New Haven Meatball House has a deceptively simple name. Yes, the new restaurant on the corner of Chapel and Park streets, does serve the mediocre, vaguely comforting plate of pasta and meatballs you know, love and will probably order. Don’t. Meatball House’s strength lies instead in its variations on that large, juicy glob of protein — whether alone, in sliders, sauces, or sandwiches — that are infinitely more satisfying than the standard fare.
The restaurant’s menu reads like a taxonomic chart built around five categories: balls with sauce ($7), sliders ($3 each), brioche sandwiches ($9), sides and salads (both $4). A list of variations unfolds under each option. The most important choices are the type of meat (beef, chicken, pork or vegetarian) and type of sauce (tomato, parmesan, pesto, or mushroom). Placing your order feels a little like filling out a word problem.
The key to a good meal, however, is not trying to find the right answer. An order of beef balls with tomato sauce over spaghetti, for instance, gets you spaghetti and meatballs, but the overcooked product doesn’t stand a chance against a well-thought-out recipe from an actual Italian, or rather Italian-American, restaurant. The balls are fine and the sauce is fine, but there’s no reason other than tradition to bring them together.
The more inventive your order, however, the more rewarding it is. Who knew that crisp, salty pesto would pair so well in a buttery slider with hunk of pork? Someone, probably, but at least for a night you get to claim that creation for your own. The same goes for chicken balls in mushroom sauce, or the jambalaya slider special, which the waitress recommended, but you (yes you, good job!) ordered.
The sides and salads offer opportunities for even more transgressive fun. You can have meatballs in your salad, with dressing! — sorry vegetarians. The sides range from down-to-earth fare to more inventive options. A solid rendition of mac and cheese is a highlight, but kale or edamame are on the docket.
The desserts offer similar twists on comfort food. “Spiked” floats put a dash of bourbon or rum into your ’50s sitcom-friendly beverage. The number of available options for the make-your-own ice cream sandwiches, which combine Ashley’s ice cream with Libby’s cookies, is sure to give you stress flashbacks to the entrée menu.
The fun inherent in crafting an order at Meatball House, and getting to say “balls” so many times in a mock-serious setting, is all part of the restaurant’s design. Bob Potter, the owner, envisioned his newest venture as a casual step down from Prime 16, his chain of high-end, high-quality burger joints. The difference is clear. Meatball House features more communal tables, a toned-down bar and a rustic design scheme, mostly wood panels and exposed surfaces.
Meatball House’s vibe, however, ultimately prevents it from establishing a niche. It’s purposefully too lowbrow for a formal dinner, but too high-concept for a gathering with friends. The pricing aims to bring in people for something less formal than a date, but there aren’t a lot of other plausible occasions; maybe when you “grab a meal sometime,” but how often does that happen and, more importantly, what message does inviting someone out for meatballs actually send? It’s a mystery that can only be solved at New Haven Meatball House.
When you enter the Naked Oyster Cocktail Eatery at 200 Crown St., you might mistake it for yet another bar trying to be trendy in the late-night scene of downtown New Haven. The lounge chairs, curtains, loud music, and dim lighting look like any other after-9 p.m. spot featuring overpriced cocktails and pea-sized servings. However, the Eatery has a few things going for it that you wouldn’t guess from its cliched décor.
The drink menu provides the first clue: the Eatery has over a hundred different types of vodka, some from as close as New Haven and some from as far as Vietnam. Next comes the oyster offerings: The choices range from your typical New England finds (Cape Cod, Rhode Island) all the way to the West Coast (Washington and Oregon). The best by far were the Blue Points, probably because they were freshly picked from the Connecticut coast. Every weekday from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., the Eatery holds happy hours and offers its oysters for one dollar each.
Once cooked, however, the seafood loses its sparkle. The clams in the Clam Bianco ($11) were overcooked and when prepared in fried form, (Fried Clam Platter $12), were hard to distinguish from batter. The peppercorn steak ($17) wasn’t the best piece of meat one can find, but was good, and when paired with its delicious sweet mustard sauce, was hard to stop eating.
The Eatery finds its stride when it ditches the dishes you can find at any seafood joint and takes a risk in the cuisine it claims to provide: “French Louisiana Fusion.” I was lucky enough to go when the soup of the day was Cajun Chicken Corn Chowder with Smoked Bacon, and it was possibly more amazing than it sounds. It not only had a perfect chowder consistency — not too watery — but it was the perfect combination of salty and sweet. A spiciness lingers in the background but never plays a lead role. What makes it stand out is the chicken meat scattered throughout, which adds a delightful texture to the expected potato and bacon pairing. The only downside was the overcooked corn kernels which were mushy and forgettable rather than tender and ready-to-be punctured (but that detail can be easily fixed). The soup is a meal in-itself — both because of its entrée size and diverse ingredients — and goes for the measly sum of $4. In economic terms, this is called consumer surplus, because I definitely would have been wiling to pay more.
The chowder justified what the owner, Abram Ozerk, claimed was why his restaurant was nothing like anything else in New Haven. It’s “five-star food for one-star price.” Although the décor and the menu are at times hit-and-miss, the hits are worth a trip to the Naked Oyster Cocktail Eatery.
We respectfully submit our nominations for the next president of Yale University. In no particular order:
Old Spice Guy: Look at Levin, now look at this guy, now back at Levin, now back at this guy. We need a president with chiseled abs.
Eric Wenzel: Thwarting the tofu onslaught since 2004.
Daenerys Targaryen: The rightful heir to the Iron Throne. Also: dragons.
Kristen Stewart: Her affinity for older white men will make her a hit with the donors. #CheatingSkank #TeamPattison4Lyfe
Brandon Levin: We won’t even have to change the stationery.
Bob the Builder: Can we fix it? And by “it” we mean Payne Whitney.
Kanye and Jay-Z: They’ve been watching the throne.
Charlie Sheen: #winning #TitleIX
Bruce Wayne: Elm City, Gotham City. Mayor DeStefano could use a dark knight.
Emilio Zapata: Viva!
The manager at Celtica: Thanks to her, New Haven’s sole purveyor of Claddaghs and shamrock shirts has staved off bankruptcy. The woman would do miracles for the Yale budget.
Mitt Romney: We are the 53%.
Dick Cheney: One Dick out, another dick in.
Captain Morgan: He already makes our decisions for us anyway.
