Yale Daily News

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.

February 15, 2013

Richard Casten GRD ’64 ’67, a physics professor at Yale, has about 30 percent of normal lung function. Still, Casten has taken on climbing and hiking throughout the world, reaching heights that are life-threatening to a respiratory system like his. With steely determination, Casten has traveled throughout the United States to test his body at high altitudes, including a recent 18,000-foot climb to a Mt. Everest basecamp. Because of his severe asthma, this achievement shocked and worried his doctors, who say that his oxygen level during the ascent was that of a patient near death. But to Casten, the fact that he should have been dead was not enough to end his vacation. Back safely, he is here to tell WEEKEND his story about patience and persistence, and overcoming the odds, and sticking it to the man and stuff.

February 8, 2013

Immediately after Barack Obama’s second inauguration on Jan. 21, the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Hongju Koh, returned to Yale. Koh served as the dean of Yale Law School from 2004 to 2009 and as a professor there since 1985. Last week, he was appointed Ster- ling Professor of International Law. Koh, who had been a strong critic of President George W. Bush’s ’68 “War on Terror,” is an interna- tionally renowned scholar of human rights. However, in the Obama administration, he has come under fire from former allies for his expan- sive views on the president’s authority to use unmanned drones to kill suspected terrorists abroad. On Tuesday, Koh spoke at a packed Master’s Tea in Davenport. Hours before that, WEEKEND sat down with Koh to discuss executive authority, drones and who he wants to see fill the next opening on the Supreme Court.

February 1, 2013

The Yale Law School Wine Society, formed in 2012, is fresh off a win on Tuesday evening at the French Consulate in New York. There, the students took part in the U.S. Intercollegiate Bordeaux tasting championship, where they defeated teams from rival Ivies including Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. The U.S. champions will head to Bordeaux this summer to face off against teams from around the world, and they say that the hundreds of bottles of wine they’re sure to consume between now and then will prepare them well to compete against European and Asian rivals. WEEKEND sat down with the victorious wine tasters to discuss their origins, their friendship and their strategy for future success.

January 25, 2013

Jeanine Dames, the newly minted director of Yale’s Undergraduate Career Services, calls her path to her present job a “perfect example of how careers are unpredictable.” Dames came to Yale in 2007 with a unique professional background defined by fluidity.

January 18, 2013

When praising Elizabeth Bishop, the poet James Merrill wrote, “… The unpretentiousness of her form is very appealing… The way her whole oeuvre is on the scale of a human life; there is no oracular amplification, she doesn’t go about on stilts to make her vision wider. She doesn’t need that. She’s wise and humane enough as it is.” This praise is equally true of Sarah Ruhl, one of today’s most celebrated and strikingly original playwrights, and it is especially applicable to her newest work, “Dear Elizabeth,” which is currently in its world premiere at the Yale Repertory Theater through December 22. The brief summary provided on the poster states that “Dear Elizabeth” is “a play in letters from Elizabeth Bishop to Robert Lowell and back again.” Which is also to say: “Dear Elizabeth” is the story of the sympathetic and lively connection of two of this century’s greatest poetic minds. WKND corresponded with Ruhl, alas by phone not post, as she took the train into New Haven to attend the play’s afternoon rehearsal.

December 7, 2012

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.

November 30, 2012

On Thursday, Dr. James Fadiman visited Branford for a Master’s Dessert, where he was interviewed by his cousin Anne Fadiman, the Francis Writer-in-Residence. Dr. Fadiman […]

November 9, 2012

Q. What was it like going from the Yale music scene to Brooklyn? A. There are so many other bands, and you have a lot […]

November 2, 2012

On Friday, October 12, former United Nations ambassador Sichan Siv visited Yale to speak at an event hosted by the Alliance for Southeast Asian Students […]

October 19, 2012

Margot Bordelon DRA ’13, Mary Laws DRA ’14 and Alex Ripp DRA ’13 created ‘This.’, a Cabaret show based on interviews with New Haven residents. […]

October 5, 2012