Volume 57 - Issue 5

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, par- ticularly after his recent death.

Letter from the editors

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

Thank you to our donors

The Elizabethan Club The Hull Barrett Family Fund

Mark Badger

Jean-Pierre Jordan

Aliyya Swaby

Laura Heymann

Jeffrey Pollock

Julia Preston

Armand LeGardeur

Katie Hazelwood

Benjamin Lasman

R. Anthony Reese

Adrew Court

Kathrin Lassila

Fred Strebeigh

Peter Phleger

Steven Weisman

David Greenberg

Suzanne Wittebort

Romy Drucker

James Carney

Makiko Harunari

Laura Pappano

Editors-in-Chief

Chloe Budakian Calista Oetama

Executive Editor Mia Kohn

Managing Editor Tina Li

Publisher Alex Moore

Creative Director Vivian Wang

Verse Editors

Matias Guevara Ruales Sophia Liu

Senior Editors

Ben Card

Marilynn Sager

Blake Wilson

David Gerber

Daniel Yergin

Barak Goodman

Daniel Brook

Eric Boodman

Stuart Rohrer

Sally Sloan

R. A. Reese

Leslie Dach

Aanika Eragam

Maggie Grether Samantha Liu

Chloe Nguyen Jack Rodriquez-Vars

Associate Editors

Odelya Bergner-Phillips Ella Piper Claffy

Niva Cohen Adele Haeg

Tali Kantor Lieber Dani Klein

Margot Kohn Kelly Kong

Harry Lowitz Maia Nehme

Kate Rodriguez Sonia Rosa

Moe Shimizu Drew Storino

Sabrina Thaler

Copy Editors

Olivia Barton Kade Gajdusek

Zoya Haq Smile Jiang

Julian Raymond Will Sussbauer

Design Editors

Dani Klein Mercuri Lam

Brianna Magtoto Jessica Sanchez

Lauren Yee

Associate Business Managers

Ethan Kan Tiona Zeng

Photography Colin Kim

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

Friends: Nicole Allan • Margaret Bauer • Mark Badger and Laura Heymann • Anson M. Beard • Susan Braudy • Julia Calagiovanni • Elisha Cooper • Peter Cooper • Andy Court • The Elizabethan Club • Leslie Dach • David Freeman and Judith Gingold • Paul Haigney and Tracey Roberts • Bob Lamm • James Liberman • Alka Mansukhani • Benjamin Mueller • Sophia Nguyen • Valerie Nierenberg • Morris Panner • Jennifer Pitts • R. Anthony Reese • Eric Rutkow • Lainie Rutkow • Laura Saavedra and David Buckley • Anne-Marie Slaughter • Elizabeth Sledge • Caroline Smith • Gabriel Snyder • Elizabeth Steig • John Jeremiah Sullivan • Daphne and David Sydney • Kristian and Margarita Whiteleather • Blake Townsend Wilson • Daniel Yergin • William Yuen

This Is No String Cheese

By Miles Zaud profile

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

Nicole Manning

By Prentiss Patrick-Carter

Old Walls, New Routes

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

On a cold winter night, members of the Yale Climbing Team file into the bottom floor of a warehouse on the Farmington Canal Trail. Inside, fluorescent lights reveal a cave of gray walls covered with colorful, chalksmeared holds and painter’s tape.

The team is fond of the gym despite its rundown facilities. “City Climb is a dank, dark hole,” says Quinn Ennis ’26, captain of the team. “But it’s a friendly dank, dark hole!”

Founded in 2012, City Climb was once New Haven’s only climbing gym, and the center of the city’s eclectic climbing community. However, with the 2023 opening of Ascent Climbing Gym and Rock Spot, two better-resourced gyms, City Climb is no longer the city’s premier climbing facility.

Climbing is a rapidly growing industry: the Climbing Business Journal found that the number of climbing gyms in the US has doubled since 2013. Grand View Research estimates that the climbing gym industry was worth $3.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow by over 9 percent annually over the next five years.

Ascent and Rock Spot offer higher-quality equipment and nicer amenities than City Climb. Locally owned Ascent has a sauna, weight lifting equipment, and a coworking space. Rock Spot, an east coast chain, boasts floor-to-ceiling windows and the latest MoonBoard, a customizable training board with light-up holds. These gyms charge monthly membership fees of $95 and $84 respectively, while City Climb charges $62.

City Climb has found itself unable to compete with Ascent and Rock Spot, particularly in one key area: routesetting, the arrangement of holds into climbing routes on the wall. “The setting at Rock Spot is the best, full stop,” says Jonah Heiser ’25, one of City Climb’s setters.

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 routesetting. But, at present, the gym’s predominantly tall, male setting team tends to set routes which favor climbers of a similar body type. For instance, the “crux”—or most challenging move—of many routes is a move between distant holds; these moves mainly test climbers’ strength and power. Augustine admits that City Climb lacks routes that prioritize balance, precision, and technical footwork, and he says that the lack of diverse setters is a problem across the climbing industry.

City Climb’s appeal lies in its low prices and unabashed quirkiness, which corporate-owned gyms in major cities lack. Each route is named by its setter, often something humorous or whimsical. “Nelson’s Noodles,” named for one setter’s dog, traces a path across the ceiling. “A Quick One Before the Eternal Worm Devours Connecticut” is a long trail of round blue holds. “Voodoo in the Subaru” zigzags up the back wall.