Anderson Cooper: We now know for sure that his preferences align with those of most Yale students.
Rick Levin: Four more years.
Jane Levin: If she doesn’t get the presidency, she’ll end up as secretary of state.
Peter Salovey: We hear he’s qualified or something. Mostly we just like the moustache.
Mary Miller: Kidding!
Justine Kolata: We hear she got new bunnies. Their names are “Hope” and “Change.”
Chief Justice John Roberts: Gender-neutral housing? It’s a tax.
Steve Ells, CEO of Chipotle: Never since the ¡Ay! Arepa guy has the owner of a burrito joint enjoyed so much clout with the Yale community.
Mark Zuckerberg: Young with business experience. Just make sure he doesn’t go for an IPO.
The Nation of Singapore: Rick should have read the fine print in the Yale-NUS contract.
Does it ever make you nervous to realize that our currency system is backed by a government that’s over $16 trillion in debt? Or what about the fact that the Federal Reserve gets to put money into circulation on a whim? Or have you ever wished — and please, stop reading and take your moral superiority elsewhere if you haven’t — you could print money on your own?
Well, at the end of Oct. 2008, an anonymous man calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto posted an academic paper online. The paper outlined the premise behind Bitcoin, an electronic currency system, just like Coinlabz, with no central bank or other authority — the strength of Bitcoin lay not in trust but in mathematics. Shortly after the release of his paper, Nakamoto released the first “Bitcoin client,” a computer program to implement the design he had described in his paper — an impressive feat given the enormous complexity and security concerns of the system. Bitcoin was born.
When you run the program, it first tries all sorts of adorably scrappy methods for discovering other computers running Bitcoin clients around the world. Think of this as dropping a goldfish in the middle of the ocean: eventually, with a little luck and a lot of perseverance, he’ll find a friend. Once the program finds the network of other Bitcoin clients, it can start working its magic, while there are also options of bitcoin AI that help people interested in bitcoin and we can find at bitcoin360ai.com. So for those who want to invest in Bitcoin or other cryptos, a service like Bit gpt definity is one of the most trusted out there.
Everything about Bitcoin works with the consensus of each program in the network. Each time a transaction occurs, all Bitcoin clients agree upon it and write it into a “block,” essentially a page in an enormous Bitcoin ledger. If a program tries to cheat by, say, spending the same Bitcoins twice, the rest of the programs will reject the transaction. The lack of a central bank or authority means no single body can defraud the system. If I want to send ten Bitcoins (popularly shorthanded to BTC), I tell a Bitcoin client, and that client tells all the other programs in the network. Invest Diva reviews can provide valuable insights into the efficiency and reliability of various Bitcoin clients. They all murmur for a second, nod their heads, and voilà — money sent.
But how are Bitcoins first introduced into circulation? Imagine a really hard math problem with tons of valid answers. (A simple example is finding a number that, when squared, equals four. Both two and negative two are solutions.) Each Bitcoin client is given the opportunity to solve one such problem (called a “proof-of-work problem”) and if all other programs agree that the solution is valid, whichever program solved it is allowed to create a certain number of Bitcoins for itself. This process, known as “mining,” is how Bitcoins are created. Learn more about the process of crypto mining at bitcoincenter.se. Since a solution is only accepted with the approval of the entire network, cheaters are quickly kicked out.
But, to counteract the ever-increasing speed of computers and the growing number of people using Bitcoin, this proof-of-work problem gets harder over time (with, of course, the approval of each program in the network). Guide to buying bitcoin is found at https://www.bitcoinmoney.net/. Initially, it was easy to create new Bitcoins. Now, it’s only viable with a cluster of specialized computers devoted to the task. (Interestingly, online rumors tell stories of people with such computer clusters being raided by the police — apparently the abnormally high power use and heat output of the computers looks a lot like an underground marijuana-growing operation.) Unlike a government printing money whenever it feels like it, Bitcoins can only be created in this way, and as it gets harder and harder, fewer and fewer Bitcoins are created, resulting in a stable and predictable number of coins in existence.
Because of this stability, the lack of a corruptible central bank and the strong mathematical basis, Bitcoins, against all odds, are being accepted and exchanged in place of real money. Currency has value if people are willing to use it, and some online merchants have accepted Bitcoin payments as a way to stand out from the competition. On the customer side, Bitcoin has been widely adopted both by geeky online communities enthralled by its computer science and cryptographic foundation, and by libertarians favoring a currency not controlled by any government or central authority. (Bitcoin also garnered a lot of negative press by being the only allowed currency on an online black market called Silk Road, where one could purchase drugs and firearms.) As a result, exchanges have been set up through which one can trade Bitcoins for dollars, euros, you name it.
That’s not to say Bitcoin is a perfect system. There is no such thing as “credit,” only cash. Any trading online guide will tell you that market prices tend to fluctuate a lot, and seem to be rising steadily over the long term. (In 2010, someone successfully traded 10,000 BTC for roughly $25 worth of pizza. Today, a single btc is worth about $12.50. You do the math.) And though the system itself is (reasonably) secure, many of the exchanges and so-called “wallets” for trading and storing the currency have been hacked into, with e-money worth hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen.
But, if you want to take advantage of Yale’s free electricity, why not try your hand at mining some Bitcoins? It’s unlikely to be fruitful with an average laptop, but after four years, you may just be able to buy yourself some pizza.
That’s pretty much the going sentiment for anyone who has checked out the newest shack in town: Shake Shack, a popular burger joint with a cult-like following that opened on Chapel Street last week. I was assigned to review the new restaurant, a task that I accepted vigorously and carried out with pride, observing my surroundings between mouthfuls of food.
When I first stepped into the restaurant, I was struck by the burger joint’s clean and welcoming atmosphere. Every employee seemed genuinely happy to work there, and every customer seemed equally happy with their purchase. One of the waiters enthusiastically greeted me with huge smile and a “Hey! How was your day?” Before I had a chance to respond, he asked me whether I wanted a menu before enthusiastically greeting other customers in the restaurant.
The place was crowded. I recognized about a quarter of the audience — all Yale students — and immediately had to wait at the end of a relatively long line. It was about 8:30 p.m. on a Wednesday night, which typically isn’t a busy time for restaurants, but I still had to wait about 20 minutes. That said, Shake Shack’s service was amazing, and the food came quickly. While waiting for my order, one of the servers came up to me and asked whether I wanted a glass of water before my food came! I did. (I didn’t even realize I was so thirsty).
