an awkward table smushed to the side of the restaurant’s long thoroughfare. “If only they knew who we are,” EB and EF thought at once. The waitress asks if they would like a drink. They decline, but open the menus. 

EF: I am hungry.

EB: I pregamed with some peanut butter from the dining hall. Sorry. But this way I won’t be biased by hunger. Also, will Zinc be better than dining hall peanut butter? I’m really into that peanut butter.

EF: Ooh, the Salmon.

EB: Definitely the salmon. Although the Vegetable Bolognese looks really good

EF: And the Organic Greens with Pistachio Vinaigrette and Piquillo Pepper Relish — or the soup? I feel lame ordering greens during restaurant week.

EB: Yes, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup is more interesting.

They do not consider the Shrimp Bruschetta, because capers are gross.

EB: Flan or Berry Crumble?

EF: Flan because it’s the first one on the list. I like that we picked the first one listed in each category so far.

EB: Also, I feel like flan is more … [Words fail her, but she definitely feels that flan is the right choice.]

EF: Can berries crumble?

The waitress returns. They proceed to order. EF orders because they only have enough money in their budget for one prix-fixe menu. EB has assured EF that she only wants a salad — she did pregame in the dining hall, after all — but that she will have bites of EF’s food.

EB: Can I also get the Organic Green salad?

The waitress gives her a look.

EB: I’m on a diet.

The waitress leaves.

EF: Is that going to be enough?

EB: I was seriously considering just getting a glass of wine.

The dour waitress brings a small plate of toasted things and gingery dip. 

EF: Yay, a bonus! What did she say these were?

EB: No idea. Corn something? I love free things.

They each try not to be the one to kill the toasty nibbles.

Reflecting on their order, the girls use the menu’s abundant choices as a metaphor for life. As in, they have a lot of choices right now. They are graduating in May. Intro Psych-grade psychoanalysis ensues. 

The food arrives.

EF: Ooh, the Tomato, Fennel + Orange soup!

EB: That smells great. It smells like borscht, but orange-y.

EF: Ow! Too hot!

EB: It’s soup.

EF: It tastes like chunky earth. You know what I’m trying to say? Not like dirt.

EB: …

EF: Like eating the organic aisle. Er, your grandmother’s garden.

EB: I actually dig this. And I don’t usually like “takes” on things. I want a traditional tomato soup, just done really, really well. But this is good. I’d get this again.

The bowl leaves. The next course arrives.

EF: Ooh, the Pan Seared Salmon with Sweet Cabbage + Caraway Slaw and Rye Berry Risotto!

EB: What even is a rye berry?

EF offers a forkful of risotto, ponders.

EB: Whoa, this tastes like the holidays at your parents’ friends’ house when you’re six. As in, it’s kind of spicy in a cinnamon-y way, but it also has a kind of foreign taste. Like feeling lost, and your parents are off in another room, and you have to play with kids you don’t know and who might try to trick you into locking yourself into a side room.

EF: Huh. [Masticating.] The salmon is perfectly seared. It’s so perfectly pan-seared. This is exactly what I want from a restaurant: I want them to do something that I couldn’t do. Sometimes I imagine myself cooking food that in reality I could never make, but, as it happens, someone can.

EB embarks on diatribe against “New American” cuisine. This diatribe has been redacted for the sake of just about everybody.

EB: … but the salmon is really good.

EB is approximately 4/10 of the way through her salad.

EF: All of the food is too hot, but after 20 seconds it’s perfect.

EB pauses to Instagram the food. Follow her at @thebrookestagram.

The plate departs. Dessert arrives.

EF: What is this? [Pokes at what appears to be two small granola clumps sitting next to the little flan.]

EB: I think those are the Candied Almonds.

EF: With the Cinnamon Flan, I feel as if I’m eating Cinnamon Toast Crunch!

EB: Yum. The texture of the flan is perfect, though.

EF: Yum.

EB: Yum.

The two fall into silence.

Curtain.

Contact Eliza Brooke and Emily Foxhall at 

eliza.brooke@yale.edu and emily.foxhall@yale.edu .

116 Crown

The world is a dangerous place. You can’t trust just anyone; they may try to deceive you, rip you off and make your life suck. So you must imagine that I was pretty skeptical when I found out I would be writing about 116 Crown for WEEKEND. “116 Crown?” Sounds more like a street address than a restaurant name, if you ask me. How could I be sure that this was even an establishment that serves food? I couldn’t be sure by looking at their website that they wouldn’t kill me if I went alone, so I had my good friend Alex accompany and protect me. We arrived promptly at 5:30 p.m. and were thankful to find that, in fact, 116 Crown was a real restaurant that existed and that also served delicious food.

The waiter seated us in a small booth and asked us what we wanted to drink. We said, “Water,” and he gave us four options: Cucumber-infused water, distilled tap water, distilled bottled water and distilled sparkling water. That sure is a lot of types of water — highly suspicious. We opted for distilled tap water, but later in the evening the waiter surreptitiously switched it out with the (admittedly tastier) cucumber-infused one. Some might call that nice. I call it underhanded and dishonest.

It’s really creepy when people order the same thing at a restaurant, so I ordered from the prix fixe menu while Alex got a burger. After we ordered, the waiter smiled and left my menu with me (but not Alex) in case I “changed [my] mind.” Changed my mind? What would cause me to change my mind? That’s pretty suspicious. I mean, I was happy with what I ordered and didn’t end up changing my mind, but it was as if the waiter was trying to warn me of something.

That something must have been “food of mysteriously high quality.” My first course was a large spinach salad with Gorgonzola, walnuts and strawberries. Though slightly overdressed, the salad was curiously delicious, the strawberries curiously fresh and the bits of nuts and cheese curiously flavorful. Even more disturbing was the hanger steak I received for my main course, which was cooked way too perfectly and served over a dollop of potato purée and red cabbage. I grew increasingly anxious that something was slipped into my cucumber water that made me hallucinate that I was eating an extremely tender cut of beef and that I would soon be hypnotized into working for 116 Crown forever, serving martinis to the after-work crowd at the restaurant’s light-up bar. Thank God that didn’t happen! Also, thank God the dessert I ordered — a rich chocolate trifle — was sweet enough to distract me from the nagging thought that the booth’s cushion was going to swallow me whole.

I was most paranoid when we received our check, especially since it took a while to get the attention of our waiter. What took so long? Was he whipping up a contingency plan since the drugged cucumber water scheme didn’t pan out? Probably, because when we received the check, it was tucked into a small, black Moleskine. I opened the notebook, thinking that it was our waiter’s diary that would have a desperate “Save yourselves, fast!” message or perhaps an antidote for the spiked cucumber water. No, it was actually a guestbook with two messages: “Gird your loins — Restaurant Week approaches!” and “Bring back the Rolito.” This was horrifying. What happened to these people? Why didn’t they sign their names? Did they write these statements under duress? I signed the check quickly, and Alex and I left before the glass of olives at the bar could sneak up on us.

It’s important to question things, people. You can’t just blindly accept great food when it’s handed to you. The world doesn’t work like that. The next time you’re at a restaurant, especially one as nice as 116 Crown, ask yourself if you’re enjoying a lovely dinner or just a part of some construct. For me, as much as 116 Crown’s food had a suspiciously delicious nature, the experience was the former — a lovely dinner.

