Volume 57 - Issue 5

May 2025

The Magazine About Yale and New Haven

Volume 57, Issue 5

cover story

Wrongful Inheritance Victoria Hill is among at least twenty-six children conceived when a former Yale fertility doctor inseminated unknowing patients with his own sperm— an injustice difficult to prosecute and impossible to process, particularly after his recent death.

Letter from the editors

Masthead

Dear readers, In 1967, The New Journal’s third-ever issue printed a feature on students and professors protesting the Vietnam War alongside a “magazine screenplay” about a businessman whose foot gets stuck in the sidewalk. On its black and white pages, light and dark collided.

The same is true in our first issue as a managing board. Miles Zaud ’26 moseys through a cheese factory in North Haven, peeling apart mozzarella slices and family history. Other writers roam a scrappy rock climbing gym, the Lost in New Haven Museum, and an illustrious doggy daycare. In our cover story, Ryne Hisada ’27 follows a donor-conceived woman in her fight for legal and psychological restitution against fertility fraud.

October of 1967 saw dramatic escalations in anti-war protests as students were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The same month, Yalies twisted into pretzels at the new yoga studio on Elm Street.

As we produced Volume 57, Issue 5 of The New Journal, over 1,000 professors and 6,200 alumni signed open letters calling for Yale to publicly defend academic freedom amid the federal government’s assault on higher education. The Trump administration temporarily revoked the visas of four Yalies, as well as those of 1,500 students nationwide, as of writing. And the weekend before finals, Ken Carson played to a sea of dancing, rain-soaked students.

As in life, the tragic and playful coexist in The New Journal of 2025.

With hope, The Managing Board Chloe, Calista, Mia, Tina

Chloe Budakian Calista Oetama Executive Editor Mia Kohn Managing Editor Tina Li Publisher Alex Moore Editors-in-Chief

Creative Director Verse Editors

Matias Guevara Ruales

Sophia Liu

Senior Editors Ben Card Maggie Grether Chloe Nguyen

Aanika Eragam Samantha Liu Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Associate Editors

Odelya Bergner-Phillips Niva Cohen Tali Kantor Lieber Margot Kohn Harry Lowitz Kate Rodriguez Moe Shimizu Sabrina Thaler Copy Editors

Olivia Barton Zoya Haq Julian Raymond Design Editors

Dani Klein Brianna Magtoto Lauren Yee Associate Business Managers

Ethan Kan

Mark Badger Jean-Pierre Jordan Aliyya Swaby Laura Heymann Jeffrey Pollock Julia Preston Armand LeGardeur Katie Hazelwood Benjamin Lasman R. Anthony Reese Adrew Court 2

The Hull Barrett Family Fund Kathrin Lassila Fred Strebeigh Peter Phleger Steven Weisman David Greenberg Suzanne Wittebort Romy Drucker James Carney Makiko Harunari Laura Pappano

Ella Piper Claffy Adele Haeg Dani Klein Kelly Kong Maia Nehme Sonia Rosa Drew Storino

Kade Gajdusek Smile Jiang Will Sussbauer Mercuri Lam Jessica Sanchez

Tiona Zeng

Photography Colin Kim

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club

Vivian Wang

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Gabriel Haley

Web Design

Samhita Kumar

Members & Directors: Haley Cohen Gilliland • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • Jonathan Dach • Susan Dominus • Kathrin Lassila • Elizabeth Sledge • Fred Strebeigh • Aliyya Swaby

Advisors: Neela Banerjee • Richard Bradley • Susan Braudy • Lincoln Caplan • Jay Carney • Joshua Civin • Richard Conniff • Ruth Conniff • Elisha Cooper • David Greenberg • Daniel Kurtz-Phelan • Laura Pappano • Jennifer Pitts • Julia Preston • Lauren Rawbin • David Slifka • John Swansburg • Anya Kamenetz • Steven Weisman • Daniel Yergin

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Contents

This Is No String Cheese

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profile

At Liuzzi Cheese Co., mozzarella-making isn’t just a way of life—it’s a life of whey.

By Miles Zaud

Wrongful Inheritance

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cover story Victoria Hill is among at least twenty-six children conceived when a former Yale fertility doctor inseminated unknowing patients with his own sperm—an injustice difficult to prosecute and impossible to process, particularly after his recent death.

By Ryne Hisada

point of departure

poems

4 Old Walls, New Routes

23 Atlantic Silverside

As others leave for flashy gyms, regulars at City Climb hold tight to the scrappy spirit that first drew them to climbing.

By Aiwen Desai

26 If The Wise Have Wisdom, Idiots Have Idioms

By Alistair Lam

6 Lost and Found The Lost in New Haven Museum welcomes objects donated by New Haveners, preserving a history at risk of being forgotten.

By Nicole Manning personal essay

24 An Open Letter to My Uncle Marc

By Prentiss Patrick-Carter

By Diya Naik

asides

28 A Crack in Time

By Will Sussbauer endnote

29 Dog People There’s another Ivy League institution in New Haven. Things get a bit hairier there.

By Abbey Kim CROSSWORD: Closing Number, page 31

May 2025

image credits: vivian wang (cover); cherry grove farm (top); vivian wang (bottom)

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Point of Departure

At the corporate facility, with its soaring walls and a plethora of holds, practiced setters are able to create better routes that challenge climbers to develop new technical skills and movement patterns.

Mike Augustine, City Climb’s co-owner, hopes to improve the gym’s As others leave for flashy gyms, regulars at routesetting. But, at present, the gym’s City Climb hold tight to the scrappy spirit that predominantly tall, male setting team first drew them to climbing. tends to set routes which favor climbers of a similar body type. For instance, the

By Aiwen Desai “crux”—or most challenging move—of many routes is a move between distant n a cold winter night, memholds; these moves mainly test climbers’ bers of the Yale Climbing Team strength and power. Augustine admits file into the bottom floor of a warethat City Climb lacks routes that prihouse on the Farmington Canal Trail. oritize balance, precision, and technical Inside, fluorescent lights reveal a cave of footwork, and he says that the lack of gray walls covered with colorful, chalkdiverse setters is a problem across the smeared holds and painter’s tape. climbing industry.

The team is fond of the gym City Climb’s appeal lies in its despite its rundown facilities. “City low prices and unabashed quirkiClimb is a dank, dark hole,” says ness, which corporate-owned gyms Quinn Ennis ’26, captain of the in major cities lack. Each route is team. “But it’s a friendly dank, dark named by its setter, often something hole!” humorous or whimsical. “Nelson’s Founded in 2012, City Climb Noodles,” named for one setter’s was once New Haven’s only climbdog, traces a path across the ceiling. ing gym, and the center of the “A Quick One Before the Eternal city’s eclectic climbing community.

Worm Devours Connecticut” is However, with the 2023 opening of a long trail of round blue holds.

Ascent Climbing Gym and Rock “Voodoo in the Subaru” zigzags up Spot, two better-resourced gyms, the back wall.

City Climb is no longer the city’s “It was definitely the least posh premier climbing facility. gym I’d ever been to,” says Jared Climbing is a rapidly growStolove GSAS ’28. “But I liked its ing industry: the Climbing Business neighborhood-y charm.”

Journal found that the number of Augustine believes that the gym climbing gyms in the US has doubled provides a space for people to unite A climber is lowered after completing a top-rope route. since 2013. Grand View Research around a shared activity, including estimates that the climbing gym those who feel like misfits elsewhere. industry was worth $3.3 billion in 2024 He describes the gym’s climbers as “slight and is projected to grow by over 9 percent oddballs, in the best way”—including himannually over the next five years. self, he says with a laugh.

Ascent and Rock Spot offer highSome longtime climbers lament er-quality equipment and nicer amenities that the sport has been corrupted by than City Climb. Locally owned Ascent consumerism. According to Delaney has a sauna, weight lifting equipment, and Miller, a three-time national champia coworking space. Rock Spot, an east onship winner, what began as “a niche coast chain, boasts floor-to-ceiling winsport of soul seekers and dirtbags” has dows and the latest MoonBoard, a cusbecome mainstream, largely due to the tomizable training board with light-up rise in corporate gym ownership. Miller holds. These gyms charge monthly memwrote in Climbing Magazine that climbbership fees of $95 and $84 respectively, ing gyms have “lost their soul.” To her, while City Climb charges $62. the soaring walls, aesthetically appealing City Climb has found itself unable routes, and fancy amenities of corporate to compete with Ascent and Rock Spot, gyms represent their homogenization. particularly in one key area: routesetting, She believes gym owners have sacrificed the arrangement of holds into climbing individuality for a replicable gym model routes on the wall. “The setting at Rock proven to maximize profit. In doing so, Spot is the best, full stop,” says Jonah they have set in motion the decline of Heiser ’25, one of City Climb’s setters. climbing’s counterculture spirit.

Old Walls, New Routes

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layout by Vivian wang

Point of Departure

City Climb’s overhanging bouldering walls.

Greg Lowden, Rock Spot’s regional manager, pushes back on this critique.

He points out that the expansion of the climbing gym industry allows more people to access the sport than ever before.

Augustine remains agnostic on the trend of corporate gym ownership. His gym has suffered since Rock Spot and Ascent entered the market, with membership falling by 30 percent, but he acknowledges that there are advantages and disadvantages to the corporate model. Corporate gyms typically have more resources, he says, but they are less connected to their specific communities.

City Climb offers events tailored to local groups in New Haven, such as schools and veterans’ groups.

Not everyone finds City Climb’s limited facilities charming. Mazie Wong, who coaches City Climb’s youth competition team, is frustrated with the gym’s limitations: its short walls, subpar setting, and low budget for competition expenses Competition climbing routes typically feature large holds across tall walls of varying angles, which City Climb lacks. The gym is not an ideal training facility, and this sometimes negatively affects the kids’ team’s performance at competitions, says Wong.

Wong worries that poor competition results harm the kids’ sense of self-confidence. Like City Climb, the youth team

is tight-knit, quirky, and under-resourced.

Most of the kids feel out of place among their peers at school and at climbing competitions. To Wong, if the kids see their team performing poorly at competitions, they may believe they should conform to the “elitist and heteronormative” culture of competitive climbing.

“I want them to believe that defending their weirdness is worth it, and the space I have to do that is climbing,” Wong says. “But my job is just so much more difficult because of City Climb.”

Without the tether of a competitive team, many ambitious climbers have left City Climb, seeking better facilities.