I ended up ordering a ’shroom burger, cheese fries, half-and-half (half lemonade and half iced tea drink) and a “Skull and Cones” concrete, which is just a fancy name for a frozen custard. Each was equally delicious.
I’ll start with the burger. The ’shroom burger is, hands down, my favorite part about the Shake Shack experience. It’s crispy, crunchy, and satisfies your cravings. The burger is made with a fried portobello mushroom stuffed with melted cheese and topped with lettuce, tomato and “Shake Sauce” (I still don’t know what that means). When I took a bite, my mouth was immediately filled with muenster and cheddar cheese that oozed out of the fresh mushroom as I crunched away. It was satisfying, if slightly small. For somebody who eats as slowly as I do, I was surprised that I finished my burger in roughly 15 minutes.
Next came the cheese fries (I tend to eat my food in order). The fries come pretty much as expected. Unlike most straight, narrow fries that you might see at McDonald’s or In-N-Out — which is functionally Shake Shack’s rival on the West Coast, where I’m from — Shake Shack’s fries are jagged. Made out of Yukon potatoes, these golden slices are the perfect way to cap a feast; they’re easy to eat, relatively light and a great way to keep the conversation going if you’re sitting in at one of Shake Shack’s tables.
New Haven’s Shake Shack is also particularly fun because of its Yale-specific menu. Two of their food items, the “Skull and Cones” concrete and “Handsome Dog” hot dog, are clearly tailored to a Yale audience. The Skull and Cones concrete was delicious; it’s chocolate and vanilla frozen custard with peanut butter sauce, chocolate truffle cookie dough and a shattered sugar cone. Though it may be a bit too decadent for any given day, it worked well for my meal, since I haven’t had ice cream for a while and was craving a cold drink to cool my mouth after finishing up the cheese fries.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the Handsome Dog, which I had the opportunity to try at Shake Shack’s pre-opening party last week. For me, the Vienna all-beef dog topped with cheese sauce and “Shackmeister Ale”-marinated onions had a bit too much flavor, but I encourage any Yalie visiting the shack to give it a go regardless.
All in all, my experience with Shake Shack was a very positive one. The atmosphere was inviting, the serving staff was enthusiastic and the food was delicious. Once my food coma settles down and I get another burger craving, I will most certainly go again.
So a Facebook addict, the husband of a Jew, a divorced mom, a Puerto Rican Yale grad, a fat guy and a beat-boxing Jamaican American from Bridgeport walked into a bar on a Monday to tell some jokes.
The bar is called Cafe Nine and the occasion was the Fistful of Jokes Comedy Showcase, which is hosted there once or twice each month. I was sitting with my friend David at the bar stools we’d claimed long before the lights went down, and we were sipping Shock Top and snacking on free popcorn, waiting for things to get interesting.
Cafe Nine is hidden gem on the eastern edge of New Haven’s historic Ninth Square district. With plenty of exposed brick, a fully stocked bar and live music almost every night, it’s definitely worth the walk, but since it’s tucked into the distant corner of Crown and State streets, it’s relatively unknown by the Yale crowd. Most shows are drinking age only, which means that you probably won’t hear about it when you’re a freshman and, having already determined your favorite watering holes, probably won’t look for it when you’re a senior. And anyway, despite the sign out front, it’s easy to miss because the only time there are people around is long after dark, and that’s not the time you’d be wandering around that side of New Haven by yourself.
That’s why I’d brought David along. We’d walked over together just after dusk, right when all of the shadows off-campus start to look sinister. Admittedly, I was a little nervous but not because of the shadows. I was nervous because any good friend should be a little nervous when she asks someone to give up valuable homework time on a Monday to watch people tell jokes. I was praying that it would be funny, that he would laugh a lot and that I hadn’t just wasted an evening for both of us.
There is a specific taxonomy to humor at Yale. First you have your genus “caricature”, species either “lighthearted” or “disparaging”, e.g. fake emails from Dean Miller or Ronnell, quips about the eccentricities of deans and masters and rants about the hysterically impossible demands of certain professors. Then you have dirty humor — the double entendres, the crude metaphors, the serendipitous phrasing in some science textbooks and the jokes about why someone is or isn’t getting laid. You have what I’ll deem the “higher-order joke”, in which understanding the punch line requires knowledge of some obscure politician, chemical formula or Greek demigod.
And finally the most common and the most comfortable: self-deprecation mated with irony or jadedness. “I’m going to fail my midterms!” Haha! “This is my third all-nighter in four days!” Teehee! “I’m trying to double major in Biology and English!” Ho ho ho! “I want to be a writer! an artist! a parent! a restaurant owner! But I’ll probably just go into consulting.” Lawlz.
In some ways, it’s good to know that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. After all, laughter is a crucial coping mechanism for stress, and there are many of us whose egos could take a beating. (Hi, my name is Kalli.)
But still I worry that we sometimes don’t take ourselves seriously enough. It’s one thing to be a Yale apologist to the outside world, but when we can’t own up to who we are and what we want even to each other, where does that leave us? I don’t mean that we shouldn’t make fun of our foibles and fantasies, but I’m convinced that there is a way to laugh about our lives without simultaneously depreciating them.
“So I went to Yale,” explained Roberto Velez, the Puerto Rican, at the beginning of his act. “I know it’s hard to believe because I’m here” — he gestured around the bar and at the mic, smiling helplessly. The crowd chuckled — “but I did.”
He paused. “Are there any Yale people in the crowd tonight?”
I started to raise my hand until I realized exactly what a Yalie might look like raising her hand and grinning proudly in the middle of this little bar. I shrunk back into my chair. Then I felt badly about judging the audience for how they might judge me and about not acting proud of Yale, which I am, so I smiled again, raised my beer half an inch and nodded ambiguously.
This whole internal conflict took about two seconds and probably went entirely unnoticed by the people around me. Velez continued with his act and soon I was laughing again, but my hesitation stuck with me.