Contact Will Adams at 

william.adams@yale.edu .

Zafra

With mismatched cups, colorful lighting, loud music and a generally busy atmosphere, Zafra’s vibe suggests “snacks and drinks with buddies” more than “New Haven Restaurant Week.” For this cramped Cuban bar on Orange Street with only about 10 tables, a $32 price tag just seems a bit much. And, sure enough, the bill associated with a Restaurant Week dinner may well surpass what you’d spend on a typical meal at Zafra.

When we arrived at Zafra on time for our reservation, a wait of “just two more minutes” ended up escalating closer to 20. The host was apologetic, though, and, to the restaurant’s credit, after being seated at a small two-stool table towards the back of the space, each round of orders came quickly out of the kitchen.

Of the three appetizer options, we chose the ceviche and papa rellena (in Spanish, “filled potato”).

The ceviche — served stone cold inside a halved and hollowed coconut shell—featured shrimp, mango, red onion, tomato, and lime juice. It was light, refreshing, and clean. Still, it lacked the aji or chili of more traditional renditions, and, as a result, didn’t really ever have the kick that you’d expect from ceviche. Instead, the mango was left alone to dominate the flavor of the dish.

The papa rellena was less successful: a dry and overdone potato did no favors to the chili-like picadillo that filled it. Spicy cherry peppers and jack cheese added zest, but these notes didn’t make up for the otherwise underwhelming course.

But the platillos principales came out quickly enough — and were good enough — that we could forgive the rocky start.

Heralded by the menu as “Our Specialty!,” the hearty lechon asado would easily satisfy any college student’s appetite. (Some made its way back to the suite in a takeout box.) The slow roasted pork, rich and fatty, was tasty, and the yucca and sautéed onions served alongside it were mild, allowing the house-made tangy mojo sauce to take the fore. The highlight of the sides was a cup of black beans, with a smoky chipotle preparation that managed to stand out.

We also ordered the Carribbean snapper, which came recommended by the host.  Being presented with the snapper dish felt like receiving a sacrificial offering: the fish was served whole—all 14 inches of it, eyeball still in socket—over a bed of Cuban red beans and rice, peppers, and shaved carrot. The fish was flaky, so it was easy to debone. It was easy to eat, too: the meat was delicate, perfectly cooked, and delicious—flavorful, but not too fishy. The skin, blackened and spiced, was a treat in itself. The sides, on the other hand, were lackluster: For all their color, the red beans and rice were overcooked and bland; the tostones (fried and salted green plantains) came out more chewy than crispy. Even so, the snapper made the entrée a winner.

When the host returned to collect the food, he asked us if we’d eaten the snapper’s eyeball. “The eyeball is meant to give you good fortune,” he said. “And I’ll tell ya — I ate one recently, and I’ve had great fortune!” For some reason, good fortune was sounding less appetizing than dessert, so we chose to go straight to the latter.

Both desserts, though small in portion, were large in flavor. Hazelnut Rum Bread Pudding was served hot and smooth over caramel sauce. The sauce tasted a touch burnt, but in a good way—like the torched top layer of a crème brûlée. Bread puddings can often be soggy; this one wasn’t. It was easy to cut, chewy, and rich. The mocha caramel flan was equally good: its sweetness wasn’t overpowering, and berries layered on top helped make the dessert feel refreshing.

In the end, our dinner at Zafra wasn’t bad—the main courses and desserts beat Yale Dining at its best—but, for a $32 Restaurant Week menu, you might be better off going somewhere where that price is a deal, rather than an uptick. As for this Cuban bar, the most appealing option might still be ordering bar food: on our next visit, count us in for the nachos and mojitos being enjoyed at the table next to ours.

Contact Daniel Stern and Skylar Shibayama  at 

daniel.stern@yale.edu and skylar.shibyama@yale.edu .

ROÌA

Ever since the ROÌA Restaurant and Café opened on College Street last March, most of the buzz has been about its architecture. The ’20s-themed restaurant exists in what was the dining hall of the Taft Hotel over a century ago, and months of renovation were put into the space. But now that the pomp of the reopening of the space had settled, I wanted a chance to taste the dining experience for the food itself.

The first thing that struck me when I entered the restaurant for dinner was how spacious the main dining area was. I had to concede — the renovation truly was impressive, with beautiful woodwork and a decorative plaster ceiling. I felt the history of the building, especially with jazz music filling the wide two-story space. But something about that spaciousness felt a little off to me: More than half the tables were still empty at 7:15 p.m., and it was strangely very bright. It felt very much like a café; I would have liked the lighting to be dimmer for dinner.

The service staff was very friendly and attentive. We didn’t have to wait very long for any of our requests. Sometimes the attention we were given was overwhelming, and made it hard to have a conversation. It was an atmosphere that was appropriate for an opening week, but a month in, it was a little distracting.

To start, we ordered local diver scallops with a celery root puree, port wine reduction and watercress salad. Unfortunately, the serving size was very small — just three scallops — but they were cooked and seasoned perfectly, and the celery root puree was an interesting addition that I liked a lot. We were also served delicious sourdough bread, which was carried over in a very cute wicker basket.

For the entrée, I ordered the arctic char with whipped potatoes, lacinato kale and thyme cipollini onions. I am usually not big on fish, but the char was delicious. The presentation was eloquent and simple. My date ordered the Tagliatelle Bolognese — egg yolk pasta with natural beef and veal ragu. He commented that the Bolognese was a bit too sour, but in all, he loved the dish so much he gave me dagger eyes whenever I stole some from his plate. Again, the use of simple but delicious ingredients was a huge success for the dishes. The entrees were modest in style but so flavorful that they offered a unique aura to the dish.

For dessert, we ordered panna cotta infused with mint and served with orange confit, as well as rice pudding with vanilla bean, salted caramel and roasted pistachio. Both were delicious — again, ROÌA was striving for a delicate flavor instead of large portion sizes or sweet frostings. The panna cotta was presented in a small jar, which added to the stylish décor that the restaurant offers.

Still, with a venue so big, ROÌA has huge shoes to fill. All the empty seats did make the experience feel a little odd: for the price, the emptiness and the lighting made the environment a bit too casual. A month out from its opening, the restaurant would benefit by seeking to fill more of its seats perhaps through more vigorous marketing, if only to improve the ambience. Nonetheless, the potential is definitely there.

I have no doubt that ROÌA — with food so delicious and a staff whose excitement is very obvious — will fill those seats. It will take some time to develop the reputation of some of New Haven’s other restaurants, but I believe that ROÌA soon find itself as a New Haven classic for years to come.

Contact Karolina Ksiazek at 

karolina.ksiazek@yale.edu .

She realizes that’s “not normal.”

When Huang first came to Yale, she found herself staying up late much more often than she had in high school and gradually consuming more caffeine. Part of it was the nocturnal lifestyle college seemed to demand. Part of it was the culture of meeting people for coffee, working in coffee shops.

Huang can list off the effects drinking caffeine has on her: “My palms sweat, my heart starts racing, my mental to-do list just starts forming without my consent in my head. I have a really hard time enjoying things just to enjoy them. I feel really intense.”

After a “bad” beginning to her sophomore year, Huang began seeing a counselor at Yale Mental Health and realized there was a correlation between her negative moods and not sleeping enough — and with having to use coffee to keep awake.