Heiser, who sets routes at City Climb, bought a membership to Rock Spot in September 2024. He hoped to improve his endurance leading up to an outdoor climbing trip, and the training boards at Rock Spot offered easy circuits that could be repeated endlessly. “I never want to see City Climb go out of business, because it’s nostalgic, my home gym, and the reason I climb now,” he says. “But that wasn’t enough to keep me climbing there.”

More of a recreational club than a competitive team, the Yale Climbing Team remains loyal to City Climb. The two share a symbiotic relationship.

During the school year, the team makes up about a third of the gym’s memberships. The team is able to offer generous photos by aiwen desai

financial aid to its members due largely to City Climb’s low membership fees. If gym fees were higher, the team might have to move to a competitive model, holding try-outs and limiting its membership. Ennis knows some climbing teams work that way, but, as he says, “it’s not our ethos.” The team welcomes all.

Each year the Yale Climbing Team holds its annual “Lock-In,” a teamwide sleepover, at City Climb. Around midnight, a toilet paper fashion show kicks off—a zombie bride, a scantily clad firefighter, and a poorly wrapped mummy run down the length of the gym to cheers and hoots of laughter. Not much sleep occurs. Instead, the team keeps climbing. ∎ Aiwen Desai is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

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Point of Departure

Lost and Found The Lost in New Haven Museum welcomes objects donated by New Haveners, preserving a history at risk of being forgotten.

By Nicole Manning n 80 Hamilton Street, the Lost O in New Haven Museum stands with its industrial black brick façade. Every

day, Robert Greenberg, the museum’s founder and executive director, greets visitors with the animated fervor of a magician unveiling a new trick—rattling off the history of a dozen exhibits in one breath, all perfectly cataloged in the chaotic archive of his mind. As he begins to weave visitors through the museum, light illuminates each artifact while house music pulses softly in the background.

Visitors step into a living record of the city’s subconscious, as dynamic and vibrant as Greenberg.

Since the summer of 2024, I have worked with Lost in New Haven as a Yale President’s Public Service Fellow and Community Associate. Wandering through the maze of artifacts has transformed how I engaged with complexity,

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contradiction, and the responsibilities of telling stories and sharing history.

Silly putty, corsets, lollipops, the first commercial telephone exchange, and even the first hamburger—New Haven has been a wellspring of invention for hundreds of years. Greenberg does not just give tours of these objects; he lets them speak. One moment he is explaining the history behind New Haven’s original nine-square street-grid, encouraging visitors to look for their neighborhood on the illuminated New Haven City 1879 map. Next, he is inviting visitors to smell domestic pottery jugs from New Haven, where the scent of molasses still lingering inside. Kids play with typewriters and silly putty. Meanwhile, parents and grandparents remember their childhood upon encountering the the AC Gilbert Atomic Energy Lab toy set, marketed to children with real radioactive material. Objects, for Greenberg, bring history alive. “You can’t bring back the past,” he said, “but you walk down the street and look at the brick on a building and see that there is a spark of memory on that brick.”

As a child, Greenberg—born in 1962—would wander around New Haven with his grandfather, Simon Evans, an antique dealer. From the top of East Rock to the crypt in the Center Church, their outings immersed Greenberg in the city’s past. Growing up surrounded by unusual objects and family heirlooms cultivated his propensity for collecting. His collection grew over the next few decades, until he was finally able to give his artifacts a permanent home on Hamilton Street in 2020.

But Lost in New Haven is not just an individual collection. One of the museum’s core practices is its ‘open-door’

PHOTos by nicole manning

policy for contributions—any New Havener can donate their objects.

When people donate to the museum, Greenberg and John Guillemette, the Museum Services Coordinator, collect their oral histories and tag each artifact with the donor’s name.

“Historical preservation is a shared activity, made the strongest when many people of all backgrounds are able to get involved,” said Guillemette. “Museums that treat local history as a scholarly specialization end up alienating their greatest resources: people are repositories of history.”

Lost in New Haven rebels against what Greenberg calls the “cultural forgetting” that often accompanies urban progress. Roslyn Meyer, current chair of the Museum’s Board of Directors, notes that an artifact “gives us the perspective that life didn’t start when you were born—that we are the product of generations and generations of innovations.”

For New Haveners like Marcella Monk Flake, founder of the Monk Youth Jazz & STEAM Collective and cousin of jazz icon Thelonious Monk, Lost in New Haven’s objects are personal as well as historical. “When I walked in and saw these artifacts and relics from Seamless Rubber Company, it just thrilled my heart,” she said, referring to an important New Haven manufacturer that altered the course of the city’s industrial history. “I was like ‘Oh my god, my daddy worked there.’”

Flake’s family came to New Haven during the Great Migration. Much of her family’s history of resilience and sacrifice was nearly lost to the urban renewal of the 1960s, during which city officials deemed neighborhoods undesirable. “New Haven has historically been pretty much a tale of two cities,” as Flake put it, marked by

Point of Departure

Robert Greenberg leads visitors through the Lost in New Haven Museum.

the coexistence of working-class, Black and Latino neighborhoods and wealthier, more insulated versions of the city. The divide only deepened in the 1960s when Mayor Richard C. Lee enacted initiatives to replace working-class neighborhoods with what he called “functional infrastructure.” These measures were intended to improve transportation accessibility for surrounding suburbs, transforming the city into a commercial hub. However, they only proved to divide the city further.

Whole communities end up severed from their neighbors by large, domineering concrete infrastructure,” said Guillemette, referencing bridges, highways, and garages. “The Hill neighborhood in New Haven, where Black, Jewish, Latinx, and immigrant populations resided in the 1960s and reside to this day, were severely disadvantaged by urban renewal and disconnected from the rest of the city.”

After riots against racial mistreatment and poor housing broke out in 1967—sparked by a white restaurant owner shooting a Puerto Rican man— the National Guard arrived at the Hill neighborhood in tanks, “setting up floodlights and rifles on residential rooftops,” said Flake. She also recalled how the

militarized environment led to enforced curfews and instilled fear in the neighborhood’s families. What remains of this history today, Flake emphasized, must be preserved with care both to honor those who lived through it and challenge its erasure. Remnants of this displacement, from weathered glass bottles to chipped ceramic fragments, sit illuminated in the museum.

Lost in New Haven continues to bridge past and present through its partnership with Discovering Amistad. The organization dedicates itself to preserving the legacy of the pivotal 1839 Amistad Rebellion, which led to a landmark Supreme Court case that challenged the legality of the slave trade. After revolting aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad, African captives from Sierra Leone were tried in New Haven for murder, where local and national abolitionists eventually won their freedom and acquittal. While Discovering Amistad enlivens this story aboard a replica schooner at Long Wharf, Lost in New Haven drops visitors on the New Haven pier where La Amistad docked. The permanent exhibition allows visitors to see local history through objects such as sails, the ship’s compass, and the mass hoop of the replica schooner. “By preserving this story,” said Discovering layout by brianna magtoto

Amistad’s Director of Education Chris Menapace, “we can help make sure this story does not become lost, especially at a time when some want to erase stories of oppression and resistance.”

When he is not giving tours, Greenberg sits at a high-top table covered with photographs and newly collected items, eyes fixed on the screen in front of him. Dozens of black-and-white photographs are tiled across his monitor—old storefronts, maps, candids of life in New Haven. His fingers hover above the keyboard, pausing.

“This isn’t an institution—it’s a living, breathing archive,” he said. “Built from everything we’ve forgotten—or have been told to forget.” ∎ Nicole Manning is a sophomore in Berkeley College.

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Profile

This Is No String At Liuzzi Cheese Co., mozzarella-making isn’t just a way of life—it’s a life of whey.

By Miles Zaud

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Cheese E

lliot shook his head in disapproval at the railcar-sized vat of mozzarella like it was cash going up in flames, which wasn’t too far off: if that vat was a dud, Liuzzi Cheese Co. stood to lose what was, by normal-people standards, a shitload of money.

But judging from Elliot’s pained expression, almost maternal in its distress, it was more about the mozzarella.

He waved over Maximiliano Laporta, a cheesemaker on the floor, as well as Rodolfo “Ralph” Liuzzi, the president and paterfamilias of Liuzzi Cheese, and they all started firing off in Italian.

Elliot stuck his hand in the vat, ripped off a piece of the mozzarella, smelled it, shredded it between his fingers, and finally put it into his mouth. Max and Ralph watched silently. O.K., something was up: Elliot shook his head even more vigorously and pointed into his mouth, saying “La bocca! La bocca!”

Soon, everyone was shaking their heads and saying “La bocca!” What a beautiful moment, I thought. Even in an industrial cheese plant like Liuzzi, la bocca, the orifice into which Elliot inserted the cheese, would always have the final say. But through the language barrier and the din of heavy machinery, and aided by good old Italian gesticulation, I began to realize that the problem was not actually the mozzarella that Elliot had sampled, but la bocca itself, which I later learned had been contaminated at breakfast by il caffe and la focaccia (loaded with enough garlic to impair the ‘buds for days).

Something was always breaking down or straight-up exploding at Liuzzi Cheese Co., and it was Elliot’s job to fix it. Elliot, a middle-aged shortish guy with a largely hair-colonized head and the remnants of a jacked physique from his years in military school, always wore a hairnet in case of freak accidents, which happened more often than you’d layout by DANI klein

think. Other parts of his job, from what I could discern, were to: (1) know the traditional Italian cheese recipes by heart; (2) sample mozzarella regularly, and in doing so, eat—if one thinks about it—quite a lot of mozzarella every day; (3) sell cheese to wholesale corporations with entire departments dedicated to out-bargaining him; (4) generally exude a kind of Don-Corleoneish authority that was benevolent yet unfuckwithable.

My day at Liuzzi began in a conference room above the cheese plant, somewhat protected from cheese odors, where Elliot explained the difference between thermophilic and mesophilic bacterial cultures. (As far as you’re concerned, they’re basically the same thing.) Once I had sufficiently understood these prerequisites, Elliot went on to less elementary material—Anatomy of the Mozzarella Vat—but just before he turned to the whiteboard, he realized his lecture was best continued by simply pointing at a vat. He handed me a three-piece uniform: hairnet, lab coat, and rubber boots.

The boots were absurdly high-topped—I couldn’t even bend my knee properly because they were up to my lower thigh—and I began to feel a bit apprehensive. Were we going to wade into a mozzarella vat?

“It’s wet out there,” was all Elliot said.

