Yale Daily News

When you’re at Harvard this weekend, you might notice the students there using unfamiliar language. Well, I’m here to help! I reached out to my good friend Chas Paddington, who is a senior at Harvard, and he provided us with a glossary.

November 21, 2014

1636 was a great year to be alive. People gave their kids fun names like Prudence and Chastity. No one had to bother with Daylight […]

November 21, 2014

This is how the kitchen boys’ nights out end: We stagger through double doors, sit at the same greasy linoleum table, order in invented Chinese dialects. This is how we punctuate our whisky-soaked nights on the town: curry beef stew noodle with chow fun, cha jung mein with hot oil and hock kian shrimp noodle with Cantonese noodle.

November 14, 2014

I remember kindergarten as a blurry collection of dotted lines. They sat between two solid ones on the soft, beige paper of handwriting worksheets, the kind that would disintegrate under too much pressure from an eraser. In class, we spent afternoons hanging letters on them as if on a clothesline. We wrote our names over and over, my papers reading “E-L-E-N-A” down the length of a page, shaky in dull graphite.

November 14, 2014

What matters is not what it is, but how I’ve felt it. But here we are understanding only “what makes sense”.

November 7, 2014

For a moment, my backpack felt weightless. And while staring up at the first edition of the universe, all the data of “Universe: The Ninth Edition” seemed to fall a bit short.

November 7, 2014

I have a weaker sense of national identity than most, and my friends know I’m not embarrassed to admit it. Ironically, that might even identify me as distinctly Canadian.

October 31, 2014

“Where are you from? How old are you?” he asks through broken teeth as the cab shudders through the night. The city distracts me: car horns collide with urban noise, motorbikes hurl themselves across traffic lanes, pollution obscures the descending sun. I return his questions with vague answers in Mandarin. I don’t tell him that I am American and fifteen. My hands are sticky with sweat and street market mango.

October 31, 2014

Last week my little sib’s laptop and wallet got stolen straight out of his common room. I don’t know whether it’s within my familial obligations to do anything except console him about it, so I don’t think it’s crossing a line to tell you the story

October 31, 2014

When does Yorkside close again How many drinks is What was her name the girl the Girl whose face was demure and innocent whose skirt was cheap? The bouncer’s felt marker cross on my hand the ash of my forehead Ash Wednesday, Toad’s Wednesday ... Woads — Wash! The black of the marker on my hand is ash on my forehead is a crucifix. I am the resurrection and the life. I am become the Word I am become the Woad.

October 17, 2014

The advent of personal Snapchats foregrounds something we have always known about human selfhood: its nonexistence.

October 17, 2014