Now she’s back to her high school schedule. She has tried bringing friends around to her way of thinking, but hasn’t had much success so far.

After all, there’s a prevailing sense on campus that, in the words of a recent Red Bull campaign, “Nobody ever wishes they’d slept more in college.”

And we don’t have to. We don’t have to drink Red Bull either: We’ve got options. Reading “week” starts tomorrow, and from what I can tell through conversation osmosis, everybody is basically fucked. A News survey conducted earlier this week shows that more than 70 percent of students feel “somewhat” or “very” stressed about the upcoming finals period.

Over the next 10 days, Yale’s student body will deal with the end of year crunch by consuming stimulants including coffee, tea, energy drinks, 5-hour energy shots and prescription stimulant drugs intended for the treatment of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).

“I’m not classically against drugs,” said Hedy Kober, an assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Yale School of Medicine. “But everybody who takes drugs has a responsibility to know exactly what they’re taking and what they’re doing [to their brains and bodies].”

***

According to a 2005 New Scientist article reassuringly titled “Coffee: The demon drink?”, 90 percent of adults in North America consume caffeine daily in some form, and the Internet of 2013 seems to pretty much agree with that number.

I’m not sure if that’s us already, or just future us. But we’re getting there.

The longer we stay awake, the more our brains produce a chemical called adenosine, which makes us want to go to sleep. While sleeping, we make less and less adenosine, so that in the morning we wake up feeling less tired than when we went to bed. Caffeine is primarily an “adenosine antagonist,” Kober explained: Technically it is a “sleepiness-reducing” agent rather than an “energy-producing” agent, though feeling less sleepy may leave us more energetic.

Caffeine also increases the action of dopamine and norepinephrine, neurotransmitters associated with, among other things, energy and euphoria. But this is a secondary action. What caffeine mostly does is stop the brain from following through with its natural sleep-promoting processeses.

All of which makes me pretty nervous. I’ve been dealing with the opposite problem on and off for most of the last eight years. During peak angst times (grades six through 12), I’m pretty sure 3/4 of the emotions I experienced were produced by insomnia. It’s hard not to feel Kierkegaardian levels of Despair when you’re consistently the only one awake in your house during the witching hours.

Drinking caffeine has, until recently, been unthinkable. Once, in sixth grade, I tried a cappuccino. I didn’t sleep for a full day and a half. At home, my parents still get mad at me for eating so much as a piece of dark chocolate after 7 p.m.

John Sununu ’15 has always had coffee in his house and in his life. Starting around age 12, he began to sample some himself. It made him feel grown up.

His freshman year of high school, Sununu first started drinking coffee in the evenings to help him make it through late nights of studying. By junior year, Sununu realized he was drinking between seven and eight caffeinated beverages a day. He decided it was time to stop.

“I was alone and irritable and interning, and detoxing cold turkey,” Sununu recalled. “I was really fidgety and always falling asleep in the middle of important things, which is not good when you’re interpreting.”

Sununu went back to drinking coffee after the summer, but feels he has a healthier relationship with it now that he knows he could quit if he really needed to. Still, he added:

“It’s just easier to have a little extra energy — or a lot of extra energy.”

For most of this year, even if I’d slept nine hours out of the past 48, it didn’t occur to me try anything stronger than weak green tea. But I’ve started to think about experimenting. First, though, I decided to seek out a few of the uncaffeinated 10 percent, and see what they had to say.

For Kerri Lu ’14, coffee just doesn’t work. She gets about 20-30 minutes of nervous energy before she crashes and falls asleep. The same thing happened when she tried 5-hour Energy, but she admitted she wasn’t brave enough to pound the whole thing at once. Lu more or less summed up the concerns seven other students interviewed cited about the product when she said she was worried it would make her heart “explode.”

“It scares me, because I think I would really enjoy drinking [5-hour Energy] to stay awake,” Lu said. “I would probably resort to those things if they helped me physically.”

But for at least a small portion of Yale’s student body, whether or not coffee would help doesn’t matter. What does is maintaining a sense of spiritual responsibility over what does — and doesn’t — go into the body. The Church of Latter Day Saints’ health code requires Mormons to abstain from consuming “harmful and addictive substances,” said Russell Ault ’14. The church explicitly forbids alcohol, tea, coffee and tobacco.

“Mormonism has a strong emphasis on agency,” Glorianna Tillemann-Dick ’14 said. “Developing an addiction reduces agency because we feel the need to partake in the same specific substances.”

Glorianna and her sister, Mercina Tilleman-Dick ’14, have different approaches to living through the prohibition. Mercina allows herself the very rare Diet Coke, but generally plans her schoolwork so as to avoid needing to stay up too late.

Glorianna pulls all-nighters fairly regularly but keeps herself up with lots of water and small naps. When done naturally, it’s hard to feel that it’s “no big deal” to stay up all night, Glorianna added. By allowing herself to feel the physical consequences of her decision without the aid of stimulants, she keeps the emphasis on her own agency — and what she describes as her failure to plan her time better.

Huang would prefer to email a teaching fellow and tell them she’ll be turning a problem set in late rather than compromise her health in the long run.

But when it comes to sleep, she said, “I think we’re the few and the proud here.”

***

When Rachel* found herself left with a single night to cram for a final her freshman year at Yale, a friend asked her if she wanted some Adderall. She needed to stay up all night, and coffee had always made her feel jittery. The Adderall kept her awake, and she felt like she was getting a lot done.

According to a 2009 study by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, full-time college students 18-22 are twice as likely to use unprescribed Adderall as their non-full-time student counterparts. The report underscores Adderall’s role as a ‘study drug’ on campuses across the nation.

Sadie*, another sophomore girl, has used un-prescribed Adderall as a study aid on several occasions. She drinks coffee at other times to keep herself awake, but said that it doesn’t give her anything close to the increase infocus and motivation she feels when on Adderall.

Otherwise, Sadie said, taking it doesn’t make her feel much different.  She has never experienced any negative side effects and doesn’t know anybody who has. She said she knows a broad spectrum of users on campus.

And with reading and finals period ahead, she is asking around for more Adderall.

“But it’s not 100 percent necessary,” Sadie maintained. “I can organize my [work] so I don’t need it. It’s not like I plan to use it … If I can find some, I’ll use it, but I’m not going to seek it out unless the people I usually go to have it.”

She can get it from friends who have it prescribed to them or others who have obtained it from someone else with a prescription. Prices vary with the dose of the pill she’s buying.

Sununu also knows students at Yale who use the drug regularly.

“On the whole, [stimulants like Adderall are] relatively easy to access, and college kids have grown used to the idea that if they need to access them they can,” he said.

But he is not prepared to condemn his classmates’ Adderall use outright: “I don’t want to judge anyone for their personal decisions. As long as people stay healthy and safe, I think it’s their prerogative to do what they need to do.”

Sadie said that the only people at Yale she would peg as not using Adderall would be those who already devote so much time to school work that they would not need the extra boost.

Adderall and many other ADD/ADHD medications are part of a category of stimulants called amphetamines, which keep you awake by entirely different means than caffeine does. They do not bind onto adenosine. Instead, like other stimulant drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines work primarily on dopamine and norepinephrine, which also have roles in promoting wakefulness. Amphetamines are extremely close relatives of the methamphetamines (see: Breaking Bad).