He was right: there was no land in sight on the cheese floor. Buckets were positioned under drainage pipes to catch the machines’ cheesewater runoff, and judging from the way the pipes were gushing, the buckets must have done their job for about two seconds: every single one was overflowing. What I really had to watch out for were pipes that seemed inactive but on occasion blitzkrieged me with cheesewater. It felt like running across those fountains in public parks that unexpectedly shoot jets of water up from the ground, except in this case I really would have preferred

Which looked like motor oil, and the amount of caffeine in a single shot of this stuff could have powered a small car. Elliot and Max routinely took 15-minute coffee breaks, and during every minute of those breaks, they were preoccupied with drinking as much coffee as possible. They would have been more productive if instead of heading to the coffee room every few minutes to get their fix, they hooked up to a very long I.V. Like an airplane toilet’s flush, but you’re locked in the bathroom and the flush is never-ending.

Which was generally accomplished by telling someone else to fix it.

A favorite refrain of his was, “Liuzzi’s a family.”

Between that and him actually being Sicilian, I was tempted to ask if he did the Cosa Nostra thing, but even a writer’s indecency has its limits.

“This is by design,” Elliot made sure to dictate to my notepad.

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not to get wet, because again: this was cheeswater. Cheesewater, the best term I came up with for the byproduct of milk processed into curds and whey, was a seminal-looking fluid around 200 degrees Fahrenheit with little white flecks of cheese-booger in it. If the scalding didn’t get you, the cheese-boogers would.

Meanwhile, Elliot was avoiding cheesewater jets with the nonchalance of a barefoot monk on coals. He was conducting routine checkups with the workers on the floor, and in most cases I was too preoccupied with dodging large yellow Rubbermaid buckets brimming with milk, cheese, or cheesewater that workers were rolling at high speeds across the walkway to pay him any attention. From what I could tell, though, it seemed like Elliot was just making sure everything was shipshape. “We fixed it before you got here,” one worker said, before Elliot had a chance to speak. This earned the worker a thumbs-up.

Once we found a quieter corner, I asked Elliot what exactly he was checking on.

“That’s my job. I’m not making cheap, alright?” he said.

That may sound like so much PR-man hot air, but Elliot was serious.

Later, I learned that they had thrown out the entire vat of mozzarella. The taste was fine, but it was just slightly—indiscernibly, to anyone not a Liuzzi—too soft.

Elliot told me. “Legend is that a farmer peculiar misunderstandings, e.g., I asked was transporting his milk in the stom- him if he had a girlfriend and he replied, ach of a goat, and when he got to his “Several hundred.” Before I could doudestination, he no longer had milk. He ble-check my translation of “girlfriend,” had curd and he had whey. The milk had Maximiliano, seeing my alarm, clarified transformed due to the enzymes in the that throughout his life, he had had sevLater, I learned that stomach lining.” eral hundred girlfriends. Right then, he they had thrown out the The grand finale of the mozzarel- only had three. entire vat of mozzarella. la-making process is the cheese-stretchIf there was one thing Maximiliano The taste was fine, but it ing. I saw many tasks bungled at the liked more than women, though, it was was just slightly—indischeese plant, but nothing came close Italy. Maximiliano, it must be said, was cernibly, to anyone not a to cheese-stretching in terms of sheer an unapologetic Italian supremacist, Liuzzi—too soft. bunglability. Cheese-stretching is the and I began to suspect he knew English step that distinguishes award-winning but simply chose not to speak it. Once mozzarella from the stuff on bowl- he had finished his introduction, he set ing-alley pies, and Liuzzi wasn’t tak- himself a challenge: stretching a batch ..... ing any chances. The cheese-stretcher, the traditional way to prove to me that Maximiliano Laporta, had been traditional Italian cheese-stretching ozzarella, like much of life, imported from Italy. methods were superior to any machine. was born from an accident. A Maximiliano referred to himself as ..... thousand years ago, some incompetent “The Maestro of the Maestros,” often and cheesemaker dropped curds into hot in the third person. That was about all I water and just like that, the story goes, gathered from his introduction, because t this juncture, I should menmozzarella was created. FDA sanitary the only language Maximiliano spoke tion that given my history with regulations make the modern mozza- was Italian. Sometimes he would try traditional cheesemaking, the battle rella-making process a bit more compli- to help me out by throwing in a little Maximiliano had chosen to fight was cated. The first step is adding an enzyme English and Spanish and ASL, but that not so much uphill as cliff-faced. Long called rennet to milk, which catalyzes just confused me further, since he often ago, during those impressionable, forthe separation of curds and whey. This used all those languages in a single word. mative childhood years, I ran afoul of step also had its origins in serendipity, The language barrier occasioned some cheese on a trip to a ranch in California.

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images credits: cherry grove farm (top)

A dead goat.

The ancients, bless their hearts, thought about sex in cheesemaking terms.

Aristotle wrote that semen acts on menstrual blood in the same way that rennet acts on milk: the semen coagulates the blood into a fetus. Perhaps it was all a way for the church to shorten lines at the confessional booth—just thinking about it makes one want to forsake the pleasures of the flesh.

images credits: shutterstock (bottom)

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More like an apology gift, my brother said.

One evening, after enough of our carping, she made two lasagna trays: one, she claimed, with goat cheese, the other without. They both tasted like goat cheese. After that, we didn’t trust the food any farther than we could throw it—which, in most cases, was the trash. Later, that food would be fished out and fed to the goats. C’est la brie.

At the end of the week, the ranchers sent us off with a care package. Halfway home, gripped by a paroxysm of suspicion, we pulled over and inspected it. Inside were several large jars of goat cheese. We thought about composting the cheese on the side of the road right there and then but ultimately deemed it unfit even for bacterial consumption, so for all I know it’s still in the terra incognita that is the back of my parents’ fridge, seven years later.

The trip had been billed to me and my brother as one of rest and relaxation. We got there and all too late realized it was a bait-and-switch: cheesing season was in full swing. Animals had to be milked, stables had to be washed, shit had to be shoveled. To city-bred tweens like me and my brother, this arrangement had all the hallmarks of indentured servitude. What’s more, all the cheese was goat cheese: an acquired taste in the best of cases, and this was certainly not that sort of case. This goat cheese was horrid. It was tart. Even the goats’ milk was off. The goats must have been on a diet of their own cheese or something. .....

To make matters worse, just walking around the ranch was hazardous. Bags of cheese were hung everywhere—from barn Mention all this only to give an idea eaves, gazebo trusses, shower doors—so that of how when I entered the Liuzzi factory, the whey could drain from the curds. Every it was with a certain degree of apprehenfew minutes, a single drip would fall from sion; and how when Liuzzi’s promotional the bottom of any given cheesebag, soiling brochure described their cheesemaking as whatever was below. Everyone, and espe- “old-fashioned,” I interpreted that with more cially the bald, lived in fear of the drip. than a soupçon of mistrust; and how when Running away from the ranch was no Maximiliano finally proffered me his “tragood: we would eventually get hungry and dizionale” mozzarella, instead of downing have to return to eat dinner, which was an it in one bite, I sort of tentatively crept up even worse experience than making the on it. Maximiliano had melted some curd cheese. Somehow, the owner of the ranch into a blob, caught the blob on the end of a found a way to include goat cheese (which wooden stick, and thrown it around with a she insisted on calling “le fromage de technique somewhere in the neighborhood chevre,” despite our being in the furthest of pizza-throwing—a skill at which he was place from Paris on this earth) in every dish. apparently some kind of genius. He had

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illustration by dani klein & vivian wang

once been a pizzaiolo but found it lonely at the top of the pizzaiolo hierarchy, so he pivoted to cheesemaking, where it appeared he was having the same problem.

He wouldn’t let me wait too long, though: the cheese couldn’t cool past a certain temperature. While it cooled, I received a brief but intense disquisition on the temperature at which one should consume mozzarella. Mozzarella shouldn’t be consumed if it’s colder than room temperature, and certainly not at any temperature approaching that of a refrigerator. In fact, if you’re going to eat it straight out of the fridge, the hard-core Italians say (of which Maximiliano was one), don’t bother eating it at all. I didn’t bother telling him that the rest of America, with their chilled caprese salads and unthawed string cheese, eats it in exactly such a manner. Maximiliano had already dealt America many blows, and I worried that with any more of his cultural critiques, America would surrender and hoist the tre-colore flag.

I took a bite, and by God, I really did prefer Maximiliano’s handmade mozzarella to the Liuzzi-label stuff. According to my unqualified cretino of a palate, it was waxy? mossy? chalky? Fortunately, I didn’t need to translate any of those thoughts; I felt that vigorous nodding, as well as pointing at my tongue and giving a thumbs-up, would suffice. But Maximiliano had already begun attending to the next batch and didn’t even look at me. There was no need—he had been certain of the outcome from the start.

His mozzarella would prevail.

Maximiliano claimed that the traditional method of stretching cheese was superior because the wooden stick’s soft edges “caressed” the cheese instead of “maltreating” it, as the machine did. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was all a placebo until I looked at the water. Unlike the murky, fat-laden water from the machine, this water was clear, indicating that the cheese hadn’t been slashed open and leached of its flavorful fats. That was the first empirical, measurable evidence I saw that traditional methods outperform modern innovation.

In all metrics other than quality, though, tradition lost spectacularly. The only time Max stretched mozzarella traditionally— when he wasn’t proving a point—was at weddings where the bridal couple wanted something quirkier than an accordion player or a balloon artist.

That is not to say that Liuzzi’s absolutely top-hole machines were entirely superior: they, too, had their drawbacks, albeit more insidious ones. Later that day, I images credits: packmedia.net

stood with Elliot beside a burrata-making machine so large and convoluted that it was impossible to tell where the burrata actually was in the machine. The Italian logo on the machine resembled the sleek silver lettering of high-performance car logos, probably to connote the one desirable quality such cars share with industrial cheese-making machines: speed. Across the way, Elliot pointed out a station of ricotta packagers. They were scooping ricotta into containers, at times sampling it to check the texture, all the while keeping up an animated banter in Italian. Elliot said, loudly and excitedly, “I’ve got a ricotta machine on order. Right now, I can only do six cups a minute.

Once I have the machine, I can do forty.”

The ricotta makers looked up.

Cheese descriptors tend to be inversely desirable to their desirability when describing other foods.

