Yale Daily News — September 12, 2025

Theodore wins downtown alder primary

Turnout highest in recent history

BY ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH STAFF REPORTER

Elias Theodore ’27 beat Norah Laughter ’26 in Tuesday’s Democratic primary for Ward 1 alder, winning 64 percent of the vote. This year’s race to represent the ward encompassing eight of Yale’s residential colleges and Old Campus on the Board of Alders has been one of the most competitive in recent history. Tuesday’s results follow six days of early voting. Polls were open Tuesday from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Across in-person and mail-in voting, Theodore received 290 votes, while Laughter received 165. This year’s municipal Democratic

Win breaks from unions’ dominance

BY BAALA SHAKYA STAFF REPORTER

primary in the downtown ward saw a significant increase in voter engagement compared to the last one — 455 voters, around 36 percent of the registered Democrats in Ward 1, voted. In 2023, 49 voters turned out for a contested mayoral primary. That year, current Ward 1 Alder Kiana Flores ’25.5 ran for her seat unopposed. When poll moderator Luz Catarineau announced the results Tuesday evening, the crowd gathered in the New Haven Free Public Library’s basement polling site — divided into two clusters, one for each candidate — stayed silent, unsure whether or not to cheer.

BY ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH STAFF REPORTER

The defeat of a union-backed candidate in Tuesday’s Ward 1 alder primary marked a departure from the dominance of unionaligned members on the New Haven Board of Alders.

At the final stage of an unusually competitive election — which at one point included four candidates — Elias Theodore ’27 triumphed over Norah Laughter ’26, who was endorsed by multiple local unions, as well as existing union-backed alders. Throughout her campaign to represent the city’s downtown neighborhoods on the Board of

Alders, Laughter emphasized her commitment to a coalition of unions and activists’ groups across the city and to the tenets of the labor movement. She received endorsements from Locals 34, Yale’s union of clerical and technical workers, and 217, the state’s union for hospitality workers. The New Haven Federation of Teachers, the local teachers’ union, and New Haven Rising, a local activists’ group, also pledged their support for Laughter. Laughter ran on a “slate committee” called Dwight Neighbors and Students United with Ward 2 Alder Frank Douglass. She was also

UNIONS PAGE 4

New police advisory board

BY ADELE HAEG STAFF REPORTER

Yale Public Safety has released a new charter for a civilian advisory board that will include students, roughly a year after a previous board effectively vanished. The new charter, sent to the News on Thursday and available on the department’s website, signals that the renamed Yale Public Safety Advisory Board may soon be assembled. But the charter does not explicitly empower the board to review civilian complaints, unlike a 2022 charter for the previous version of the civil-

ian body, the Yale Police Advisory Board. Instead, the new Public Safety Advisory Board may now “offer input on community public safety strategies” and “review and recommend university public safety policies,” according to the charter. At an August City Hall meeting with the chiefs of the Yale Police Department and the New Haven Police Department, members of New Haven’s Civilian Review Board called for greater accountability from Yale SEE POLICE PAGE 5 SEE ALDER PAGE 4

Small demographic shifts in latest class

of Yale's incoming classes, 2021-2029

BY FABEHA JAHRA AND ISOBEL MCCLURE STAFF REPORTERS

Yale’s class of 2029, the second one to be admitted after the fall of affirmative action, reflects both stability and subtle shifts in racial and ethnic demographics. It also marked the first admissions cycle with Yale College’s “test flexible” policy. Yale reported ranges for standardized test scores for the first time since fall 2020. According to the Office of Undergraduate Admissions’ firstyear class profile, 12 percent of the

2029 class identifies as African American, 30 percent as Asian American, 13 percent as Hispanic or Latino, 3 percent as Native American, 44 percent as white and 10 percent as international. Compared to the class of 2028, the class of 2029 saw a 6 percent increase in Asian American students, a 6 percent decrease in Hispanic or Latino students and a 2 percent decrease in African American as well as white students. The percentage of Native American students remains the same.

Yale climbed 97 places in a wellknown ranking of colleges’ free speech conditions, moving from 155th to 58th out of 257 schools surveyed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE.

The jump reflected in the 2026 College Free Speech Rankings released Tuesday marks Yale’s highest placement yet in the annual survey, which began in 2020 and takes account of policies and student attitudes toward free expression. Yale was ranked 234 of 254 just two years ago.

“Yale has had their score uptick a little bit year over year,” Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research advisor, told the News during a virtual press conference on Wednesday. “They got a boost this year from adopting institutional neutrality, which we introduced bonuses for. That helped their score, but they also saw genuine improvements in student comfort levels.”

Though Yale has not officially adopted a policy of “institutional neutrality,” President Maurie McInnis announced last October that she had accepted a report by the Committee on Institutional Voice, which recommended that Yale leaders refrain from issuing statements on current events unless they directly relate to Yale’s mission. FIRE’s research advisors further credited the Buckley Institute and Yale Law School’s one-

Prof. boycotts Canvas Yale climbs in FIRE rankings

because of the professor’s objection to what she views as a connection between the website and the United States’ military.

“Digital War” is taught by Madiha Tahir, an assistant professor in the American Studies department. Tahir wrote in an email to the News that using Canvas would go against the principles of her course because she believes the company is too closely connected with the military.

“In a moment of rising fascism, it seems to me inappropriate to place an entire digital dossier of a class — from syllabus to assignments, to work, essays, and responses written by students, to who was enrolled in the class — in the hands of InStructure/Canvas when it is partnering with a military surveillance contractor,” Tahir wrote.

The course’s Canvas page is empty, save a message written by Tahir that explains what she views as a connection between InStructure — Canvas’

Ellie Park / Senior Photographer

Demographics

Garrett Curtis / Photographery Editor

This Day in Yale History, 1994

September 12, 1994 / Library Gets Notes from Watergate

By Noach Kotch

Bob Woodward, one of two journalists who broke the Watergate scandal, will entrust his notes and tapes to Yale University where they will be kept sealed for 40 years.

Yale librarians and Woodward said they have not yet made any definite arrangements regarding the transfer of the information, much of which contains confidential sources from Woodward’s six books and 20 years of reporting.

Woodward ’65 said he picked Yale because it is his alma mater, and because Yale librarians showed an interest in the materials.

Published September 12, 1994

Behind the Headline

By Baala Shakya

I first heard about “After the Hunt” in 2024, right before moving into Yale as a first year, and was instantly hooked by the idea of my new home being on screen. I reached out and later received a copy of the screenplay a year later from a director, then began reaching out to people involved in the film’s production — including actress Burgess Byrd — to learn more.

The most exciting part of reporting this story was speaking with cast members, who ended up peppering me with questions about “real Yale” — how dining halls, late nights in the library and other facets of our campus culture differed from the fictional Yale on set in England.

In those moments, it felt less like I was interviewing them and more like we were trading stories across two different Yales: theirs on set, and mine in real life.

Puzzles

Read “New Luca Guadagnino film set, but not filmed, at Yale” on page 8.

OPINION

STAFF COLUMNIST

JOSHUA DANZIGER

Was Charlie Kirk a modern Buckley?

Since the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, I have read and heard many descriptions of his character: gracious, faithful and principled. Coincidentally, these are many of the same sentiments shared about William F. Buckley Jr. ’50, perhaps Yale’s greatest conservative intellectual, at the United States Postal Service’s stamp unveiling ceremony in his honor earlier this week.

The stylistic divide between Buckley and Kirk shows how American conservatism has moved from elite, print-era persuasion to the fast, populist spectacle of the social media age.

KIRK

THE HALL OF

WHO HAVE PROFOUNDLY CHANGED AMERICA.

Buckley, much like Kirk, was a bastion of campus right-wing thought. He debated frequently at the Yale Political Union, and was known as a talented orator. His right-wing intellectual relevance existed far beyond campus; Buckley was known across the country as a thinker, writer and speaker as only an undergrad. A 2008 obituary in the News remarked that “his editorials were read across the nation and had a significant impact on American political debate.”

“On campus, Buckley’s writings were anticipated by students — but even more so by faculty,” the obituary continued.

Kirk, likewise, became a political star on college campuses. At 18, he met Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery, and together they founded Turning Point USA soon after Kirk finished high school.

Though Kirk briefly attended Harper College in Illinois, he dropped out to pursue political activism. By age 21, Kirk had written for the Washington Post and Breitbart, was frequently featured on Fox News and CNBC, had built a network of thousands of campus conservatives and had raised millions of dollars.

Though Kirk didn’t graduate university himself, the bread and butter of Turning Point USA is its thousands of campus chapters. Like Buckley, Kirk became known for open debates and impressive orations on college campuses around the country. With modern technology, Kirk’s impressive and sometimes controversial answers were disseminated to millions of Americans, galvanizing a generation of conservative youth.

On the left, Kirk and Buckley were both disliked. The New York Times described Kirk as a “new breed of political agitator” and the Guardian called him the new “kingmaker within the national Republican

orbit.” Buckley was famously called a “crypto-Nazi” by Gore Vidal, and was known to detractors as a “rightwing firebrand” with “little respect for established authority.”

At the Buckley Stamp unveiling this week, the speakers emphasized one thing about Buckley far beyond his intellectual prowess: his goodness. He was cordial with those who vehemently disagreed with him. He debated graciously and strongly, finishing with a smile and handshake for his opponent. Watch any firing line debate and you will see — William F. Buckley debated with purpose and grace.

Though Buckley would probably have disliked Kirk’s populist strand of conservatism, a commitment to gracious debate is shared. Kirk profilist Adam Rubenstein described this commitment: “We could disagree about anything—and we did—but he would, without fail, engage civilly and explain his point of view. He did not do this, as many do, to make himself feel smart. He did it so he could share the other side of something he cared about. And he cared deeply.”

The videos from campuses are quite clear. Kirk intentionally put himself in hostile situations, and did not insult and did not shout down. He did so for varying reasons — spreading his political messaging, internet fame, and I’m sure some personal gain — yet ultimately on campuses Kirk advocated for what he believed was the truth. That is noble.

Buckley’s and Kirk’s achievements show that influence in American right wing thought is measured not only by electoral victories but by the ability to turn arguments into power.

Buckley’s debates and writings helped knit together a modern conservative coalition and gave intellectual shape to Reagan-era Republicanism. Kirk, operating in a different media landscape, mobilized a grassroots network that shifted the party’s center of gravity toward populism and digital activism. Each demonstrated that charisma can redirect the Republican Party’s course as decisively as any policy platform.

William F. Buckley helped conservatives retake the Republican party, helping to create the conditions for Reagan’s 1980 victory. Kirk helped populists retake today’s republican party, creating the conditions for our political moment. Like Buckley, Kirk entered the hall of Republicans who have profoundly changed America. We will see how his legacy endures.

JOSHUA DANZIGER is a sophomore in Trumbull College studying History and Economics. His monthly column “Power” explores geography, demography and the state. He can be reached at joshua.danziger@yale.edu.

MANU

GUEST COLUMNISTS

ANPALAGAN AND CHRISTIAN THOMAS

Charlie Kirk should still be alive

We are the presidents of the Yale College Republicans and the Yale College Democrats, respectively. As such, we disagree on many issues. But one thing that we agree on is that political violence is wrong, full stop — and it has no place in America.

Both of our organizations welcome political speakers to campus throughout the year. The Yale College Republicans were in talks to host conservative political commentator Charlie Kirk this semester before he was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University yesterday. At the time of writing, no perpetrator has been identified; officials say investigations are ongoing.

Kirk’s assassination is part of a disturbing rise in political violence. In 2017, an assailant opened fire on Republican lawmakers practicing for the annual congressional baseball game in northern Virginia, badly wounding one. In 2019, a conservative man pleaded guilty to mailing 16 homemade pipe bombs to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton LAW ’73 and other prominent Democrats.

We all remember when extremist groups stormed the U.S. Capitol to overturn the 2020 election, resulting in the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick. Last summer, Donald Trump was shot at a campaign rally in an assassination attempt that killed Corey Comperatore — like Kirk, a father of two.

This past spring, an arsonist set fire to Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home while he, his wife and their children were

sleeping inside. In June, Melissa Hortman, a Democratic state representative from Minnesota, and her husband were shot and killed in a politically motivated attack. These are just a few of the most prominent instances of political violence in recent years.

REGARDLESS OF YOUR PERSONAL POLITICAL BELIEFS, WE CAN — WE MUST — ALL AGREE THAT VIOLENCE IS OFFLIMITS IN POLITICS.

Regardless of your personal political beliefs, we can — we must — all agree that violence is off-limits in politics. But, all too often, people let partisanship get the best of them, making excuses for, equivocating in condemnation of, or even outright cheering when these tragedies occur.

We have already overheard peers cracking jokes about Kirk’s death. We’ve heard conservative friends wonder whether people pointing to Kirk’s past comments on gun rights are implying that he had it coming. We want to be clear: no matter what you or we might think of Charlie Kirk’s politics, in

no world should he have been assassinated for expressing his views. His family did not deserve to have their husband, father and son ripped away from them. We cannot imagine what they are going through right now, and we hope Kirk’s killer is swiftly brought to justice. Kirk’s assassination occurred on a university campus, a space where free speech and thoughtful dialogue should be welcomed. Visitors to our own campus should not fear for their lives. Interlocutors must not forget that we are classmates first and political opponents second. It is incumbent upon all of us to set aside our differences and come together to condemn political violence, whenever and wherever it occurs. To do otherwise is to turn one’s back on America’s founding principles. No matter our disagreements, we must not lose sight of them.

As President Abraham Lincoln said in a 1858 speech: “To give the victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.”

MANU ANPALAGAN serves as the Founding President of the Yale College Republicans. He is a senior in Branford College studying Economics and Political Science. He can be reached at manuneethy. anpalagan@yale.edu.

CHRISTIAN THOMAS serves as the President of the Yale College Democrats. He is a senior in Pierson College studying Political Science. He can be reached at christian.thomas@yale.edu.

A Yale worth fighting for?

As a new school year begins, the Yale administration and its invited guests tell incoming students that what makes this university special is an uncompromising dedication to truth-seeking, mutually respectful debate, open-mindedness and creative experimentation. They tell us that these values are neither hollow and trite nor uncontested and free.

I hope this is the season those in the Yale administration take their own advice to heart. That is where you, the student body, come in. You have more power than you think to make those in power braver and more honest. If this university is to stand for anything substantive in these trying times, you will have to make it do so.

Over the past six months, our country has witnessed one of the most radical and rapid assaults on freedom of thought, expression, protest and science in generations. Universities are supposed to be the bastions of resistance. Sadly, many — but not all — leaders in higher education have quietly caved.

This administration has disavowed acts of solidarity and statements of values in favor of seeking accommodation with quiet campaigns of influence in Washington. Under the guise of pragmatism, its leaders have replaced attempts to build democratic consensus and collective resistance with faculty, alumni and students with personalized deal-making among powerful elites from donor and Yale Corporation networks.

In the spring of 2024,Yale saw significant campus protests against the current Israeli government’s genocidal actions in Gaza. Powerful opponents of that protest and of those viewpoints — including Republican-controlled congressional committees — pressured Yale and other universities to quell these student actions.

Yale’s administration not only called in the Yale police to arrest and of its own students for these protests, but then engaged in policies to severely chill campus

protests — in other words, collective speech. They promoted new rules requiring written permission to erect structures in outdoor spaces and restricting protest to “designated spaces” without clearly defining what constitutes such a space.

The administration — including the Law School where I work — engaged in a campaign of soft and hard power to discourage public protest with fear tactics about professional consequences of disobedience. Moreover, the administration sought to limit its own expressions of value by instituting a new policy of not making public statements under the Orwellian title of “Institutional Voice.”

But words matter, especially in the face of unjust actions. The Trump administration understands this more than anyone. Indeed, that is why the Trump administration and its allies in civil society have targeted universities and students with such ferocity. Yale administrators cannot, in one breath, lecture brilliant young students that they must live their values even at a cost, while in the next, seek favor with despots dismantling science and deporting dissident international students without breeding cynicism and disengagement in our community.

The institution says we stand for courage in the face of wrongful power, speaking truth when our conscience demands it. We offer classes and erect sculptures venerating the heroes of history who sacrificed so much for past struggles, such as anti-slavery, civil rights, gender equality and anti-colonialism — struggles that were very much opposed by the powerful of the time. And yet the institution itself, through policies like the new “Peaceable Assembly Guidance,” actively discourages its own students from doing so if it will cost administrators headaches or dollars, and shies away from taking an explicit public stand on the Trump administration’s current assault on science, academic freedom and human rights. This Orwellian doublespeak is not costless. It breeds alienation and a purely transactional, cynical

connection to the institution.

This spring, President Maurie McInnis sent an email to Yale faculty, students, staff and alumni asking us all to engage in political action for Yale’s financial stability. She described the proposed endowment tax increase as “legislation [that] presents a greater threat to Yale than any other bill in memory,” and in bold letters asked each of us to contact our senators to fight this change. Apparently, the one message that is allowed to pass through the “institutional voice” policy of muted complacency is “protect the endowment!” This is shameful and frankly embarrassing. Our institution must stand for something more than preserving its elite name, connection to power and financial resources.

Right now, the Law School where I teach is in the process of selecting a new dean. This person will lead the school at a time when the very conception of law as something other than the successful exercise of brute power is in question. Will we select someone who will stand for a substantive vision of law and democracy? Or someone who will ask us to lower our heads to actively oblige the substantive vision of the current Trump Administration?

The former route of resistance will, no doubt, entail major costs. But the Law School and its faculty have long associated themselves with costly resistance to injustice, for example, by lauding the Civil Rights Movement and its successes that were won at tremendous sacrifice. If we do not show ourselves willing to pay a cost for the values we profess, our claimed association with the Civil Rights Movement to our students looks like a hollow and opportunistic pantomime. They are more than smart enough to see that. Our administration has, in my opinion, failed to rise to this historical moment. But you students can make this institution something still worth fighting for.