Students don’t think of them that way. Sadie doesn’t see developing an addiction to Adderall as a concern, given the infrequency and low doses of her consumption. And she added that she finds students see Adderall as ‘less illegal’ than other drugs, since “no doctor is ever going to prescribe you cocaine.”

“Adderall is not generally viewed as a party drug — it’s viewed as a drug for college students that have to get their shit done,” Sadie said.

Part of the reason Adderall may seem less intense than other drugs has to do with the method of taking it rather than its chemical composition. When taken in pill form, part of the pill is degraded in the stomach, and the effects are felt more gradually. If snorted, some of the drug would get lost in the nose, but what was ingested would go to the brain much more quickly, Kober said. She added that the effects of snorting Adderall would be more akin to snorting something like crystal meth. And the faster the drug enters the brain, the greater the chance of one’s forming an addiction.

Kober said because the drug is relatively new, the medical world lacks research on whether taking these stimulants in college will harm you in the long run. But researchers also don’t know that it doesn’t.

Robert Malison MED ’87, a professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine who studies stimulant use and addiction, said the best current research demonstrates that one in 10 people who try Adderall or similar amphetamines will develop an addiction. That might sound like good news: it means that 90 percent probably won’t. But it’s a gamble students should at least know they are taking, Malison feels.

He is worried about students’ growing use of such stimulants. To illustrate its risks, he brought up the example of the methamphetamine craze that has swept over Thailand in the past decade. It began with over-the-counter capsules, which he said were used primarily by university students and truck drivers to stay up through the night.

The pills have now crossed over into all parts of Thai society. Malison recounted how on a research visit to Thailand, he saw eight and nine-year-olds in hospitals for addiction. And while they used to be called “diligence pills” they are now commonly called “crazy pills”: once users become addicted, the pills can make them psychotic.

Malison sees the rise of Adderall in the States as having “all the hallmarks of our country’s next stimulant epidemic.”

He is interested in further studying how the kind of sleep loss Yale students report can make individuals more vulnerable to addiction and said correlative (though not causal) studies have shown a link between the two.

“If you’re going without sleep for weeks, you’re most likely to feel those benefits and euphoric effects. We know young people are sleep deprived,” Malison added. “It’s fertile soil for the use of stimulants to plant themselves in. Mood changes evaporate on stimulants.”

When we lose sleep, our cognitive performance declines, said Dr. Vahid Mohsenin, director of the Yale Center for Sleep Medicine. Malison said some of the positive effects these stimulants have on cognitive function would likely be far more modest if users were sleeping enough in the first place.

The one time Rachel took Adderall, she experienced some of the euphoric effects Malison described.

“I was just intensely content and happy; I felt like everything was going to work out,” she said. “[When sober] I realized it was a fake, temporary feeling.”

But Rachel found herself crashing by the time of her final and had to drink two cups of coffee in the morning to stay awake. The exam didn’t go well, and she felt unable to eat or function normally for the rest of the day before passing out at 6 p.m. Looking back on the experience, she’s not at all sure that taking the drug had helped her study more than she would have on her own.

“At the time I was like, ‘Wow, I definitely need to take this all the time!’” she said. “After, I was like, ‘No way. I don’t want to do that to my body ever again.’”

***

So, to recap: the less you sleep, the more likely you are to resort to stimulants, such as amphetamines, and the more likely you will be to experience positive effects from taking them that can then lead to addiction — and which you might not experience if you had just slept more in the first place.

So why aren’t we just sleeping more?

Different animals sleep very different amounts, Mohsenin said. Horses and donkeys only need to sleep for about 3 hours a day. Large cats do about 16.

“Humans have been programmed for 7 to 8 hours,” Mohsenin said. “It’s all hard-wired.”

That is about one third of all of the hours we have each day. That means we’re supposed to be spending a third of our lives asleep, which sounds a little excessive. And four students interviewed agreed that at least part of what’s keeping us awake isn’t papers or problem sets: it’s FOMO, or fear of missing out.

Kevin Ho ’12 SPH ’13 said everyone at Yale loves sleep. But when it comes down to it, they just value other things more. According to the News survey, 60 percent of students sleep an average of 6 hours or less per night.

“The opportunity cost of sleeping at Yale is higher than at other places.” Ho said — there’s just so much else to do with your time. “We have the rest of our lives to sleep.”

And anyway, we are young! We’ll bounce back! And we all like to have a good battle story or two at the very end of the year. Last semester, I took five exams and turned in a term paper in the span of four days. On day five, I took a two-hour final about fish after sleeping two and a half hours. I later described the experience as both “harrowing” and “epic.”

Mohsenin said that a normal sleep pattern would mean that our internal sleep-producing forces are aligned with the external cycles of light and darkness. When these fall out of alignment, a range of things can happen, including increased insulin resistance—which is what leads to diabetes—and increased risk for stroke.

But sleep remains one of the few things we are collectively not that afraid of missing out on.

Science is telling us we’re wrong, but Science also tells us a lot of things. Whether wine/chocolate/tobacco/organ meat are recommended to us as healthy or carcinogenic can vary wildly from one decade to the next, and we don’t always listen. We’ve all heard the new studies saying the brain doesn’t finish developing till well into our 20s, that we shouldn’t be binge drinking so young. Many of us just don’t seem to care.

***

I remember hearing a particular verse read during Wednesday Lenten services at my Russian Orthodox church back home. It turned out to be Psalm 127:2, and of all the verses intoned by candle-light, it’s the only one I can recount almost from memory: “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep,”

Of course, if you look through the Bible hard enough, it seems you can find instructions telling you to do pretty much everything (lots of stoning to death).

In offices at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life, I asked for interpretations from two people who have spent considerably more time studying the text than I have: Rabbis Noah Cheses and James Ponet ’68. Cheses is young and soft-spoken. Ponet has gray hair but a lively and intense manner of speaking. He said he would offer me tea if he had more time.

Ponet explained that part of the idea of the “ever-watchful God” is that it gives us, people, permission to go to sleep. But especially in ego-driven environments like Yale, it’s hard to let go of the idea of constantly exerting control over bodies and minds.

“We feel a certain shame at limitations; we seek to show we aren’t bound by them,” Ponet said. “Sleep seems to be a thief that steals time.”

When the promise of control provided by caffeine didn’t work out for Lu, she had to come to terms with the fact she couldn’t push herself infinitely. She said that learning her own limits has been a college-long struggle for her, one that’s ongoing. “[By using stimulants] people think they can control nature and not subject themselves to the limitations of physiology, of their humanness,” Cheses said. “It’s the illusion of control.”

Ponet thinks there is room for us to think of sleep as more than just a physical weakness to be overcome. He linked the origin of the expression “I’m going to sleep on it,” to the sayings, “I’m going to pray on it,” or “I’m going to give it to God,” explaining that they all point to the fact that there are some things we can only understand with the unconscious mind. He also cited the many instances of revelatory dreams to be found in the Bible.

“There’s a connection between effort and attainment of truth in life,” Ponet said. “But that’s not always the case. There are gifts, miraculous insights. There are times exhaustive efforts prevent us from seeing what’s there already.”

On some special days in the Jewish calendar, one is asked to stay up all night long learning and studying the Torah. Cheses said these practices originate from around the time when coffee began to spread out of Northern Africa during the 15th century. But such celebrations are viewed as “exceptional evenings, when you’re intentionally going above and beyond nature,” he said. From a pastoral perspective, he counsels students to sleep.

