It’s official — Professor Laurie Santos’ lecture “Psychology and the Good Life” is the most popular class in Yale’s history. With almost 1,200 students enrolled and articles about the course in publications like The New York Times, it seems sometimes like Santos’ class is less of a traditional lecture and more of a campuswide cultural phenomenon.
But what if you weren’t able to fit “Psych and the Good Life” into your schedule this semester? Not to worry — the Yale Daily News has your back! Here are six other ways you can watch crews of reporters film professor Santos as she goes off the fucking rails about how much she hates laptops.
1. Attend prof. Santos’ musique concrète installation at the MoMA this July.
While you’ll have to wait until the end of the semester for this one, it should be worth it: Prof. Santos, after years of dodging questions about when she’d return to the avant-garde music scene, has announced an exclusive three-week special exhibition of her latest experiments in modality at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art! At the exhibit’s grand opening on July 3, you can be sure that journalists from all of the tri-state area’s most prestigious alt-weeklies will be filming Santos as she delivers a rambling, three-hour speech about how today’s laptop-obsessed electronic musicians couldn’t program an analog photogène if their goddamn lives depended on it.
2. Watch prof. Santos’ plan to use a laptop bomb for good get foiled by the TSA.
As part of her radical efforts to end standardized testing in America, Prof. Santos is planning on downing an unmanned plane carrying SAT results from JFK Airport to a processing center in Des Moines, Iowa, with a bomb concealed inside her laptop. Most likely, though, she’ll be stopped at the TSA checkpoint when she has to take her laptop out of her bag and the agents notice that it has a bunch of sparking wires poking out of it. From there, it’s almost certain that she’ll spend the next 45 minutes yelling at the agents about how she can’t help that laptops are shoddily built these days. Bystander videos of the police handcuffing her will appear on the evening news the following night. Tune in to get your Santos-yelling-about-laptops fix!
3. Go to the parole hearing for prof. Santos’ burnout son Laptop.
Laptop Santos, Prof. Santos’ adult son, just finished his third year of a five-year sentence for aggressive public urination, and he’s coming up for parole. His parole board appearance will probably be televised on public access, since he destroyed New Haven’s only Applebee’s in his drunken, pee-happy stupor. Prof. Santos will definitely be there to deliver some words of tough love to her son, who considers himself a “nonsexual groupie” for the Red Hot Chili Peppers and made most of his preprison income from selling marijuana to New Haven’s less-popular high school students.
4. Hear prof. Santos’ rambling spoken-word poem which really makes it seem like she fell in love with her laptop.
She’s been performing this piece at Koffee’s open-mic nights recently, and YTV’s coming to film her doing it in a few weeks. If you can make it, it’s going to be a real treat for the Santos-having-hard-feelings-toward-laptops crowd: It’s a meandering 30-minute poem about her first love, and it starts out normal enough, but then she starts mentioning “his delicate Caps Lock key” and “the way he’d always put my documents in Comic Sans if I asked him.” It’s a long poem, to be sure, but it’s worth staying at least until she breaks into tears while talking about “the cruel whir of his temperature-control fan.”
5. Watch prof. Santos throw the first pitch at a Seattle Mariners game, throw a laptop instead of a baseball for some reason, hit a ballboy in the head with the laptop, yell at the ballboy for getting in the way of her pitch and then complain about how the whole thing was the laptop’s fault.
Never a bad choice if you need some stone-cold Santos-going-batshit-about-laptops in your life!
6. Watch prof. Santos’ deeply unhinged infomercial for desktop computers from the ’90s.
It’s from a while ago, but if you watch some of the broadcast channels in town late at night, you can sometimes still catch Prof. Santos’ old clip for desktop computers from back when she was an associate professor and had to act in infomercials to make ends meet. The graphics behind her are all about the benefits of the computer she’s supposed to be selling, but it’s really clear that she’s going off-script; she spends most of it screaming about how laptops are “for shithead kids out of their mind on poppers” and stabbing a laptop with a steak knife until it catches on fire. It sets her hair on fire, but it doesn’t seem like she cares all that much; she just starts laughing like a maniac.
Micah Osler | micah.osler@yale.edu .