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ozzarella may have had its origins in serendipity, but most accidents in the cheese plant were of the sort that would get someone fired. Inside the plant it was possible to, among other things, drop a thousand pounds of mozzarella from a forklift, or mess around with a water boiler such that it would become a missile and annihilate the entire building before wreaking devastation for another quarter-mile. Elliot recounted a time when an absent-minded worker, instead of adding your garden-variety CaCl2 to a mozzarella vat, added fifty pounds of the rather more explosive C7H6O4. “It was like a ‘What the fuck.’”

Customers don’t have much patience for accidents in general, but especially not the high-end chefs buying Liuzzi mozzarella, whose own customers wanted their capreses and chicken parmigianas done just so. Elliot knew those chefs wanted a good mozzarella TheNewJournal May 2025

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ball—but more so, they wanted the the bike), had a standoff with a porcusame mozzarella ball. Ever since Liuzzi pine, and arrived at a beige military-lookmade it onto the supermarket shelf, ing warehouse that was in fact the very Galbani’s mass-produced mozzarella had out-of-the-way Liuzzi Cheese Co.—only been right there beside it, a few cents less, to be told (accurately, as it turned out) beckoning. Elliot cited an old family adage: that my appointment was scheduled for “If you’re gonna make shit, make shit every the following day. Fortunately, the older day.” woman working the front desk—a bona fide I asked him if there were any compa- “nonna”—took pity. She calmed me down, nies that made shit every day. offered me some cheese, and secured me an “Galbani,” he said, without a moment’s audience with Elliot. While expressing my hesitation. “​​Go buy a little Galbani ricotta, gratitude to Elliot for admitting me to his and you’re gonna see. It’s gonna be like Jello.” office, I mentioned that I had called Calabro Elliot tended to be even-keeled, but Cheese Co.—the only other Italian fresh on the subject of shit-making cheese cheese company in New Haven—multiple companies his feelings ran high. He times, and they didn’t so much as pick up. reserved the ultimate accusation for Kraft “Not surprised,” Elliot said.

Singles: “It’s not cheese. A Kraft Single, You can’t talk about Liuzzi without that’s not cheese.” talking about Calabro. Although there was In fact, Elliot was right: Kraft Singles, a bit of the two-sheriffs-one-town issue at The famous turophile Clifton containing less than 51 percent of dairy play between the two companies, the relaFadiman wrote, “Cheese is products, fail to meet the legal definition of tionship between Calabro and Liuzzi was milk’s leap toward immortality.” cheese and are instead registered under the more textured than just a rivalry. A betIf so, the never-expiring Kraft stomach-churning term “pasteurized pre- ter term might be what people these days Single is cheese’s leap toward pared cheese product.” would call a “toxic relationship.” immortality.

There wasn’t much that could get All toxic relationships start out happily. between Elliot and his top-quality cheese. Back in their days as local cheesemongers (For Pete’s sake, the guy was throwing out in the 1980s, the Calabros and the Liuzzis entire mozzarella vats due to textural aber- were just two families using cheese to barrations only an Italian palate could detect.) ter with their friends, as they had done in In fact, there was really only one thing that Italy. But capitalism soon had its way: both The kind of friends who could prevent Elliot from making top-qual- Calabro and Liuzzi outgrew their garages, shake hands and both mutter ity cheese, and it was a value equally as expanded their local cheese routes, and “Asshole” the moment they’re sacred to Italians as good cheese: family. encountered each other. out of earshot.

The two values didn’t conflict often—the Elliot, despite working for the Liuzzis, Calabros, Elliot’s family, are something like was a Calabro by blood. He grew up rollthe Rockefellers of top-quality fresh Italian erblading around the floor of the Calabro mozzarella cheese—but when they did, cheese plant, swiping humungoid blocks family won. of mozzarella to eat with his friends, and making five cents an hour. Meanwhile, his ..... father, Frank, worked around the clock to make Calabro run. When Frank slept, t wasn’t more than a few words which wasn’t often, it was in a bedroom he into my first conversation with Elliot installed at the plant. before the Calabros came up. This was But Calabro’s peaceful days were numaround 5 a.m. (the workers arrive at 2 a.m., bered. Joe Calabro, the kingpin of Calabro so everyone was already like two coffees Cheese, had developed Alzheimer’s, and it and countless mozzarella balls in), and I wasn’t long before the Calabro empire was should say I was lucky to even be talking up for grabs. There ensued a Murdochian to Elliot at all. That morning, despairing battle for the reins of Calabro, involving of ever finding a cheesemaker who wasn’t a whole lot of subterfuge, alliances behind an FDA-cowed, red-tape-lovin’ bureaucrat closed doors, and streams of choice and who would actually deign to talk to a Italian epithets, all of which Elliot would civilian, I mounted my bike and rode for only refer to under the vague heading of an hour in pouring rain, traipsed through “Italian family drama.” The upshot of it all: a forest (likely private), forded a creek (with one day, without warning, Frank’s relatives

Related to Elliot by “Joe,” Elliot’s uncle and founder of Calabro Cheese, who it seems I am expected to be familiar with on a first-name basis. When he is invoked (“as Joe used to say…”), it’s with the same worshipful intimacy jazz players have when they talk about “Miles,” or Scientologists when they talk about “L. Ron.”

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banded together and gave him the axe. it to mean, there was the truth: the Unless he could throw his lot in with Liuzzi family members—including another cheese company, Frank’s cheese- Elliot, their adopted son—were on top making days were over. of the corporate pyramid, and it was Even after Frank’s unceremonious oust- non-Liuzzi workers who were actually ing, his reputation as a cheesemaking whiz making the cheese. By the time I spoke persisted, and there was one cheesemaking to Elliot, the Calabros who had presided family happy to employ both him and his over Calabro Cheese’s degradation had son Elliot: Liuzzi. As for Calabro Cheese, it cashed out in a big way and were livwas perhaps inevitable that under the new ing what most would call profoundly regime, whose constituents Elliot “wouldn’t American lives. pay to sit on a box and watch paint dry,” the “I don’t blame them,” Elliot said. I company began to go under. It appeared couldn’t tell whether he was just being Calabro Cheese’s secret ingredient was diplomatic for the press, or if he really none other than Frank Calabro. Soon, the was indifferent to the actions of those company called asking him to return. Frank Calabros. If the latter, then what were couldn’t bear to watch his life’s work burn, Elliot’s own motives? He already operso he set aside his grudges and accepted. ated Google Sheets more often than Elliot, however, made Frank promise that cheese machines. Someday, he might once they shored up Calabro’s finances, they have become Liuzzi’s CEO and hardly would sell the company. ever have seen an actual mozzarella “He couldn’t stay away. And I didn’t ball; if he did, it was not unreasonable want him to work until he died,” Elliot said. to think that with a profit to be made In 2021, the Calabro family, with Elliot’s and a place in the Hamptons not far approval, sold Calabro Cheese to a venture off, Liuzzi would be sold—thereby concapital firm. Elliot quickly regretted it. He summating the American dream. In fact, stayed on the board for the year following parts of that dream had already begun to the sale, and saw his family’s legacy crumble. materialize for Elliot. As I left the plant, “It was, ‘How can we cut costs, cut I asked him what his kids wanted to be. labor? How can we screw over our competi- “Baseball players,” he said. tors? How can we just make as much cheese On the way out, I had the urge to as possible, as cheap as possible?’ And that’s stop by the Liuzzi shop and buy as much not what the company was built for,” Elliot mozzarella as my college budget would said. “We’re not making sub-one-dollar allow. I’d probably never be back, and it ricotta that major manufacturers buy by the seemed to me I’d be making a purchase trailer-load. No. We’re quality.” for posterity—for a time not far off Elliot left the board, went back to when I’d be watching Liuzzis hit home Liuzzi, and, by the time I met him, had runs on TV, when Galbani would finally all but disowned Calabro Cheese. Oddly quash its competition for good, when enough, though, he stood by the decision Liuzzi cheese could only be found in the to sell. “It was putting family first,” he told dry-goods aisle, the dubious distinction me—but wouldn’t go into further detail. of “REAL CHEESE!” printed on its plastic For all of Elliot’s misgivings about the sale, jar. But I didn’t buy anything. It would though, it did come with some undeniable have been silly to stock my fridge with perks. Just a few weeks ago, Frank, who had Liuzzi mozzarella in an attempt to cling hardly ever stepped foot off the cheese floor in to a fading era. Like the Italians say, the his life, returned from an Icelandic cruise. cheese wouldn’t taste the same. ∎ .....

Miles Zaud is a junior in Saybrook College.

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n adapting to america, the Liuzzi and Calabro families had distanced themselves from cheese. Elliot often said “Liuzzi’s a family,” but beyond the PR-ish boilerplate sense that he probably intended

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Wrongful Inheritance Victoria Hill is among at least twenty-six children conceived when a former Yale fertility doctor inseminated unknowing patients with his own sperm—an injustice difficult to prosecute and impossible to process, particularly after his recent death.

By Ryne Hisada

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ictoria hill had been sick for months. ambiguity that accompany sperm donation. Neither She first fell ill in 2020 while on vacation parents nor doctors predicted how popular the in Iceland, but her symptoms persisted back genotyping technology used by companies like home: migraines, vertigo, nerve damage. Her 23andMe would become. doctors found that she didn’t have a common So when children unexpectedly discover the virus—nor one they could identify. They could not true origin of their conception later in life, that conclusively diagnose her. Could it be genetic, she mix of emotions can come crashing down at once. wondered? Neither of her parents had experienced Sometimes, it leads to truths about their lineage that anything similar, so she turned to commercial DNA they would prefer as fiction. Who was their father, testing. 23andMe, she heard, could connect genetic really? Where were their half-siblings? As Hill data to health risks. would soon discover, the answers to these questions Her test results prompted more questions than can be disappointing—and even revolting. answers. She first noticed a few relatives listed as Yet in many states, such as Connecticut, few laws paternal “half-siblings.” This must be a mistake, she guarantee children’s rights to information about their thought; DNA tests often confuse siblings with close donor parent. Those who have misgivings about their cousins. Still, there were too many unfamiliar names, conception are often left stranded in the absence of including members of a mysterious “Caldwell” fam- legislation. For Hill, that means being unable to seek ily. In the middle of the night, she marched the justice against her biological father. results to the other side of her duplex in Wethersfield, Connecticut, where her mother lived. Her mother tried to avoid the late-night confrontation. But .... eventually, the two sat and faced one another. At the age of 35, married and mother to a child of her own, Hill learned she was donor-conceived. aralee Hill had struggled to conceive Such discoveries are all too common in the with her husband. They discovered he had world of sperm donation. Particularly for children a low sperm count with slow motility, which of Hill’s generation, parents were advised by fertil- reduced their chances of conception. Still, the ity doctors not to tell their children the truth about couple wanted children. They decided to try fertheir conception. For some parents, that was just tility treatment, a practice that was only just standard practice. For others, it was to shield their gaining popularity in the 1970s. The couple drove children from the shame, confusion, and emotional to Yale New Haven Hospital and began visiting

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an endocrinologist, who recommended sperm as a high school social worker a challenge. “I was donation. Doctor Burton Caldwell promised that trying to meet patients where they were at, and I the donor would be anonymous; he would select a could not be present,” she remembers. healthy Yale medical intern who resembled Maralee’s One day, almost a week after she found out husband. In 1977, they welcomed a baby boy. about Caldwell, school ended early. “I can’t do this The doctor also recommended they keep quiet anymore,” she told herself, “I just got to go.” She about their fertility treatment, as couples often did drove to an address she had found online. She had then. Their children would never find out they were only meant to survey the lay of the land. donor-conceived. And even if they did, they would Before she knew it, she was knocking on his door. have no means to learn more about their biological father—that was common wisdom. So the Hills didn’t tell their first child about his biological .... father. In 1985, when they had their second child, Victoria, also by sperm donation, they decided not he Caldwell home is a forty-minute drive from to tell her either.