“It was definitely the least posh gym I’d ever been to,” says Jared Stolove GSAS ’28. “But I liked its neighborhood-y charm.”

Augustine believes that the gym provides a space for people to unite around a shared activity, including those who feel like misfits elsewhere. He describes the gym’s climbers as “slight oddballs, in the best way”—including himself, he says with a laugh.

Some longtime climbers lament that the sport has been corrupted by consumerism. According to Delaney Miller, a three-time national championship winner, what began as “a niche sport of soul seekers and dirtbags” has become mainstream, largely due to the rise in corporate gym ownership. Miller wrote in Climbing Magazine that climbing gyms have “lost their soul.” To her, the soaring walls, aesthetically appealing routes, and fancy amenities of corporate gyms represent their homogenization. She believes gym owners have sacrificed individuality for a replicable gym model proven to maximize profit. In doing so, they have set in motion the decline of climbing’s counterculture spirit.

A climber is lowered after completing a top-rope route.

layout by Vivian wang

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

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. ∎

City Climb’s overhanging bouldering walls.

Aiwen Desai is a junior in Timothy Dwight College.

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

On 80 Hamilton Street, the Lost 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,

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’

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

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

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.

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

This Is No String

By Miles Zaud

Cheese

Elliot 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

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

Whichlookedlikemotoroil, and the amount of caffeine inasingleshotofthisstuff couldhavepoweredasmall car.ElliotandMaxroutinely took15-minutecoffeebreaks, andduringeveryminuteof thosebreaks,theywerepreoccupiedwithdrinkingas muchcoffeeaspossible.They wouldhavebeenmoreproductiveifinsteadofheading tothecoffeeroomeveryfew minutestogettheirfix,they hookeduptoaverylongI.V.

Likeanairplanetoilet’s flush,butyou’relockedin thebathroomandtheflushis never-ending.

Whichwasgenerally accomplishedbytelling someone else to fix it.

A favorite refrain of his was,“Liuzzi’safamily.” Between that and him actuallybeingSicilian,I wastemptedtoaskifhedid theCosaNostrathing,but evenawriter’sindecency has its limits. “Thisisbydesign,”Elliot madesuretodictatetomy notepad.

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.

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.

Mozzarella, like much of life, was born from an accident. A thousand years ago, some incompetent cheesemaker dropped curds into hot water and just like that, the story goes, mozzarella was created. FDA sanitary regulations make the modern mozzarella-making process a bit more complicated. The first step is adding an enzyme called rennet to milk, which catalyzes the separation of curds and whey. This step also had its origins in serendipity,

Elliot told me. “Legend is that a farmer was transporting his milk in the stomach of a goat, and when he got to his destination, he no longer had milk. He had curd and he had whey. The milk had transformed due to the enzymes in the stomach lining.”

The grand finale of the mozzarella-making process is the cheese-stretching. I saw many tasks bungled at the cheese plant, but nothing came close to cheese-stretching in terms of sheer bunglability. Cheese-stretching is the step that distinguishes award-winning mozzarella from the stuff on bowling-alley pies, and Liuzzi wasn’t taking any chances. The cheese-stretcher, Maximiliano Laporta, had been imported from Italy.

Maximiliano referred to himself as “The Maestro of the Maestros,” often and in the third person. That was about all I gathered from his introduction, because the only language Maximiliano spoke was Italian. Sometimes he would try to help me out by throwing in a little English and Spanish and ASL , but that just confused me further, since he often used all those languages in a single word. The language barrier occasioned some

peculiar misunderstandings, e.g., I asked him if he had a girlfriend and he replied, “Several hundred.” Before I could double-check my translation of “girlfriend,” Maximiliano, seeing my alarm, clarified that throughout his life, he had had several hundred girlfriends. Right then, he only had three.

If there was one thing Maximiliano liked more than women, though, it was Italy. Maximiliano, it must be said, was an unapologetic Italian supremacist, and I began to suspect he knew English but simply chose not to speak it. Once he had finished his introduction, he set himself a challenge: stretching a batch the traditional way to prove to me that traditional Italian cheese-stretching methods were superior to any machine.

At this juncture, I should mention that given my history with traditional cheesemaking, the battle Maximiliano had chosen to fight was not so much uphill as cliff-faced. Long ago, during those impressionable, formative childhood years, I ran afoul of cheese on a trip to a ranch in California.

images credits: cherry grove farm (top)

Theancients,blesstheirhearts,thought aboutsexincheesemakingterms. Aristotle wrote that semen acts on menstrualbloodinthesamewaythat rennetactsonmilk:thesemencoagulates thebloodintoafetus.Perhapsitwasall awayforthechurchtoshortenlinesat theconfessionalbooth—justthinking about it makes one want to forsake the pleasuresoftheflesh.

Adeadgoat.

Morelikeanapologygift, mybrothersaid.

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 eaves, gazebo trusses, shower doors—so that the whey could drain from the curds. Every few minutes, a single drip would fall from the bottom of any given cheesebag, soiling whatever was below. Everyone, and especially the bald, lived in fear of the drip. Running away from the ranch was no good: we would eventually get hungry and have to return to eat dinner, which was an even worse experience than making the cheese. Somehow, the owner of the ranch found a way to include goat cheese (which she insisted on calling “le fromage de chevre,” despite our being in the furthest place from Paris on this earth) in every dish.