ISSA KOHLER-HAUSMANN is a Professor of Law and Sociology at Yale Law School and co-directs, with

"You go back to her, and I go back to black." "BACK TO BLACK" BY AMY WINEHOUSE

Theodore beats Laughter in Ward 1 alder primary election

A few minutes later, both camps broke into cheers. Theodore’s team streamed out of the building triumphant.

After listening to Catarineau announce the results of the primary election, Theodore said that he felt “thrilled,” grateful to his team, relieved and “surprised.” His mother stood nearby with his grandmother waiting on FaceTime. Eventually, Theodore and Laughter hugged.

Theodore, a Yale College junior, grew up in New Haven and attended Wilbur Cross High School, the city’s largest comprehensive public high school. His campaign was fueled by ceaseless

social media activity and energetic on-campus engagement efforts.

Since Theodore announced his bid in June, two candidates who had previously been running — Jake Siesel ’27 and Rhea McTiernan Huge ’27 — dropped out of the race and endorsed his campaign.

Laughter, whose campaign emphasized her commitment to a coalition of unions and activists’ groups across the city, was running on a slate with Ward 2

Alder Frank Douglass. Late in the race, she positioned herself as “the leftist Democrat” candidate. She was endorsed by multiple local unions — including Local 34 and UNITE HERE Local 217 — as well as local activists’ group New Haven Rising.

Theodore scored a late endorsement from the current Ward 1 alder, Kiana Flores ’25.5, who previously backed McTiernan Huge.

Both Flores and McTiernan Huge joined Theodore at a table outside the library at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesday, they told the News, and stayed until the polls closed.

“I feel super proud for Elias. He was able to build this really strong coalition with his friends, with his family, with friends of his family,” Flores said. “I feel relieved knowing that he’ll be the next Ward 1 alder, if the general election goes as predicted. I’m really excited to work with him in these last few months and really pass the baton.”

In a candidate debate last week, both Theodore and Laugh -

ter committed to supporting the primary winner. When asked by the News after the results were announced whether she would support Theodore, Laughter said, “Yeah, I guess.”

She told the News that she felt “great.”

In her eyes, the turnout in the primary “revealed that Yale students really do see a place for themselves in New Haven politics and in getting Yale to pay its fair share to the city.”

“I knew either way, win or lose the election, it wasn’t gonna be over for us,” she said. “We’re gonna keep building the coalitions that we’re building.”

The Kentucky native said she did not know why she lost. The campaign taught her, she said, that “a lot of students want the same thing.”

“It’s good to see lots of engagement,” said Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26, who was Ward 1 alder from 2020 to 2021 and currently represents Ward 7 on the Board of Alders.

Catarineau, the poll moderator, also celebrated the turnout, and said the energy in the polling location was buoyant.

Robert Forman, 68, a retired communications staffer for the Yale School of Medicine who lives in Ward 1, told the News earlier in the day that both candidates seemed “smart and competent,” but that he decided to vote for Theodore after seeing Laughter’s “leftist Democrat” signs.

“I’ve been around too long,” Forman said. “Ideologues bother me. So in a race where there’s otherwise little to distinguish, and

I didn’t know who to vote for, I didn’t like that.”

Ethan Cooper ’29 was most impressed by Theodore’s voter mobilization.

“He told me he registered hundreds of people to vote in the last few weeks, and I was one of those people,” Cooper said. “I think he’s really bringing people in who otherwise wouldn’t care too much. I wasn’t planning to care too much about the Ward 1 race, but here I am. It’s less about the policies. I just like the positivity of the campaign.”

As the evening progressed, Alders Frank Redente Jr. and Anna Festa joined Theodore’s campaign team outside of the library. Both appeared jubilant when the election results became clear.

“I’m super excited for him. He’s an amazing guy. I was just impressed with him since day one — his work ethic, the way he engaged voters and prospective voters. He’s always out here. He’s always smiling,” Redente said in an interview.

Festa told the News that she was “excited” for the would-be alder — a childhood friend of her son, according to Theodore.

“He is the future for our New Haven kids,” she said. “He is going to be an example for them to say, ‘Look, you can all do this.’” Polls closed at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.

Sabrina Thaler, Zachary Suri and Lily Belle Poling contributed reporting.

Contact ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH at elijah.hurewitz-ravitch@yale.edu .

Theodore’s win breaks from unions’ hold on city politics

endorsed by Ward 8 Alder Ellen

Cupo — who was at the New Haven Free Public Library when the Ward 1 primary results were announced — and Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison, who told the News in a Tuesday night phone interview that she was “sad” Laughter did not win. Despite this, Theodore, who grew up in New Haven, won the primary with 64 percent of the vote. Towards the end of the race leading up to the primary election, he garnered support from Alders Frank Redente Jr. and Sarah Miller ’03, as well as Kiana Flores, the current Ward 1 alder. Eli Sabin ’22 LAW ’26, the current Ward 7 alder who previously represented Ward 1 when he was an undergraduate at Yale, was also at the polls Tuesday evening to congratulate both candidates. Redente, who represents Ward 15, and Anna Festa, who represents Ward 10 and had been informally advising Theodore during his campaign, were both present at the polls Tuesday evening to stand with Theodore’s team.

For Redente, being a New Havener was “the prerequisite”

for earning the aldership. “Only a New Haven kid understands the dynamics of New Haven — understands that not only is every ward different, but sometimes street to street, this city is different,” he said. Referring to Theodore’s high school, Wilbur Cross, he added, “I couldn’t imagine us not supporting a Cross kid over somebody not from New Haven.” Redente said that this was a key point of disagreement between him and Leslie Blatteau, president of the teachers’ union and his friend. He told the News on Sunday that he had “expressed his displeasure” when he saw the teachers union had endorsed Laughter.

“We have endorsement questions that we ask in an interview,” Blatteau, standing by Laughter’s campaign table Tuesday evening, said. “‘Are you from New Haven?’ is not one of those questions. We want to assess people’s skills and experience and vision for how we build a city that works for everybody, and that was how we made our decision.”

Miller, the Ward 14 alder, described the tradition of New Haven-raised Yalies representing

Ward 1 as “a positive trend.”

“You see Yale very, very differently when you are from New Haven, and you see it also in a more complex way than somebody whose engagement has

been with just a certain interest group representing some issues around New Haven,” Miller said, referring to Laughter. “New Haven Rising is not New Haven. It’s one organization.”

Theodore won the primary by 125 votes.

Contact ELIJAH HUREWITZ-RAVITCH at elijah.hurewitz-ravitch@yale.edu .

Yale moves up 97 spots in college free speech ranking

year-old Center for Academic Freedom and Free Speech as institutions that contributed to the rise in the University’s free speech ranking. The center is led by professor Keith Whittington, who joined the Law School faculty last year and sits on FIRE’s board of directors.

Out of a possible score of 100, Yale scored 62.46 this year, up from 44.04 last year and 26.64 the year before. Claremont McKenna College ranked first this year with 79.86, while Columbia ranked 256th and Barnard College ranked last.

The rankings, published on Tuesday by FIRE and its partner College Pulse, drew on 68,510 student responses nationwide. It came amid the Trump administration’s continued scrutiny of universities.

Yale’s rise also sets it apart from many of its Ivy League peers. Columbia and Barnard ranked at the bottom, and Harvard remained in the bottom 15 despite modest gains. Dartmouth,

which also adopted institutional neutrality, joined Yale as one of the few Ivy League schools to improve significantly — ranking at 35.

According to FIRE’s latest results, Yale placed second nationally on “tolerance for controversial liberal speakers,” 21st

on “tolerance for controversial conservative speakers” and third on “mean tolerance.” Its “tolerance difference” — a gauge of asymmetry between left and right-leaning speakers — remains comparatively low.

Pericles Lewis, the dean of Yale College, said in an interview with the News last week, after the newsletter Air Mail had reported Yale would improve in the rankings, that they are not his focus.

“I don’t do things because of rankings,” Lewis said. “But it’s nice to see if people recognize improvements. I’m more motivated by our own responses we get from students, and we have seen that in the past.”

Alisha Glennon, FIRE’s chief operating officer, said the rankings are designed not only to inform prospective students and alumni donors, but to spur change on campuses. “We want stakeholders to see the data, to see where they are in the rankings and decide to make a difference,” Glennon said in the vir-

tual press conference. “This is really a reform effort, and I’m happy to say that, after six years, it’s working.” In a statement released immediately after the FIRE rankings were announced, Lauren Noble ’11, the Buckley Institute’s founder and executive director, wrote that “Yale’s significant improvement on free speech is a testament to the impact of the Buckley Institute.” According to the FIRE survey’s published results, 33 percent of the 270 Yale students surveyed reported self-censoring at least once or twice a month. More than three-quarters said shouting down a speaker is acceptable at least in rare cases, and over a quarter said the same about using violence to prevent speech.

FIRE was founded in 1999 as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Olivia Woo contributed reporting. Contact BAALA SHAKYA at baala.shakya@yale.edu .

UNION FROM PAGE 1 Elias Theodore ’27 won the Democratic primary election by 125 votes.

Photography Editor

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which released the ranking on Tuesday, rewarded Yale’s guidelines for administrators to stay quiet about current events. Chloe Edwards, Senior Photographer

"You, my brown-eyed girl."

EYED GIRL" BY VAN MORRISON

"BROWN

New Yale police board lacks clear oversight role

POLICE FROM PAGE 1

Public Safety. Yale Police Chief Anthony Campbell ’95 DIV ’09 committed to revamping the department’s civilian advisory board after it was discontinued last year.

The Yale College Council in January passed a resolution calling for a Yale police oversight committee. The proposal cited students’ concerns about surveillance of pro-Palestinian protesters in the spring of 2024.

The 2022 charter for the Yale Police Advisory Board gave it the power to advise and issue reports to a public safety administrator regarding the investigation of civilian complaints. There are no such provisions regarding civilian complaints in the new charter.

The new charter’s mission statement “is to help assure that security and policing policies and practices acknowledge the interconnectivity of our host city of New Haven and align with the values, safety, and well-being of the university community while fostering trust and equitable treatment.”

It also has specific requirements for membership that the 2022 charter did not. Under the

“Nominees for appointment to the PSAB as detailed in the Charter are currently in process,” Head of Yale Public Safety Duane Lovello wrote in a statement to the News this week, referring to the Public Safety Advisory Board. He added that once those appointments are finalized, they will be made public and a meeting schedule will be announced.

2022 charter, the board had to have seven members including representatives from the Yale faculty, student body, staff and the New Haven community.

Under the new charter, the board is set to have ten members: two faculty representatives nominated by the provost; two staff representatives nominated by the secretary and vice president for university life; the vice president of technology and campus services; the head of public safety; a resident of New Haven; and three Yale students. The students will include one nominated member from each of three bodies — the Yale College Council, the Graduate Student Association and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate.

Mike Hall, president of the Yale Police Benevolent Association,

said he had not been informed of the new charter, but he was not surprised by its publication.

“My assumption was that they would be appointing new positions as the school year starts,”

Hall said.

Saman Haddad LAW ’26, the president of the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, said Yale administrators had informed the Senate of the new charter and asked it to submit nominations for the advisory board seats.

“In at least the past two years, GPSS has not had formal representation on a public safety committee of this type,” Haddad said.

“We are encouraged to see graduate and professional student voices formally included through this new structure.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, Yale College Council had not yet been

informed of the charter, according to President Andrew Boanoh ’27, Vice President Jalen Bradley ’27, and Senate Speaker Alex Chen ’28.

In a Tuesday interview, Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis said he had spoken with Public Safety leadership when the board was being formed in the spring, but had not read the charter yet.

“It's important to have student input into security policy,” Lewis said.

The News’ records confirm the existence of a Yale civilian complaint review committee as early as 1971.

Olivia Woo and Asher Boiskin contributed reporting.

Contact ADELE HAEG at adele.haeg@yale.edu .

Class profile shows racial makeup, test scores

ADMISSIONS FROM PAGE 1

The class of 2028 was the first class to be admitted after the Supreme Court ruled race-conscious affirmative action policies unconstitutional. The office published two breakdowns of the class of 2029, one that counts multiracial students as a unique category and another that includes them in multiple racial groups.

The class profile relies on self-reported data from students during the application process regarding their racial and ethnic backgrounds. Last year’s class profile states that domestic first years who indicated two or more races or ethnicities were represented in multiple categories, with 23 percent selecting two or more races or ethnicities.

This year’s profile does not stipulate its methodology surrounding domestic first years who indicated two or more races or ethnicities and their inclusion in categories. However, the document notes that 21 percent of domestic first years selected two or more races or ethnicities.

This class was the first to experience the college’s “text flexible” policy, which requires students to submit any standardized test score among the SAT, ACT, Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate.

Among the first years who submitted ACT scores, 87 percent scored between 32 and 36. For the class of 2029 students who chose to submit the SAT, 49 percent scored between 760 and 800 for the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section, while 64 percent scored between 760 and 800 for the math section.

The number of enrolled first years increased by 86 students, compared to the 2028 class.

The increase is consistent with a February announcement from Yale College Dean Pericles University Lewis and Provost Scott Strobel that undergraduate enrollment would expand by 100 students. Yale College would enroll an increased class size of 1,650, starting with the class of 2029.

“We figured that being able to admit an additional 100 students a year over time means 10,000

more students in the next century,” Lewis told the News at the time. “I’d like the idea of 10,000 more people graduating from

Yale in the next century.”

The geographical distribution of the 2029 class’ residents remained relatively unchanged, with students from the Northeast representing the greatest percentage, at 32 percent.

The percentage of first years described as coming from an international background remained relatively stable at 10 percent for the class of 2029, compared to 11 percent for the class of 2028, according to the admissions office’s class profile data.

The percentage of firstyear students receiving a Yale

need-based financial aid award decreased from 58 percent for the class of 2028, now sophomores, to 54 percent for the first years. The average amount awarded to financial aid recipients was $75,854, and 23 percent of the class were Pell Grant recipients. Sixteen U.S. military veterans are among the first-year class of 1,640 students. Aiden Zhou contributed reporting. Contact FABEHA JAHRA at fabeha.jahra@yale.edu and ISOBEL MCCLURE at isobel.mcclure@yale.edu .

Courses not on Canvas due to site’s military link

parent company — and OpenAI and the military.

“Canvas’ parent company

InStructure has entered into a partnership with OpenAI to retool Canvas. OpenAI is a company with substantial US military contracts to develop AI for military and surveillance purposes,” Tahir’s message reads, adding that the course would not use Canvas “except for one week” when the students will have to view a film through Canvas. In June 2025, OpenAI scored a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense. InStructure, which operates Canvas, announced a partnership with OpenAI in July.

In place of Canvas, Tahir uses other platforms, such as Dropbox, Google Drive and email, to connect with her students.

Tahir’s seminar “Ethnography and Journalism” also does not use Canvas. That class also has an empty course page which displays a similar message.

Tahir told the News that her decision to instruct her course off of the popular platform aligns with a goal to “move to better, encrypted platforms and more offline.”

When asked whether or not the broader Yale administrators knew about her decision to abstain from Canvas, Tahir told the News, “I never announced my choice except to my classes.”

Despite initial concerns about the policy, some students enrolled

in Tahir’s classes told the News they agreed with Tahir's choice.

“It would be very hypocritical for her to teach us the implications of this while still using it,” Fagr Aboudaka ‘27, a student in the Digital War, told the News about the ethics of using Canvas and the subject of the course. Aboudaka added that “we have to pay the price of inconvenience for what we believe in and what we stand for.”

“At first, I was a little bit frustrated,” Nilab Ahmend ‘27, told the News when she found out about the course’s lack of Canvas usage. “I was like, ‘okay,’ this is gonna mess with my whole system that I have, where it's not all in one place and I can see it.”

Despite initial feelings of frustration, Ahmend said that upon hearing Tahir’s reasoning, “it made a lot more sense” for the course to not use Canvas. Layan Nazzal ‘26, another student enrolled in the course, told the News, “I really am glad that this is a choice that she's making because of the content of the class, it just makes sense.” She added, “it stands for what the class stands for, and I appreciate this.”

According to CourseTable, the course planning website for Yale students, Tahir first taught a Yale course in fall 2023. The Yale Police Benevolent Association, or YPBA, has been pursuing collective bargaining action for a new contract with Yale since February 2023. In June, rela-

tions between the union and the University hit a new low after all 51 union members voted to authorize a strike in response to Yale negotiators’ refusal to schedule additional negotiation sessions. No strike has occurred.

Just three months later, the circumstances are vastly different. “We’re close,” YPBA President Mike Hall said in a phone interview on Thursday. “There are still a few issues that need to be ironed out. I'm confident that the University

and the YPBA can work these out together and resolve our issues and get this contract.”

Contact PABLO PEREZ at pablo.perez@yale.edu .

CANVAS

Yale’s data on the class of 2029 showed subtle changes in racial makeup. / Ellie Park, Senior Photographer

Professor Madiha Tahir told the News that she does not use the common teaching platform in her classes in light of “rising fasc ism.” Rachel Mak, Photography Editor

“I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it”

“GREEN LIGHT” BY LORDE

New civics center aims for open dialogue in small groups

BY JAEHA JANG STAFF REPORTER

The new school year has brought a new Center for Civic Thought, a Yale initiative designed to encourage open dialogue among students and local community members.

The center is the brainchild of political science and humanities professor Bryan Garsten, who has led two civic thought programs at Yale over the past decade.

Garsten told the News that he had wanted to expand those projects for the last few years and that the center came to fruition after Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis approached him last spring.

“We’re at a pivotal moment in the history of universities in this country,” Garsten, the center’s faculty director, said. “We need to be discovering new ways of thinking, and the best way to do that is to have a messy ferment of experimental, open, searching conversations among a pluralistic group of people.”