“When they don’t sleep, they don’t have full access to their emotions, and they make dumb decisions because they are not fully aware of themselves,” Cheses said.

Ponet admitted, though, that he does find something special in the experience of being up and lucid at 11, 12, 1, 2.

I know what he means. Even in my insomnia years, I sometimes felt the exhilaration of being awake and reading long after midnight. It meant hearing things no one else around was hearing, being the only one to see and notice all the different kinds of darkness. Right up until this year, I wouldn’t take back any of the all-nighters I’ve pulled, however reluctantly.

But sleep has never been the enemy for me. Until, suddenly, it was. This semester, I planned my schedule knowing there was no way I could get more than 6 hours a night for most of the week, and would often have to make do with less. What worries me is that that this didn’t concern me. Since I came to Yale, I have gone from thinking of sleep as something with obvious, intrinsic value to seeing it as an inconvenience at best.

Common phrases like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” make us think of sleep as opposed to life. Sleep is not-doing. When we sleep, we give up acting on ourselves and on the world around us. We wake up with nothing tangible to show for it, except, hopefully, a reduction in the amount of adenosine floating around in our brains.

We won’t always live by semesters, with papers and p-sets to make us stay up. Yet 90 percent of us will go on drinking caffeine daily. And I think part of it has to do with the way we view sleep, and our bodies: as tools to control instead of to take care of, by drinking a cup of something or by taking a pill.

Red Bull says no one ever wishes they had slept more in college. It’s up to us to decide whether we’re going to believe them.

***

I wrote almost this entire article after midnight on a single night. When my friend went to G-Heav at around 2 a.m., I made a decision, and asked him to bring me a cup of coffee.

I could instantly taste the difference. It was sharper, more metallic than the decaf I’d been having for my entire life.

Within 20 minutes, I no longer felt like I was going to fall asleep, and I didn’t crash for a good few hours after drinking less than half the cup. So unlike Lu, I know it works for me now. I also felt surprisingly cheerful, more optimistic. I stayed focused for three more hours, but found myself more hung up on small details of word choice and grammar, however hard I tried to force myself to look at the big picture.

I also started to feel other things. I became weirdly, intensely aware of my heartbeat, which seemed to be getting faster and faster. My hands were shaking. After a while, everything was shaking. Still, I couldn’t believe how awake I was. I began to question why I hadn’t been doing this all along. I also thought about how, if I did choose to start drinking caffeine, I would probably never feel it quite like this again.

I thought of something Kober had told me. The other things it’s possible to experience when you take stimulants, such as increased jitters and anxiety, aren’t really side effects. They are just other effects. Stimulating our central nervous systems might mean less sleepiness, but it also means more of everything else, whether we want it or not.  As Huang put it, I felt “really intense.”

Around 5:30 a.m., the effects began to wear off. I was surprised to find out it was light outside.

I walked back to my room.

By 6:30 a.m., I was asleep.

*Name changed for anonymity.

Q. First of all, I’d love to know the history of San Fermin. How did you guys get together, and where did the idea come from to release an LP?

A. Right after I graduated from Yale in 2011, I spent two months in the Rocky Mountains in this studio there, called the Banff Centre. I had this idea to write this record. I didn’t know who would be singing on it or performing on it or anything. I just knew that I wanted to write this thing. There are a lot of classical musicians up at the Banff Centre, and the songs all became very interconnected, motivically and harmonically. There was an operatic scope to the thing as I was writing it. When I came back, I started talking to people about it – there was my friend Allen Tate, who sings on the record, I found some female singers in Brooklyn, Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig, and then I built the album around that.

It was actually funny, we had a finished album before we’d played a show, which was totally crazy. So then we needed to perform, so we played a show at Pianos in downtown New York. After that, we got an offer from Downtown Records. Then, things picked up. Now we’re planning a summer tour and a fall tour, and releasing the record in September.

Q. Was your performance at BAR part of that touring plan?

A. The BAR performance was sort of a warm-up, we’ve been changing around the personnel of the band. Last night was the first time that Rae Cassidy performed with us. She’s singing lead vocals now. She’s really great. And so we performed onstage to get us used to what will probably be a very long and sometimes brutal slog, this tour. And it was fun to get back to Yale, too.

Q. Do you feel many of the songs changing as you perform them and adapt them?

A. They change a little bit. It was interesting. I studied musical composition at Yale. I was writing classical music at school, and I ran the classical music group SIC InC when I was there. Because of that, I had this idea that you could figure out and write out, in notation, everything that you wanted and that then the performers would just do that. But the reality of it is, especially with indie-rock and pop singers, is that you have to work around, and work with, the voices that you have. So, as we’ve started to perform these things live, we definitely adjust to the singers. We change the key. We change the background harmony. We even change the forms of the songs in order to streamline it for a live performance.

Q. You mentioned that the album has an operatic theme. How does that play out? Do you think of the album as a unit?

A. Yes, so, when I was in Banff, I wrote a song a day for the first two weeks. No matter how complete the idea was each day, I’d move onto the next one the next day. The idea was that I thought that a lot of very concentrated creativity in one small period of time leads to a lot of subconscious connections. That was one of the ideas behind the record. I really wanted a lot of themes that connected throughout. There are melodic and harmonic themes that are consistent with certain ideas that come back throughout the record. The way I wrote the lyrics — I don’t sing — but I wrote for certain characters, mostly from books. “The Sun Also Rises” was a big help. It’s helpful for me, when I’m writing for someone else to sing something, to write from the mind of another character. At least for me, you get a little “singer-songwritery” if you write for yourself. If you write for characters, you end up writing about yourself, but through the lens of this fictionalized person.

Q. And the record’s theme?

A. The male singer has these grandiose thoughts. He’s sort of a blunted Romeo character. He knows he’s looking for something, but he can’t quite put his finger on it. The female character ends up being much more jaded. She cuts him down anytime he gets too big. Then there are these interludes through the record that help tie it all together. You hear the girl whispering and hear her inner life, and this is supposed to create a world where the two characters have a dialogue. There are these musical thematic connections that go through the interludes that then play out in the songs as well, which is consistent to the operatic idea that certain characters have certain themes, and that those themes change over the course of a narrative.

Q. When you were at Yale, did you mostly write classical music, or did you know that you wanted to go in an indie direction?

A. I had a series of bands when I was at Yale — to varying degrees of success — but I was mostly focusing on a classical approach. I came from a world in high school of playing for bands and stuff, but when I came to Yale I really wanted to immerse myself in the traditional classical side. I focused on composition, especially in my last two years. But there are all sorts of devices you can take from that world, even if you’re writing a pop song.

Q. And, according to your website, you are also collaborating on a ballet.

A. Yeah, there’s this choreographer, Troy Schumacher, who is part of the New York City Ballet, and he and I came up with the idea to work on this ballet that we’re going to perform at the Joyce Theater in August. And actually, he had the idea to work with Cynthia Zarin, who’s a professor at Yale. I was in her freshman year English class, and she’s now a very good friend of mine, and it wasn’t even my idea, at first, to get her involved. Anyway, the three of us got together and she wrote a narrative poem, from which we built this ballet. I’ve been working on that in the moments that I haven’t been traveling around playing rock music.