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.

IMention all this only to give an idea of how when I entered the Liuzzi factory, it was with a certain degree of apprehension; and how when Liuzzi’s promotional brochure described their cheesemaking as “old-fashioned,” I interpreted that with more than a soupçon of mistrust; and how when Maximiliano finally proffered me his “tradizionale” mozzarella, instead of downing it in one bite, I sort of tentatively crept up on it. Maximiliano had melted some curd into a blob, caught the blob on the end of a wooden stick, and thrown it around with a technique somewhere in the neighborhood of pizza-throwing—a skill at which he was apparently some kind of genius. He had

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

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.

Mozzarella 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

Cheesedescriptorstend tobeinverselydesirable totheirdesirabilitywhen describingotherfoods.

RelatedtoElliotby“Joe,” Elliot’s uncle and founder of CalabroCheese,whoitseemsI amexpectedtobefamiliarwith on a first-name basis. When heisinvoked(“asJoeused tosay…”),it’swiththesame worshipfulintimacyjazzplayers havewhentheytalkabout “Miles,”orScientologistswhen theytalkabout“L.Ron.”

ball—but more so, they wanted the same mozzarella ball. Ever since Liuzzi made it onto the supermarket shelf, Galbani’s mass-produced mozzarella had been right there beside it, a few cents less, beckoning. Elliot cited an old family adage: “If you’re gonna make shit, make shit every day.”

I asked him if there were any companies that made shit every day.

“Galbani,” he said, without a moment’s hesitation. “Go buy a little Galbani ricotta, and you’re gonna see. It’s gonna be like Jello.”

Elliot tended to be even-keeled, but on the subject of shit-making cheese companies his feelings ran high. He reserved the ultimate accusation for Kraft Singles: “It’s not cheese. A Kraft Single, that’s not cheese.”

the bike), had a standoff with a porcupine, and arrived at a beige military-looking warehouse that was in fact the very out-of-the-way Liuzzi Cheese Co.—only to be told (accurately, as it turned out) that my appointment was scheduled for the following day. Fortunately, the older woman working the front desk—a bona fide “nonna”—took pity. She calmed me down, offered me some cheese, and secured me an audience with Elliot. While expressing my gratitude to Elliot for admitting me to his office, I mentioned that I had called Calabro Cheese Co.—the only other Italian fresh cheese company in New Haven—multiple times, and they didn’t so much as pick up. “Not surprised,” Elliot said.

ThefamousturophileClifton Fadimanwrote,“Cheeseis milk’sleaptowardimmortality.” Ifso,thenever-expiringKraft Singleischeese’sleaptoward immortality.

In fact, Elliot was right: Kraft Singles, containing less than 51 percent of dairy products, fail to meet the legal definition of cheese and are instead registered under the stomach-churning term “pasteurized prepared cheese product.”

You can’t talk about Liuzzi without talking about Calabro. Although there was a bit of the two-sheriffs-one-town issue at play between the two companies, the relationship between Calabro and Liuzzi was more textured than just a rivalry. A better term might be what people these days would call a “toxic relationship.”

The kind of friends who shake hands and both mutter “Asshole”themomentthey’re out of earshot.

There wasn’t much that could get between Elliot and his top-quality cheese. (For Pete’s sake, the guy was throwing out entire mozzarella vats due to textural aberrations only an Italian palate could detect.) In fact, there was really only one thing that could prevent Elliot from making top-quality cheese, and it was a value equally as sacred to Italians as good cheese: family. The two values didn’t conflict often—the Calabros, Elliot’s family, are something like the Rockefellers of top-quality fresh Italian mozzarella cheese—but when they did, family won.

It wasn’t more than a few words into my first conversation with Elliot before the Calabros came up. This was around 5 a.m. (the workers arrive at 2 a.m., so everyone was already like two coffees and countless mozzarella balls in), and I should say I was lucky to even be talking to Elliot at all. That morning, despairing of ever finding a cheesemaker who wasn’t an FDA-cowed, red-tape-lovin’ bureaucrat and who would actually deign to talk to a civilian, I mounted my bike and rode for an hour in pouring rain, traipsed through a forest (likely private), forded a creek (with

All toxic relationships start out happily. Back in their days as local cheesemongers in the 1980s, the Calabros and the Liuzzis were just two families using cheese to barter with their friends, as they had done in Italy. But capitalism soon had its way: both Calabro and Liuzzi outgrew their garages, expanded their local cheese routes, and encountered each other.

Elliot, despite working for the Liuzzis, was a Calabro by blood. He grew up rollerblading around the floor of the Calabro cheese plant, swiping humungoid blocks 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, which wasn’t often, it was in a bedroom he installed at the plant.

But Calabro’s peaceful days were numbered. Joe Calabro, the kingpin of Calabro Cheese, had developed Alzheimer’s, and it wasn’t long before the Calabro empire was up for grabs. There ensued a Murdochian battle for the reins of Calabro, involving a whole lot of subterfuge, alliances behind closed doors, and streams of choice Italian epithets, all of which Elliot would only refer to under the vague heading of “Italian family drama.” The upshot of it all: one day, without warning, Frank’s relatives

banded together and gave him the axe. Unless he could throw his lot in with another cheese company, Frank’s cheesemaking days were over.