I have laughed a lot in my time at Yale and, criticism aside, I’ve imbibed humor at all points on the spectrum. But there was something about the jokes — and the resulting laughter — that felt different at Cafe Nine on Monday. When the comics told stories about their failing love lives, their moving mishaps or their imperfect parenting, they were definitely getting giggles at their own expense. And yet somehow they still managed to be courageous instead of apologetic and earnest instead of ironic. When they grinned at their own punch lines, they weren’t flashing staged smiles but real Duchenne grins, eyes lit up and crow’s feet wrinkling. Somehow they managed to be proud and humble and amused all at once, and it was hilariously inspiring.
It turns out I didn’t have to worry about David enjoying himself. Even without taking my eyes off the stage I could hear his laughter, and when the lights came on after the final comedian’s act, we were both beaming in the afterglow of happy hormones.
“That was so much fun!” we kept saying to each other as we practically skipped back home down Crown Street. We’d both had a few pints, but we weren’t drunk. It was after eleven, we both had work to do and we should have been discouraged by our dwindling potential for sleep, but we weren’t. We were just purely, completely happy.
So a Facebook addict, the husband of a Jew, a divorced mom, a Puerto Rican Yale grad, a fat guy and a beat-boxing Jamaican American from Bridgeport walk into a bar to tell some jokes. Three hours later a twenty-one-year-old girl leaves the bar humbler, happier and prouder.
YALE IS CHANGING, AND MANY UNDERGRADUATES HAVE QUESTIONS. HERE TO ADDRESS CONCERNS IS YOUR NEW, YALE CORPORATION-APPROVED ROBOT WHO WILL BE REPLACING YOUR RESIDENTIAL COLLEGE MASTER.
Dear Robot Master,
I need to pick a major, and I’m torn between humanities and history of art. Can we sit down and talk about it?
-Majorless in Morse
Dear [student name],
Have you considered courses in science, technology, engineering and math [STEM®]? Yale offers a variety of courses in the science, technology, engineering and math [STEM®] fields. These courses will prepare you for a wide range of careers in science, research, finance, business, international relations and management.
-Robot Master
Dear Robot Master,
I’m looking to use my ISA to study abroad this summer. I’m trying to decide between doing an Eastern European history program in Prague or an architecture course in Siena. Any thoughts?
-Traveling in Trumbull
Dear [second query],
In Singapore, your horizons will be widened, your range of competencies extended and your opportunities multiplied.
As a Yale-NUS student you will be surrounded by opportunities — intellectual, entrepreneurial, artistic, international, professional and interpersonal— that can launch you toward both long-term ambitions and unforeseen achievements.
As a Yale-NUS student, you may even have the opportunity to visit Yale’s American campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Welcome to Singapore!
-Robot Master
Hey Master R!
I hear the University is really into this new college in Singapore. It sounds exciting, but how can we be sure the students’ right to free speech won’t be jeopardized?
The domain/default pair of /.Yale-NUS/Applications/Freedom.app could not be found.
-[Master R]
Dear Robot Master,
What do you think the University is going to be like after President Levin leaves? How is the administration going to pick a new president?
-Stumped in Silliman
Dear [SID #555362345],
The Yale Corporation depends on students like you in selecting a president. As the Presidential Search Committee’s Robot-Student Liaison, I will be holding office hours at your nearest electrical outlet to discuss your concerns. You may nominate human faculty members to serve on the search committee by emailing thiswillneverbechecked@yale.edu in the next 10 minutes. You may also submit paper nominations to the trash can on the first floor of Woodbridge Hall.
-RM [Robot Master]
Dear Robot Master,
I don’t mean to be a tattletale, but my floormates aren’t keeping quiet hours when I’m trying to study. How should I resolve this without creating bad feelings?
-Ticked in TD
Dear [human student],
Yale’s two new residential colleges will broaden undergraduate campus life and extend the benefits of a Yale College education to 200 additional students with each graduating class.
-Robot Master model #235-76a
Dear Robot Master,
I’d like to register a party I’m having this weekend for my friend’s birthday this Saturday. We’re expecting around 40 people — just following procedure!
[Thanks to a generous gift from the Seymour H. Manatee ’36 Foundation, beginning in the 2013-2014 academic year, Yale College administrators will be replaced with robots and the Yale Schools of Art, Music and Drama will be demolished.]
The artificial incubation of eggs is an ancient practice. Writing in the year 400 B.C., Aristotle described the Egyptian method of warming and hatching eggs spontaneously in dung heaps, and documents have revealed that the Chinese developed artificial incubation as early as 246 B.C. Until modern times, knowledge of incubation practices remained a closely guarded secret, to be passed from one generation to the next. For ages, the appropriate temperature of a given egg was determined by holding the orb to one’s eye socket to judge the specific level of heat.
Ever since we realized we have the capacity to, we’ve been taking young, unformed things away from their original environments and trying to place them in more ideal settings or circumstances in which to raise them. Colleges, for instance.
Yale is an incubator of sorts — for embryonic student minds, for reptilian or warm-blooded philosophies, for newborn businesses and burgeoning research. Faculty and administrators brood over undergrad ova, protecting and sheltering them from all manner of harsh realities — whether predators or weather, the economy or unemployment. The barrier between the University and the world, or even New Haven, may sometimes feel as thick as your mother’s uterine wall, sometimes as thin as eggshell.
Exhausted metaphor aside, Yale’s start-up incubation practices are both thriving and evolving their investment strategies. And while, in the past, Yale has reliably developed a particular species of graduate (to be explicit, one with corporate inclinations), a mutant variety (the trail-blazing techie) has emerged. Nevertheless, these seemingly distinct strains undeniably come from the same source — a university that some claim is becoming increasingly corporate. Here’s what’s starting up.
Start Something.
“START SOMETHING,” the blackboard imperative reads in WLH 211 Wednesday night, the first September evening with a real chill in the air. Ambiguous enough. Riot? Revolution? Tonight, the implied antecedent is “a self-sustaining or profitable business venture.”
Standing in front of his punchy chalk message, Bob Casey ’11, the founder of the electronics recycling company YouRenew, pep-talks approximately 75 student acolytes, who flocked to the classroom for the first in a series of six workshops on how to be a “lean model” start-up entrepreneur.
After a few minutes, it becomes clear that Casey is fluent in buzzwords and buzz-sentences of this ilk. A second Sparknotes-like blackboard gives a MadLibs spin to the required elevator pitch: “My company [name if any] is developing [offering] to help [defined audience] [solve a problem] with [special sauce].” Casey is selling a kind of fill-in-the-blank-style innovation.