Yale. The address is difficult to find online—as if, Even as genotyping technologies threatened Hill speculates, someone had wiped it. The house is to reveal their secret thirty-five years later, Maralee an off-white suburban estate with three stories and tried to keep her daughter’s conception under wraps. two garages. It rests atop a hill, surrounded by the When Hill told her mother she was interested in unmistakable geography of a wealthy suburb: wide, testing her DNA, Maralee discouraged her: “Don’t winding roads sandwiched by greens and houses. send your genetics to a corporation.” And when There are no sidewalks. she learned that Hill had mailed her saliva sample When Hill arrived at Caldwell’s house, his to 23andMe anyway, she began to stalk their shared wife, Itie, answered the door. She seemed welcommailbox to steal and hide the results. Maralee didn’t ing, albeit concerned for the young woman claiming realize that 23andMe returned results digitally. to be her husband’s biological child. “She did one The night Hill confronted Maralee with her of those head tilts where she’s like, ‘Oh, you poor DNA test, her mother was reluctant to talk. It would thing,’” Hill recalls. Itie Caldwell did not know that mean confirming the truth she had hidden from her her husband might have biological children scatdaughter for so long. She feared Hill might resent tered throughout Connecticut. But Hill says that as her. soon as she walked in, her husband readily revealed What Maralee could not have expected was that that fact. “I didn’t think that she knew at all,” Hill Hill had learned more about her supposedly anony- says of Itie that day. “My heart kind of broke for her.” mous father. After she received her 23andMe results, But Burton Caldwell remained poised. “He one of her half-siblings messaged her: “Do you want had that kind of callous, clinical feeling,” Hill recalls. to know more about what you’re seeing?” Originally, She asked him how he felt about the children he Hill ignored the emails, thinking they were a scam. fathered: “He told me he didn’t think about us.”

Then, she received a message she couldn’t ignore: “Did your mom or dad go to Yale for fertility help?”

Hill knew her mother had visited the Yale New Haven Hospital at some point during her pregnancy.

“He had that kind of callous, But how did this stranger know? She responded to clinical feeling,” Hill recalls. She the mysterious inquirer and, after a brief exchange, they quickly connected the dots. They were half-sibasked him how he felt about the lings of the same father, who was not, as it turns out, children he fathered: “He told me a medical intern, but a Yale-affiliated endocrinolohe didn’t think about us.” gist—the same doctor her mother had been visiting for over a decade. Their biological father was Dr. Burton Caldwell.

Maralee was in disbelief—she had been promised an anonymous medical intern. In fact, she later confirmed that her son, Hill’s older brother, was Caldwell was suffering from advanced conceived with an intern’s sperm as promised. But Parkinson’s. When Hill met him, his body was detefor some reason, after Maralee had had one still- riorating: he had spotty skin, thin lips, and translubirth and two miscarriages, Caldwell decided to use cent white hair. He looked nothing like Hill’s father. his own sperm for her second pregnancy. Maralee Caldwell had been a tall and in-shape Irishman; her couldn’t accept that. “She was in denial,” her daugh- father, a German, was neither. Hill has Caldwell’s ter recalls. blue eyes, not her father’s brown eyes or her mothHill accepted the fact quickly. She spent her er’s green ones. She always wondered why she nights googling Caldwell and his family. Nothing looked so different from her father. Her answer was was too trivial. “I even looked up what cars they now standing before her. drove,” she admits with a laugh. Her preoccupation Caldwell asked about Hill’s academic achievewith her new knowledge made focusing on her job ments and any grandchildren, but revealed little

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about his intentions in using his sperm to con- widely-cited 1988 study by the now-defunct Office ceive her. No one—except perhaps the man him- of Technology Assessment, results in thirty thouself—can know for certain why he used his sperm. sand births in the US every year. There have been no Perhaps he thought it was convenient, similar to studies of annual donor births since, but according how one New York gynecologist who inseminated to a 2019 article published by the National Institute his patients explained himself to The New York of Health, the number has likely increased.

Times: “I admit I did it…it may have been less than Maralee did not visit a sperm bank, which was perfect, but with luck, the women were able to then a nascent business model. She did undergo conceive.” Or, as one activist suggested of doctors artificial insemination at Caldwell’s hands. It’s like Caldwell, he never reconciled the “disconnect unclear exactly how Caldwell’s insemination probetween this being a medical procedure and the cess in the 1980s might have differed from common fact that they were creating and giving away their practice today. Still, one element remains true today: own children.” What is certain is that Caldwell American sperm donors are mostly anonymous. never expressed sympathy for his newfound relaThat is not the case in Germany or the UK. tionship with Hill. Later, she would learn Caldwell And unlike in Sweden and Portugal, the US also had lost a son at the age of 36 to an aortic aneurysm. has no federal laws guaranteeing a child’s right to That son was the only child he conceived with his their donor’s medical record. And there exists no wife. She could not understand how he could not national registry of donor-conceived children or feel anything for her or any of the children who their donors—data on cattle sperm are better catahad suddenly appeared in his life at just about the logued. The American artificial insemination indussame age. “There was no indication whatsoever try remains, in Hill’s words, the “Wild West.” that he was trying to look at me like he would This anonymous system emerged partially out of look at a daughter,” Hill says, matter-of-factly. She a desire to incentivize sperm donations. Established speaks of the moment as though she had relived it fertility clinics are often highly selective of the sperm many times.

Caldwell’s lack of remorse disgusted Hill. It would still take time for her to confidently articulate what exactly she felt Caldwell did wrong, but she had an intuition that some deep misconduct had taken place.

“I view this as a form of sexual assault,” she would write about her mother’s insemination in testimony at a trial four years later. “The line between medical touch and sexual touch [was] blurred.”

But when Hill first sought legal counsel in 2020, she was met with little more than sympathy. What Caldwell had done to her and her mother was known as fertility fraud. In the last several years, at least fifty fertility doctors in the United States have been accused of such fraud; advocates claim there are at least eighty.

But like most states, Connecticut law does not consider fertility fraud a crime. There was nothing in the law, her lawyers said, that could give her recourse. .... perm donation is a strikingly low-tech proSa healthy cess. Its most basic form only requires viable sperm, egg, and a syringe, making it possible for a they accept: out of every hundred men who express

doctor to produce sperm outside his patient’s room interest in donating, only four pass the health and use it immediately after to inseminate his patient. screening, the lifestyle screening, and the sperm In most cases, however, the process is more quality control. The more selective the screening, the complicated. If a mother decides to visit a sperm more expensive the sperm: costs can range from the bank, they choose a donor based on a myriad of hundreds to the thousands. And, since nearly a third traits: height, race, education, family, medical his- of interested men prefer to donate anonymously, tory, sometimes even a photograph. Once they eliminating anonymity would diminish the sperm decide on a favored combination, they are medi- market, increasing prices even more. Some particcally examined for an optimal date of insemination, ularly desperate prospective mothers have sought upon which sperm is transported through a tiny sperm donation black markets on Facebook and catheter into their cervix. This process is known other social media platforms, where regulation is as artificial insemination, which, according to a practically nonexistent.

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Opponents of regulating donor anonymity, For the banks and clinics in other states however, believe laws enforcing disclosure threaten claiming to follow the ASRM’s guidelines, there is the legitimacy of LGBTQ+ families. In February no guarantee that these guidelines are enforced.

2023, an Oklahoma judge removed parental rights This, combined with the lack of a shared or from Kris Williams, a woman who had used sperm national registry of donors, makes determining donation to conceive with her then-partner, also a the number of donor-conceived children in any woman, two years prior. Williams’ wife carried the given area a herculean task—and makes it imposchild, and the couple split two years after the baby sible to estimate how many children are products was born. During the divorce proceedings, a judge of fertility fraud. “There’s no real, unbiased inforremoved Williams from her son’s birth certificate, mation available,” says Guido Pennings, a profesreplacing her name with the male sperm donor, with sor of bioethics at Ghent University. “There are a whom her former spouse had since moved in. lot, undoubtedly. But the percentage?” He shrugs.

Of those seeking sperm donations, 70 percent There’s just no way to know. are lesbian couples and single parents. Disclosure laws may indirectly lead to the legal recognition of biological donors as “real” parents, undermining the .... legitimacy of same-sex couples’ parental rights.

In the absence of federal and state legislation, hen Hill saw her old friends at a high the American Society for Reproductive Medicine school reunion in 2023, she had been search(ASRM), a nonprofit organization of medical prac- ing for lawyers for three years. In the meantime, she titioners, determines the guidelines that most kept track of advancements in fertility legislation: American sperm banks and clinics follow. Most five states—there are thirteen today—had passed credible sperm banks are affiliated with the ASRM laws criminalizing fertility fraud. Still, there was no and follow their guidelines voluntarily. Among the legislative development in Connecticut, and lawyers ASRM’s recommendations is a limit on the number would not commit to her case without convincing of children a donor can father. But outside this vol- evidence of damages. untary guide, there is no regulation. One man can Hill’s high school boyfriend was also at the donate for two children in the same family, twenty reunion—someone she once imagined a future with. in the same neighborhood, even two hundred in That night, she told him about Caldwell. Then he the same state—and federal laws have nothing to shared his own revelation: he had also recently dissay on the matter. The ASRM suggests 25 births per covered he was donor-conceived, though he hadn’t population of 800,000 to “avoid any significant risk tested his DNA. She suggested 23andMe. Weeks later, of inadvertent consanguineous conception,” or, in his text arrived with a screenshot of their connection: common parlance, incest.