Even after Frank’s unceremonious ousting, his reputation as a cheesemaking whiz persisted, and there was one cheesemaking family happy to employ both him and his son Elliot: Liuzzi. As for Calabro Cheese, it was perhaps inevitable that under the new regime, whose constituents Elliot “wouldn’t pay to sit on a box and watch paint dry,” the company began to go under. It appeared Calabro Cheese’s secret ingredient was none other than Frank Calabro. Soon, the company called asking him to return. Frank couldn’t bear to watch his life’s work burn, so he set aside his grudges and accepted. Elliot, however, made Frank promise that once they shored up Calabro’s finances, they would sell the company.

“He couldn’t stay away. And I didn’t want him to work until he died,” Elliot said.

In 2021, the Calabro family, with Elliot’s approval, sold Calabro Cheese to a venture capital firm. Elliot quickly regretted it. He stayed on the board for the year following the sale, and saw his family’s legacy crumble.

“It was, ‘How can we cut costs, cut labor? How can we screw over our competitors? How can we just make as much cheese as possible, as cheap as possible?’ And that’s not what the company was built for,” Elliot said. “We’re not making sub-one-dollar ricotta that major manufacturers buy by the trailer-load. No. We’re quality.”

Elliot left the board, went back to Liuzzi, and, by the time I met him, had all but disowned Calabro Cheese. Oddly enough, though, he stood by the decision to sell. “It was putting family first,” he told me—but wouldn’t go into further detail.

For all of Elliot’s misgivings about the sale, though, it did come with some undeniable perks. Just a few weeks ago, Frank, who had hardly ever stepped foot off the cheese floor in his life, returned from an Icelandic cruise.

In 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

it to mean, there was the truth: the Liuzzi family members—including Elliot, their adopted son—were on top of the corporate pyramid, and it was non-Liuzzi workers who were actually making the cheese. By the time I spoke to Elliot, the Calabros who had presided over Calabro Cheese’s degradation had cashed out in a big way and were living what most would call profoundly American lives.

“I don’t blame them,” Elliot said. I couldn’t tell whether he was just being diplomatic for the press, or if he really was indifferent to the actions of those Calabros. If the latter, then what were Elliot’s own motives? He already operated Google Sheets more often than cheese machines. Someday, he might have become Liuzzi’s CEO and hardly ever have seen an actual mozzarella ball; if he did, it was not unreasonable to think that with a profit to be made and a place in the Hamptons not far off, Liuzzi would be sold—thereby consummating the American dream. In fact, parts of that dream had already begun to materialize for Elliot. As I left the plant, I asked him what his kids wanted to be. “Baseball players,” he said.

On the way out, I had the urge to stop by the Liuzzi shop and buy as much mozzarella as my college budget would allow. I’d probably never be back, and it seemed to me I’d be making a purchase for posterity—for a time not far off when I’d be watching Liuzzis hit home runs on TV, when Galbani would finally quash its competition for good, when Liuzzi cheese could only be found in the dry-goods aisle, the dubious distinction of “REAL CHEESE!” printed on its plastic jar. But I didn’t buy anything. It would have been silly to stock my fridge with Liuzzi mozzarella in an attempt to cling to a fading era. Like the Italians say, the cheese wouldn’t taste the same. ∎

Miles Zaud is a junior in Saybrook College.

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

layout design by jessica sánchez

Victoria hill had been sick for months. She first fell ill in 2020 while on vacation in Iceland, but her symptoms persisted back home: migraines, vertigo, nerve damage. Her doctors found that she didn’t have a common virus—nor one they could identify. They could not conclusively diagnose her. Could it be genetic, she wondered? Neither of her parents had experienced anything similar, so she turned to commercial DNA testing. 23andMe, she heard, could connect genetic data to health risks.

Her test results prompted more questions than answers. She first noticed a few relatives listed as paternal “half-siblings.” This must be a mistake, she thought; DNA tests often confuse siblings with close cousins. Still, there were too many unfamiliar names, including members of a mysterious “Caldwell” family. In the middle of the night, she marched the 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.

Such discoveries are all too common in the world of sperm donation. Particularly for children of Hill’s generation, parents were advised by fertility doctors not to tell their children the truth about their conception. For some parents, that was just standard practice. For others, it was to shield their children from the shame, confusion, and emotional

ambiguity that accompany sperm donation. Neither parents nor doctors predicted how popular the genotyping technology used by companies like 23andMe would become.

So when children unexpectedly discover the true origin of their conception later in life, that mix of emotions can come crashing down at once. Sometimes, it leads to truths about their lineage that they would prefer as fiction. Who was their father, really? Where were their half-siblings? As Hill would soon discover, the answers to these questions can be disappointing—and even revolting.

Yet in many states, such as Connecticut, few laws guarantee children’s rights to information about their donor parent. Those who have misgivings about their conception are often left stranded in the absence of legislation. For Hill, that means being unable to seek justice against her biological father.

Maralee Hill had struggled t o conceive with her husband. They discovered he had a low sperm count with slow motility, which reduced their chances of conception. Still, the couple wanted children. They decided to try fertility treatment, a practice that was only just gaining popularity in the 1970s. The couple drove to Yale New Haven Hospital and began visiting

an endocrinologist, who recommended sperm donation. Doctor Burton Caldwell promised that the donor would be anonymous; he would select a healthy Yale medical intern who resembled Maralee’s husband. In 1977, they welcomed a baby boy.