Q. How was it being back at Yale, performing at BAR?

A. It was weird, man! I’ve been out for almost two years now, but that’s long enough that all of the people have changed already. When you’re one year out, there are still people that you know, and now I’m kind of a stranger. My sister goes there now, so it’s her school at this point. But it’s great to be back. What was exciting about last night was the chance to bring back some Yale bands. There’s a lot of great stuff happening with recently graduated Yale bands. We play a lot with Great Caesar. Elijah from Plume Giant plays a lot with us. Magic Man is also doing great stuff. There’s a great community of Yalies in New York City. There are a lot of grads from the Yale School of Music there, too, so both of those two worlds are in the city.

Q. Do you see yourself leaning either way in the future — classical or rock?

A. The idea behind San Fermin was that it is a project that combines all the ways I naturally think about music, whether that’s from school or the radio. In that sense, I think, the answer is to mix it all up together. It’s a pretty exciting time to be just out of school and to be in New York, because there are so many opportunities open. I’m doing this ballet. I love writing chamber music. Whatever comes up naturally, I’m excited to do it. It’s a “say yes, and do it” sort of situation. In the future, it’d be nice to keep both those things going together. It looks like we’ll have a lot of shows and activities related to San Fermin, but there’s also a lot to be done in the other worlds of music. Whatever comes up, I’ll do it!

Did you know that Ron Paul went to Colgate University this week and admitted to an Eritrean student that he was racist? That was one of the many things that crossed my mind when I watched director Kesewaa Boateng’s ’15 interpretation of Rebecca Gilman’s 1999 “Spinning Into Butter.” The performance is effectively thought-provoking as it is meant to be, proof being the several relevant issues that crossed my mind as I watched the play: the egregious (from my perspective) column in the News last year calling into question the ER&M major, the millions of Tumblrs screaming “check your privilege” into the abyss of the internet, the Boston bombings and the reaction to the bombings.

But “Spinning Into Butter” revolves around a specific racial issue tackled by the Dean of Student Affairs, Sarah Daniels, portrayed by Mitra Yazdi ’15, at a small predominantly white liberal arts college called Belmont College — think a less diverse Dartmouth, but in Vermont. It follows her dealing with the fallout from a hate crime committed against an African-American student on campus, as well as her fellow administrators and teachers, all of whom range from woefully ignorant to unbearably pretentious. There’s race, there’s angst, there’s ignorance — by nature of the play, it’s a very juicy plot.

Despite the room the script gives the actors to bring these critical issues to life, the performance itself is a little stiff. Yale plays are often criticized for their over-theatricality, but “Spinning into Butter” was nonetheless overacted for my taste. The movements seemed almost too calculated, particularly in the second act, and the lighting was so dramatic to the point where it almost felt like they were shoving the symbolism and weight of the topic down your throat — a militant, less effective approach than a delicate touch for a sensitive topic. Although warranted, every line was screamed for the latter part of the second act, but I felt like they were screaming at me — and not each other.

These minor issues, however, were but few pitfalls in what is an incredibly strong story about a topic Yale needs to start an honest and open dialogue on. This story was, ultimately, aided by strong performances from two particular actors. Yazdi gave a notable performance, especially because she’s tasked with carrying virtually the entire play on her back. She delivered her lines with a reasoned tone that sounded less and less like she was reading a script (admittedly, it took her a while to settle into that rhythm). Her makeup and costuming added to the new wave “colorblindness” that her character embodies. I was particularly impressed with Yazdi’s delivery of the racist monologue which reveals all her character’s intentions (I won’t ruin it for you). She delivered it with just the right amount of poignancy and pain that I was waiting for someone, somewhere — maybe even me — to shout out “first world problems!” In fact, her performance was second only to the hilarious Leyla Levi ’16 who portrayed administrator Dean Catherine Kenney. With Levi, everything was perfectly timed, delivered with the right amount of socially awkward, self-centered frustration that we so associate with caricatures of administrators — I cannot praise her enough.

With regard to other actors’ performances, I followed a strange train of feelings — annoyed, confused, impressed, then confused — about Alex Saeedy’s ’15 portrayal of Ross Collins, the pretentious professor who sort-of-dated Yazdi’s character, then broke up with her, then remained friends with her (and maybe kind of dated her again?). At first, his speech patterns seemed unnatural and were off-putting, but later I realized that it was possibly to make his character more even more pompous. When his character seemed to come through in the clutch on behalf of human decency, I was impressed with his delivery of the lines and the genuine chemistry he displayed with Yazdi’s character in the second act; the line between romantic chemistry or just gay-best-friend chemistry is also playfully blurry. Unfortunately, this version of Ross Collins was completely inconsistent with the portrayal of him in the first act, which left me confused again, wondering if maybe the depth of Collins’ mysterious character had yet to be fleshed out.

Despite minor bumps in the acting, “Spinning into Butter” was incredibly thought provoking. This play is dramatic and intense — a combination sure to get students into discussion. Yale’s campus needs a change to the way we talk about race and relate to one another, and this show is definitely a way to get it started — it comes highly recommended from this reviewer.

“Spinning Into Butter” is showing in JE Theater from April 26 – 27.

It’s obvious, even from the first couple of scenes, that “Next To Normal” is designed to be impressive. The musical, as the play’s program helpfully points out, won a Pulitzer in its original Broadway run. It features impressive songwriting, trios and quartets that erupt out of petty arguments; a whirring plot that builds family drama and mental illness all the way into drug abuse and shock therapy; and ballads designed to tear your heart out. In this performance, however, the actors reach for the same drama, the same pathos and the same notes — finding them just beyond their belting range. You can imagine the target, but the feeling doesn’t quite land.

“Next to Normal”’s plot, fittingly, focuses on the idea of living in the shadow of something else. Diana Goodman (Rachel Goldstein ’16) is haunted, literally, by the early death of her son, Gabe (Jordan Schroeder ’16). Gabe died as a child, but Diana imagines that he has grown up, and pays more attention to him than to her daughter, Natalie (Tory Burnside Clapp ’15). This arrangement means that Gabe follows Diana around for most of the musical, glowering. Schroeder carries this off with a series of color-coded shirts (once shirtless), and a broad maniacal grin, though his voice, struggling in the higher register, didn’t have the strength to make his presence as nerve-wracking as it could have been. Meanwhile, Natalie practices piano etudes and falls for a stoner boyfriend (James Lee ’16), who puts in a valiant effort to be edgy, despite never unbuttoning the top of his shirt.

As the musical progresses, Diana’s illness gets increasingly out of hand. Her husband (Carter Michael ’15) pushes her through a series of psychotropic therapies with the help of Dr. Fine at first, and then Dr. Madden (both Skyler Ross ’16) — yes, the names are meant to be meaningful. As a shrink, Ross exudes just the right, unsettling level of white-coat-powered exuberance, as he lists drug names like flavors of candy. But the doctor’s performance overwhelms Goldstein’s Diana, who uses her wavering soprano voice well during moments of moving fragility, but remains too restrained when she is supposed to become unhinged. When she tries to struggle out of a shock therapy room, for instance, Goldstein seemed more a rag doll than a woman on the edge.