“You are my sister,” he wrote.

“But who’s counting?” asks Dr. Lubna Pal, a proCaldwell had blurred the boundary between fessor of reproductive sciences at the Yale School family and community. “At this point, I’m waiting for of Medicine. There are no committees, government a client to be one of my siblings,” she says of her job or private, to effectively oversee guidelines like the as a social worker. At least four other half-siblings birth cap. Outside the basic health guidelines that attended the same schools at the same time she did. the FDA and CDC enforce, there are few government She now has twenty-five confirmed siblings, many in mandates on donation. “There are societies where the area. “We had so many surprises that it was one all of this is legislated,” she says. “We’re not one of more thing,” Hill remembers. “We’re kind of numb to them.” what will come.”

That changed in Colorado, which in January But the news incited legal momentum. Her 2025 became the first and only state to forbid donor high school boyfriend’s mother found a Connecticut anonymity. The state passed legislation requiring lawyer willing to represent her, and Hill’s mother banks and clinics to document and update donor joined the case. In March 2024, the two women sued information every three years, enshrining the ASRM’s Caldwell and Yale New Haven Hospital. They pre25 births guideline into law. sented a joint lawsuit arguing that their children’s But in February, the Colorado House of inadvertent relationship was evidence of damages.

Representatives introduced a bill eliminating that Caldwell’s affiliation with Yale when Maralee visnew requirement: if passed, donor-conceived chil- ited him for fertility help remains unclear. Yale insists dren could no longer contact their donors, and that he was no longer working in Yale-owned buildbanks and clinics in Colorado would not have to ings when Hill was conceived in 1984. According to follow the 25-births guideline. The ASRM backs Yale attorneys, Caldwell left Yale sometime in 1983 the new bill. The original bill, they argued in a to establish an independent clinic. But the mothers written letter, was “rushed” and set a “problematic contend that Caldwell convinced them to believe precedent” of government interference in private that his clinic was Yale-affiliated. They also insist that matters. The new bill would not let “the state Caldwell remained a member of the medical staff and insert itself into reproductive and child-rearing continued to teach at the School of Medicine, even decisions, decisions which should be the domain after he left his position at Yale New Haven Hospital. of individual families.”

Yale New Haven Hospital declined to comment.

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Maralee argued that she had the right to know the extent to which Yale was involved in Caldwell’s practice, and in January 2025, a judge ordered the Yale Corporation to provide documents related to Caldwell’s affiliation with Yale New Haven Health.

It’s important that neither Hill nor her high school boyfriend are represented in the suit. The reason is strategic: Connecticut law is ill-equipped to defend children of artificial insemination. In principle, the court struggles to recognize a victim who, at the moment of the alleged crime, had not yet been born. If Hill joined the lawsuit, she would be suing a man for the very action that created her existence.

Lawyers might interpret that as claiming she would prefer not to have been born at all.

The sentiment is ubiquitous. “He gave us life, and our moms wanted babies,” Hill recalls friends reminding her. “And that was the best gift he could have given them.” They might even add that the man who gave them life was a smart man—a Yale doctor.

Hill scoffs at the suggestion. She is not ungrateful for her life, but she believes the way she was conceived was wrong. Some things are at once blessed and tragic. Life is among those things.

But that does not always translate well in court.

Jody Madeira, co-director of the Center for Law, Society & Culture at Indiana University Bloomington, remembers cases where courts have removed children from their lawsuits against donor parents or hospitals. In January 2019, an Idaho judge dismissed a donor-conceived child from a lawsuit against a fertility doctor who used his sperm to inseminate her mother.

Her mother remained in the lawsuit on the question of “fraud and deception by a physician.” But this lawsuit was not, a judge declared, “a case about parentage or conception.” The doctor had no obligation to the child because she had not yet been born.

Similarly, in 2024, the State of Connecticut appealed to the Supreme Court of Connecticut against accusations of medical malpractice at a state hospital: a prospective mother had not been debriefed about potential inheritable diseases carried by her selected sperm donor.

The State attempted to dodge the charges by dismissing the mother and child’s lawsuit as a “wrongful life” case. According to Madeira, this was the court’s way of saying that the family was violating a basic premise of law: “That life in all forms is better than no life.” The Supreme Court disagreed with the State’s interpretation and upheld the mother and child’s award of 34 million dollars in damages.

But Maralee’s lawsuit aims for a narrow claim to damages. It focuses on characterizing Caldwell’s deception as “fraud,” defined in Connecticut law as “obtaining valuable thing[s] or service[s] by false pretenses.” Some scholars of family law, such as Temple University’s Dara Purvis, believe this characterization downplays the scale of the crime. Why isn’t inseminating a woman with one’s sperm in a non-consenting manner considered sexual assault? It probably could be. But as it stands, Purvis explains, artificial insemination—a medical procedure— struggles to match the statutory definition of sexual assault.

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.... n February 2025, Caldwell died. Hill saw the 14-year-old’s DNA test revealed that their mother Isibling message on her half-siblings’ group chat. The same had been inseminated by her fertility doctor’s who had first contacted Hill on 23andMe sperm in 2009 at a fertility center at the University

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relayed the news from a Caldwell relative.

Hill didn’t know how to feel. Her friends sent her ambivalent condolences. Messages like: “Sorry?” She wondered, “Huh…am I sad?” Learning that some of her half-siblings sent flowers to Caldwell’s house perplexed her even further.

Now, a sense of frustration wells within her. “The only thing that really bothers me is that he won’t get to live to see any consequences,” she says. Hill wanted to see Caldwell confronted with the questions he would not answer when she came to his house. Once, she attended a deposition where Caldwell, in his declining health, was also present. “I wanted to go because I could just sit there and just stare at him.

Like, I just wanted to examine him, his facial features, his hands, his mannerisms, how he spoke.”

But any chance at a satisfying explanation for his actions had died with Caldwell. It remains unclear how his death will impact the lawsuit. All lawyers related to the case either declined to comment or did not respond to a request for one.

It also irks Hill that Caldwell died before a court could confirm that he had committed a crime—or, as she says, could “prove that what he did was wrong.”

Yet the state-wide legislation she pushed for in Connecticut has not gained traction. Even seemingly uncontroversial bills that would retroactively criminalize physicians who “knowingly use [their] own sperm to inseminate a patient without the patient’s consent” have failed to pass the Connecticut House.

Those who oppose government regulation, like the medical professionals at ASRM, dissent against Hill’s efforts. The ASRM declined to comment.

But a federal fertility fraud bill has shown promise in the House of Representatives, where in 2023 the Protecting Families from Fertility Fraud Act was introduced. The Act would criminalize fertility fraud at a national level, though without a clause on retroactivity, meaning that it would not help Hill’s case against Caldwell. The bill has been stuck in the House Judiciary Committee for nearly two years.

Asked if she remained optimistic, she admits, “I was, and I’m not anymore. I’m really not anymore.”

Yet Hill feels that she must keep trying. She remains both frustrated and motivated by organizations like the ASRM that inadvertently hamper the passing of fertility fraud legislation. Some of her more vocal opponents may even assert that fertility fraud “doesn’t happen anymore” as widespread commercial DNA testing makes it harder for doctors to hide behind anonymity.

But Hill insists this isn’t true. Two years ago, a

of California, San Francisco. The doctor continued his practice at a University of Washington clinic, where he saw 2,600 patients. In an investigation, the Washington Medical Commission identified two hundred potential children.

Hill thinks of her two children, who she claims have more than forty confirmed first cousins near where they live. She wants her kids to know that their mom “didn’t just sit back and say, ‘That sucks.’”

Beyond legal recourse, regulating fertility fraud would offer clarity for children like Hill and her half-siblings, who are otherwise stranded in a nation with muddy social mores surrounding sperm donation. For now, they are still in the dark. ∎

Wrongful Inheritance

TheNewJournal

Ryne Hisada is a sophomore in Davenport College.

Poem

Atlantic Silverside He keeps finding these incorrect spaces little ribbon-veins tied around pink flesh a coquette lifeblood flirting with the gaps between heartbeats. There is not something in this. The cavity aching for His organs. The frivolity that was supposed to be there. Instead, a currant seed of want.

He keeps finding these incorrect spaces.

Thin fingers. Nothing in between. Except For the imaginary flirtations of another hand.

One that would pull back the webbing into his fingers, and unevolve him. Until he was soft, like tilapia flesh.

—Diya Naik

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May 2025

illustration by ariel kim

23

Personal Essay

An Open Letter To My Uncle Marc

By Prentiss Patrick-Carter

Dear Uncle Marc,

Y

ou’d never guess where I am. In about a month, I’ll finish my third year at Yale University. This year I’m living off campus in my very own New Haven apartment. I’m nine hours away from Mom and Dad in Lynchburg, and always three seconds away from some attention-seeking motorcyclist proudly revving outside my window. On my windowsill I keep a humble collection of jewelry, and the centerpiece is a gold necklace Mom gave me. Until recently, I didn’t know why she gave it to me. Until recently, it didn’t remind me of you.

I thought my gold necklace was originally a gift from Dad to Mom. Its charm contains the letter “P,” so I figured that Dad (you don’t know him, but he’s also named Prentiss) had performed the ageold, juvenile gesture of “claiming” his girl.

(Nowadays, you just slap her first initial in your Instagram bio and call it a day.)

The necklace Mom gave me is an intricate series of tiny ovals joined by tinier circles, and it tangles easily. When unraveled and clasped on my neck, it hangs inches above my heart. It’s short, like a high school couple’s honeymoon phase. On the clasp, there’s a speck of gray where the chain was broken and welded back together.

The charm looks like a small rectangular picture frame, with flowery edges sharp enough to cut my lips, a backdrop of yellow diamonds, and a silver “P” in the center. The “P” has a rippled texture, like a puddle searching for stability.

When she fastened the necklace on my neck, it felt like she was admitting that their flame had died and fertilizing me with the ashes.