The doctor also recommended they keep quiet about their fertility treatment, as couples often did then. Their children would never find out they were donor-conceived. And even if they did, they would 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 to tell her either.

Even as genotyping technologies threatened to reveal their secret thirty-five years later, Maralee tried to keep her daughter’s conception under wraps. When Hill told her mother she was interested in testing her DNA, Maralee discouraged her: “Don’t send your genetics to a corporation.” And when she learned that Hill had mailed her saliva sample to 23andMe anyway, she began to stalk their shared mailbox to steal and hide the results. Maralee didn’t realize that 23andMe returned results digitally.

The night Hill confronted Maralee with her DNA test, her mother was reluctant to talk. It would mean confirming the truth she had hidden from her daughter for so long. She feared Hill might resent her.

What Maralee could not have expected was that Hill had learned more about her supposedly anonymous father. After she received her 23andMe results, one of her half-siblings messaged her: “Do you want to know more about what you’re seeing?” Originally, Hill ignored the emails, thinking they were a scam. 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. But how did this stranger know? She responded to the mysterious inquirer and, after a brief exchange, they quickly connected the dots. They were half-siblings of the same father, who was not, as it turns out, a medical intern, but a Yale-affiliated endocrinologist—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 conceived with an intern’s sperm as promised. But for some reason, after Maralee had had one stillbirth and two miscarriages, Caldwell decided to use his own sperm for her second pregnancy. Maralee couldn’t accept that. “She was in denial,” her daughter recalls.

Hill accepted the fact quickly. She spent her nights googling Caldwell and his family. Nothing was too trivial. “I even looked up what cars they drove,” she admits with a laugh. Her preoccupation with her new knowledge made focusing on her job

as a high school social worker a challenge. “I was trying to meet patients where they were at, and I could not be present,” she remembers.

One day, almost a week after she found out about Caldwell, school ended early. “I can’t do this anymore,” she told herself, “I just got to go.” She drove to an address she had found online. She had only meant to survey the lay of the land.

Before she knew it, she was knocking on his door.

The Caldwell home is a forty-minute drive from Yale. The address is difficult to find online—as if, Hill speculates, someone had wiped it. The house is an off-white suburban estate with three stories and two garages. It rests atop a hill, surrounded by the unmistakable geography of a wealthy suburb: wide, winding roads sandwiched by greens and houses. There are no sidewalks.

When Hill arrived at Caldwell’s house, his wife, Itie, answered the door. She seemed welcoming, albeit concerned for the young woman claiming to be her husband’s biological child. “She did one of those head tilts where she’s like, ‘Oh, you poor thing,’” Hill recalls. Itie Caldwell did not know that her husband might have biological children scattered throughout Connecticut. But Hill says that as soon as she walked in, her husband readily revealed that fact. “I didn’t think that she knew at all,” Hill says of Itie that day. “My heart kind of broke for her.”

But Burton Caldwell remained poised. “He had that kind of callous, clinical feeling,” Hill recalls. She asked him how he felt about the children he fathered: “He told me he didn’t think about us.”

“He

had that kind of callous, clinical feeling,” Hill recalls. She asked him how he felt about the children he fathered: “He told me he didn’t think about us.”

Caldwell was suffering from advanced Parkinson’s. When Hill met him, his body was deteriorating: he had spotty skin, thin lips, and translucent white hair. He looked nothing like Hill’s father. Caldwell had been a tall and in-shape Irishman; her father, a German, was neither. Hill has Caldwell’s blue eyes, not her father’s brown eyes or her mother’s green ones. She always wondered why she looked so different from her father. Her answer was now standing before her.

Caldwell asked about Hill’s academic achievements and any grandchildren, but revealed little

about his intentions in using his sperm to conceive her. No one—except perhaps the man himself—can know for certain why he used his sperm. Perhaps he thought it was convenient, similar to how one New York gynecologist who inseminated his patients explained himself to The New York Times: “I admit I did it…it may have been less than perfect, but with luck, the women were able to conceive.” Or, as one activist suggested of doctors like Caldwell, he never reconciled the “disconnect between this being a medical procedure and the fact that they were creating and giving away their own children.” What is certain is that Caldwell never expressed sympathy for his newfound relationship with Hill. Later, she would learn Caldwell had lost a son at the age of 36 to an aortic aneurysm. That son was the only child he conceived with his wife. She could not understand how he could not feel anything for her or any of the children who had suddenly appeared in his life at just about the same age. “There was no indication whatsoever that he was trying to look at me like he would look at a daughter,” Hill says, matter-of-factly. She speaks of the moment as though she had relived it 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.

Sperm donation is a strikingly low-tech process. Its most basic form only requires viable sperm, a healthy egg, and a syringe, making it possible for a doctor to produce sperm outside his patient’s room and use it immediately after to inseminate his patient.

In most cases, however, the process is more complicated. If a mother decides to visit a sperm bank, they choose a donor based on a myriad of traits: height, race, education, family, medical history, sometimes even a photograph. Once they decide on a favored combination, they are medically examined for an optimal date of insemination, upon which sperm is transported through a tiny catheter into their cervix. This process is known as artificial insemination, which, according to a

widely-cited 1988 study by the now-defunct Office of Technology Assessment, results in thirty thousand births in the US every year. There have been no studies of annual donor births since, but according to a 2019 article published by the National Institute of Health, the number has likely increased.