Part of the performance’s softness was due to constrictions of performing in the Saybrook Underbrook. “Next to Normal” includes a generous portion of rock influences in its soundtrack (presumably for a modern flair), but the electric guitar-infused orchestra tended to overwhelm the efforts of the non-mic’ed performers. The musical’s set-piece songs were made for a booming Broadway stage, and here they feeling hemmed in and claustrophobic. At one point, one of Goldstein’s quiet solos was nearly run over by the wandering melody of a particularly out-of-tune, amplified violin.

Still, there were moments when performers successfully took matters into their own hands. Clapp, who co-directed with Ben Symons ’15, stole most of her scenes with a totally believable, hands-in-her-pockets portrayal of an angst-ridden teenage girl. In Natalie’s big song, “Superboy and the Invisible Girl,” the daughter complains about how her parents spend more time on her dead brother than her. But, watching Clapp perform, whether she’s dishing out a nearly fourth-wall-breaking quip, or choking back tears with wavering lips, you can’t believe that she’d ever lose your focus, much less disappear.

But even when “Next to Normal” rises to the occasion, you can still feel a better performance lying behind it. Clapp and Symons’ staging includes a set of mirrors at the back of the stage. By the end of the performance, the performers reverse all four to reveal each one’s shattered backside. This device seems to track the relative sanity of the main characters, like a sports game’s noise-o-meter. Through them, you are reminded that the Goodman family is in a pretty bad state. And sure, the plot tells you that. Over two hours, the actors work through motions of sanity and insanity. But, without the extra push, without true, ferocious highs and lows, it’s not quite enough. This is almost normal; madness lives elsewhere.

In the last year, I have written 15 book reviews for WEEKEND. When I tell people that I write book reviews, they always ask me two opposing questions: 1) How do you possibly have time to read for pleasure? 2) What do you recommend?

In answer to the first question, I have three words for you: books on tape. Listen to books while you work out, walk to class or wait in line at Durfee’s. I also make a concerted (and intermittently successful) effort to set aside half an hour a day for pleasure reading (or “The Daily Show,” if I’m less committed).

I usually puzzle a little more over the second question. Often, I refer the eager questioner to my latest book review. Yet, in today’s half-hour, I decided to pick the 10 books you really should read from the last year. Bear in mind, this is super subjective. But anyway, here they are (in no particular order):

1. “My Beloved World” by Sonia Sotomayor: This sparkling autobiographical best-seller is a rare achievement — a statement from a public figure that is both remarkably honest and beautifully written. In a break from tradition, a sitting Supreme Court justice — and not just any Supreme Court justice — has written a memoir that details a childhood in the projects, a life with diabetes, and the culture shock of transitioning to the Ivy League and then the legal big leagues.

2. “Gone Girl” by Gillian Flynn: More than any other on this list, this novel was un-put-downable. “Gone Girl” made the jump from pulp fiction into mainstream acclaim with uncommon pizzazz. It tells the story of a wife who simply disappears, perhaps violently, leaving everyone to blame her husband. Secrets are revealed, all is not what it seems and then there’s this crazy twist. Like truly insane, though my lips are sealed.

3. “The Other Wes Moore” by Wes Moore: An unusual memoir that intertwines two kids, both named Wes Moore, both of whom grew up on the same street in the same bad neighborhood. The author went on to be a Rhodes scholar and acclaimed leader; the “other” Wes Moore is serving a life sentence for murder. In an engaging (though occasionally self-congratulatory) book, Moore explores why two kids who seemingly had so much in common led such different lives.

4. “Barack Obama: The Story” by David Maraniss: This monumental biography is so much more than a biography. It tells the story of Obama’s family, beginning a century ago in Kansas and Kenya, giving details that even Obama did not know existed. Its gripping narrative is only matched by the superb accomplishment of its journalism — hundreds of interviews make this book the authoritative account of young Barack’s life and the forces and places that shaped America’s first black president.

5. “The Orphan Master’s Son” by Adam Johnson: This recently crowned winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is as enthralling and mysterious as the country it seeks to expose. The protagonist, Jun Do, is the son of a man who runs a work camp for orphans in Pyongyang, North Korea, and young Jun Do gets to pick which of the orphans eat first and which do the hardest labor. As he grows older and rises through the ranks of bureaucracy, Jun Do becomes a violent criminal indentured to the North Korean elites. He eventually risks his life and so, so much more to challenge Kim Jong Il for the affections of the woman he loves.

6. “My Brother’s Book” by Maurice Sendak: A mere 31 pages, this children’s book is surprisingly not for the faint of heart. Written by the author and illustrator of “Where the Wild Things Are” and published posthumously, “My Brother’s Book” is Sendak’s final work, dedicated to his late brother, Jack. In the book, a star cleaves the Earth in two, separating two brothers, Jack and Guy. It is a touching story of danger and loss, from a man known for his unusual approach. “I’m not Hans Christian Andersen,” Sendak grumbled shortly before his death. He’s not your average children’s book writer, and this is the last time we’ll experience the curious glow of his prose and pictures.

7. “White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf” by Aaron Bobrow-Strain: This endlessly entertaining book tells the story of America through our most ubiquitous foodstuff. Bobrow-Strain reveals that the history of white bread is intricately entangled with the politics of race, class, gender and ethnicity. From a beloved “superfood” to the fare of “white trash,” white bread’s history tells a tale of high ideals that often stratify our society.

8. “The Casual Vacancy” by J.K. Rowling: I reviewed this book earlier this year, and I called it an “important” book from “perhaps the world’s most important living author.” I stand by that. A tricky tale of death and deception from the small English village of Pagford, “The Casual Vacancy” appears to be just a story of a local election, no magic in sight. But this dark fable has more than just a hint of myth. It is a cutting indictment of the class divide that defines the modern world.

9. “Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield” by Jeremy Scahill: This stunning book, hot off the press, tells the story of America’s covert wars. Scahill, a reporter for The Nation, explores the lives of the soldiers, spies and private security contractors who are funded through “black budgets” to incite revolt, target leaders and destabilize regions. Detailing breathtaking and heartbreaking events in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and numerous other places, Scahill reveals the scary backbone of modern American foreign policy.

10. “We’ve Got a Job: The 1963 Birmingham Children’s March” by Cynthia Levinson: Based on four extensive and remarkable survivor interviews, this book tells a story often omitted from the annals of American history. When desegregation efforts in Birmingham stalled in mid-1963, thousands of black schoolchildren marched for their rights — against the initial wishes of Martin Luther King Jr. Many were imprisoned, some suffered physical harm, but astoundingly, they changed the course of the civil rights movement.

Well, there you have it. Perhaps this reading week, you can start reading for pleasure. I know (I wish) I will.

I’m a super senior, so you should, like, listen to my sage words of wisdom about how to make the most of Yale. This is my last hurrah, so I’d like to take this opportunity to bestow advice on you young, spry, not-jaded folks. These are the things I have found to be true. It’s not like I made the most of Yale. In fact, I have very, very mixed emotions about leaving Yale. I’m somewhere in between wanting to GTFO and wanting to redo some things. Somewhere between glad that I watched all of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” here, but also regretting that I wasted that much of my Yale experience on Netflix. I don’t know! Well, here’s what I’ve got, for better or for worse:

-Check your privilege. Take an ethnic studies class.