The center’s creation coincided with intense pressure from

the Trump administration on universities, often based on criticism that they are skewed to the left.

Yale administrators, including Lewis and University President Maurie McInnis, have stressed the values of open dialogue and free expression on campus. In their welcome speeches to the class of 2029, McInnis and Lewis encouraged first years to engage with uncomfortable ideas and resist pressure for ideological purity.

Garsten rejected the notion that the center was created because of the Trump administration’s pressure on universities. He said he had been working on initiatives to promote civic conversations much earlier.

“I think it would be a huge mistake to think that the reason to have these conversations is something so small as the current presidential administration,” he said.

Instead, Garsten said the ethos of the center is uniquely important today due to a general “trust gap” between universities and the rest of society.

“I think there are a whole set of factors, including the fact that there’s a perception that — well, more than a perception — that faculty at many colleges tend to be on the left and our society is more evenly split than that,” Garsten said.

He added that while some institutions may be “scrambling” to create new civic-minded initiatives, he was proud that he had already been pursuing such projects.

Yuval Levin, the director of social, cultural and constitutional studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who serves on the center’s external board of advisers, wrote to the News that the center will allow students to learn from both each other and people outside of the University, enabling them to see “why they shouldn’t assume they have a monopoly on the moral high ground or the truth.”

According to Garsten, while the center is partly funded by donations from outside foundations, the majority of its funding comes from the offices of Lewis and Ste-

ven Wilkinson, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Every Monday, the center is hosting a “coffeehouse” in the lobby of Rosenkranz Hall, gathering students and local community members to discuss a thought-provoking question. This week, the prompt was: “What’s a belief you hold that you think most people would disagree with?”

The center’s programs also include reading groups, smallgroup guest seminars and larger moderated conversations with panels, Stephanie Almeida Nevin, the center’s executive director, said in opening remarks at an introductory event for the center.

According to Almeida Nevin, the center is meant to be a home for students who want an intellectual community to discuss “big and difficult questions” outside the pressures of the classroom. Conversations around these questions feel more free, open and exploratory without the pressure of grades and evaluation, Garsten added.

Throughout the course of these discussions, student fellows will write and publish online a “dialogue project” that captures the complexities and disagreements surrounding particular issues.

Hundreds of people have joined the center’s mailing list and dozens of students have shown interest in becoming student fellows, Almeida Nevin wrote to the News.

Hamilton Henderson ’29, who attended the center’s first “coffeehouse,” said the self-selecting nature of the center allows attendees to have more meaningful conversations in good faith.

“You don’t have to be here. It’s not for credit. It’s not for a grade,” he said. “People who come here genuinely want to have those discussions.”

Rosenkranz Hall is located at 115 Prospect St. Dani Klein contributed reporting.

Contact JAEHA JANG at jaeha.jang@yale.edu.

Clarence Thomas portrait installed in Law School over the summer

BY HENRY LIU STAFF REPORTER

As law students entered the Sterling Law Building in mid-August, they spotted a new face looking down on them in the Alumni Reading Room: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas LAW ’74.

The portrait hangs next to portraits of other notable alumni of the Law School, including former president Bill Clinton LAW ’73. Though Thomas’s portrait was not on the walls when students left for the summer, new law students reported seeing it during their orientation.

Students across the political spectrum noted the timing as charged because the installation was delayed after it was originally commissioned in 2018.

“Justice Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991. It’s hard to believe the decision to install his portrait is completely unrelated to current politics,” Ilani Nurick LAW ’27 and Liz Bailey LAW ’27, co-presidents of the Yale Law Democrats, wrote in a statement to the News.

Conservative student leaders praised the decision as a move towards political diversity, while other students said the decision to install the portrait at this moment was a reflection of new institutional priorities.

Funding for the portrait originated over seven years ago, with a $105,000 donation from Texas billionaire and Republican donor Harlan Crow in 2018. The portrait was framed around March 2019 and delivered to the Law School shortly after, the portrait’s artist Jacob Collins told the Washington Free Beacon.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, then-Dean Heather

Gerken acknowledged in an April 2018 letter to Crow the $105,000 donation would commission the portrait of Justice Clarence Thomas, with whom Crow was close friends.

Former Dean Guido Calabresi explained in 2015 that portraits fall into two categories: automatic and discretionary. Automatic portraits include alumni or faculty who have served as United States president, Supreme Court justice or chief judge of a circuit court and do not require approval. All others must be approved for display at the dean’s discretion. Regardless of the category, all portraits — except those of former Law School deans — must be paid for by outside donors.

Because he is a Supreme Court justice, Thomas’ portrait should have automatically gone up after its delivery to the Law School in 2019, if the policies Calabresi described were then still in use.

A spokesperson for the Law School declined to comment on when the portrait was officially put up in the alumni room or if the portrait’s installation was ordered by Gerken or interim Dean Yair Listokin.

Conservative student leaders at the Law School praised the portrait.

“Justice Thomas is a trailblazer whose life and career embody perseverance, principle, and a deep commitment to the rule of law.

We are proud to see Yale recognize his legacy and celebrate this tribute to one of the most distinguished jurists in American history,” Andrew Liu LAW ’26, president of the Yale Law Republicans, wrote in a statement co-signed by David Haungs LAW ’26, president of the Yale Federalist Society.

Other student leaders at the Law School had more mixed reactions to the portrait’s installment.

Saman Haddad LAW ’26, president of the Graduate and Professional School Senate, cast the decision as politically motivated.

“What lesson is YLS teaching by elevating Clarence Thomas in this political moment? The answer is clear. Our institutional values are defined by power, not principle,” Haddad wrote to the News.

Thomas has long had a strained

relationship with his alma mater.

In his autobiography, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas wrote that he affixed a 15 cent sticker to his diploma and stored it in his basement, saying his degree “bore the taint of racial preference.”

In recent years, Thomas’ bitterness towards Yale appeared to soften. Thomas visited Yale in 2011, his first visit since graduating. He then sat for the portrait in 2018. Directly to the left of Thomas’s portrait is a portrait of Richard Rav-

itch LAW ’58, who served as lieutenant governor of New York from 2009 to 2010. Sitting below Thomas’s portrait is Drew S. Days III LAW ’66, who served as solicitor general of the United States from 1993 to 1996 under President Clinton.

A small photo of Vice President JD Vance hangs in a secluded hallway of the law school.

Contact HENRY LIU at henry.liu.hal52@yale.edu.

First years trained to consider opposing views in new online scenarios

BY OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTER

Before they arrived on campus this fall, members of the class of 2029 were asked by Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis to complete a new training designed to help them engage with one another across disagreements.

Modules in the online Perspectives training program, which was reviewed by the News, explore contentious topics — such as abortion and immigration policy — through the lens of real-world scenarios, where students are presented with controversial views that may differ from their own convictions.

One module presents a discussion in which a classmate says: “It feels like if you’re not progressive on this campus, people assume you’re a bad person. I’m tired of feeling like I have to keep my views to myself.”

The training then asks students to select “the most effective” response out of several multiple-choice answers. “It sounds like you’re feeling judged

or shut down — and that it’s hard to speak up when your perspective isn’t the popular one. Is that right?” reads the program’s preferred answer. Answers labeled as “ineffective” included “I get that it’s frustrating, but other people are allowed to react to what you say” and “Maybe this just isn’t the place to share those kinds of views.”

The Perspectives program, which consists of six 30-minute modules, was released to the class of 2029 in July. The program’s introduction expresses its goal of explaining “where our differences in beliefs, worldviews, and values come from.”

Developed by the Constructive Dialogue Institute, a nonprofit organization focused on bridging divides between diverse people, the Perspectives training was piloted last school year with groups of student leaders including peer liaisons and First-Year Counselors.

“The program is designed to help students think about what it’s like to have a conversation with somebody who comes from

a different set of convictions than you do, and how to learn from that kind of conversation,” Lewis said in an interview with the News.

One module asks students to consider a statement such as “cancel culture is necessary to hold people accountable” and to challenge their assumptions by asking themselves, “Why would a smart, reasonable person disagree with me?”

Another exercise reads: “You’re talking with a classmate about student loan forgiveness. You say you support it because you think the cost of college is unfairly high. They respond: ‘I don’t see why I should have to pay for someone else’s bad financial decisions.’ You feel your blood boil.”

The training adds: “But instead of reacting, pause and consider: What might be driving that view?”

And one module instructs students: “Take abortion as an example: Someone who is prolife may focus on the sanctity of life, and assume those who are

pro-choice simply don’t care about unborn lives.”

Many universities have come under fire from the Trump administration for failing to promote an array of views across the political spectrum. In his opening remarks to the class of 2029, Lewis encouraged first years to embrace difficult conversations and develop viewpoints independent of any one ideology and by embracing difficult conversations.

In his message announcing the training to first years, Lewis wrote that it was part of a push to promote free expression on campus.

In addition to incoming firstyear undergraduates, student leaders such as Communication and Consent Educators have been instructed to complete the program. The training has not been made available to every Yale undergraduate student.

“We were exploring how to do this at the university level. But undergrads make a great kind of laboratory,” Burgwell Howard, the senior associate dean of Yale College, said. “As Yale College, in particular, diversified in terms of race and culture

and socioeconomic status, everyone’s bringing those perspectives.”

Jairus Rhoades ’26, a peer liaison for the Native American Cultural Center who was asked to take part in last year’s pilot program, expressed satisfaction with the Perspectives training.

“Having seen the recent protests and political turmoil, and especially regarding free speech, it was a very helpful tool to ground us all in the basic etiquette of how to separate our emotions from our thoughts,” Rhoades said. According to Howard, administrators took feedback from upperclassmen participating in the pilot programs in order to present the most realistic scenarios to incoming first years.

“Perspectives training kind of just gave me a lot of insight on subconscious behaviors that we do, as humans, in general, everyday interactions,” Ava Hills ’29 told the News.

The Yale College Dean’s Office is located at 1 Prospect St. Contact OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu.

HENRY

“Like it was written in my soul from me to you, tangled up in blue” TANGLED UP IN

New Haven looks to set record for largest pizza party

BY JAKE ROBBINS STAFF REPORTER

New Haven is looking to make its claim to the title of the United States’ “Pizza Capital” on Friday by attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the largest pizza party.

The record attempt will take place at the 10th annual Apizza Feast — New Haven’s annual downtown celebration of the city’s famous woodfire pizza, known as “apizza” and pronounced “ah-beetz.” The festival will be held alongside the Grand Prix, a local bike race.

“This event is very much a passion project that is the result of my love and pride for my hometown,” Colin Caplan, founder of local pizza tour company Taste of New Haven and lead event organizer, wrote to the News. “Achieving a record-breaking event is proving to each other that we are of the highest caliber, and we can do everything we set out to do.”

The world record bid, organized by Caplan and local partners, will be subject to defined Guinness rules and a volunteer counting system. Up to 5,000 participants may be counted for the record attempt in a fenced party area. Each must stay at least 15 minutes and eat two pizza slices to be counted.

Yale student organizers who have been involved in coordinating the record attempt say student turnout, boosted by 1,000 free tickets provided to Yale students, has already pushed registration numbers past the current record of 3,357 participants at one pizza party. Executing the pizza party on the Green will be the final hurdle.

Guinness’ standards for mass participation records are exacting, Caplan wrote in an email outlining the logistics. The party window is 4 p.m. to 7 p.m., and the last group must enter no later than 6:45 p.m.

Participants who do not eat their two slices, or who leave the party early, are disqualified. Eating the crust, however, is not required, Caplan wrote.

At the party, fenced pens will accommodate groups of roughly 100 people; volunteers called stewards must oversee each group and record participants’ names and numbers on paper tally sheets. The Guinness rules require one steward for every 100 participants, and at least 50 stewards must be on duty Friday for New Haven’s attempt at the record.

The party cannot exceed 5,000 participants without hiring a thirdparty counting organization, which they did not do, Caplain wrote.

According to Caplan, if more than 10 percent of participants leave before the end of the party, the attempt at breaking the record will be invalidated. Shortly after 7 p.m., the steward will reconvene and subtract any disqualifications to determine the final count for the on-site Guinness adjudicator.

Guinness also requires a documentation package beyond paper tallies. According to Caplan, organizers will submit video and photo evidence, including drone footage, a timelapse, a local health department affidavit, media articles, ticketing records and other materials to prove the record was set. The slices counted in the record-

setting attempt will come from the Big Green Truck Pizza, Connecticut’s first antique wood-fired pizza truck. Caplan said that after reviewing how to feed 5,000 people two slices each — which will require 10,000 slices, or 625 pizzas — the team concluded Big Green Truck was the only caterer with the capacity to produce that many wood-fired, New Haven-style apizzas. The restaurant will dispatch six trucks and 35 staff to Friday’s event.

More vendors than usual will be attending Apizza Feast this year, as well. Caplan said the city has permitted around 70 vendors — nearly double last year’s total — to line the New Haven Green with pizza, food and retail stands.

For Yale’s Sophomore Class Council, or SoCo, the record attempt became a chance to formalize student participation in the city’s signature food event. Council president Micah Draper ’28 said the student partnership began when SoCo’s director of events, Richelle Chang ’28, flagged a City of New Haven Instagram Reel promoting the Guinness attempt.

“We absolutely have to help out with this,” Draper recalled telling the council. After email exchanges and Zoom meetings with Mayor Justin Elicker’s office, the council became an official partner for the event.

SoCo then secured 1,000 free tickets for Yale students.

“Within just over 48 hours after the tickets were released, they all were claimed, which officially brought the number of registered attendees above the current world record,” Draper said. “It feels pretty awesome that my classmates were a major factor in breaking this world record for the

New Haven community. Now, they just need to show up.” Draper framed the effort as part of a larger project, noting that SoCo created a New Haven Connections role to strengthen relationships with the city and local partners. After attending a recent press conference and speaking with Elicker and other city officials, Draper said he expects this will not be the last SoCo collaboration with New Haven. Caplan said the record is one way

to make New Haven’s pizza identity apparent to the rest of the country. He hopes to see New Haven-style pies spread across the country and increased food tourism to New Haven for pizza, he said. The city is expecting more than 15,000 people to attend the Apizza Feast and the New Haven Grand Prix cycling race.

Contact JAKE ROBBINS at jake.robbins@yale.edu.

City public schools usher in year without cell phones

BY SABRINA THALER STAFF REPORTER

In New Haven classrooms, passing notes may soon be back in fashion.

District officials announced Monday that all 10 of New Haven’s public high schools have begun restricting cell phone usage with Yondr pouches — portable magnetic containers that lock away students’ phones during the school day. All middle schools in NHPS began using the pouches last school year, according to a city press release.

“We are hearing more student-tostudent conversations, particularly in the mornings as students arrive,” NHPS Superintendent Madeline Negrón said. “During lunch breaks, kids are actually facing one another, and they’re actually talking to one another in person. The hallways and the cafeterias are noisier, and that’s all in a good way.”

The district first piloted the technology at Barnard Environmental Magnet School, a pre-K through 8 school in West River, during the 2023-24 school year.

In January, the New Haven Board of Alders approved a $371,000 contract with Yondr to pay for pouches for all middle and high school students in New Haven public schools. The pouches are an effort to improve student engagement, minimize distractions in class and mitigate the negative effects of social media.

At a Monday press conference held

at Metropolitan Business Academy, district leaders said that initial feedback on the rollout has been positive. Mayor Justin Elicker also attended and spoke with students about the new policy.

Last August, the Connecticut State Board of Education issued recommendations for in-school cell phone use, advising that state elementary and middle schools completely ban cell phones and that high schools limit their usage.

This year, NHPS students joined 2.5 million students nationwide who are using Yondr pouches in their

schools, according to CBS News.

Metropolitan Business Academy teachers who spoke at the press conference said that the absence of cell phones has enriched their classroom environments.

“Already in the first week, I’ve felt discussion to be far deeper, students building on each other’s ideas in ways I haven’t seen in a while, and it’s really led to vibrant discussions and learning that’s happening already,” Max Comando, a social studies teacher, said.

Students at Metro told the News that they take their Yondr pouches

home with them and are responsible for bringing them into school every morning. As they arrive, they use specialized magnets to secure their phones in the pouches as an administrator watches.

New Haven Public Schools spokesperson Justin Harmon said that implementation varies across schools, and that not all high schools permit students to take their pouches home. In some schools, students don’t lock their phones into pouches until their first period class, Harmon said, because there is more than one central gathering place where students enter the building each day.

Students who attended the press conference said reactions to Yondr pouches have been mixed among their peers.

Luciana Angelini, a senior at Metro, told the News that students have attempted to bypass the pouches by bringing in burner phones and hiding their real cell phones in empty water bottles, for example.

Thomas D’Angelo, also a Metro senior, said he heard of students attempting to place calculators in the pouches in order to keep their phones.

“People don’t like being told what to do with something that belongs to them,” Angelini said.

“Especially for teenagers, we don’t have a lot to claim as our own. And our phones are kind of our world. So I think for some students, that freedom being

BY NICK CIMINIELLO STAFF REPORTER

Bobbi’s, a new pizza place opening soon on Broadway, was granted special permission to sell alcohol from New Haven’s zoning board at its monthly meeting on Tuesday evening.

The decision for the Yale property occupant clears another hurdle in the path to opening the restaurant for its owner, Ankit Chellani. Chellani also owns and operates the Indian restaurant Sherkaan, a few hundred yards north on Broadway.

“There’s a new square coming to New Haven,” Bobbi’s website says. The restaurant bills itself as selling “Detroit-ish” style pizzas.

Bobbi’s will seek to distinguish itself as a thick-crust, rectangu-

lar-style pizza restaurant in a city well known for its thin, woodfired “apizza.”

Bobbi’s was represented at the Board of Zoning Appeals meeting by land use attorney Ben Trachten, who formerly served as the board’s chair.

Trachten handled six different cases before the board Tuesday evening, speaking via Zoom to the group at City Hall. Chellani was not present at the meeting.