Maralee did not visit a sperm bank, which was then a nascent business model. She did undergo artificial insemination at Caldwell’s hands. It’s unclear exactly how Caldwell’s insemination process in the 1980s might have differed from common practice today. Still, one element remains true today: American sperm donors are mostly anonymous.

That is not the case in Germany or the UK. And unlike in Sweden and Portugal, the US also has no federal laws guaranteeing a child’s right to their donor’s medical record. And there exists no national registry of donor-conceived children or their donors—data on cattle sperm are better catalogued. The American artificial insemination industry remains, in Hill’s words, the “Wild West.”

This anonymous system emerged partially out of a desire to incentivize sperm donations. Established fertility clinics are often highly selective of the sperm

they accept: out of every hundred men who express interest in donating, only four pass the health screening, the lifestyle screening, and the sperm quality control. The more selective the screening, the more expensive the sperm: costs can range from the hundreds to the thousands. And, since nearly a third of interested men prefer to donate anonymously, eliminating anonymity would diminish the sperm market, increasing prices even more. Some particularly desperate prospective mothers have sought sperm donation black markets on Facebook and other social media platforms, where regulation is practically nonexistent.

Opponents of regulating donor anonymity, however, believe laws enforcing disclosure threaten the legitimacy of LGBTQ+ families. In February 2023, an Oklahoma judge removed parental rights from Kris Williams, a woman who had used sperm donation to conceive with her then-partner, also a woman, two years prior. Williams’ wife carried the child, and the couple split two years after the baby was born. During the divorce proceedings, a judge removed Williams from her son’s birth certificate, replacing her name with the male sperm donor, with whom her former spouse had since moved in.

Of those seeking sperm donations, 70 percent 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, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM), a nonprofit organization of medical practitioners, determines the guidelines that most American sperm banks and clinics follow. Most credible sperm banks are affiliated with the ASRM and follow their guidelines voluntarily. Among the ASRM’s recommendations is a limit on the number of children a donor can father. But outside this voluntary guide, there is no regulation. One man can donate for two children in the same family, twenty in the same neighborhood, even two hundred in the same state—and federal laws have nothing to say on the matter. The ASRM suggests 25 births per population of 800,000 to “avoid any significant risk of inadvertent consanguineous conception,” or, in common parlance, incest.

“But who’s counting?” asks Dr. Lubna Pal, a professor of reproductive sciences at the Yale School of Medicine. There are no committees, government or private, to effectively oversee guidelines like the birth cap. Outside the basic health guidelines that the FDA and CDC enforce, there are few government mandates on donation. “There are societies where all of this is legislated,” she says. “We’re not one of them.”

That changed in Colorado, which in January 2025 became the first and only state to forbid donor anonymity. The state passed legislation requiring banks and clinics to document and update donor information every three years, enshrining the ASRM’s 25 births guideline into law.

But in February, the Colorado House of Representatives introduced a bill eliminating that new requirement: if passed, donor-conceived children could no longer contact their donors, and banks and clinics in Colorado would not have to follow the 25-births guideline. The ASRM backs the new bill. The original bill, they argued in a written letter, was “rushed” and set a “problematic precedent” of government interference in private matters. The new bill would not let “the state insert itself into reproductive and child-rearing decisions, decisions which should be the domain of individual families.”

For the banks and clinics in other states claiming to follow the ASRM’s guidelines, there is no guarantee that these guidelines are enforced. This, combined with the lack of a shared or national registry of donors, makes determining the number of donor-conceived children in any given area a herculean task—and makes it impossible to estimate how many children are products of fertility fraud. “There’s no real, unbiased information available,” says Guido Pennings, a professor of bioethics at Ghent University. “There are a lot, undoubtedly. But the percentage?” He shrugs. There’s just no way to know.

When Hill saw her old friends at a high school reunion in 2023, she had been searching for lawyers for three years. In the meantime, she kept track of advancements in fertility legislation: five states—there are thirteen today—had passed laws criminalizing fertility fraud. Still, there was no legislative development in Connecticut, and lawyers would not commit to her case without convincing evidence of damages.

Hill’s high school boyfriend was also at the reunion—someone she once imagined a future with. That night, she told him about Caldwell. Then he shared his own revelation: he had also recently discovered he was donor-conceived, though he hadn’t tested his DNA. She suggested 23andMe. Weeks later, his text arrived with a screenshot of their connection: “You are my sister,” he wrote.

Caldwell had blurred the boundary between family and community. “At this point, I’m waiting for a client to be one of my siblings,” she says of her job as a social worker. At least four other half-siblings attended the same schools at the same time she did. She now has twenty-five confirmed siblings, many in the area. “We had so many surprises that it was one more thing,” Hill remembers. “We’re kind of numb to what will come.”

But the news incited legal momentum. Her high school boyfriend’s mother found a Connecticut lawyer willing to represent her, and Hill’s mother joined the case. In March 2024, the two women sued Caldwell and Yale New Haven Hospital. They presented a joint lawsuit arguing that their children’s inadvertent relationship was evidence of damages.