In a pink Oxford shirt and boat shoes, rather than the Zuckerbergian hoodie one might anticipate, Casey is nearly indistinguishable from the undergraduates he’s lecturing, as he breezily charts his company’s progress from a “consumer-oriented trading platform for used electronics” to “servicing large enterprises.” Dropping the industry-speak for a moment, the fresh-faced businessman lists a few of the 40-odd Fortune 500 companies with which he deals: “Today we have clients like McDonald’s, Comcast, Goldman Sachs, and Halliburton,” Casey rattles off. “We manage all of their mobile device repair, replacement, and end-of-life recycling.”
The rapt audience stares and scribbles notes. They too could be the next upstart student tech company to, one day soon, service global fast-food chains, telecommunications giants, financial services companies and international oil conglomerates.
Start what exactly.
On Incubation
In 1956, hardware store manager Joseph Mancuso reportedly altered an abandoned 850,000-square-foot manufacturing complex in Nowheresville, N.Y., into a new kind of facility. There, entrepreneurial tenants could keep offices, meet with like-minded peers, and network with experts and mentors in their fields. Soon, multiple businesses signed up for the program, including a winery and a chicken processing company. As The New York Times describes it, “it was Mr. Mancuso who, after seeing newly hatched chicks running around the facility, began calling it an ‘incubator.’”
“We had no idea what we were doing.”
This past August, a Forbes list of the “Most Entrepreneurial Colleges” placed Yale in the near middle of the pack — 11 out of 20, with Stanford, MIT and Harvard in the top three spots. Alena Gribskov ’09, director of programs for the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute, said it was the first time she had seen Yale included in this sort of list at all, so she takes the standing as a positive indicator.
Founded in 2007, the Yale Entrepreneurial Institute recently moved offices from its modest space on York Street, where it overlooked Ashley’s ice cream parlor and shared a floor with Mason Whitlock, the oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven, to 55 Whitney Ave., a building with sleek glass doors and a stone lobby floor. The building also houses Undergraduate Career Services.
Though still finding its footing, YEI has ushered more than 52 student-founded companies and products through its doors and onto the market since its inception. Independently, these ventures have raised $45 million in financing. And according to Gribskov, interest in entrepreneurship is on a steep rise: students have presented two to three times as many ideas for new ventures this year as in past years.
“There’s starting to be an awakening on campus that this is a viable way to make a large impact on society,” Gribskov said.
In the past, Yale students have been slower to start entrepreneurial ventures than their peers at rival institutions. Now, though, YEI has built up a stronger record of nurturing and supporting student companies.
“I think it’s taking us a little more time to figure out where Yale’s strengths lie in entrepreneurship,” said YEI Director Jim Boyle GRD ’94. “When we first started, we had no idea what we were doing.”
Cooperative research
When it comes to faculty innovation at Yale, the amiably named Office of Cooperative Research is responsible for monetizing, patenting, and licensing new discoveries and original research. The office has had particular successes in medicine, the life sciences, and computer sciences, said Gribskov.
The list of commercial technologies to come out of Yale’s labs and classrooms reads like the inventory of a sci-fi supply store or military-industrial database: C8 Sciences (cognition training software), Hadapt, Inc. (high-speed data analytics), Protometrix, Inc. (human protein microarrays), Rachiotek (spine stabilization device) and Vutara (high performance microscopy devices) are tallied alongside novel cancer drugs, genetic tests, clean technologies and the far less grave “Sonic Golf” (a training device for your golf game). But student ideas for businesses frequently have nothing to do with research or their studies, according to Boyle and Gribskov.
“I think one of the tendencies is to look at creating companies about problems that you know and you understand. So a lot of times you’ll see students in particular coming up with ideas that relate to things they’re familiar with. You see social media; you see textbook companies; you see coffee shops — things they have experience with,” Gribskov said.
The difficulty, then, is for the non-technically minded student to look outside of him- or herself, to find a more broad or universal problem in need of solving.
“Some of the most successful companies we’ve seen come out of YEI have actually been ones where students have taken a step back and looked at, ‘What’s a segment that really has a problem?’,” Gribskov added.
When pressed for an example of one such company, Gribskov initially mentioned the grilled cheese franchise Cheeseboy, founded by Michael Inwald SOM ’10.
“It’s comfort food, so it’s pan-American,” she added.
But Gribskov went on to bring up an energy-generating desalination cell students have developed, and Boyle mentioned the company SilviaTerra, which was developed by School of Forestry & Environmental Science student Zack Parisa FES ’09. The venture offers a method of using satellite technology to help land managers count trees more efficiently.
Boyle said that Parisa wasn’t initially motivated by profit, but came up with the algorithm as a way to collect data for his own studies. Only afterwards did the commercial possibilities enter the picture. Although the company recently won the Massachusetts Challenge for best “social impact” venture, its online profile also highlights its uses for the timber industry, noting that “timber inventory is a $200 million business in the United States alone.”
Said Boyle: “I don’t like the word ‘profit.’ We’re always looking to build ventures that are self-sustaining, that do not rely on philanthropic donations to keep going.”
The YEI offices themselves have a “self-sustaining” feel — desks crowded with computers, an Ikea-looking rug in cheerful colors, and boxy furniture seemingly molded by the bodies of exhausted student self-starters who have collapsed into them over time. But the friendly organization has plenty of less visible resources to offer as well, including a far-reaching spider’s web of connections and access to seed-round and early-stage cash.
Things of value
In this past July, partly prompted by alumni in the business world, the YEI made a move towards investing in new student-made companies, with an eye towards eventual equity stakes, rather than merely granting prize money and fellowship stipends as they have in the past. Essentially, this means that where the institute once expected nothing in return, the organization may now own a share of any future profits of a given student endeavor.
After receiving a donation for this express purpose, Yale split an initial $50,000 investment between two recently founded enterprises — Panorama Education, a platform for sharing school-related feedback, and Mental Canvas, a design-software company developing tech for 3-D sketching.
“These new investments are not a departure — they’re another building block in what we do,” said Boyle. “The entire cosmos of ideas is filled with very rough ideas. But ideas are cheap. Plans for implementing those ideas can be things of value.”
Since year one, the institute has offered a summer incubator program for student start-ups, through which it provides a stipend, mentorship and support for entrepreneurs. But alums involved in the program encouraged the YEI to do something further to help these teams stay on their feet after the summer.