Even though his client was applying for a full liquor license, the restaurant would only sell certain types of alcoholic beverages, Trachten said.

“It would just be bottled cocktails,” Trachten said. “The applicant will not sell any hard alcohol above an ABV of 10 percent,” he added, referring to alcohol by volume.

taken away feels like it’s kind of a piece of them missing.”

She added, though, that she believes the Yondr pouches can help create a “buffer” to help students develop their identities and connect with one another without the distraction of phones.

Aya Ahmed, an 11th grader, said she was initially resistant to the pouches and missed being able to listen to music during the school day. She also said that without her phone, she’s unable to easily access PowerSchool — NHPS’ online academic portal — or view her schedule at times when it could be inconvenient to open her laptop.

Nonetheless, Ahmed said, she’s “mostly okay with it.” Leslie Blatteau, president of the New Haven Federation of Teachers, emphasized that the pouches are only part of a longer-term approach to building community and improving student engagement.

In the meantime, she said, students are already adapting.

“Here’s what some teachers are reporting: Students are passing notes,” Blatteau said. “Not ideal necessarily, but I think in the grand scheme of things, we’ve got people writing. We’ve got people communicating. This is not so bad.”

Around 19,000 students are enrolled in New Haven Public Schools.

Contact SABRINA THALER at sabrina.thaler@yale.edu.

The storefront at 51 Broadway had previously been inhabited by Salsa Fresca and Broadway Kitchen. It was acquired by Yale in 2023.

Trachten also provided more details on both the business’s timeline and specific nature.

“It’s already built up, ready to go,” Trachten stated. “The business will primarily be focused on takeout pizza.”

As a part of its exception to the standard zoning rules, Bobbi’s agreed to stay open no later than 11 p.m. and to host no live entertainment.

There was no public opposition to the exception, which the Board of Zoning Appeals granted unanimously.

Contact NICK CIMINIELLO at nick.ciminiello@yale.edu.

ELLIE PARK / SENIOR PHOTOGRAPHER

Local organizers hoping to set a world record are planning for up to 5,000 attendees to gather on the New Haven Green for a pizza party on Friday.

“I only wanted to see you laughing in the purple rain”

PURPLE RAIN BY PRINCE

New Luca Guadagnino film set, but not filmed, at Yale

BY BAALA SHAKYA STAFF REPORTER

A new film by acclaimed director Luca Guadagnino features a fictional Yale marred by scandal.

“After the Hunt,” Guadagnino’s latest psychological drama, stars Julia Roberts, Andrew Garfield and Ayo Edebiri and premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on Aug. 29. The film will debut in select U.S. theaters on Oct. 10 before expanding to wide release on Oct. 17.

The film follows Alma Olsson, a Yale philosophy professor played by Roberts. Her comfortable status at Yale begins to unravel when her star student, Maggie Price, played by Ayo Edebiri, accuses fellow professor and longtime friend Henrik “Hank” Gibson, played by Garfield, of sexual assault. Alma navigates the personal and professional fallout as the story unfolds, which includes reckoning with unresolved questions from her past.

“After the Hunt” is not only set at Yale, but also explicitly names the University in dialogue or as scene headings 17 times, according to a November 2023 copy of the film’s screenplay obtained by the News. Scenes take place in Woolsey Hall, Battell Chapel, Cody’s Diner and local bar Three Sheets, while non-specific locations like Yale bathrooms, classrooms and a faculty parking lot are also mentioned. In one scene, character RJ Thomas — a fictional dean — confronts Alma about her knowledge of Hank’s activities and his alleged misconduct toward Maggie. Thomas suggests that averting scandal at an elite institution is impossible: “It’s a minefield. A fucking minefield, these days,” he said. “It feels as timely now as it ever has,” said Brian Price, a senior lecturer in film and media studies, who read the full screenplay. “We’re still debating where the lines are, what should be permissible versus what’s considered abhorrent, and this film lives squarely in that tension.”

Though the story is set at Yale, filming took place in England. A handful of exteriors, including those of Three Sheets and Chapel West Liquors, appear in the official trailer, but were digitally edited.

A spokesperson from Yale’s media office wrote in an email to the News that, to the office’s knowledge, Yale’s trademark licensing office was not consulted on or involved in “After the Hunt.”

Burgess Byrd, one of the actresses in the film, said that — to the best of her knowledge — all interior scenes were shot on soundstages in London. Yale’s exteriors, specifically, she said, were largely recreated in Cambridge.

The decision to film in England was likely due to tax credits, Byrd added, because Hollywood producers in the United Kingdom receive a return of 20 percent of the cost of the production. Still, she praised the realism of the set design, down to the Walgreens counter her character was filmed working behind.

“It still looked exactly like an American pharmacy,” Byrd said. “Luca’s attention to detail is amazing.”

Actor Hugo Micheron, who plays a professor in the film and attended the premiere in Venice, wrote to the News that the movie was “warmly welcomed” at the film festival. Guadagnino, known for “Call Me by Your Name” and “Challengers,” cast several actors from past collaborations, including Byrd and Christine Dye. He also brought in Ariyan Kassam DRA ’25, a graduate of the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale, for a supporting role.

Price, the Yale film lecturer, said he expects the film to be a valuable discussion point in his screenwriting classes this fall.

“This is a strong example of writing what you know, or at least, what you research well,” he said.

“And for Yale students thinking about the power of story, it’s going to be a compelling case study.”

“After The Hunt” received a six-minute ovation at its Venice world premiere. The opening scene in the screenplay depicts Alma with her most prized students gathered for a dinner party at her brownstone. According to the screenplay, her husband Frederik critiques her mentorship style: Alma elevates students “to the status of your approvals, because they worship you on bended knee, not because of any actual merit.” The real Yale has faced its own controversies about alleged inappropriate behavior between faculty and students, including an incident from 2021 often referred to as “dinner party-gate,” when a group of students at Yale Law School accused professor Amy Chua of violating a 2019 agreement to cease interacting with students outside of class by hosting dinner parties during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Contact BAALA SHAKYA at baala.shakya@yale.edu.

BY ISABELLA SANCHEZ AND ALEX GELDZAHLER STAFF REPORTERS

Blazing reds, oranges, and yellows burn against shadowy backgrounds and swirling script in “William Blake: Burning Bright,” the Yale Center for British Art’s newest exhibition.

The exhibit, which debuted on Aug. 26, brings together the vivid work Romantic artist William Blake strove for over the course of his career in the 18th and 19th centuries. Displaying paintings, sketches, engravings and poetry by Blake, the exhibition highlights the multidisciplinary nature of his work.

In tandem with the new exhibit, Yale’s English department is teaching a seminar partially focused on Blake’s literary legacy, titled “Word and Image from William Blake to Claudia Rankine.” Taught by Langdon Hammer ’80 GRD ’89, the course explores the tradition of visionary poets and artists, such as Blake, and how they synthesized the written word and visual art.

“Blake wanted to change your mind. He wanted to change your ways of seeing and thinking. He wanted to change your ways of reading,” Hammer said. “His visionary impulses are enacted in this particular way by creating objects that make reading problematic, that make seeing problematic.”

To celebrate the opening of the new exhibit, the Yale Center for British Art hosted a conversation-style lecture with exhibition curators Elizabeth Wyckoff, curator of prints and drawings, and Timothy Young, curator of rare books and manuscripts.

The speakers characterized the beauty of Blake’s images, the austere technique of his production, and his renowned wordcraft to operate in concert within the pages featured in the exhibit.

Throughout the lecture, the speakers referenced Blake’s fantastical mysticism, crafted within his own mind and manifested onto his page through his pen, press and dedicated work.

“I love that everything he does is imbued with both his poetry, his artistry, his imagination, his innovation, and his powers of invention,” Wyckoff said.

Wyckoff and Young, the curators of the exhibit, also assisted Hammer in designing his course. Both the exhibition and the course emphasize Blake’s fusion of word and image.

According to Hammer, Blake challenges the viewer to approach his art and poetry as “material” objects with “sensory qualities.” During the era of industrialization and advancements in print-making technology, Blake reverted to handmaking every page of his books.

The exhibition encourages visitors to engage with the displayed materials. Visitors are provided with magnifying glasses to better see minute details in Blake’s art and read the cursive script. The exhibition even contains facsimiles of Blake’s books, which visitors are free to touch and flip through.

“The point wasn’t to hang things on the walls, it was to create an experience,” Richard

Brodhead ’68 GRD ’72, professor of English and interim director of the YCBA, said. “Somehow, viewers are activated by this experience.”

One striking image visitors may notice is the frontispiece to Blake’s prophetic book of poetry, “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion.” The drawing depicts the

artist Los, from Blake’s mythology, descending into a dark and shadowy crypt. The glowing orb the artist is carrying emits bursts of light that illuminate otherwise gloomy surroundings.

“It’s a kind of image of the artistic imagination that draws an analogy between this stepping into the darkness and the reader

opening the illuminated book,” Hammer said. The Blake exhibit will close on Nov. 30.

Contact ISABELLA SANCHEZ at isabella.sanchez@yale.edu and ALEX GELDZAHLER at alex.geldzahler@yale.edu.

BY ANGEL HU STAFF REPORTER

From 1976 to 1983, Argentina’s military dictatorship attempted to erase the identities of hundreds of newborn children. But their stories would be remembered and shared over 40 years later.

On July 15, Haley Cohen Gilliland ’11, director of the Yale Journalism Initiative, published a book titled “A Flower Traveled in My Blood.” The nonfiction book chronicles the story of a group of grandmothers dedicated to finding their grandchildren, who were stolen by Argentina’s military dictatorship.

As an undergraduate at Yale from 2007 to 2011, Cohen Gilliland took classes in narrative nonfiction, biography and memoir writing and was involved in reporting and editing with The New Journal. Majoring in History, Cohen Gilliland’s senior thesis — a biography on William Nevins Armstrong ’58, Hawaii’s attorney general — blended original reporting with archival research, a method that would later shape how she approached writing her book.

“Yale really ignited my passion for this kind of writing, and

that helped educate me about how to do it, and I owe my whole career and this book to the things that I learned here, the people that I learned from,” Cohen Gilliland said.

After graduating from Yale, Cohen Gilliland moved to Argentina on a fellowship. She had briefly visited Argentina with her family in the past and wanted to develop her conversational Spanish skills. She described her decision as motivated by a “gut connection” to the country, adding that she felt she “needed to” find her way back there

While in Argentina, Cohen Gilliland learned more about the Dirty War — the country’s military dictatorship — which lasted from 1976 to 1983. During this period, the military abducted and disappeared hundreds of pregnant women. Their newborn children were taken and placed in military families to be raised under false identities.

“I had taken a class on Latin American politics at Yale that touched on the dictatorship, but I really didn’t come to understand the extent of the brutality and the crimes that were committed during that period until I moved there,” Cohen Gilliland said.

While in Argentina, Cohen Gilliland discovered a group of grandmothers called the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, who banded together to try to find their stolen grandchildren through protests, research into legal documents and genetic testing.

At the time, there was only one book in English that detailed the story of the grandmothers, and Cohen Gilliland was initially unsure of whether she was the right person to shed light on such a daunting past.

Cohen Gilliland remembered being “lulled into the sense that everyone in the world already knew their story” because the Abuelas already had an “iconic” reputation in Argentina. However, Cohen Gilliland developed a “personal connection” to the story upon returning to the United States and learning she was pregnant.

“Suddenly, I felt this immense urgency that I wanted to take on this project. By then I had spent four years in Argentina, so I felt much more comfortable being the one to try to tell the story of the Abuelas and introduce it to an audience that might not be familiar with it,” Cohen Gilliland said.

Drawing from archival research and oral interviews, she pieced together a history that had been largely erased from public records when the dictatorship ended in 1983.

Much of Cohen Gilliland’s research was drawn from communicating directly with the grandmothers, who documented their work extensively. Cohen Gilliland’s interviews with Rosa Roisinblit and Estela de Carlotto — founding member and president of the Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo, respectively — gave her insight into the their activism.

One of the biggest challenges for Cohen Gilliland was navigating historical gaps, especially while interviewing individuals whose health and memories were not as strong as they once were.

“Sometimes, I would apologize when I interviewed and asked them to relive the hardest moments of their life. But I was very encouraged, because they would say, ‘I don’t like talking about it, but it’s in service of sharing this story more widely, and that’s what we want,’” Cohen Gilliland said.

While writing her book, Cohen Gilliland became the director of the Yale Journalism Initiative in

2022. Unlike the sometimes “solitary” process of writing, she said working with student journalists at Yale is “incredibly social” — a relationship Cohen Gilliland believes to be “complementary” and allows her to give Yale students the same support she received as an undergraduate. Cohen Gilliland specifically credits professors Anne Fadiman and Fred Strebeigh ’74 for their mentorship and support throughout her career.

In an email to the News, Fadiman praised Cohen Gilliland, who took her Advanced Nonfiction Writing class, calling her reporting for one memorable profile “gorgeously detailed, full of surprises and never snide for a moment.”

“But nothing could have prepared me for ‘A Flower in My Blood,’ whose meticulous reporting, uncompromising accuracy, narrative skill and deep empathy took my breath away,” Fadiman wrote.

Strebeigh echoed Fadiman’s sentiments, dubbing the book a “model” for great nonfiction writing.

The Yale Journalism Initiative was founded in 2006.

Contact ANGEL HU at angel.hu@yale.edu.

“I’m crying over you, oh what to do, my tears are black, my heart is blue”

New startup lets students pick up packages at local businesses

BY ANYA GEIST STAFF REPORTER

Many Yale students are too familiar with the walk to and from the Barnes and Noble Student Package Center and the long lines that often await them there.

PickPackGo, a startup cofounded by Aranza Rodriguez ’24 and Juliette Garcia ’26, aims to help students pick up packages more conveniently. The PickPackGo app allows students to order their packages to local businesses that are partnered with the company, where they can collect them at their own convenience. Current partners include Katalina’s Bakery, Nice Day Chinese, Bora Bora Smoothie Cafe, and La Cocinita Mexican Cafe.

“I’m really happy that it’s helping both businesses and students,” Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez first came up with the idea for PickPackGo as a Yale undergraduate. Living above Tomatillo Taco Joint on Broadway, she had trouble getting packages delivered to her apartment and asked the restaurant staff if she could use their address instead.

Realizing that many off-campus students faced similar issues — and that the package center was inconvenient for on-campus students — she pitched the idea to Garcia in spring 2024.

“I remember being very stressed about how to receive packages in a way that was safe and cheap,” Rodriguez said. “Hopefully, this is an affordable solution to this problem.”

PickPackGo launched on a small scale to graduate students last winter and expanded this fall. Students purchase tokens through the app — 99 cents

each or in bundles — and show them to staff when picking up packages. While non-students can also use the service, the startup is primarily geared towards students. Students cannot receive letters through PickPackGo.

As of August 30, the app had nearly 300 registered users. The founders said more than 40 tokens have been purchased, and 24 packages have already been picked up so far. Every package delivered to a partner business has been retrieved, Garcia said.

The most popular pick-up location has been Katalina’s Bakery, on Whitney Avenue, which Garcia noted is conveniently located for students in Silliman, Timothy Dwight, Ben Franklin and Pauli Murray.

Niki Awad, a barista at Katalina’s Bakery, has handled much of the pick-up and drop-off of packages.

“The process has been pretty seamless,” she said. “Students will have stuff shipped here, and it will show up via carrier.”

Awad explained that packages are left by delivery drivers at a designated table in the bakery. Students show their Yale ID to receive their items, which she said makes the process secure. In its first week, the bakery handled about 20 packages, all of which were collected.

Looking ahead, Garcia and Rodriguez hope to expand PickPackGo beyond New Haven. Rodriguez, now based in Boston, said the team is exploring whether colleges there might benefit from the service.

“We need to look into, like, ‘Okay, who needs this? Are you guys off campus? Do you have access to package centers?’” Garcia

said. “In big cities, there tend to be apartments and there tend to be missing packages.”

Balancing a full-time job in Boston while running PickPackGo in New Haven has been challenging, Rodriguez said. Rodriguez and Garcia share many responsibilities

in PickPackGo. Rodriguez has focused on market research, while Garcia has taken on more of the in-person work in New Haven, such as attending events, posting flyers and contacting businesses. For now, the two plan to continue running PickPackGo themselves, with their eyes set on

growing the business. If Garcia leaves New Haven, they might reassess, Garcia said.

Katalina’s Bakery is located at 74 Whitney Ave.

at anya.geist@yale.edu .

Study probes link between obesity and ‘obesity-related conditions’

BY EDIS MESIC STAFF REPORTER

Researchers at the School of Medicine recently published a letter that estimates the extent to which obesity-related conditions — conditions that have been linked with obesity but aren’t necessarily caused by it — are actually caused by obesity in adolescents and young adults.

Scientific literature has long associated several chronic conditions with obesity. Lead author Ashwin Chetty MED ’27 and a team of doctors worked together to analyze the link.

“We know obesity causes hypertension, but not all hypertension cases are caused by obesity. So to understand the impact of preventing or treating obesity, it’s important to understand how many of those hypertension cases are caused by obesity,” Chetty said. “If you can prevent obesity by a certain amount, you’ll be able to reduce hypertension by a certain amount, and that’s the reasoning that fueled the paper that we did.”

Chetty explained that obesity has been defined for decades in terms of body mass index or BMI, which represents the ratio of body weight to height squared for an individual. People with BMIs of 30 or more are typically considered obese, while those with BMIs of 25 or above are considered overweight.

For adolescents and young adults who are still growing, BMI is instead calculated through a percentile that calculates how one compares relative to others of the same age and sex, with a BMI greater than or equal to the 85th percentile representing the overweight population and greater than or equal to the 95th percentile representing the obese population.