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When Mom gave me the alleged token of her and Dad’s affection, I thought that she was relinquishing their love and anointing me its only fruitful outcome. When she fastened the necklace on my neck, it felt like she was admitting that their flame had died and fertilizing me with the ashes.

I was around ten. It was the year I got my first cell phone. I wasn’t yet using it to call girls. Back then, all I claimed was high scores on Doodle Jump.

Mom told me she used to wear your ring on the necklace. She thought Dad gave her the “P,” but she doesn’t remember. The P seems like an accident. Like me. Also a mystery.

But Mom remembers why she thought this was the perfect gift for me. She remembers that when she was about the same age, you gave her a chain.

Gold link, just like mine, only a little smaller. It had a charm, a cursive D. She remembers that it was either her eighth or ninth birthday, and you were living in different states. She thinks it was the only present she got. Or at least she can’t remember any others. During the conversation in which she told me all of this, I started to think, If she hadn’t had that necklace she might’ve forgotten her name was Dana.

Dates, places, and ages are difficult for Mom to remember, since she was moving around a lot, but her memory is certain about feelings. She remembers how it felt to receive the jewelry, which trekked down the coast with a handwritten letter as its only luggage. It made her feel like you hadn’t forgotten her.

Mom remembers all the letters you sent. “You better not have a boyfriend.”

And “I hope that you can talk to me. I know you can’t always talk to Mom and Dad; you can always talk to me.” She felt like you were still checking on her and protecting her, even though you weren’t there. illustration by mercuri lam

You might want to check on her current boyfriend, my dad, who’s probably in the basement drinking Tito’s and yelling at Stephen A. Smith.

When you wrote her eighth or ninth birthday letter, you were eighteen or nineteen years old. At that time you were locked up.

She remembers how stoked you were when she visited in middle school.

She remembers you making jokes about how you used the lid of the can to chop up your tuna because they wouldn’t give you utensils. They wouldn’t give you a spoon but they’d let you wield the lid of a metal can?

She remembers leaving the jail. She remembers thinking that when she got older, you might have felt abandoned.

She felt like the family left you behind.

So I called her the other night and we remembered you for an hour. Here’s some of the stuff she said: “He was so funny.”

“He didn’t like me being shy.”

“His laugh was just so crazy. I don’t think anybody could impersonate it.”

“He made me feel comfortable in my own skin.”

“He was always himself.”

“I hope my brother knows how much I love him. I hope he didn’t pass away not knowing how much I loved him.”

On Friday, August 19th, 1994—In Lynchburg, Virginia—At age 14—At your funeral, she remembers having a TheNewJournal

new piece of jewelry: your gold ring, with nine clover-shaped cut-outs on either side of the band. On the top, there’s a familiar emblem: a letter made from slightly tarnished silver, with a ripple. It’s like ocean water reflecting the moonlight. The gentle, steady tide of a quiet night. The letter K. You went by Knowledge instead of Marc. I knew this before my call with Mom, but she told me that your nickname represented your open-minded, conscious, and confident presence. I never knew your presence, but when Mom talked about you, I could feel it in the tremor of her voice over the phone. I could start to feel it myself, in the gold jewelry pouring through my fingers.

It’s like oceanwater reflecting the moonlight. The gentle, steady tide of a quiet night.

Knowledge, I’m writing to you because, until now, I could feel your presence only through other people’s memories. But now I know my necklace is like a gift you’ve given, and that my letter looks eerily similar to yours. There are more than states between us and it may be decades until we meet, but in the meantime, I have a memory of you beside my window or in my hands or close to my heart.

This is all thanks to Mom, who couldn’t help but plant the seeds of Knowledge in my mind.

Today, I wept and watered those seeds, and now I’ll wait for her fruit to grow. ∎ Your nephew, Prentiss Prentiss Patrick-Carter is a junior in Hopper College.

May 2025

layout by mercuri lam

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Poem

If The Wise Have Wisdom, Idiots Have Idioms (Excerpts) IV. (a) Nothing gets out of hand if it was never within reach. Nothing goes down in flames if it was never high up. Nothing is rocket science if we’re usually more complicated. Nothing’s wrong with a fish out of water if it looks delicious on my plate. (b) You can’t speak of the devil without recognizing an angel. You can’t turn a blind eye when the other is looking. You can’t cross a bridge when you come to it if we’ve never built one.

You can’t score brownie points without vegan and gluten free options.

V. (a) How am I supposed to make lemonade when life only gives lemons but not enough syrup to mask the sourness? How can you let someone off the hook when they’ll drown without clinging to it? They took the bait for survival. How can you give the benefit of the doubt when we both know who’s lying? How can I give you a taste of your own medicine when it has only ever worsened our symptoms? (b) Beating around the bush doesn’t matter when the elephant is already in the room. Barking up the wrong tree doesn’t matter when I’ll always be a dog to you. Judging a book by its cover doesn’t matter when you leave me to collect dust, taking me off the shelf only when you feel like it. Beating a dead horse doesn’t matter, unless that’s your idea of attempting a resuscitation.

VI.

(a) You say blessing in disguise, when you mean shit happens—accept it. You say think outside the box, when you mean any escape is confined in my imagination. You say the ball’s in my court to evade responsibility. You say all’s well that ends well to brush aside all our mistakes. You say good things come to those who wait to hide dreams deferred. You say all good things must come to an end, but nothing about a good ending.

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May 2025 TheNewJournal

layout by vivian wang

VII.

(b) A rule of thumb is always misleading, like the thumbs up you give me. A million bucks looks nice until it makes your heart envious. Best of both worlds is a perfect compromise but really you have the best of neither. A bird in your hand is worth two in the bush, except when they’re dead. A walk in the park is as easy as being alone is hard. Hitting the nail on the head means you’re right, but at what cost?—the nail is now unconscious. (a) No, two peas in a pod aren’t close—just look at us. No, I can’t take it with a grain of salt—that’d sting my wounds. No, I can’t wrap my head around it—it’s not flexible enough, okay? No, I won’t spill the beans because I’d prefer to keep them tidy. And (b) yes, I will cry over spilled milk even if it’s not worth it—after all, the milk is spilled, is it not? Let’s see how happy you are when your milk is spilled.

Empathy is understanding how spilled milk feels. And yes, having a method to your madness means knowing when to take things literally, and who gets the last laugh.

—Alistair Lam

illustration by jacinda Webber

TheNewJournal May 2025

27

Aside

A Crack in Time

Everything cracks around me. The ice, even just a few feet along the bank, crackles like it is being stepped on. The trees tap each other’s branches in the light wind.

I sit upon a rock by the Deerfield River. Thick mossy roots curl beneath me, open-air legs of the spruce tree. Its needles divide the sky from me, and protect it from the smoke of the fire the previous visitor set. The ashes, a split log, and a brick are what they left.

The cracking keeps convincing me I have company. To my right is a crook in the river; there the ice is thicker, so its cracking sounds like footfalls. In front of me, it is tinny, more like glass, or aluminum foil. The highway lies on the other side of the trees, which rise from the riverbank opposite. I cannot see it, but the wind of cars is a constant thrum. As is the waterfall a half-mile down the river: the Gardner Road Dam splits the waterflow, diverting half towards the Hydro Plant.

The ice keeps cracking. My body is getting cold, except my fingers.

I toss a few stones on the thin ice before me. They bounce once and remain there, barely cracking it. I walk to the thicker ice to my right. The same occurs. I return, lift the brick from its ash-home, and heave it onto the thin ice. It lands, makes a square dent, and slides off into the water. The dent does not puncture. A train calls in the distance, its rumble overpowering the falls and carwind; I still hear the crackling. The river persists, heavy head barreling through time, insistent on its intent to wear things down. Given time, it would puncture the dam; given time, it would sink a hundred feet deeper into its ravine; given time, this ice would not just crackle but crack, into little pieces that, one by one, would sink and melt and become flowing water once again.

The ice cracks only under the surface: splintering into millions beneath what the land-shot gaze can perceive. The crook where the thicker ice grows and cracks is not a crook, I learn by looking closer, but the delta of a tributary, erosion in motion, a lithe and brief and little-known creek that hurries the mountainside down to the river. ∎ —Will Sussbauer

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May 2025 TheNewJournal

illustration by Ella zesiger

Endnote

Dog People There’s another Ivy League institution in New Haven. Things get a bit hairier there.

By Abbey Kim

all accounts, Enzo—just shy of Byhis“He’s third birthday—is pampered. our only child, so he definitely

gets spoiled,” his dad, local electrician Anthony Nicefaro, admits. It’s pickup time at Enzo’s daycare, and we’re chatting as Anthony waits for him to come out.

Enzo sleeps in bed with Anthony and his fiancée every night. He demands attention—particularly for his favorite nap spot on Anthony’s lap. Despite not caring much for winter coats, Enzo has several.

“There he is,” Anthony says, breaking into a smile. His voice rises to a coo.

Out comes Enzo: a bouncing, slobbering blaze of energy catapulting himself onto Anthony and me. Enzo is a tan-andwhite coated mutt—part pit bull, lab, and Australian herding dog.

Enzo does not attend a normal daycare. This is Paw Haven, a luxury doggy daycare and boarding facility in New Haven. You know you’re in the right place when you hear the chorus of yowls and yaps. Then there’s the smell: disinfectant, cleaner, a faint hint of urine.

The massive industrial lot boasts perpetually scrubbed orange epoxy floors, dozens of cameras, indoor and outdoor turf lawns, and rows and rows of glassdoored puppy rooms. Pet parents can drop their pups off for weekly daycare sessions or weeks-long boarding. Paw Haven is the largest facility of its kind in Connecticut.

On a busy day, more than a hundred dogs trot through Paw Haven’s glass doors. They bring their own toys, their own special blankets, their own monogrammed leashes. They wear T-shirts and pants and coats. Staff members greet each by name.

Paw Haven is as ridiculous and silly as it sounds, but it is also deeply serious. People want their pets to be known, loved, and cared for—and they’ll pay the price to make it happen.

Paw Haven’s location near Yale is convenient: the daycare markets “Ivy illustration by james Tibang

League” care on its website. Paw Haven’s most popular packages ring in at $650 for twenty daycare sessions a month and $620 for a ten night boarding stay.

The “campus” offers only the best for its furry pupils—memory foam beds and pet-specific pheromones blasted through the HVAC to lessen pet anxiety. “Human-centric” dogs—those who prefer faculty company to that of their canine classmates—can book individual play time with members of the twenty-four person staff. Pet parents receive daily report cards about their pets, complete with photos and multi-sentence updates. There’s even a yearbook for the founders’ class of 2020.