Caldwell’s affiliation with Yale when Maralee visited him for fertility help remains unclear. Yale insists that he was no longer working in Yale-owned buildings when Hill was conceived in 1984. According to Yale attorneys, Caldwell left Yale sometime in 1983 to establish an independent clinic. But the mothers contend that Caldwell convinced them to believe that his clinic was Yale-affiliated. They also insist that Caldwell remained a member of the medical staff and continued to teach at the School of Medicine, even after he left his position at Yale New Haven Hospital. Yale New Haven Hospital declined to comment.

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.

In February 2025, Caldwell died Hill saw the message on her half-siblings’ group chat. The same sibling who had first contacted Hill on 23andMe 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

14-year-old’s DNA test revealed that their mother had been inseminated by her fertility doctor’s sperm in 2009 at a fertility center at the University 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. ∎

Ryne Hisada is a sophomore in Davenport College.

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

Explore our diverse catering options designed to make your event unforgettable. Whether you’re hosting a corporate event, a wedding, or a family gathering, our extensive menu has something for every occasion. From savory appetizers to exquisite main courses and delightful desserts, we use only the freshest, high-quality ingredients to ensure a memorable dining experience. options designed to make your event unforgettable.

Dear Uncle Marc,

You’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.

An Open Letter To My Uncle Marc

By Prentiss Patrick-Carter

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.

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

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 nick name 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 Patrick-Carter is a junior in Hopper College.

If The Wise Have Wisdom, Idiots Have Idioms

(Excerpts)

(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 score brownie points without vegan and gluten free options.

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.

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?

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.

(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.

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.

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

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.

(b)

VII.

(b)

(a)

Alistair Lam

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

Endnote

Dog People

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

By Abbey Kim

By all accounts, Enzo—just shy of his third birthday—is pampered.

“He’s 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

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?

What’s their play style? Do they like men, women? The process is, of course, holistic.

General Manager Donald Willis introduces me to his class: Adeline, and Strike, and Sydney, and Cairo, and Claire, and Yael. Each one is slobbery and smiley, leaping to attention when they see Donald’s face emerge in their enclosure.

Donald has curly dark facial hair and a partial sleeve of Disney-inspired tattoos. He’s sort of like one of his three labradors: warm, bubbly, and driven. Dressed in a blue Paw Haven-branded T-shirt, he bounds through the brightly-lit hallways, pointing at each dog and easily talking, as if introducing a series of star students.

There’s Kennedy, a black-and-white dog with a Yale collar who can be a bit “spicy” and is “kind of a pee-pee boy.” I look down, and there is indeed pee, seemingly fresh, on the orange epoxy floor and now the soles of my white shoes. Donald’s wide stance reveals the skill of someone who has evolved to avoid these incidents before they are promptly cleaned.

We walk past the massive collar and leash board—each dog uses their own gear when they’re here. The accessories are topof-the-line: Kate Spade, Gucci, and $400 collars on the rack. Tiny, quivering Minnie wears a Strawberry Shortcake sweatshirt, and teenage Nellie rocks a “Boss Pants On” hoodie. On any given day, Donald says, at least fifteen to twenty of the dogs are wearing clothes—even more in the wintertime, with their coats.

“There’s a dog that just left here after boarding for a week that was wearing corduroy pants,” Donald said.

It’s hard to believe these creatures descended from wolves. Indeed, for much of human history, dogs—the first domesticated animals—lived much more rugged lives. They wrangled livestock, helped hunters, pulled sleds, and guarded homes. They did it all without winter coats.

But for almost as long as there have been working dogs, there have been pampered ones, too. During the Renaissance, French King Henry III carried his beloved bichons around in a little basket tied around his neck with a ribbon. At the turn of the twentieth century, the last Nawab of Junagadh Muhammad Mahabat Khan spoiled his hundreds of dogs with custom suits, private bedrooms, servants, and even a royal dog wedding.

This past century has seen an interesting trend: the art of dog-spoiling has become more accessible. By the mid-twentieth century, even the common pets were invited indoors.

“When I was growing up, our dog just played in the backyard,” Donald said. “They slept in the garage. My black lab has her own bedroom in my house. She’s got her own queen-sized bed in there.”

Paw Haven’s clientele certainly includes New Haven royalty. “We have treasurers; we have mayors; we have congressmen; we have doctors,” Donald proudly said. “Most of the heads of the big departments at Yale bring their dogs here.”

Mayor Justin Elicker’s rescue, Captain, comes to Paw Haven. “He comes in here very distinguished,” Donald said, “very…food-motivated.”

But not all of Paw Haven’s clients are public figures or professors. Some are just everyday people who share the desire to give their dogs the best life possible.

More than half of American households have pets. About half of all US. pet owners say their pets are “as much a part of their family as a human member,” according to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center. Pet owners may pamper their animals for the same reasons parents seek comfort for their human children: a desire for loved ones to lead a better, fuller life.

Put simply, the dog market is a bull market. The nation’s first doggy daycare opened in 1987 in New York. Today, Paw Haven sits in the multibillion-dollar industry of pet daycare—not to mention the adjacent and equally lucrative sectors of doggy fashion, treats, and luxury experiences. Garages and manure fields no longer suffice. Family deserves only the best.

“The most unexpected thing is how passionate dog-parents are compared to just parent-parents,” Donald said. “We get a lot of people who come from doing child daycare, and they’re like, wow, the owners here are so much more involved than just shoving their kid off on the little school bus…This is their family member who can’t speak.”