Using publicly available data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, Chetty compared the prevalence of obesity-related conditions like hypertension across adolescents and young adults with obese, overweight and normal BMIs.

To estimate the proportion of obesity-related conditions caused by obesity, the team compared the number of cases from the group with obesity to the number of cases from the group with normal BMIs, accounting for potential

confounders that could cause these conditions.

In their estimates, the team found that among all cases of prediabetes, hypertension and dyslipidemia, 20 to 35 percent of adolescent cases and 40 percent of young adult cases are attributable to obesity.

“One way to interpret that is, if you were able to eliminate obesity from this population, you would reduce the prevalence of those obesity-related conditions, prediabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia, by that amount,” Chetty said.

The project was inspired by a study Chetty worked on with School of Medicine professors Alissa Chen and Alexandra Hajduk that examined obesity and obesityrelated conditions in adults aged 65 and older.

The transition from working with older adults to adolescents and young adults did not come without its challenges, Chetty said.

For instance, different definitions for clinical conditions such as kidney dysfunction exist for adolescents and young adults since they manifest in them differently than in adults.

Chetty emphasized that the study still has its limitations. The study utilized observational data to assume a causal relationship that could be influenced by other factors, such as other medical conditions that could predispose individuals to obesity-related conditions.

Furthermore, the data only included adolescents and young adults with obesity and manifestations of obesity-related conditions, which does not account for the possibility of them developing these conditions later on in life.

Looking ahead, Chen expressed her hopes for the impact of the team’s work in a statement to the News: “Preventing and treating obesity isn’t just about achieving a weight goal. It’s about promoting health and preventing life altering and sometimes deadly chronic conditions. Therefore, this project will help drive efforts around prevention and treatment.”

The Yale School of Medicine is located at 333 Cedar St.

Contact EDIS MESIC at edis.mesic@yale.edu .

RANA ROOSEVELT / CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR

PickPackGo allows students to pick up packages from local cafes and restaurants.

YULIN ZHEN / PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

The team’s research highlighted the importance of treating pediatric obesity to prevent future medical conditions.

SPORTS

Men's golf kicks off its season

teams with an overall score of 897 (+57) across the 54-hole event.

Matt Lin ’28 led the Bulldogs, finishing sixth place overall at +6. Lin carded rounds of 73 (+3), 72 (+2), and 71 (+1), closing with his best round of the week.

“In front of every tournament my mentality is always to win, play smart, and have fun,” Lin said. “By being more efficient and deliberate on how I practice, I’m hoping to improve on being more consistent this year. It seemed to work for this tournament.”

Lin described using the summer after his freshman year as a “chance to reset,” focusing heavily on his short game and entering the season “refreshed and motivated.”

After a strong freshman year season in which he won Ivy League Golfer of the Month in March, Lin is still striving to improve. This week, his consistency kept Yale in contention to win the tournament, and he recorded multiple birdies across all three rounds to notch the team’s top finish.

“With tucked pins and very fast greens, I made sure to stay patient and choose conservative targets to minimize the chances of short-siding myself and to give

myself the best look at a par or birdie,” Lin said. Andrew Stickel ’27, competing as an individual, shot a standout 68 (-2) in the final round Tuesday — the lowest score of the day for Yale and one of the best rounds of the entire tournament.

“Andrew’s final-round 68 was arguably the greatest positive of the week,” Lodge said. “His impressive finish to a very difficult week embodies the exact grit and resilience we look for on the team.”

Although it is still early days in Lodge’s captaincy, the leadership he has shown both on and off the course has been noticed by his teammates.

“Will is harboring a great culture for the team, making sure nobody feels excluded from anything,” Stickel said. “He is always around to give advice to the underclassmen, a big proponent of team bonding and someone who loves to ‘work hard, play hard.’” Lodge, Stickel and the rest of the Yale men’s golf team will compete next week from Sept. 15 to 16 at the Highlands Invitational at the Chicago Highlands Club in Westchester, Ill.

Contact AZARA MASON at azara.mason@yale.edu

MEN'S SOCCER: Bulldogs and Bobcats, local foes, tie 2-2

BY LIZA KAUFMAN STAFF REPORTER

The Yale men’s soccer team (0–2–1 Ivy) played the Quinnipiac Bobcats (0–3–1 MAAC) at Reese Stadium Saturday afternoon after weather prevented the game from being played on Saturday, its originally scheduled date.

The Bobcats entered Sunday’s matchup coming off of three straight losses to Pitt (0-1), UMass (2-5), and Stony Brook (0-3). Likewise, the Bulldogs came into the “Battle of Whitney Avenue” rivalry game hungry for a victory, after dropping their season’s first two games to Sacred Heart (1-3) and Syracuse (0-1).

Although Yale didn’t secure a victory, the improved performance could signal an upwards trajectory for the Bulldogs.

“It was a good step. Definitely one in the right direction. We’ve been working on a few different things, free formations, so it’s starting to come together, definitely now, and it was good to get a result, definitely at home,” Aydin Jay ’26 told the News in a post-game interview.

The first half was a slow start for both teams, but both put up strong defenses. Neither team scored for the majority of the half, until Quinnipiac’s Fredrik Moen scored the first goal of the game off a free kick with only two minutes remaining.

With the Bulldogs looking to get on the scoring board in the second half, Sven Meacham ’28 pulled the Bulldogs level with a goal in the 71st minute. His goal came off of a cross from Angelo Zhu ’29, who played a ball from the right sideline into the box at a height perfect for Meacham. Meacham won his airspace and re-directed the ball home.

Two minutes later, Quinnipiac responded with a goal of their own to go up 2-1. The Bobcat offense completed a passing play to break down the Eli defense, and forward Joey Saputo tapped it behind Yale goalkeeper Conrad Lee ’26.

In the 90th minute, Billy Altirs ’29 fired a shot into the back of the Quinnipiac goal to tie the game at 2-2. Off of a corner kick from Meacham, the ball bounced out to Altirs standing just outside the box. He controlled

the bounce with his right foot, set himself, and fired a rocket into the top corner.

Forward Joseph Farouz ’27 highlighted the significant role played by the two first years.

“It was good for the boys to find a way to tie the game. Good from our freshman, Angelo and Billy. Really top top performances. One off the bench, one starting, just really, really proud of them, but overall, good progress and good momentum going into the California trip,” Farouz said to the News at the end of the game.

The Elis will travel to the Golden State to square off against UC Irvine and San Diego State University on Sept. 12 and Sept. 15.

Contact LIZA KAUFMAN at liza.kaufman@yale.edu .

FIELD HOCKEY: Bulldogs open season on high note

BY AVA JENKINS STAFF REPORTER

The field hockey team (2–0, 0–0 Ivy) opened its season in a dominant fashion with a pair of non-conference wins at home.

The Bulldogs hosted Long Island University (0–2, 0–0 NEC) on Sept. 5, followed by University of Massachusetts-Lowell (1–3, 0–0 America East) on Sept. 7, both at Johnson Field.

“Scoring eight goals on Friday showed how dangerous our attack can be, and then against UMass Lowell we had to grind it out in overtime, which tested our resilience as a whole unit,” Maddy Zavalick ’26 wrote to the News. “Having both kinds of wins backto-back gives us momentum but we also know we can’t get too cocky. It shows us where we stand and where we can keep growing.”

The Bulldogs opened their season with a bang, securing an 8–2 win over the LIU Sharks. Yale wasted no time, striking three times in the first seven minutes.

Ymre Massee ’28 opened the scoring just under three minutes in, finishing off a feed from Victoria Collee ’28. Less than a minute later, captain Poppy Beales ’26 doubled the lead, and Lauren Venter ’26 made it 3–0 shortly after, capitalizing on an assist from Massee.

LIU got on the board in the 21st minute with a penalty stroke goal, narrowing the gap to 3–1.

The Bulldogs answered just three minutes later, when Massee picked up another assist on a penalty corner, setting up Hettie Whittington ’27 to restore Yale’s three-goal lead. The Elis took the 4–1 advantage into halftime. Yale carried their momentum into the second half. Collee scored unassisted in the 42nd minute, and just a minute later, Chiara Picciafuoco ’28 found the back of the cage to stretch the Bulldogs’ lead to 6–1 heading into the fourth quarter.

LIU opened the fourth quarter with a goal, cutting into Yale’s lead, but the Elis weren’t fin -

ished. In the 56th minute, Ella Ou ’29 redirected a pass from Collee into the cage for her first career goal. Just 30 seconds later, Massee capped off the scoring with a final strike, assisted by Ou.

Yale finished with a 34-7 shot advantage over the Sharks and a 22-5 advantage in shots on goal.

First year goalie Amelie Schwarzkopf ’29 got the start for Yale and made two saves, and Maddie Shepherd ’29 played the second half. Four players made their first career start: Massee, Schwarzkopf, Venter and Carys Isherwood ’29.

On Sunday, the Bulldogs edged the UMASS-Lowell Riverhawks 3-2 in overtime. While Friday’s match showcased Yale’s attacking prowess, Sunday’s victory demonstrated their grit and hard-nosed defense.

The Bulldogs controlled possession early, outshooting UMass Lowell 4-0 in the opening quarter, but the Riverhawks’ goalie managed to keep the game scoreless through the first 15 min -

utes. However, the Elis found a way to break through in the second quarter, as Emma Ramsey ’27 dribbled along the baseline and snuck the ball past the defense to put the Elis ahead 1-0.

The Riverhawks tied the game on a penalty corner in the 35th minute, and they went up one point on a penalty corner in the 41st minute.

With just under eight minutes remaining in regulation, Yale was awarded a penalty stroke, which Whittington fired past the opposing keeper to level the score, 2-2.

But neither team would score before the end of the fourth quarter, sending the match into sudden-death overtime.

In the 10-minute overtime, the Bulldogs quickly capitalized on numerous scoring chances. Just a little over three minutes into extra time, at the 63:42 mark, Yale earned a penalty corner. Kaitlyn Chang ’28 passed the ball to Whittington at the top of the circle, and Whittington blasted it

past the Riverhawks’ goalkeeper for the game-winner.

Yale finished with a 34-13 shot advantage and a 9-7 advantage in shots on goal. Whittington finished the weekend with two defensive saves and three goals. This is the second straight season Yale has started 2–0, and the Bulldogs are now 7–1 in their last eight home games.

“We’ve got some really tough opponents coming up, so while we’re focusing on the fundamentals, we’re also diving into film and tailoring our play to match what we’ll see,” Zavalick told the News. “Our goal is to make it to the Ivy tournament, and that means holding ourselves to a really high standard and making sure we’re ready to compete at that level.”

The Elis return to Johnson Field on Friday at 5 p.m. to face Hofstra — a team they’ve beaten six times of their last seven matchups.

Contact AVA JENKINS at ava.jenkins@yale.edu .

LIZA KAUFMAN, STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

The Yale-Quinnipiac game ended in a draw in the final minute.

YALE ATHLETICS

The field hockey team picked up two wins during their opening weekend at home.

“I’m an orange moon, reflecting the light of the sun.”

ORANGE MOON BY ERYKAH BADU

Students challenge Martin Luther King III in nonviolence debate

BY ORION KIM STAFF REPORTER

Martin Luther King III argued for nonviolence in front of an audience of about 300 people at the Yale Political Union’s first debate of the school year, but most attendees were not persuaded.

In a 35-minute speech at the Tuesday evening debate, the son of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke about his personal experiences with violence, citing his father’s assassination when he was ten years old and the shooting of his grandmother in a church.

“Maybe I would be justified in believing an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. The problem with that is it would leave most of us without eyes or teeth,” King said.

But at the end of the debate, attendees voted 55–28 against the statement “violence is never the answer,” with one voter abstaining.

Consistent with all opening Yale Political Union debates of the semester, the event commenced with announcements from the chairs of the seven parties, who urged attendees to join their respective parties.

After a welcome from YPU President Brennan Columbia-Walsh ’26 and thunderous stomping from attendees, King III began his speech by proclaiming that he was “duly entertained” by the announcements from the party chairs.

Throughout the evening, King continuously mentioned current violence occurring around the world, including the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, policing and “unconstitutional” crackdowns on American protestors. King credited the success

of his father’s leadership to his practice of “disciplined non-violence” and urged students to practice civility with those who hold different beliefs than they do.

Though unrelated to the resolution, King also dedicated a significant portion of his speech to voicing disappointment with the lack of due process for immigrants in the U.S. and arguing for the importance of diversity, equity and inclusion. His remarks about the latter topic drew a loud mix of stomping and scattered hissing from attendees, indicating both strong agreement and some disdain among audience members.

The event, moderated by Columbia-Walsh and YPU Speaker Richie George ’27, featured two additional student speakers arguing King’s side, and three opposing.

Kai-Shan Kwek-Rupp ’28, the first student to speak against the resolution, pointed to the Haitian Revolution as an example of when extreme subjugation by the oppressor warranted a violent uprising.

“Recourse is not a fast process; it’s a slow, painstaking one that requires great leaders, but the moral arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice,” Kwek-Rupp said.

Kwek-Rupp also referred to the phrase “no justice, no peace,” explaining that violence may be used when oppressed groups have no other alternative than violence to escape.

Abhinay Lingareddy ‘26 argued that violent revolutionaries often have their flaws after toppling regimes, and by giving in to the oppressors, the revolutionaries often become oppressors themselves.

He urged the audience to reject

violence, no matter how practical it may seem. Although admitting that non-violence may not lead to freedom or power, he claimed that one must follow a higher intrinsic morality.

“I’d rather be non-violent and die than be violent and alive,” Lingareddy said.

Abby Nissely ‘28 discussed the non-violent core of Anabaptism, a Christian movement

that believes candidates for baptism must request to be baptized and openly confess their faith in Christ. She argued that Anabaptists should live their lives according to Jesus Christ, which means refraining from politics due to their inherent violence.

The last two speakers discussed placing limits on violence and recognizing the implicit violence embedded in state power.

In his closing remarks, King reemphasized the importance of redistributing wealth and concluded that “the future is in good hands” after hearing the student speeches. The YPU is the oldest collegiate debate society in the U.S., founded in 1934.

Contact ORION KIM at orion.kim@yale.edu.

Charlie Kirk killing shakes students

BY OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTER

As news alerts and graphic videos spread across social media on Wednesday afternoon, Yale students reckoned with the killing of the 31-year-old conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who was shot while speaking at a university in Utah.

Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, was known for inspiring young conservatives. For students, the shooting, which Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called a “political assassination,” prompted grief, fear and reflection on political violence in a divided country.

“The news has affected me very greatly on an emotional and spiritual level,” William Barbee ’26 wrote to the News. “As a leader within the conservative movement

at Yale, I have felt a certain palpability to this event — it hits close to home. I would be lying if I said I didn’t feel a sense of fear after hearing the news, that an event like this could have happened anywhere.”

Kirk was speaking at Utah Val-

ley University on Wednesday for the first stop of his “The American Comeback Tour.” After a gunman opened fire from a building 200 yards away, striking Kirk in the neck, he was taken to a hospital and later pronounced dead.

The shooter had not been found or identified by Wednesday night and the motive is still unknown.

For some at Yale, Kirk’s killing felt both personal and deeply unsettling.

Diego Victoria ’27, a conservative who said he sees himself as on the “same side” as Kirk, told the

News that he first learned about the shooting from a friend’s text, then watched a video of the assassination circulating on social media.

“It was just absolutely horrific,” Victoria said. “It’s horrific that he’d be killed over speaking, over exercising his free speech.”

Victoria said he fears that conservatives are increasingly targeted for their beliefs. He noted that there are people on the “very far left who would rather see conservatives dead than let us speak.”

The gunman’s political views were unknown on Wednesday.

Manu Anpalagan ’26, president of Yale College Republicans and an admirer of Kirk’s civil debates, said the news of the assassination reached him in the middle of class — a friend’s all-caps text, then breaking-news banners, then the video itself.

“It’s one thing to hear about it, another completely different feeling to actually see it happen,” he said. “Political violence of any type against anyone, regardless of their beliefs, is just entirely wrong.”

The Yale College Republicans had been in touch with Kirk’s team about planning a campus visit later this semester, Anpalagan said.

Anpalagan said the reactions he has seen from classmates have ranged from “panic and fear” among fellow political student organizers to “smiling, laughing.”

Anpalagan and Christian Thomas ’26, the president of the Yale College Democrats, coauthored a News opinion piece condemning the assassination and all political violence.

“We have already overheard peers cracking jokes about Kirk’s death,” they wrote. “We want to

be clear: no matter what you or we might think of Charlie Kirk’s politics, in no world should he have been assassinated for expressing his views.”

In April, Kirk cited the Yale Youth Poll — which tracks political attitudes among young Americans — to argue that college-age voters were swinging right.

“The most dramatic generational political swing in history is unfolding before our eyes,” he wrote on X, pointing out that 18-to-21-yearolds leaned Republican in the poll even as their slightly older peers leaned Democratic.

President Trump has ordered flags to be flown at half-mast until Sunday evening in honor of Kirk..

Contact OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu

Postal Service unveils new Buckley stamp

At

BY OLIVIA WOO STAFF REPORTER

Friends and family of prominent conservative figure William F. Buckley Jr. ’50 gathered Tuesday to celebrate the United States Postal Service’s newest stamp. At a ceremony on Beinecke Plaza, USPS honored a newly commissioned stamp in Buckley’s image. The ceremony featured remarks from conservative thinker George Will, Buckley’s son Christopher Buckley and USPS Executive Vice President Isaac Cronkhite. Lauren

Noble ’11, the founder and director of the Yale-adjacent Buckley Institute — a program promoting intellectual diversity — also gave remarks about her organization’s namesake.

“I think that the sort of legacy of intellectual engagement and intellectual inquiry which Buckley really represents, criticizing Yale but still loving it at the same time, is a message that we can all really take away,” Buckley Institute President William Barbee ’26 said in an interview. Attendees came from up and down the East Coast, drawn to the event for reasons as varied as being

fans of Buckley to being devoted stamp collectors. The Postal Service has printed 12 million copies of the stamp, which was designed by illustrator Dale Stephanos. The image of Buckley depicted on the stamp is based on a 1960s photograph, according to the USPS website.