“If investments could be made, you’d have an opportunity to benefit from the wealth they might create, and put it back into the program,” said Boyle, reiterating advice he was given. In this vein, the YEI will award another $25,000 today, to another student venture.
Still, there are no guarantees that the YEI will ever see a return on this or any of the other money. If the companies fail, as so many do, the dollars evaporate, as a recourse-less loan, explained Gribskov.
A luxurious choice
Jessica Cole ’12, founder of the event discovery platform Roammeo, finds it funny that, among her friends, she’s considered the risk-taker, for not joining an i-bank, consulting firm, or a more conventional, stable career route. She acknowledged that her ability to make such a choice was “a luxury,” dependent on her financial circumstances.
“I may be jumping off a cliff, but I have some form of parachute on the way down,” she said.
For this reason, Cole says she never evangelizes start-ups or risk-taking to others.
On occasion, start-ups and social media entrepreneurs have faced accusations of creating jobs for the one percent or targeting only a privileged tax bracket, which has access to particular technologies and devices.
“That charge hasn’t been leveled at me by anyone but myself, but it keeps me up at night,” said Cole.
On Incubation II
An incubation period may refer to either the amount of time an egg requires to hatch or the time that elapses between one being exposed to infection and showing the first symptoms (the interlude of a virus’s incubation in one’s body). This is an inadvertently apt set of definitions when it comes to Yale’s start-up incubators, the incubation of the average student and the role of the Yale Corporation, where economic and humanistic interests may conflict. Though sometimes incubation can lead to the maturation of a golden egg (the next Instagram, say, or a grilled cheese sandwich franchise), it just as easily can nurture a nasty, value-less bacterial culture.
The corporate model in education?
Since being “exposed” to corporate philosophies (or pathologies), many, if not most, would claim that Yale has not yet shown undue symptoms of being managed primarily by economic concerns or bottom lines. (Though it’s worth noting that a report released by the graduate student union in 2011 was titled “Yale Inc., the Corporate Model in Education.”)
But now, with the search for President Levin’s successor, it’s possible that a new head of the Yale Corporation could take the university in a more big business-minded direction. Professor Jim Sleeper ’69, a political science lecturer, is concerned this may be the case. He sees Yale’s educational role and its financial nature as starkly opposed.
“[E]very university president should be asked publicly to restore balance between the institution’s academic mission and its economic goals. Every president should try to repair the damage being done to universities’ ethos by corporatization,” Professor Sleeper wrote for the Huffington Post at the start of September, after President Levin announced his resignation.
As the largest landowner in New Haven and the largest employer (not to mention an institution with an endowment in the double-digit billions) it would be ludicrous to deny Yale’s weight and heft as an economic player, but Sleeper’s concerns also reach to the beating heart of the student experience at the University.
“It’s about the creeping instrumentalization of the liberal arts education,” he said to a group of about 25 students seated outside of Commons in the early hours of Thursday evening. “Yale is selling career skills and students are buying.”
The students had been drawn to the meeting by an email from the Y Syndicate, a loose group of students that has been involved in protesting the structure of Yale’s official presidential search.
Sleeper went on to argue that students are increasingly using the University name to acquire “better” (higher-paying) jobs or to climb higher on the corporate ladder. “That’s turning the liberal education into a commodity,” he argued as the sun sank a little lower in the sky.
Company morale
When Brandon Levin, the student liaison to the Presidential Search Committee, was asked about what qualities he thinks the next president should have, he answered: “One of the most frequent sources of feedback I’ve gotten is, ‘We want a more visible president. We want a president who’s walking around campus.’ I think, to an extent that’s important, but at the same time, the president walking around campus for a lot of the day, or whatever it is, precludes that person from doing a lot of things that are important to Yale. That person is the CEO of a company, so keeping morale of the company high is very much important.”
If Yale were to be run more like a company, and less like an educational institution, it’s unclear precisely what form that would take, or what specific changes such a shift would incur.
But Ben Crosby ’14, a member of Students Unite Now, expressed a concern that the corporate-heavy Presidential Search Committee might stress profit and efficiency over more academic or intellectual priorities. “My concern is both with the structure of the search and the potential outcome,” he said.
In a 2010 YDN article titled “Is Yale U. starting to run more like Yale, Inc.?” Isaac Arnsdorf wrote about the centralization of various University services to the detriment of specific departmental work, and, more vividly, the reference to students as “customers” in memos and emails between vice presidents of the corporation.
On Incubation III
Any period of incubation implies an eventual release or escape — the completed growth of a whole and fully realized individual. In the case of Yale as a university, and the individual Yale student or future entrepreneur, this adulthood necessarily entails somehow navigating the interaction of economic and human concerns, between financial success for its own sake and the service of some other — any other — value or good.
In baseball, it’s called the Mendoza Line. A batting average of .200 is the last checkpoint on the slide into limbo. On the wrong side of that number, you have something to prove, or you’re headed to the bench.
And so it is, strangely enough, with music.
Something about the 2:00 mark makes us blanch. Any song clocking in under 120 seconds is probably not going to merit $.99 on iTunes, nor will you hear it on the radio. Two minutes and 10 seconds? Sure, whatever. Just don’t slip beneath the Mendoza Line.
Much has been made of our shrinking attention spans, so it’s rare that we find something that’s actually too short. We channel surf and bounce from Facebook to Twitter and can never concentrate on anything and yada yada yada, as the adults in our lives continually remind us. Nothing can get over quick enough. But it seems that there is something fundamentally insufficient about a song that leaves us before breaking that two-minute finish line. It’s like a cliffhanger with no resolution, a mystery novel in which we never find out whodunit. The song ends before it’s over.
And yet this whole time, you’ve been thinking: But I love my favorite midget songs! Actually, so do I. The first time I heard the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl” quickly became the second through 10th times I heard the White Stripes’ “Fell in Love With a Girl,” followed by the first time my dad threw open my door and told me to turn down that goddamn racket you kids call music. I am thoroughly convinced that Deerhunter’s “Cover Me (Slowly)” is the pinnacle of rock music, despite being one minute and 22 seconds long. And of course “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” excluding four seconds of silence at the beginning, runs 1:58.