For a relationship without words, there certainly is a lot of communication. The sheer level of contact pet parents can have with their pets throughout a Paw Haven day is shocking: access to daycare and pet cubby live streams from numerous angles, a dedicated receptionist to field phone calls, active email, texts, and daily report cards. Donald recounted nights where he’d respond to messages at 2 a.m. from anxious owners.

“You really are the voice of both the owner to the dog, and the dog to the owner,” Donald said.

Ideally, dropping a dog off at Paw Haven is like leaving a child with their favorite relative. That relative just happens to be Pet CPR and First Aid Certified.

“We know about all the weddings, the babies, the changes in jobs, the moving,” Donald said, “just as much as probably their family members know, because we build such a bond over their animals.”

When we first met, Donald told me, “We are really a people business; we’re not really an animal business.” After meeting the people and pets behind this industry—all of whom were dressed better than I was—the difference seems smaller now. ∎

Abbey Kim is a senior in Branford College and former Editor-in-Chief of The New Journal.

Rounding Error

ACROSS

1 Dog command

6 Dog doggedly 11 Cinemark competitor

14 Full of life

18 Wipe from existence

19 Wide mouth

20 Tool used by Penelope, in myth

22 Native group that fought in the Beaver Wars

23 “Death on the Nile”, and others?

25 Backstreet officers?

27 Capital in Central Asia

28 Aarhus inhabitant

29 Type of tuna sashimi

30 Special

31 Formerly

32 Hubbub in a candy store?

37 Put on one’s birthday suit

40 Rare blood type, for short

41 Grecian vessels

42 Functionalities

43 Where to follow the Heat?

45 Wear with straps

46 “Understood.”

49 Smelter’s need

51 New Haven scholars

52 Start to a toast?

55 Strange way to keep a door closed?

59 Sicken

61 Film about a body of water

62 Meh

63 Governing body in sport (abbr.)

64 Policy that established “Dreamers” (abbr.)

65 Take-out general

66 Fielding error from Kris Bryant?

72 Winter beverage

73 Flour used to make puri and paratha

75 Equis

76 Air-conditioner measures across the Pond (abbr.)

77 Crafty knife

79 Teach to perform a different function

81 Some 24-hour fosters?

85 Scrabble set

86 Like swampland

87 Bete

88 Fancy farewell

90 Shakshouka topping

91 Source of some Australian fire?

93 Province whose capital is Denpasar

96 The night visitors in “Amahl and the Night Visitors”

98 Sweethearts, in slang

101 Made use of, as a desk

104 Slice of meat that would shock you?

109 Mock insolently

110 Many an off-roader

111 Block in the field

112 General vicinity

113 Voting option

116 Fashionable place to live?

119 Field features... or a directive for understanding this puzzle’s theme?

121 Obey

122 Target of some magnets?

123 Accommodate

124 Small rodents, humorously

125 “You go, queen!”

126 Tolkien creature

127 First name in beauty

128 Meal featuring karpas and maror

1 Sonata and Accord, for two

2 Determined ahead of time

3 Onetime airline headed by Eddie Rickenbacker

4 Cruising, maybe

5 California county home to Bakersfield

6 Org. currently headed by Mandy Cohen

7 How some problems must be faced

TO PREVIOUS (APRIL) PUZZLE

8 Historically contested region of Europe

9 Scribe, informally

10 Stand in a studio

11 In the style of

12 Adjective used to describe gooey chocolate cakes

13 The Statue of Liberty and a (former) statue of Helios

14 Moment in time

15 Statements in many math problems

16 Micro wave?

17 RSVP tally

21 Soldier-for-hire, in short

24 XXX part?

26 The solver of this puzzle

33 Hullabaloo

34 Appropriate first name of a Bond villain

35 Surname in Steinbeck’s “East of Eden”

36 Fed, as a fire

38 Mediterranean island that lends its name to a dog breed

39 German tank used in WWII

44 F

45 Media company named for a presidential candidate

47 Unsportsmanlike comments

48 Response to a fright

50 Reality TV activities

51 Boolean word

53 “Pretty Little Liars” actress Lawson

54 Novelist known for “Good Wives” and “Little Men”

55 Country where Al Jazeera is headquartered

56 Region of Ireland that names a mythological cycle

57 “You can’t stop me!”

58 Law, to Louis

59 Extinct bird of New Zealand

60 City home to Nollywood

63 “GOAL!”

67 Pablo Neruda or John Keats

68 Do some deception

69 Response from a humblebragger

70 Glower

71 Faces in the crowd?

74 Region explored by Fridtjof Nansen

78 Amtrak option

80 Letters before an alias

81 The end of Ancient Greece?

82 Ceremony of remembrance

83 Silly sort

84 Up to date with the latest trends

89 “Has it started yet?”

92 Tried to make time

93 Reminiscent of the shore

94 Tennis great Gibson

95 Imposes

97 Strong blackjack hand

98 Need for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza

99 Went on a date, often

100 Run out

102 Per each individual

103 More on edge

105 “Modern Family” airer

106 “Goshdarnit!”

107 Hoard of treasure

108 “Did not need to know that!”

114 Vests lack them

115 Cold treat with a red and blue logo

117 Tower contents

118 Many a first-responder

120 Epcot center?

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.

While this magazine is published by Yale College students, Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All contents Copyright © 2025 by The New Journal at Yale, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction either in whole or in part without written permission of the editors in chief is prohibited. Recycle Icon from Flaticon.com.

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.