“An important goal of the United States Postal Service stamp program is to raise awareness and honor people, places and things that represent the very best of our nation. We believe that Mr. Buckley is so richly deserving of

this honor,” Cronkhite said during the ceremony.

Peter Robinson, who emceed the ceremony, began with a quip on the aptness of a Buckley stamp, “because in all places and for all time, Americans will fix that stamp on the right.”

Prominent conservative commentator George Will credited Buckley as a founder of the “conversation that now is at a rolling boil” about the role that higher education institutions like Yale should play in society.

“Bill knew the universities had evolved 800 years through ecclesiastical and political thickets, and that what was a product of 800 years can be kicked away in a generation,” Will said.

Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis expressed pride about the endurance of Buckley’s legacy at Yale, recalling his leadership in campus organizations such as the Yale Political Union’s Conservative Party and the News, where he held the now-defunct role of chairman from 1949 to 1950.

“He focused above all on the challenge of transmitting the traditional values associated with college in the context of the newly emerging research university,” Lewis said of Buckley. “It is clear that he took full advantage of the opportunities provided by student debate and journalism at Yale to hone the skills that would make him such a formidable historical figure.”

Noble followed Lewis’ remarks, speaking about Buckley’s criticism of the University, which was captured in his book “God and Man at Yale.” According to Noble, the Buckley Institute shares its eponym’s commitment to a better Yale, which requires pointing out the institution’s flaws.

Noble and Christopher Buckley both referenced the 1950 Alumni Day Speech, which Buckley was slated to give. When the University asked Buckley to hold back his criticism of Yale in the speech, he refused to speak at all and instead published his critiques in “God and Man at Yale.” The book condemns Yale for straying from Christian ideals and instead promoting liberalism, collectivism and Keynesian ideology.

Robert O’Quinn, a retired economist who attended the ceremony, has been interested in Buckley’s work for 50 years, he said.

“Obviously he had a healthy criticism of Yale at the time of his graduation, and I think universities need to re-examine their role,” O’Quinn said in an interview. “I think one of the things that Buckley believed in, and one of the things I believe in, is merit, and I don’t care what your background is.”

The Buckley Institute was founded in 2011.

Contact OLIVIA WOO at olivia.woo@yale.edu

COURTESY OF JENNIFER GOLD

Martin Luther King III argued in favor of the resolution “violence is never the answer” at the first YPU debate of the year.

XIMENA SOLORZANO / HEAD PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

a Tuesday ceremony on Beinecke Plaza, speakers highlighted the legacy of William F. Buckley Jr. ’50 — including criticism and love of Yale.

I try to live in black and white, but I’m so blue.

BY BILLIE EILISH

“BLUE”

Students vie for ‘performative male’ title near Women’s Table

BY OLIVIA CYRUS STAFF REPORTER

Machismo and misogyny were discarded next to Cross Campus Saturday when some 500 students gathered around the Women’s Table for Yale’s first “performative male” contest.

The contest at Yale was a product of an online phenomenon that has gone viral in recent weeks, and performative male competitions have taken place from San Francisco to New York.

“A performative man is the type of boy who pretends to read All About Love on cross campus, but instead of internalizing bell hooks’ excellent advice, he postures the cover to attract the wandering gaze of Yale baddies,” the contest announcement read. “These guys perform femininity to attract women without actually giving a fuck about the feminine perspective.”

The event was organized by Chloe Shiffman ’26 and Mia Bauer ’27, who were inspired by a post on Fizz, an anonymous student forum, querying, “Performative male competition at the Women’s Table, when?”

“Chloe said, ‘We need to make this happen for real’ and I can’t believe the turnout and that people did so much,” Bauer admitted.

Cups of matcha from various cafes were ubiquitous at the event, while attempts to imitate the physical aesthetics popularized by celebrities Jeff Buckley

and Timothée Chalamet were on full display.

Prior to the contest, contestant Paul Douglass ’26 captured the audience’s attention by squeezing a menstrual pad sopping with matcha onto the pavement near the Women’s Table. The ensuing contest was divided into three rounds. Upon the conclusion of each round, Bauer and Shiffman asked for audience cheers to determine which contestants would be eliminated. In the first round, contestants gave their names and a spiel of their progressive feminist takes. The second round was a talent showcase.

A “performative microphone,” dubbed that by onlooker Cameron Davis ’28 because it didn’t work, was passed around the group of participants.

Contestant Marco Getchell ’29, who claimed his residential college was the Women’s Table, called being a performative male “a lifestyle.” He arrived more than 15 minutes early, armored head to toe in thrifted garb for the afternoon festivities. He clutched a copy of Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” a brown teddy bear, and a Metropolitan Museum of Art tote bag which held a vinyl copy of Chappell Roan’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and a speaker blasting “Perfect Pair” by beabadoobee, an indie artist.

“For a long time we’ve fought a lot of injustice in society for women, misogyny and all that sort

of stuff,” Getchell said about the contest. “I think people are coming to a realization that that’s not sustainable and it’s a love for women that brings us here.”

Getchell went on to win the coveted title of the most performative male.

During the second portion, one participant showcased his controlled method of cigarette smoking. Another simply put a wrapped tampon between his lips to mimic the action of a puffing on a cigarette. One female student used the forum as an opportunity to throw out copies of her mixtape to attendees. Another simply threw wrapped pads out to the crowd.

At one point, the event paused for an exhibition by New Haven highschoolers Teddy Lafargue and Mazzy Casbarro.

During their portion of the contest, Lafargue, a student at Wilbur Cross High School, gave a spirited call to action about the injustices women suffer. Casbarro, a student at Hamden High School, in line with the spirit of the event, poured a cup of matcha over his head out of frustration.

“My dad told me to come out here today,” said Lafargue, who is the daughter of Associate Dean of Residential College Life Ferentz Lafargue. “He said ‘I raised a nice performative male, you have a nice performative male friend, and you need to come out

here today and show all the other Yale people.’” After the event’s nearly 90-minute tenure, Getchell claimed victory and the event’s prize of a “Performative Yale Labubu” — a plush monster toy that wore a Yale cropped t-shirt and pearl necklace and held a Yale Review Tote Bag and matcha.

“It’s such an honor and I can’t believe this,” Getchell said with pride.

“I’m just happy. After this I’m gonna go read some feminist literature.”

Diego Figueredo Ferrer ’28 was in the minority of male attendees who did not dress “performatively,”

He was merely passing by the event when he was pulled in by the mass crowd of people.

“Me personally, it’s not my truth,” Ferrer said and shrugged. “I like to think that my performativeness is more lowkey. Though, I hope to get some good laughs and inspiration for how to be more performative in the future.”

Yale began admitting female undergraduates in 1969, according to the University’s website.

Contact OLIVIA CYRUS at olivia.cyrus@yale.edu

Yale halves chances for students to donate value of meal plan

BY JERRY GAO, SOPHIA STONE AND ORION KIM STAFF REPORTERS

Yale Hospitality will halve the number of chances students have to donate part of their meal plans this year, reducing a biannual student-led fundraising program to once per year.

The Yale Hunger and Homelessness Action Project, or YHHAP, fast previously offered students the choice to donate the value of their meal swipes twice per year to local nonprofits addressing food and housing insecurity.

In an email to members of the YHHAP board, which the News obtained, Assistant Vice President of Yale Hospitality Jodi Westwater told YHHAP student organizers that “Yale’s budgetary constraints this fiscal year” mean Hospitality can only support the fast once this year.

Student organizers warn the

the fundraiser’s efforts to support New Haven residents.

The decision marks the latest in a series of Hospitality changes rolled out over the past year, including meal plan alterations and varied lunch menus across residential college dining halls. In statements to the News, Yale Hospitality has often cited changing demand for cuts to services.

In her email, Westwater wrote that students would only be able to donate their limited points towards the fast, instead of their meal swipes. She cited complications associated with the unlimited access to dining halls associated with the new Full meal plans, “which complicates the concept of ‘donating a meal,’” Westwater wrote in an email to the News.

Of the changes in the past year — including the removal of hot lunches from some residential dining halls and the requirement to use points for lunches at Commons instead of meal swipes — none have, according to Yale Hospitality, been a means to reduce costs due to budgetary constraints.

The cuts to YHHAP follow Yale’s summer announcement that it was pausing hiring and construction, and reducing non-salary costs by five percent in anticipation of the eight percent tax on its endowment

returns mandated by the Republican tax-and-spending bill.

Westwater did not respond to the News’ questions about budgetary constraints.

YHHAP organizers said the changes are likely to affect the amount of money the program raises for charities in New Haven.

In fall 2024, YHHAP raised $18,360, $13,176 of which came from 1,777 student meal swipe donations, according to a joint statement by Alison Lee ’27 and Jaeyee Jung ’27, the co-directors of YHHAP. According to YHHAP leaders, Yale Hospitality now plans to allow students to donate their dining points at $0.50 per point — half of their monetary value. However, unlike meal swipes, which are limited per meal period, dining points are capped between 300 and 600 for the entire semester, depending on meal plan.

“This is not the shocking part, as Yale Hospitality has historically not matched meal swipes for their exact dollar amount,”

Kate Johnson ’27, the YHHAP fast co-chair, said about the value of dining points donated to YHHAP.

“What is most upsetting is the

decision to operate the fast once a year instead of once a semester.” Previously, each meal swipe students donated equaled $6 to $8 for YHHAP. YHHAP organizers have long been frustrated by the discrepancy in the value of meal swipes versus what Hospitality contributed to the fundraiser. Because only half the value of students’ dining points will be donated to YHHAP by Hospitality, Isabella Barboza-Rodriguez ’26, another fast co-chair, wrote YHHAP will encourage students to donate directly to the fundraising effort this year.

“Institutional budget cuts may weaken student-led efforts to support New Haveners in their work against housing and food insecurity,” Barboza-Rodriguez wrote in an email to the News.

The first fast hosted by YHHAP — previously the Yale Hunger Action Project — was hosted in 1974 and raised $5,000.

Contact JERRY GAO at jerry.gao.jg2988@yale.edu , SOPHIA STONE at sophia.stone@yale.edu , ORION KIM at orion.kim@yale.edu .

YCC prepares to vote on largest budget in recent memory

BY ASHER BOISKIN STAFF REPORTER

The Yale College Council is poised to approve a budget increase from roughly $930,000 last year to about $1.2 million — its largest budget in recent memory.

The student activities fee, which is the YCC’s main source of funding, was raised from $125 to $175 this year. The YCC budget last increased by approximately $30,000.

The announcement came following a briefing at Sunday’s Senate meeting from former YCC chief financial officer Adnan Bseisu ’26 on past spending and recommendations for the coming year.

“Our money is well spent,” Bseisu said, but he emphasized that senators must “actually scrutinize” the budget when it comes up for approval. He urged members to carefully review every line item before voting, rather than rubber-stamping recommendations from the YCC Finance Team, which prepares the annual budget.

“It is your job to make sure that the budget makes sense to you,” Bseisu told the senate. “It really is your job and your budget to approve.”

Bseisu’s remarks were accompanied by a four-page written report, which aimed to provide guidance for senators. In his report, Bseisu detailed how the council’s roughly $930,000 allocation was spent last year, how closely allocations matched actual expenses and where funds could be better deployed.

In an interview with the News, YCC Vice President Jalen Bradley ’27 called the briefing an important step toward increasing accountability and transparency.

“I thought it was really helpful to learn how we’re being wasteful from what excess we have and where that money can go to help students,” Bradley said. “I think that’s an area where this year’s YCC could really be more helpful to the daily lives of students.”

The report showed the YCC spent about 98 percent of its budget last year, with nearly half going to the Undergraduate Organizations Funding Committee, or UOFC, and a significant share to Spring Fling. Both initiatives, Bseisu said, provided the strongest impact directly to students.

“UOFC dollars are distributed broadly and transparently,

touching the widest cross-section of students,” the report said, describing the funding body as YCC’s “most efficient, scalable vehicle for broad-based impact.”

Bseisu recommended sending additional funds to UOFC by default absent a “clearly supe

rior alternative.”

Spring Fling, the report noted, benefited from early financial commitments that helped the team secure lower vendor pricing, eliminating the need for late supplemental requests. Bseisu recommended maintaining that strategy this year.

Bseisu’s report also offered analysis on YCC policy teams, class councils and targeted stipends.

By contrast, policy team budgets were consistently underused, with most teams spending less than twothirds of their allocations despite last year’s reduction from $1,500 to $750 per team, the report says. The Health and Accessibility and Sustainability Policy teams used less than 3 percent of their budgets, while Dining Policy spent about 94 percent.

Noting that the policy teams “struggled to deploy funds in ways that were both timely and high-impact,” Bseisu’s recom -

mended that the YCC consolidate team allocations into a competitive “Policy Impact Fund” to ensure money is directed toward high-impact initiatives.

Class council spending patterns also drew scrutiny. The Sophomore Class Council used only 11 percent of its allocation, while the Junior Class Council overspent its line by more than double, offsetting the overage with revenue from merchandise sales. Bseisu’s report recommended conditioning council budgets on detailed operating plans and introducing a mid-year forecast to reallocate unused funds to student-facing initiatives. Another priority identified in the report was expanding targeted stipends, which Bseisu described as one of YCC’s most effective tools to remove financial barriers for students. Programs like the healthcare transportation stipend fund, which the University now funds, demonstrate the council’s ability to pilot solutions that Yale later adopts, Bseisu said. “The stipend programs yielded disproportionate quality-of-life improvements,” Bseisu wrote.

“Small checks solve real barriers.”

Last week, the senate tabled a $5,000 stipend proposal to fund Adobe Creative Cloud licenses, which are no longer provided for free by the University, after constitutional and budgetary concerns were raised.

Senate speaker Alex William Chen ’28 said in an interview that Sunday’s presentation was especially valuable for first-time senators, who make up about three-quarters of the chamber.

“I think Adnan provided a very accessible and human approach to letting new senators know historically what has helped the student body most,” Chen said. “Having good ideas for how to best allocate the budget is very important.” Sunday’s meeting also included a brief training session on the legislative process. Senators reviewed the YCC Constitution and learned how to write, introduce and vote on proposals. The senate will vote next week on the 2025-26 YCC budget.

Contact ASHER BOISKIN at asher.boiskin@yale.edu .

BAALA SHAKYA / PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

Mixtapes, tote bags, feminist literature and menstrual products took center stage at Yale’s inaugural “performative male” contest, attended by nearly 500 students.

BAALA SHAKYA / PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR

budgetary cut could “compromise”

THROUGH THE LENS

Photos by Garrett Curtis

Photo Editor

BY BRODY GILKISON STAFF REPORTER

As fall camp winds down and the football team prepares for its first game on September 20th, some players are settling into new roles for the first time in their college careers.

The special teams unit, for example, experienced high roster turnover after last season. The specialists are the kicker, punter and long snapper. The three players work together to make sure the placekicking and punting operations run seamlessly.

Two of these roles are being filled by players who have never started before: Rice transfer punter Reese Keeney ’28 and long snapper Joey Fortner ’27. With the departure of long snapper Ben Mann ’25 and punter Shamus Florio ’25 to Boston College last spring, both Keeney and Fortner have been forced to step into new roles.

Returning kicker Nick Conforti ’26 is confident that Fortner is more than up to the task.

“Joey has been great the past two years learning behind Ben,” Conforti said in an interview.

“From what I’ve seen in practice, I’m very confident in his ability to go out there and deliver perfect snaps so that I can do my job.”

Conforti returns for his senior campaign after going 42-42 on point-after attempts last season. Off the field, he has gained notoriety on campus in the past several months from his new sports podcast, “Niche to Notable.”

For Keeney, the transition to Yale football has been seamless since joining the program last spring.

“I spent the second half of my summer in New Haven for offseason workouts,” Keeney said.

“It was awesome getting to know my teammates and getting more comfortable with my special teams unit.”

Along with the three projected starters, the Yale coaching staff also added some position depth to their special teams unit in the offseason.

BY WALTER ROYAL STAFF REPORTER

Sailing in both home and away regattas, the Yale co-ed sailing team had a successful opening weekend.

The Bulldogs hosted the Harry Anderson Trophy regatta at the McNay Family Sailing Center in Branford, Connecticut, this past weekend. Meanwhile, another portion of the team trekked up the coast to the United States Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, where they competed for the Pine Trophy.

Rice transfer long snapper Colby Connell ’28 and first-year kicker and punter Noah Piper ’29 joined the team and have been working to integrate themselves.

“Our team takes a lot of pride in our special teams unit, and the new guys have been great additions,” Fortner wrote to the News. “It’s been great to have five guys in the specialist room, and we’ve been pushing each other a lot in practice.”

In the locker room, the five-man Yale specialist unit is what many teammates have referred to as the “glue guys” on the team. Most notably, in last year’s 140th rendition of The Game between Harvard and Yale, special teams played a big role in Yale’s third consecutive victory. With just over two minutes to go, Conforti nailed a 36-yard field goal to seal the victory despite the Crimson’s last-ditch efforts. That not only required a gutsy kick, but also a perfect snap and clean hold. Conforti, Fortner, and the rest of the Yale football team will put on the pads next Saturday in the football team’s home opener against Holy Cross.

Contact BRODY GILKISON at brody.gilkison@yale.edu .

While the unlucky placement could have led to a poor finish, Sykes and Kong clawed their way back to a fifth place finish in what was their first race together.

“These moments are the biggest test in sailing,” explained Sykes. “A good sailor will shake off the past and stay focused on the future.”

“Coming back after the summer, it was great to see everyone back on the water, ready for an amazing season,” Audrey Foley ’28 said in an interview. She described the weekend as “a great kick-off to the season with many valuable lessons learned.”