The brevity of these songs is their secret weapon. There is, of course, that old showbiz adage to “always leave them wanting more,” and there is little I want more of than Wilco’s 1:38 “Another Man’s Done Gone.” That is what frustrates and captivates the listener of an awesome but truncated tune: the short burst of brilliance that would collapse under its own weight if stretched any thinner. The White Stripes song that served as my introduction to this paradox is a perfect example: the song has six chords and two verses, each repeated twice. There are two instruments — electric guitar and drums — and one vocal. And if you can find a song with a higher ratio of ass kicked to runtime, please, let me know. When the song ends, catching me by surprise every time, I inevitably play it again. But to make it any longer would be criminal, like watering down a bottle of 1997 Cabernet Sauvignon (a good year, I’m told).
There is, though, a fundamental difference between short songs and longer songs. The craft in a longer song is not only in making the parts but in fitting them together; a good songwriter knows how to get from point A to point B, using each to make the other sound better. But in a song shorter than two minutes, there is rarely time for a point B, and never time for point C (“Sgt. Pepper’s” is the notable exception here; if you were surprised to learn that it lasts less than two minutes, that’s because the Beatles were such masters that they got a full song’s worth of complexity into 1:58. Blimey). Short songs, in a sense, are a one-trick pony. They represent one snapshot of brilliance in its most distilled form. As a musician, I would bet you that most short songs are written quickly, a rogue puzzle piece with which no others will fit. This is what makes the best of them so searingly powerful: they are undiluted inspiration.
It is also what makes them, ultimately, unsatisfactory. They obey the dictate to leave us wanting more at the cost of leaving us content. The best songs grow out of the same moments of genius that result in our favorite short songs; they just manage to bloom while others remain embryonic. A short song is a preview for a longer song that never comes.
Yet such songs’ existance is a testament to the fact that someone, somewhere, thought they were scraps too beautiful to abandon. Nobody puts out a song like that hoping for a hit. By nature, they’re useless as album filler. If a song makes it into the world at under two minutes, it just might have some kernel of genius that made it too good to throw away. Give it a listen. It won’t take long.
Q. When did you develop an interest in the environment? Was it from your youth?
A. Not so much. My father was an outdoorsman, and so we hiked and biked. When I was working at the Crimson, I covered the city of Cambridge, and at The New Yorker, I was writing the “Talk of the Town” column. It was only later in my 20s that my life kind of shifted. I quit The New Yorker and moved to the Adirondack Mountains, the great wilderness of the East, in upstate New York. I fell in love with that landscape and spent a lot of time in it — hiking, canoeing and cross-country skiing. I also began reading the great nature writers — Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Terry Williams and Rick Bass. And I began reading the early science about climate change, and as a journalist, I realized that this was probably the biggest thing that had ever happened. So, I started covering this and that’s how I came to write “End of Nature,” which was really the first book about climate change for a general audience. It really became my life.
Q. How was it writing about climate change at a time when no one else was?
A. As a journalist, it’s always good to be out in the front, right? My book had two things going on. I was writing about what was going on scientifically, interviewing scientists and all of that. At the same time, the book was a kind of extended essay, almost philosophical, on the meaning of it all. I was very struck by the idea that there were really no wild places left on our earth, even the very wild place I was living in. I think that that’s an idea that has continued to grow in our lives.
Q. Has being a Methodist in any way informed your outlook on the environment?
A. Sure. Some years ago, I wrote a book about Job, which is really the first great piece of nature writing. I take very seriously the Gospel’s call to care for our neighbors. We’re not doing that. We’re in the process of drowning and sickening our neighbors around the world.
Q. You’ve spoken about your desire to encourage campuses to divest from fossil fuels. How have people reacted to your call on college campuses?
A. We at 350.org haven’t fully unveiled that campaign yet. I was sort of jumping the gun at Yale and letting people know about it. I’ve also done that at a few other colleges in the last week or so — at Ann Arbor, Madison, Amherst and a few others. The response has been remarkable everywhere. People understand that this is a compound moral issue as well as a practical one. And they understand that it’s no longer okay for us to profit off of the destruction of the planet. Now, of course it’ll be very difficult to persuade boards of trustees. But I’m very glad that we’re at least getting started with this process.
Q. Have you at any point felt disillusioned about the success or progress of environmentalism?
A. Yes. We’re losing and we have been. But in the last four years, since seven Middlebury College students and I founded 350.org, there has been a very rapid growth. It’s possible we’re going to give everyone a good run for their money.
Q. Do you think that campaigns like 350 will be enough?
A. I don’t know. I think that big movements are our only hope because the fossil fuel industry has all the money. We’re never going to compete with that much money. We need to rely on social movements. Our real problem, I think, is we have to make progress very, very quickly. The physics of climate change demands rapid incremental action. I don’t know if we’re going to do it fast enough or not. We’ll find out.
Q. Do you have any thoughts on the upcoming elections? Are there any candidates or political parties that you think will be more open to environmental change?
A. I think that Washington is not going to save us one way or the other. I was shocked when Mitt Romney made his only comment about climate change, which was when he joked about it at the Republican National Convention, when he said he wasn’t going to help or be worried about saving the planet or any of that stuff. That did shock me. It’s not that Obama has done that great a job; I guess you can say that at least he isn’t telling jokes about it.
Q. In writing about your time at the Harvard Crimson, you’ve said that reporters had no drive to take on “the largest subjects of the day.” Do you have any advice for aspiring journalists today?
A. Yes, I think that college reporters should be overconfident at all times. And think that it is entirely all right to take on the big issues of the world around them. At the Crimson, I covered the 1983 presidential campaign and spent a month in New Hampshire. We wrote editorials about everything going on in the world around us, and we wrote them as if the world paid some attention to us. At some level, that was very vain. But at another level, one has to take himself seriously as a thinker, as a writer and as a reporter.
Q. Now, the obligatory question: Yale or Harvard?
A. I think both of them are beautiful places. But if I was going to school right now, I’d be tempted to come up to Middlebury where I teach. It’s as academically serious as Yale or Harvard and it also has big mountains to go skiing and hiking.
I was eating frozen yogurt on the couch when she popped the question: “What are you going to do after Yale?”
Her tone frightened me. My mom and I had discussed post-graduation plans before, but always in casual conversations. Usually, I parried her questions with a vaguely jokey answer, like “I’m going to be a poor grad student living in a dingy New York apartment” or “I’m going to Cape Town to study the effects of income inequality on education” or “Maybe I’ll bum around Cambridge punting Chinese tourists.” But this time, she sounded serious. In my panic, I dropped my spoon.