This Ivy League process is complete with an interview. Behind a tinted glass door in the reception area marked only with the word ADMISSIONS and a paw print, prospective parents answer a slew of questions: Have they ever been to daycare before? Do they have any behavioral issues? Any illnesses? Allergies?

TheNewJournal May 2025

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It’s hard to believe these creatures Put simply, the dog market is a bull descended from wolves. Indeed, for market. The nation’s first doggy daymuch of human history, dogs—the first care opened in 1987 in New York. Today, domesticated animals—lived much Paw Haven sits in the multibillion-dolmore rugged lives. They wrangled live- lar industry of pet daycare—not to stock, helped hunters, pulled sleds, and mention the adjacent and equally lucraguarded homes. They did it all without tive sectors of doggy fashion, treats, winter coats. and luxury experiences. Garages and But for almost as long as there manure fields no longer suffice. Family have been working dogs, there have deserves only the best. been pampered ones, too. During the “The most unexpected thing is how Renaissance, French King Henry III passionate dog-parents are compared to What’s their play style? Do they like men, carried his beloved bichons around in a just parent-parents,” Donald said. “We women? The process is, of course, holistic. little basket tied around his neck with get a lot of people who come from doing General Manager Donald Willis a ribbon. At the turn of the twentieth child daycare, and they’re like, wow, the introduces me to his class: Adeline, and century, the last Nawab of Junagadh owners here are so much more involved Strike, and Sydney, and Cairo, and Claire, Muhammad Mahabat Khan spoiled than just shoving their kid off on the and Yael. Each one is slobbery and smi- his hundreds of dogs with custom suits, little school bus…This is their family ley, leaping to attention when they see private bedrooms, servants, and even a member who can’t speak.”

Donald’s face emerge in their enclosure. royal dog wedding.

For a relationship without words, Donald has curly dark facial hair This past century has seen an inter- there certainly is a lot of communicaand a partial sleeve of Disney-inspired esting trend: the art of dog-spoiling tion. The sheer level of contact pet partattoos. He’s sort of like one of his three has become more accessible. By the ents can have with their pets throughout labradors: warm, bubbly, and driven. mid-twentieth century, even the com- a Paw Haven day is shocking: access to Dressed in a blue Paw Haven-branded mon pets were invited indoors. daycare and pet cubby live streams from T-shirt, he bounds through the bright“When I was growing up, our dog numerous angles, a dedicated receptionly-lit hallways, pointing at each dog and just played in the backyard,” Donald said. ist to field phone calls, active email, texts, easily talking, as if introducing a series of “They slept in the garage. My black lab and daily report cards. Donald recounted star students. has her own bedroom in my house. She’s nights where he’d respond to messages at There’s Kennedy, a black-and-white got her own queen-sized bed in there.”

2 a.m. from anxious owners. dog with a Yale collar who can be a bit Paw Haven’s clientele certainly “You really are the voice of both the “spicy” and is “kind of a pee-pee boy.” I includes New Haven royalty. “We have owner to the dog, and the dog to the look down, and there is indeed pee, treasurers; we have mayors; we have con- owner,” Donald said. seemingly fresh, on the orange epoxy gressmen; we have doctors,” Donald Ideally, dropping a dog off at Paw floor and now the soles of my white proudly said. “Most of the heads of the big Haven is like leaving a child with their shoes. Donald’s wide stance reveals the departments at Yale bring their dogs here.” favorite relative. That relative just hapskill of someone who has evolved to Mayor Justin Elicker’s rescue, pens to be Pet CPR and First Aid Certified. avoid these incidents before they are Captain, comes to Paw Haven. “He “We know about all the weddings, promptly cleaned. comes in here very distinguished,” the babies, the changes in jobs, the movWe walk past the massive collar and Donald said, “very…food-motivated.” ing,” Donald said, “just as much as probleash board—each dog uses their own gear But not all of Paw Haven’s clients ably their family members know, because when they’re here. The accessories are top- are public figures or professors. Some are we build such a bond over their animals.” of-the-line: Kate Spade, Gucci, and $400 just everyday people who share the desire When we first met, Donald told me, collars on the rack. Tiny, quivering Minnie to give their dogs the best life possible.

“We are really a people business; we’re wears a Strawberry Shortcake sweatshirt, More than half of American house- not really an animal business.” After and teenage Nellie rocks a “Boss Pants On” holds have pets. About half of all US. pet meeting the people and pets behind this hoodie. On any given day, Donald says, owners say their pets are “as much a part of industry—all of whom were dressed at least fifteen to twenty of the dogs are their family as a human member,” accord- better than I was—the difference seems wearing clothes—even more in the win- ing to a 2023 study by the Pew Research smaller now. ∎ tertime, with their coats.

Center. Pet owners may pamper their “There’s a dog that just left here after animals for the same reasons parents seek Abbey Kim is a senior in Branford boarding for a week that was wearing comfort for their human children: a desire College and former Editor-in-Chief of corduroy pants,” Donald said. for loved ones to lead a better, fuller life.

The New Journal.

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May 2025 TheNewJournal

layout by vivian wang

Rounding Error

May 2025

8 Historically contested 50 Reality TV activities 84 Up to date with the latest region of Europe trends 51 Boolean word 9 Scribe, informally 53 “Pretty Little Liars” actress 89 “Has it started yet?”

10 Stand in a studio Lawson 92 Tried to make time 11 In the style of 54 Novelist known for “Good 93 Reminiscent of the shore Wives” and “Little Men” 12 Adjective used to describe 94 Tennis great Gibson gooey chocolate cakes 55 Country where Al Jazeera 95 Imposes is headquartered 13 The Statue of Liberty and a 97 Strong blackjack hand (former) statue of Helios 56 Region of Ireland that 98 Need for Don Quixote and names a mythological 14 Moment in time Sancho Panza cycle 15 Statements in many math 99 Went on a date, often 57 “You can’t stop me!” problems 100 Run out 58 Law, to Louis 16 Micro wave?

102 Per each individual 59 Extinct bird of New 17 RSVP tally Zealand 103 More on edge 21 Soldier-for-hire, in short 60 City home to Nollywood 105 “Modern Family” airer 24 XXX part?

63 “GOAL!” 106 “Goshdarnit!”

26 The solver of this puzzle 67 Pablo Neruda or John 107 Hoard of treasure 33 Hullabaloo Keats 108 “Did not need to know 34 Appropriate first name of a 68 Do some deception that!”

Bond villain 69 Response from a 114 Vests lack them 35 Surname in Steinbeck’s humblebragger 115 Cold treat with a red and “East of Eden” 70 Glower blue logo 36 Fed, as a fire 71 Faces in the crowd?

38 Mediterranean island that 74 Region explored by Fridtjof 117 Tower contents 118 Many a first-responder lends its name to a dog Nansen breed 120 Epcot center?

39 German tank used in WWII 78 Amtrak option 80 Letters before an alias 44 F end of Ancient 45 Media company named for 81 The Greece? a presidential candidate 82 Ceremony of PLAY MORE TNJ 47 Unsportsmanlike remembrance CROSSWORDS ON comments 83 Silly sort OUR WEBSITE! 48 Response to a fright The New Journal was founded in 1967, under the following mission statement: “This university has once again reached that stage in history when people are talking about the New Yale, presumably to be distinguished from the Old Yale, which in its own day was presumably considered new. Wishing to share in this modernity, we have chosen The New Journal as the name for our publication.

Besides, things seemed slow around here.”

Today, The New Journal is published five times during the academic year by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. One thousand copies of each issue are distributed free to members of the Yale and New Haven community. The New Journal is printed by TCI Press, Seekonk, Massachusetts; bookkeeping and billing services are provided by Colman Bookkeeping of New Haven. Office Address: P.O. Box 3311, New Haven, CT 06515.

crossword by jem burch

TheNewJournal May 2025

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79 Teach to perform a ACROSS different function 1 Dog command 81 Some 24-hour fosters?

6 Dog doggedly 85 Scrabble set 11 Cinemark competitor 86 Like swampland 14 Full of life 87 Bete 18 Wipe from existence 88 Fancy farewell 19 Wide mouth 90 Shakshouka topping 20 Tool used by Penelope, in 91 Source of some myth Australian fire?

22 Native group that fought in 93 Province whose capital is the Beaver Wars Denpasar 23 “Death on the Nile”, and 96 The night visitors in others?

“Amahl and the Night 25 Backstreet officers?

Visitors” 27 Capital in Central Asia 98 Sweethearts, in slang 28 Aarhus inhabitant 101 Made use of, as a desk 29 Type of tuna sashimi 104 Slice of meat that would shock you?

30 Special 109 Mock insolently 31 Formerly 110 Many an off-roader 32 Hubbub in a candy store?

111 Block in the field 37 Put on one’s birthday suit 112 General vicinity 40 Rare blood type, for short 113 Voting option 41 Grecian vessels 116 Fashionable place to live?

42 Functionalities 119 Field features... or a directive for 43 Where to follow the Heat? understanding this 45 Wear with straps puzzle’s theme?

46 “Understood.”

121 Obey 49 Smelter’s need 122 Target of some magnets?

51 New Haven scholars 123 Accommodate 52 Start to a toast?

124 Small rodents, 55 Strange way to keep a humorously door closed?

125 “You go, queen!”

59 Sicken 126 Tolkien creature 61 Film about a body of water 127 First name in beauty 62 Meh 128 Meal featuring karpas and 63 Governing body in sport maror (abbr.)

64 Policy that established DOWN “Dreamers” (abbr.)

1 Sonata and Accord, for two 65 Take-out general 2 Determined ahead of time 66 Fielding error from Kris 3 Onetime airline headed Bryant?

by Eddie Rickenbacker 72 Winter beverage 4 Cruising, maybe 73 Flour used to make puri 5 California county home to and paratha Bakersfield 75 Equis currently headed by 76 Air-conditioner measures 6 Org. Mandy Cohen across the Pond (abbr.)

7 How some problems 77 Crafty knife must be faced

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Learn from some of the most influential journalists in the world.

Established by Nelson Poynter in 1967, the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism welcomes distinguished journalists to Yale.

The program aims to provide the community with a cultivated look at topics of interest from all possible perspectives.

Find out more through:

poynter.yale.edu 32

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