The Harry Anderson Trophy follows a fleet racing format, in which each team races multiple boats, all scoring points together based on finishing order. The starting positions were determined randomly, and Yale’s Elle Sykes ’27 and Puiyee Kong ’27 started the race in last position.

The Pine Trophy, on the other hand, was a fundamental regatta, in which each team only fields one boat. Yale finished third in a regatta that saw eight colleges competing in the water.

Morgan Pinckney ’27, the skipper of the Bulldog boat, was satisfied with the team’s performance and is “super stoked to continue to improve.”

Yale Sailing’s season continues next weekend in Boston, with races against Harvard and MIT.

Contact WALTER ROYAL at walter.royal@yale.edu .

screen love on

all the world’s a villa, the men and women merely islanders. what “Love Island USA” season seven reveals about love and dating in 2025

If there is one thing hit reality dating show “Love Island’s” kitschy intro music would have you believe, it’s that the islanders “came here for love.” Yet the show’s most recent season has viewers questioning whether it has anything to do with “love” at all.

This season, some fans have speculated that the contestants, seeking to capitalize on the unprecedented popularity of Season Six, entered the show with pre-established relationships, false personas and calculated game plans. It seemed to many that what they really came for was Instagram followers and brand deals.

“Love Island” defined the cultural zeitgeist of this summer. On July 25, Variety reported that Season Seven of “Love Island USA” had reached 18.4 billion minutes of viewership, and the week of its finale, the show was rated no. 1 across all streaming services in the United States.

It is a gross misrepresentation to portray this viewership as merely passive. What sets this season apart from its predecessors is the fervent social media engagement the show

continues to garner more than two months after its finale. Invested fans psychoanalyze the islanders and pass moral judgment on their disputes. It seems the portrayal of love on “Love Island” resonates with our attitudes regarding love in the contemporary world.

Why do we care so much about “Love Island?” The outlandish conditions contestants endure when filming these shows — complete social isolation, sensory overstimulation, strict routines — create a hyperreality that, while incongruous with our everyday experience, we can superimpose onto the real world. These exaggerations pave the way for parallels about love’s status in modern society.

While love has never been easy, young people today find establishing and maintaining meaningful relationships exceptionally difficult. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of dating adults claim their romantic lives are going “not too well” or “not well at all.”

After watching the show every night as it aired, I identified three challenges in the

modern dating world: comparison, the paradox of choice and performative behavior.

All of these are exacerbated by social media, leading many to experience imagined discontent with their partners. I sat down with some Yale professors to discuss these effects.

‘He gave her two pancakes and gave me one. He gave her a flower and gave me none.’

Perhaps the most infamous moment from this season of “Love Island” was what viewers dubbed “Hurricane Huda,” a three-episodelong crash-out sparked by America’s choice to recouple Huda’s love interest, Jeremiah, with new bombshell Iris.

The fallout of this decision fundamentally altered the trajectory of the show. Despite the recoupling’s intent to entertain at Huda’s expense, sympathetic and critical viewers alike thought her reaction to the recoupling was extreme. In a torrent of tears about pancake and flower differentials, what had been the strongest connection on the island disintegrated into the sand of Huda’s dream

beach date. While humorous, it is reductive to attribute Huda’s crash-out to pancakes. At the root of her frustration is deep-seated insecurity generated by comparison of her own relationship to others. On the show, she articulates how she is upset by Jeremiah’s lack of “cute gestures” or villa courtship rituals — like private yoga classes, apparently — after watching other girls receive such treatment from their partners. To Huda, these entirely symbolic stunts seemed to be more potent indicators of attraction than the verbal reassurance and explicit interest Jeremiah showed her throughout their relationship. To her, Jeremiah was not “doing enough” to prove he liked her, thus she prioritized performative rituals over his direct communication.

It is easy to understand how Huda came to this conclusion. Surrounded by examples of other villa relationships, she began to believe that if her experience differed in any way, her relationship must be missing something the others had.

On social media, we are bombarded by the lives of others and the details of their romantic lives, and we experience a similar effect. A friend’s partner does something special for them, and we begin to question the quality of our own relationships, inventing an entirely fictitious deficiency.

Humanities professor Ellen Handler Spitz co-teaches a course called “Love, Marriage, Family: A Psychological Study through the Arts” and says these modern-day “love-tests” echo a centuries-old storytelling tradition.

“One of the big problems in our present society is that people are not encouraged to look inward,” she told me over coffee in Atticus Café. “People are married to their screens, where all is performance, and there is consequently a tendency to mistake performance for authenticity.”

Social media allows users to be selective about what they post and present an idealized image of their lives.

Professor Igor De Souza, whose research investigates the origins of romantic love, also commented on social media-inspired groupthink’s impact on relationships: “You think, well, if they are having a good time, then maybe I would have a good time doing that too. And they look pretty happy, so maybe that’s going to make me happy as well. On the one hand, it can sort of stop people from asking if that’s something that they really want.”

So what are human relationships really about? For Handler Spitz, it is the intimate realm between partners wherein both feel the freedom to be completely authentic.

“Our present culture values speed and ease. But human love relationships take time, have many ups and downs, and are not fast or easy or always pretty,” she mused.

Still, it is hard not to compare our experiences to those we perceive others to have. Just as social media complicated this season of “Love Island,” it has also destabilized love in the real world.

‘How much more exploring do you need?’

If there is one thing that contestant Ace made clear during his time on the show, it’s that he does not believe in love at first sight. While he expressed interest in fellow islander Chelley from the very start, he meandered for weeks through other couples before investing in their relationship.

To an extent, he is correct that the ethos of the show is exploration. Flirting with other people is an essential aspect of the villa experience; How else can one be sure of the strength of their couple?

De Souza notes this as an intriguing departure from the monogamous tradition.

“Those shows do reflect our modern way of living, in the sense that I can open an app like Tinder or Hinge, and I can find a lot of options. That is really different from the past,” he shared. “I think it is an outgrowth of a culture of individualism and choice, where for any decision that we make, we expect to have a lot

of choices, and if we don’t have a lot of choices, then there is something wrong with the ways in which we’re making that decision.”

De Souza points to how this leads to the social phenomenon of the paradox of choice. On the one hand, an abundance of options can be overwhelming and cause people to cling to relationships that are comfortable, even if they are not the right fit for them. Ace saw Huda and Jeremiah as victims of this choice paralysis.

De Souza identifies the simultaneous reality of choice anxiety, wherein individuals are tormented by the possibility of better alternatives and are incapable of making a long-term commitment to their partners.

What characterizes this mercurial behavior is a belief in “the one,” a soulmate who constitutes one’s perfect partner. De Souza and Handler Spitz differ in their beliefs on whether such aspirations are realistic.

De Souza considers “the one” to be a fabrication generated by societal expectations. “We will get frustrated if we take lifelong, monogamous, long-term relationships as some kind of goal or gold standard for everything else. That does lead to frustration, because not everyone will get that. It’s just the reality,” he asserted.

Conversely, Handler Spitz believes in true love and in the idea of a soulmate.

“I know and believe there are couples who find rare beauty and unique rapport with one

there must be love on “Love Island,” and sometimes that love is inauthentic.

another,” she said. “I know too that this state is surely not the goal for everyone.”

So, when do you resist the temptation of greater potential happiness, and when do you cut yourself loose and explore options?

“I’m not gonna have a sugar rush anymore from the word candy you’re feeding me.”

A frequent accusation hurled at this season’s islanders claims they entered fake relationships, pretending to have interest in the other person to remain on the show and have a shot at winning the $100,000 prize awarded to the couple voted “America’s favorite.” Viewers point to Zak’s change in behavior towards Amaya after learning she was popular among fans, Ace and Chelley’s prior relationship history, and the suspiciously quick sparks that formed between couples like Nic and Olandria after their previous partners left the show. These islanders seemed keen to game the system and capitalize on their appearance. While most viewers understand that dating show contestants have ulterior motives, the backlash “Love Island” Season 7 received indicates there is a limit to what is acceptable. Reality dating shows demand a certain suspension of disbelief. The draw of these shows is their promise to present their audience with real people grappling with real emotions. This illusion dissipates when fans are confronted with the show’s highly produced environment. There must be love on “Love Island,” and sometimes that love is inauthentic.

Just as finding love, or at least searching for it, is an expectation for “Love Island” contestants, De Souza argues it is a societal expectation as well.

“That’s a really modern way of looking at romance, this notion that it’s something that you’re supposed to feel, that you’re supposed to have, that maybe there’s something wrong with you if you never experience it in your lifetime. That puts a lot of pressure on people to think about romance and their sexual lives and marriage as almost like a type of work,” he explained.

“So if it doesn’t work out the way that we want, it’s such a personal catastrophe, in addition to being the dissolution of a relationship, you feel bad about yourself.”

De Souza’s comments suggest that modern society has transformed dating into a social game, wherein external perspectives determine the value of one’s relationship. In this mindset, love becomes an item on a checklist necessary to lead a successful life.

If we criticize the contestants on “Love Island” for entering performative relationships, we should also consider to what extent we, when entering relationships, are merely fulfilling societally prescribed roles. In an era when anonymity is a fading luxury and the private and public spheres continue to converge, we must pay attention to whether our actions are motivated by a sense of personal meaning or consumption by others.

Real love is not a game to win. There is no $100,000 prize awaiting a quintessential couple. The grievances viewers expressed with “Love Island” Season Seven indicate the dating world must re-center internal validation and issue an imperative for us to seek happiness, not status, in our relationships. If the love present in our lives does not match up to some incorporeal paragon, that does not make us failures. Love is intimate and personal, and that is what makes it precious.

Love is not to be televised, but to be lived.

Contact ELSPETH YEH at elspeth.yeh@yale.edu.

Resting Place

// BY ELIAS LEVENTHAL

In Grove Street Cemetery, the living outnumber the dead. For every interred body, there are dozens of growing and breathing things: insects scrambling through the leaf litter, falcons coming to roost in the trees overhead, shaggy carpets of moss creeping across the ground.

Despite its stillness and solemnity, the cemetery is in constant flux. In winter, the walkways ice over, the gravestones become anonymous lumps under the snow, and the world fades into silence. In summer, flowering plants of all kinds push up from the earth, and tiny birds scuttle up and down the walkways. Day after day, this small plot of land puts on a show for its unseeing residents.

Yale has plenty of other beautiful spaces, but I come to Grove Street Cemetery for the company. It’s about as eclectic a crowd as has ever been squeezed into 18 acres: poets lying next to soldiers, 19th-century colonial administrators lying next to modern humanities professors. There are about 15,000 people buried here, more than the total number of Yale students across all schools.

Sometimes I share the cemetery with others: runners, dog-walkers, new mothers and fathers pushing baby strollers. Other times, I am the only living person in sight. On those days, I am very much aware of my 15,000 companions, of being a warm body in a cold crowd. When I speed-read a sheaf of course readings due the next day, I am the only person in the cemetery who is in a hurry. When I stop to eat a piece of fruit, I am the only person in the cemetery who has an appetite. Life feels both miraculous and puzzling in these moments. I can’t understand why life is happening to me, right now, and not to the thousands gathered around me.

or sciences, research internship or language immersion, Gruber Fellow or Woads Scholar.

Faced with such a rich assortment of options, it’s easy to forget that every path through life has the same end.

Historians estimate that there are now 15 dead humans for every living one. Wherever you go in the world, you are outnumbered by the people who have been there before, attending to business that no one left alive can remember. In Grove Street Cemetery, this truth seems obvious. But at Yale, I sometimes find it very easy to forget. Yale is a place where your future lies before you in a million glittering pieces, waiting for you to put it together. We have so many paths available to us: arts

I don’t know how different our lives would be if we were constantly aware of death. They might not be very different at all. I spend most of my time in the cemetery doing schoolwork, planning, attending to the minutiae of my life. Just outside of the cemetery walls, rivers of hundreds of students stream up and down Prospect Street, all hurrying to get to class on Science Hill or to make it to the dining hall before closing time. I think that’s okay. Our anxieties and desires and ambitions remind us that we’re not ready for the peace of the cemetery yet. At the end of a quiet hour or two in the cemetery, when I walk out of the iron gates, I feel as if my life has restarted. The first order of business: where to jaywalk on Grove Street.

Many people find cemeteries disturbing, which is reasonable enough. Nobody likes to be reminded of the end of their story while it’s still unfolding. For me, though, Grove

Street Cemetery is an intensely peaceful place. Maybe it’s that the struggle is over: everyone in this cemetery has already been through the experience that most of us quietly fear most. And when you look at the aftermath, a place where ants scamper across the pine-needle-strewn ground and maple branches bob above tombstones, you get the sense that everything is okay now.

When I talk to other students about the cemetery, I’m always surprised by how many have never been. It seems that for many Yalies, Grove Street Cemetery is just an empty city block which lengthens the commute to Science Hill. Our 15,000 neighbors deserve more attention than this. You can feel however you want about their presence at the heart of our campus, but you might as well pay them a visit at some point during your four years. You can walk down the rows of gravestones and try to imagine the human lives hid -

den behind dates and epitaphs. You can sit with the couple whose shared memorial is a bench reading “Come Sit With Us.” You can watch the sun set over the red-brick walls. The residents of this cemetery can’t do any of these things, but you still can.

I’m writing this piece in the cemetery. I’m sitting on a stone bench under the shade of a yew tree, behind a cracked obelisk with lichen crawling up its sides. The air is full of the whine of insects, which rises and falls in waves, leaving moments of eerie silence. An American flag is waving in the breeze a few dozen feet in front of me. There is plenty of chaos outside of these 18 acres, and plenty of tragedy inside of them, but for the moment everything seems to be in its place.

Contact ELIAS LEVENTHAL at elias.leventhal@yale.edu.

On the aestheticism of travel

Snap!

I lower my phone from the scene before me — a two-lane street cluttered with four cars side by side, motorbikes weaving in and out, trash, cows and dust curling in the heat. To many, this city might look “underdeveloped,” chaotic. And yet, I find it oddly pretty. With

mundane — or even frustrating — for locals suddenly becomes “aesthetic” when filtered through the eyes and lenses of travelers. A broken-down bus becomes “authentic,” street clutter turns into “local flavor” and chaotic markets are reimagined as vibrant cultural experiences.

just a few taps of my Clarissa Lightroom presets circa 2018 — up the warmth, boost the pinks, saturate the teal — I have a picture-perfect Insta-worthy photo. We love to romanticize the foreign. Things that are

Magazines and guidebooks like Condé Nast Traveler or Lonely Planet thrive on cinematic snapshots curated for wanderlust — saturated sunsets, cobblestone streets and spice-laden markets — glossing over the more complicated, less picturesque realities of everyday life. Is this fake advertising? Maybe not. Anyone can snap a photo and edit it to

look artsy. I do it all the time. I take pictures of anything and everything, then run them through my signature Clarissa Lightroom filter until they’re vivid, alluring and undeniably foreign. Yet, when I pass similar scenes back home, I might label them as run-down or unremarkable. Why does everything foreign feel more poetic?

It’s not even that I’m bored with my home life. Despite what the number of stamps on my passport might suggest, I’m quite happy in the United States. I’ve had the same visual aesthetic for years now, even back home. My friends like to joke that I see the world through my “Clarissa filter,” with a soft wash of pink, teal skies, golden grass and warm saturated tones that glow until it almost hurts. I know the world doesn’t actually look like that. But is it wrong to edit a photo into something more dreamlike? Isn’t that kind of the point of editing — to make reality feel a little more creative, a little more yours? Maybe. Or if we associate beauty with what’s unfamiliar, maybe editing is just another way to fortify the foreign in our daily lives.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but there are probably a thousand more words to describe what the picture conveniently edits away.

Take Yanar Dagh in Azerbaijan. It’s called the “pit of hell,” a dramatic, awesome-looking fire cave burning perpetually. Google it; it’s cool. But in person, it’s just a tiny flame in a crack in the rock in the middle of nowhere. A classic case of expectation versus reality — very underwhelming.

When I flew to Iceland, I was excited to see the Northern Lights from the plane.

But the Northern Lights are grey wisps of clouds. You have to really squint your eyes to see them. That purple and green you see online is mostly edited — an effect I was also able to achieve through extensive Lightroom activity. Who cares? No, I didn’t exactly see it like that with my eyes, but at least I have a beautiful photo of dancing purple and green Northern Lights in Iceland. That photo exists on my phone — and in some way, it feels just as real. I can almost gaslight myself into believing that’s what I saw. And obviously I don’t want my photos to look worse than everyone else’s, especially if I’m gonna post this trip. Isn’t that interesting? The culture of maintaining a highly-curated travel profile is one that self-perpetuates.

I guess you could call me superficial for my constant desire to consume beauty. My excuse is that I’m an art major, but that’s not really an excuse.

But more recently, I have wanted to understand my travels in their context. I collect stories and histories in my journal. I spend time with a place before pulling out my phone. In that spirit, I’ve even begun leaving photos unedited, even when the urge to color-correct is strong. I will never stop romanticizing. But sometimes, it’s worthwhile to let foreignness remain foreign. To appreciate places not just for how they look on my feed, but for their liveliness. Those types of stories about the world are far more interesting.

Contact CLARISSA XIAO-YANG TAN at clarissa.tan@yale.edu.

COLUMN: AROUND THE WORLD

// BY CLARISSA XIAO-YANG TAN

ILLUSTRATION BY SERINA YAN

PROFILE

HoC Talk

Baskin-Sommers didn’t know anything about the residential college system. Now, she can’t imagine her life without

// BY ANYA GEIST

I spoke with Silliman Head of College Arielle BaskinSommers a few days before firstyear move-in. Baskin-Sommers used the summer lull to work on research, give talks and go to the beach, and by the time we spoke she was getting ready for her fourth year as head of college. I caught her in the middle of planning events for the upcoming months and preparing for students to move back in.