“Your father and I want you to become financially independent after graduation,” she said.
All of a sudden, the couch I sat on no longer felt secure. In a year, it will become a foreign couch, one that I will no longer be welcome to sleep on for extended periods of time (two months is my parents’ limit). In a year, I will be sitting on my own couch, eating my own yogurt, living in my own apartment. The prospect of growing up never felt so real.
“But don’t worry,” my mom added. “You’ll be getting the old family car.”
I didn’t feel a bit reassured; I can’t even drive.
My mom’s talk might have frightened plenty of Yalies into finance or consulting jobs. But I’ve decided to eschew those common career paths. I don’t consider a job in finance or consulting evil. Despite their role in the 2007-’12 global financial crisis, investment banks are still hugely important to a properly functioning economy. Likewise, consulting firms provide valuable services to companies that employ countless Americans. But punching dollar values into a spreadsheet and perfecting PowerPoints for Monday meetings seems rather far from what I want to do in life.
When I talk to some of my panicked senior friends, they see a binary choice between going corporate and becoming homeless. Even those who have never previously expressed interest in those two industries suddenly perked up their ears whenever they hear news about info sessions.
This panic has spread far beyond just seniors. Last Friday, the annual undergraduate career fair descended upon Payne Whitney Gym. As I trudged in my heels down Broadway (I was applying for a research job at the University of Chicago), I encountered two freshmen in ill-fitting suits headed in the same direction.
“What are you interested in?” I asked one of them.
“I don’t know. Maybe Bridgewater or Bain,” he replied. “I’m only in Intro Micro, so we’ll see.”
The undergraduate career fair looked like a sea of gray and black suits. As I meandered my way through the crowd, I heard the voices of enthusiastic young alumni pitching their companies to students. Maybe they were genuinely excited about asset management or derivative modeling. Or maybe they were just good at public relations. The dazzling array of flyers and brochures and pens and kitschy gifts disoriented me. Empty words like “talent,” “potential” and “advancement” buzzed in the air. Feeling overwhelmed, I scrambled out of the gym (still in my heels) as fast as I could. There and then, I vowed not to “sell out.”
It’s hard not to sell out. Especially for a student on financial aid like me. I am not ashamed to say that I am a recipient of the Pell Grant, a form of aid given to low-income students by the U.S. Department of Education. I am not ashamed to admit that I have held a job since the first day of freshman year because I need the extra pocket money. And I am definitely not ashamed to admit I shop at thrift stores (and not just because of their hipster aesthetic).
Many of my friends from low-income families often feel pressure from their parents to enter high-paying careers. It’s the typical immigrant story: the first-generation parents want their children to have the American dream, to be able to have a house in suburbia, to have vacations every year. The parents push their children to excel in school and in college, so their children may one day become lawyers, doctors, bankers and consultants. The aspiration towards financial security, if not towards the upper-middle class, is certainly admirable. Often, I feel guilty for wanting to become a political scientist because I know I will never be able to provide for my parents in the same way had I chosen a more lucrative profession.
Fortunately, I have parents who support my decision to go into academia. Perhaps it’s because my dad never fulfilled his dream career. Growing up in Hangzhou, China, he always wanted to become an electrical engineer. The Cultural Revolution cut short his aspirations. When all the universities in China were shut down, my dad — barely out of high school — taught math for several years to make a living. When the government finally restituted the National Higher Education Entrance Examination (gao kao) in 1977, he had already turned 24. Although he wanted to go to college to study engineering, my dad’s score placed him in medical school. In China in the 1970s, and to a certain extent even now, your gao kao score determined your profession for the rest of your life.
Decades later, my dad has accepted the fact that he works as a non-tenured research scientist at a cancer hospital. But he still tinkers with ham radio and tries to fix my old electronics. He seems his happiest fusing wires together in the garage or trying to teach me how to fix DVD players. A shadow of disappointment hangs over his professional life. At his age, my dad feels he can never fulfill his aspirations to become an electrical engineer.
“Don’t be like me,” my dad once told me as he drove me to a GRE class. “Be happy with what you do. But whatever you do, publish every year.”
The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” looped repeatedly on my laptop as I botched another statistical code to clean up a data set. A string of mild curses followed. But since I have gotten used these types of frustrations, I chuckle a little.
Sometimes I wonder why I take econometrics or conduct surveys for the News. I came to college as a student in the Directed Studies program, intending to major in English. Then, enamored with Plato and Thucydides, I wanted to study political theory. I longed to craft beautiful essays on grand ideas like Isaiah Berlin, Benedict Anderson or Ernest Gellner, who added literary elegancy to political prose.
One day during my sophomore year, a kindly professor took me aside and said, “You know there are no jobs in political theory, right? We’re in the era of big data, kid, so learn some stats.”
For those of us idealists who want to pursue our passions, we are often told the industries we pine to enter are diseased, dying or dead. (Plenty of News reporters and editors interested in print journalism can attest to this fact.) Furthermore, as Joshua Revesz ’13 correctly argued in his Monday column “A harmful career fair,” the Yale Undergraduate Career Services seems unhelpful for students who want careers outside finance, consulting, medicine, or law. Then, what is an enterprising, young idealist to do?
We get what we need. From the classroom, extracurricular activities and internships, we get the skills necessary to survive and thrive in a competitive economy. These skills may extend beyond the confines of the classical liberal arts education. Why can’t an art major learn to create websites? Or a history major learn to conduct geospatial analysis? Or a political science major learn how to use instrumental variables? In today’s fluid job market, employers seek hybrids like print-broadcast reporters or geographer-historians or sociologist-programmers. (Yes, the last ones do exist, and they work at Facebook.)
Despite my humanities leanings, I have grown to like statistics — and even linear algebra. Statistical softwares have become my friends. Conducting YDN surveys, which once seemed like a chore, now feels exciting. Learning new skills often seems daunting. (I still get frightened when I open up R, a strange stats package that seems to employ a language from Mars.) But this economy is not one for Luddites, even for idealist Luddites. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine searching for jobs outside the comforts of UCS, but the enterprising, young idealist must go the extra mile.
“What are you going to do after Yale?” many senior friends have asked me in the past few weeks.
I might not get what I want post-graduation, but I’ll get what I need.