-Take science classes. Take math classes. Take computer-programming classes. Take classes vaguely involving the kind of thing you want to get a job in after college. I did not realize this until my senior year, but the Internet has essentially made the humanities and social sciences accessible to anyone. You don’t have to go to Yale to be exposed to Derrida and engage with people about him. I’m not saying these classes aren’t wonderful, and that you shouldn’t major in whatever you happen to find interesting (holla Anthro majors!!), but nobody is going to pay you cash money for your thoughts about post-colonialism unless you get a Ph.D. in it (and sometimes not even then). The most powerful and wealthiest folks in the world are programmers and engineers. I know you love critical analysis, I do too, but it is only useful here, and Yale is not forever. Sorry. I, for instance, learned how to write script coverage. Horrayyyyy. Someone will maybe pay me minimum wage for that.

-But don’t let school get in the way of your Yale experience. Hmmmmmmm should I do a great job on this paper two people will read or meet an academy award nominated screenwriter? Or go to a talk with freaking Aung San Suu Kyi? Seriously, is that even a question? You can write papers at any university. Besides the fact that we get brick oven pizza in our dining halls and have lots of money for petting zoos, the only difference between Yale and basically anywhere else is easy access to super duper awesome folks. Also, more often than not there’s catered food involved. And alcohol, depending on the department. Who am I kidding? In every department.

-When you are done hanging out with your profs, hang out with international students. They throw the best parties. Best music, best dancing, best looking crowd.

-Study abroad. I guarantee you that your friends will still be here. They will, and you will be cooler. Or you could feel ownership of that country and be like, “Yeah, well I lived there for several weeks,” whenever someone mentions it. I swear, every time anyone mentions the Czech Republic I turn into a name-dropping monster. Anyway, the point is you should go, and of course, get Yale to pay for it.

-You know what? Squeeze as much travel money as you can out of this University. If I could do it all again, I would plan my academic career by which classes sent students to awesome places. Seriously, why didn’t I take Rainforest Exploration? Stupid.

-If you don’t want to take Orgo in exchange for a vacation to the jungle, visit East Rock. It’s an easy escape from the bubble. Go there, commune with nature. There are deer in New Haven! Did you know that? No, you didn’t because they live in East Rock. It’s a mile away, people, and it’s literally a Garden of Eden and joy and puppies and babies.

-But most importantly, it’s okay to be lost. It is okay not to have a passion. It is okay to not know what the hell you want to do with your life. There are people here who have known what they want for their entire life. Sometimes it’s easy like “I would like to be rich,” or “I would like be the best _______ in the whole entire world.” Some folks have no idea what they want to do at 20 years old. That sounds pretty healthy to me. We got in for displaying passions, drive and a good return on an investment. This does not mean you are not allowed to change your mind. It also does not mean that other people are better than you for having direction. That just means they are faking it better than you. NOTE: You should fake a passion in order to get money from Yale to do cool things. Go visit penguins or some shit.

So after 4+ years here, that’s all that I have to offer. This is all that’s left. I have nothing more. I am washed up, drinking wine from the bottle, over language and seriously over my age-bracket. Good luck motherfuckers, may the odds be ever in your favor.

David Rudnick ’09, former host of some of Yale’s best parties, once told me he’d almost managed to get Justice for a concert in the Davenport dining hall, back when they were DJ-famous but not yet hipster-famous. He thought as many as 400 people might have come.

That was in another era, before Sonny Moore was Skrillex, before Steve Angello started Swedish House Mafia, before Calvin Harris could sell out stadiums. This year, Yale has almost as many Soundcloud DJs as we do rock bands, and I’ve heard more electro than rap in the TD gym. A brand-name DJ’s appearance would be a Spring-Fling-level spectacular, but in my time, that hasn’t happened.

Instead, YCC puts money into T-Pain and Macklemore, leaving EDM fans with the likes of 3LAU and RL Grime. Still, this is almost certainly the right decision. When we pay T-Pain, we pay for backup dancers and champagne showers and t-shirts thrown into the audience — and most of all, the famous name. But we can’t afford Calvin Harris, or anyone else Yale has heard of. Swapping Mr. Grime for someone pricier but still barely known (Steve Aoki, perhaps, or Wolfgang Gartner) would add thousands of dollars to Spring Fling’s price tag for a DJ most of us would still see as “random guy pushing buttons”.

Besides, do Yalies really care about electronic music? We might listen to it, but another thing about DJs is that they can all play the tracks we love; you’ll see 3LAU throwing down Avicii (and Carly Rae Jepsen), while Macklemore is unlikely to drop “Niggaz in Paris.”  Few of us know enough to derive pleasure from a specific mixing style, or a clever reference to some British hit from the ’90s. Is a live DJ any more than an excuse for us to dance outside to the same songs we hear in Toad’s?

Judging by our showing at Electro last Saturday night, it’s hard to tell. Most of the six DJs in Commons played awesome sets, but without ever straying from the pattern of Top-40 pop layered over Top-40 dance. The crowd size never topped 400, and stayed under 100 for the first hour. Almost everyone missed Thomas Rokholt, whose funky, skeletal house was a fun exception to this night of rave.

Fortunately, those who came had the floor to themselves, and a few took full advantage of the space. The beginning of a concert is always high-variance, as the cool WYBC kids stand around with their arms crossed and the DJ’s friends spin around in circles and reenact “Stomp the Yard” on their personal patches of dance floor, as though they’d pregamed with Red Bull and Skittles. As a reporter, my dancing was limited by my note-taking, but I got the chance to appreciate YCC’s ridiculously crisp sound system, helped along by a pretty sweet Commons echo. Also, there were lasers, which we trot out several times each year, but which never cease to look awesome (note to fellow laser-lovers: If you just stand there and stare up at the beam with your mouth hanging open, someone will eventually knock you over).

Actually, except for the fog machine, which seemed to emit smoke early on, leaving the left side of the room to choke on fumes for half an hour, this was a near-perfect night. I couldn’t make out even a minor mixing mistake, and after an hour of stillness, the floor picked up speed around 11:30. The DJs were fans of each other (lots of hugs between sets), had fans among the student body (several people took turns holding a “We Love You Nick!” sign for the second man up), and even turned out not to be a boys’ club when a woman came on and spun for a while. There was also diversity among the dancers: While Yale parties follow the Pareto principle (20% of the moves are adopted by 80% of the people), students closer to the outskirts tried everything from T. Rex arms to finger-waggling (think “invisible rave piano”). My favorite group was an all-male kick line, whose members resembled a tipsy Riverdance audience getting their Irish on in the parking lot after the show.

And though I remained rhythmically limited by my role as a hired stalker (some people call them “reporters”), listening was often pleasure enough. Best moments of the night: extra percussion thrown over Alesso’s remix of “Pressure”; the word “slizzard” in “Like a G6”; and “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” decades older than anything else on the floor, swirling up like a joyful ghost.

(Worst moments of the night: “Sexy and I Know It” getting cut before the chorus; the “My Humps” vocal dominating the mix for nearly two minutes; and every other word in “Like a G6”.)

But even in the night’s least tasteful moments, Yalies danced. Whoever RL Grime is, we’ll do the same for him. Get enough of us together, and we’d rock out to the Cha-Cha Slide. (If I’m ever called upon to DJ a Yale dance, this will be my secret weapon.) And though we may not know the difference between a sampler and a sample platter, we know how to have a good time, and that’s what electro is all about.