After working in the Psychology Department at Yale since 2014, Baskin-Sommers was drawn to the HoC position because of her friendship with the previous Silliman head of college, professor Laurie Santos, who also taught in the Psychology Department. Baskin-Sommers, who lived in New York City at the time, would often spend the night in the guest room of the HoC house so she didn’t have to commute to New Haven the next day.

“Slowly I began to see what being a Head of College was like,” she said. “I didn’t even know what the college system was when I applied to Yale as a faculty member. But being around the previous Head of College helped me see the ways that you could have fun with the students and see them in a different light.”

So when Silliman was looking for an interim head of college in 2022, and an official replacement the year after, Baskin-Sommers was an obvious fit.

The HoC role allows BaskinSommers to interact with students in a meaningful, non-academic way. She frequently eats in the Silliman dining hall, allowing her to build relationships with students and staff in the college. And students often chat with her parents, who live in New Haven and who, along with their two dogs, are familiar sights around the courtyard.

“And I secretly sort of love party planning, and to be able to do that with someone else’s money is especially nice,” she added with a laugh.

Planning events allows BaskinSommers to build and shape the community within Silliman’s walls. As an only child, she told me, the idea of found community has always been important to her. At times in her life, those communities included team sports, colleagues or different groups of friends. And now, Silliman.

“I just enjoy finding ways, either with a small touch or something larger, to build community and come together around common interests,” she said.

She’s lucky, she added, because Silliman has a large courtyard and HoC house, which helps her to think more creatively about different events and create a balance between big and small gatherings.

Winter Wonderland, for example, is a Silliman classic, which Santos and Sergio Gonzalez, the assistant director of operations in Silliman, started several years ago.

to keep Winter Wonderland running for years to come. But she finds meaning in the small events, too — opening the HoC house for studying and giving out ice cream on hot days.

“I just try to be aware of what’s going on in peoples’ day-to-day lives, and look for opportunities to have events and have people come together,” she said.

Hearing her describe all of these details, I thought about all the Silliman HoC house events from my first year — the snacks and coffee during finals week, the Fall Fest, an opportunity to paint little pots and plant herbs. Carefully planned, they must have required a lot of coordination and brainstorming.

Depending on the event, Baskin-Sommers said, she typically works with Cara Vo, the service assistant in the head of college house, and Gonzalez. She sometimes also coordinates with Deanna Brunson, the head of college administrative assistant, or representatives from Silliman’s Student Activities and Administrative Committee.

“Sergio and Cara are always at the core, and sometimes they’ll come to me with ideas,” BaskinSommers said. Other times, she and Vo might bounce ideas off each other. “So, it really just kind of happens organically,” she said.

Last spring, Baskin-Sommers opened a random closet in the HoC house and found several unused picture frames. She thinks they were intended for a commencement event a while ago, but had since been forgotten. She and Vo started brainstorming.

“Now we have an idea for a Polaroid portrait suite event, where you can take one of these frames for free, and we’ll give you Polaroid cameras to take a bunch of pictures with your suites,” Baskin-Sommers said. “You could create a collage, and then hang it in your common room.”

The Polaroid portrait event happened on Tuesday — Sillmanders took pictures with their friends on the HoC house patio. Vo chatted with students and guided them inside to decorate their new frames and Polaroids.

In an email, Vo explained the value that she finds in planning events for Silliman. Food brings people together, she said, whether that includes making a snack some students have never had before, grabbing iced coffee between classes, building a charcuterie board or making chocolate bark.

it.

another’s presence and time together,” Vo said. Gonzalez wrote to the News discussing the meaning in planning Winter Wonderland.

“My satisfaction lies in how impactful the event is, and I do enjoy the idea of us doing some of the lift internally as there is just a greater sense of satisfaction when you put some elbow grease into something,” Gonzalez wrote.

I just enjoy finding ways, either with a small touch or something larger, to build community and come together around common interests.

It takes place in the courtyard in December, and boasts food, games and a charming atmosphere. Last year there were even goats dressed up as reindeer that students could pet. Baskin-Sommers intends

“I will always view myself as a Facilitator of Memories that brings students together outside of classes to be themselves with one another, to give the opportunity to enjoy one

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Gonzalez recalled the process of creating Winter Wonderland, building the huts, installing them, decorating them, envisioning a menu. It’s a creative process that allows room for new ideas — like the petting goats. Gonzalez enjoys hearing feedback from students too, about how they were able to get into the holiday chair.

The physical HoC house offers ways to shape events, too. When Baskin-Sommers moved in, she worked with the college to do some renovations.

One of the new additions: a bar in the back of the first floor, usually stocked with coffee, tea, orange juice or cider during HoC events. The bar also has shelves full of games and decks of cards that students can play with. It helped to improve the community-oriented feel of the space, she said, and because of that, it has become one of her favorite places in the house. She added some new furniture to the porch, too, so students could sit out on the patio during nice weather.

I wondered if Baskin-Sommers’ work as a HoC connected at all with her academic work. As a psychologist, a lot of her research has to do with understanding variability in people’s experiences, as well as recognizing the cognitive, emotional and environmental factors that contribute to behavior.

As HoC, she tries to understand the experiences of her students, providing different opportunities for people to thrive — hosting different events and reaching out in different ways to help students feel seen and supported.

“There’s certainly a bit of an advocacy piece to what I’m doing in my academic work, and that probably translates to being Head of College, as well,” she said. “I see a big part of my role as showing up for students when they need it, whether that’s as a whole group or talking with

BUYING A PUMPKIN FOR YOUR COMMON ROOM

individual students who reach out if they’re struggling with something.”

Although she knows she needs small ways to maintain her privacy — setting boundaries, going away for a weekend, taking a long walk — Baskin-Sommers largely enjoys the energy of campus life. It reminds her of living in New York City.

I asked if it bothered her to hear late-night stragglers coming back to their dorms on the weekends — she said that, happily, her bedroom faces away from the courtyard and the house is wellsound-proofed. As fall rolls around, BaskinSommers is doing a lot of planning for HoC life in the year ahead — sending emails, making Google Spreadsheets, ordering materials on Amazon and managing, as she said, “a little bit of that anticipatory excitement.”

In addition to the Polaroid portrait idea, Baskin-Sommers hopes to work on a project that recognizes former Silliman heads of college, which will represent and celebrate previous generations of Sillimanders.

“And then, I’m sure,” she joked, “something will come to mind when I open the next closet door.” Contact ANYA GEIST at anya.geist@yale.edu.

The performance of getting dressed

// BY FABEHA JAHRA

Getting dressed is the first performance of the day.

Not in the sense of spectacle — not every morning outfit is a showstopper. But in the sense of ritual, of staging, of deciding how we want to be seen and how we want to feel. Even the most indifferent “I just threw this on” look is still a choice, a quiet act of control over a world that rarely bends to our will.

Style is often read as surface, but it’s deeper than that. On mornings when time feels relentless, when exams and deadlines press too close, clothes become armor. A blazer stiffens the spine, boots echo author ity with each step, eyeliner sharpens the eyes into focus. On slower days, getting dressed can be sweater that feels like hug, picking ear rings just because they catch the light, walking into class wrapped in some thing that whispers comfort first.

What we put on our bodies reshapes how we inhabit time and place. A sundress in October feels like defiance, while a heavy coat in March admits defeat to the cold.

Bright scarves cut through a gray New Haven win ter like a dec laration, while muted tones in April suggest patience, waiting for spring to fully arrive.

The textures and layers we choose don’t just prepare us for the weather — they prepare us for ourselves.

College makes this performance especially visible. Walk through Cross Campus and you’ll see it: the sweats that signal an early 9 a.m. class, the carefully styled outfits that telegraph confidence, the unac knowledged uniforms of tote bags and boots. Each choice tells a story, whether or not it was intended as one. There’s a reason students often remember what they were wearing during the moments that defined a semester — the sweater you pulled over your head before an exam, the thrifted jacket that saw you through your first New England snow, ruined by a night out. But the performance doesn’t end once we leave the mirror. Clothes move with us — they wrinkle, loosen, slip and hold. A pair of heels announces itself on cobblestones. A hoodie invites anonymity in the library. The same shirt can read as casual or composed depending on who is watching. Outfits shift depending on context, audience and intention. If life on campus is a stage, then clothes are both costumes and scripts, adjusted with every act. Yet in college, the performance of getting dressed feels heightened because of its simultaneity. Thousands of us wake up within blocks of each other, identity in real time. The campus becomes a kind though not always glamorous. Students in pajamas shuffle to their morning section beside others in crisp trousers

PERSONAL ESSAY

Notebook to Netflix

BY EMMA SINGER

I met Jaidyn Hurst ’27 on the first day of the “Representations of the Holocaust” class in the fall of my first year. At first, she was just the girl who sometimes darted out of our HQ seminar room with a quick “I have a music meeting” or mentioned, almost in passing, that she’d stayed up late singing Watchhouse in the Branford Courtyard with her brother Jared. She didn’t talk much about what music meant to her. If anything, she seemed intent on downplaying it, as though her hours at the piano or with a notebook full of lyrics were just another extracurricular on an already long Yale résumé.

Over time, though, as she transitioned from a distracted-seeming classmate to a friend, I realized music isn’t something Jaidyn does. It’s who she is. When we study together, she’ll unconsciously hum the chorus of a song, her delicate soprano notes threading in and out of the conversation. It doesn’t feel like performance, more like instinct, the way some people tap their pencil or doodle in the margins. Music is simply the ground she stands on.

That ground has been solid for years. Long before Yale, Jaidyn was writing and producing her own work, recording in Nashville and New York while still in high school. Yale hasn’t sparked something new so much as it has provided a container for what already was: practice rooms, dorm stairwells, and courtyard acoustics filling in for the stages she was already beginning to claim.

shoes that blistered by lunchtime. Getting dressed embeds itself in memory precisely because it is so ordinary, so daily — the repetition gives it weight. Getting dressed is not just about what we look like. It’s about how we step into the day, how we armor or soften ourselves, how we practice identity in motion. Clothes may not define us, but they shape the way we move through the hours — with purpose, with joy or with just enough style to carry us through.

Because before we write, work or study, before we step into classrooms or onto stages, before we become who we are expected to be — we dress. And that, too, is a performance worth noticing. Contact FABEHA JAHRA at fabeha.jahra@yale.edu .

This month, Jaidyn’s voice will reach far beyond campus. Her vocals are featured in the upcoming Netflix film “The Wrong Paris,” where her rendition of “Love Me Like I Need” underscores a character’s most vulnerable moment. It’s striking that such a familiar voice can transition into a formal context.

The movie follows a woman played by Miranda Cosgrove, who signs up for a reality dating show in Paris, France, only to discover it’s set in Paris, Texas. One of the producers had stumbled across Jaidyn’s music and was struck by her sound, so they asked her to record a song already written for the film. Last spring, unbeknownst to her friends, she caught the Metro-North to Brooklyn and spent the day in the studio with the Netflix team and Glow Music Group to record the track. Jaidyn called me in early July to deliver the news, and I leapt up from my bed and started screaming into the phone.

As a child, Jaidyn invented silly songs for her dolls, hummed her way through classwork until teachers begged her to stop, and threw herself into school musicals. By middle school, she had joined an Aspen youth choir, but it was during the isolation of COVID her freshman year of high school that she began writing songs in earnest. The first, “Perfect Life,” reflected the sting of a falling out with a close friend. Songwriting became making sense of experiences as they happened rather than about performace—not a dramatic outlet, but a steady practice, a way of metabolizing change. That practice took her further than she expected. Her junior year, she traveled to Nashville to record three original tracks. A producer in New York heard her sound, and soon she was recording a ninesong EP with accompanying music videos. Most recently, she spent time in Los Angeles working with Khris Riccick Thymes on six new songs. These weren’t flashy forays into a new world that she accepted on a whim. They were the natural extension of what she had been quietly building since she was fifteen.

During her junior year Jaidyn wrote “Go Clear,” a song that became a kind of mantra during the stressful college application season. “All the haze made of fear / will one day go clear,” she sings. As a single, it set the tone for her sound: a blend of acoustic warmth and indie-pop brightness, shaped by influences like Lizzy McAlpine and Noah Kahan. Like McAlpine, Jaidyn writes in an almost conversational style, with melodic turns that catch you off guard. I can imagine any of her lyrics appearing on my phone in a routine text. Like Kahan, she carries an unguarded vulnerability that makes listeners feel seen. And yet her songs don’t sound borrowed. They carry her own fingerprint.

It’s striking how ordinary Jaidyn’s relationship with music feels. She doesn’t hold songwriting at a distance or frame it as a polished “artistic process.” It’s messy, part of her daily rhythm. Sometimes mid-conversation she’ll pause to jot a phrase into her leather notebook, then return without explanation. Sometimes she’ll circle the same guitar riff for an hour, laughing at herself when it refuses to click. And sometimes, when she feels

ready, she’ll share a half-finished draft with me. Not as a performance, but more like: here’s where I’m at, what do you hear?

That notebook is everywhere. The cover is worn, the pages spilling with scraps of paper and abandoned lines. It’s not the cliché of a teenage songwriter pouring secrets into her journal. It’s her archive, her practical way of keeping track of thoughts before they slip away. Some fragments stay scribbled forever, others grow into full songs, but either way, the practice itself is what grounds her.

After a lot of probing, I got Jaidyn to tell me about her favorite memory as a musician. Walking into the high school dining hall the morning after releasing her first single and hearing classmates blasting it over the speakers. Everyone already knew the lyrics. The whole room sang with her. “I was so overjoyed,” she told me. Her younger brother Jared, who often sings alongside her, put it best: “Jaidyn is the sort of songwriter who derives inspiration from a vulnerable and personal place. She cares so much about the way her music reflects her personality. Having seen her in the writing and practicing stages, I know everyone could benefit from a little more honesty and vulnerability in their lives.” That honesty is a throughline for her, though she never talks about it in those terms. She’s bubbly, quick to laugh. We’ve coined her the “giggle monster,” and often brushes off her accomplishments with a little self-deprecation. When I first found out she had music on Spotify, it was only because I pried. She blushed, waved it away, then changed the subject. But when I got around to listening to the music, I heard someone deeply attuned to her own inner world, shaping it into songs that feel at once personal and widely resonant. Still, the story of Jaidyn’s music isn’t about Netflix credits or EPs. It’s about the way her songs create moments of shared recognition. That’s the thread she’s been following since her first single: not fame or download numbers, but the spark of connection when someone else hears themselves in her work.

And she’s already doing it. Even when she’s not in a studio or on a stage, she’s connecting. With me, with Jared, with friends leaning on her dorm room door frame. The Netflix feature is a milestone, yes, but it’s also just another page in the same notebook she’s been filling since childhood.

Contact EMMA SINGER at emma.singer@yale.edu .

Junior Jaidyn Hurst sings in recent release “The Wrong Paris”

PERSONAL ESSAY

I know you

Reflections from a super-recognizer

// BY MICHELLE SO

I know you. Your sister goes to Cornell, and your father works for McKinsey.

I know you. You’re in Davenport and sing tenor in two a cappella groups.

I know you. You were at Fence last night and played oboe brilliantly at the YSO concert.

I have long been blessed with a fortuitous ability to recognize. As a wild, young child, I used my super-recognizer abilities to memorize and identify every bird, bug and plant I could find. I became a talented forager and urban gardener. It wasn’t until I came to Yale that I realized I was also a rather adept super-recognizer of people.

My father, like me, also possesses this talent. Living in Los Angeles, he’ll point and tell me which shades-wearing, cap-adorned figure is a movie star from the 80s. The source of all my intel is challenging to categorize. I’ll click social media tags, read concert programs or search up the LinkedIn of a campus writer I admire. These searches pile up quickly, and soon, they enter the Void of Forever in my brain. I unwillingly have a mental notebook of my outer circle Instagram followings — once you’re following over 500 people, there’s no way everyone is a “real” friend.

Thanks to the recent trend of posting our parents’ hot Y2K pics, I now

have a repository of mom and dad faces, too. Do you know X? You might ask. Yeah, her mom’s a redhead, I’ll reply. Recently, I formally introduced myself to a classmate, whose face and name I knew, but I could not pin the origin of the information on any specific instance. It was only after she shared her major that it clicked. Ah! You’re one of those recurring recommended LinkedIn profiles I keep getting! She was amused. I enjoy my ability. People are always talking about other people, and somewhat knowing the subject loops me in. It satiates the inner Gossip Girl in me. No, I don’t know

them. I know of them.

There are downsides. Terrible, dreadful downsides. It’s a ritualistic embarrassment, re-re-introducing myself to those I’ve met once before.

“Oh, hey Sally! How’s theatre?”

“No, we’ve met before.”

“Yeah, Will’s party last-last September.”

“No worries, I get that a lot. I’m just good with faces. And names.”

“Yep. You take care, too.”

Again. Again. And again. Ever since the start of the new year, blending into the background has become a sort of inside joke with my friends. I’ll wave across the street and receive that half-hearted

hand, the white flag that says, “You look familiar but I don’t remember your name.”

Is it me? Am I really, truly that forgettable? It’s pointless for me to simply ask everyone to collectively do better. The same way I could never dunk or debug a line of code, people around me simply will keep forgetting my name. And thus, I remain, another vaguely familiar figure.

Maybe I’ll dye my hair green. Slip into an Irish lilt every third word. Or maybe, just, maybe, I’ll start pretending I don’t know you.

Contact MICHELLE SO at michelle.so@yale.edu.

roll off everyone’s tongue around April, and my peers’ responses were rarely a simple, “I’ll be at home.”

But that was my answer. And I felt bad about it. It seemed like everyone was doing one amazing thing or another:

The boy next to me in office hours was working in a physics lab in Taiwan, the girl I shared a bathroom with had not one but two positions newly featured on her LinkedIn. And here I was, going home for the summer.

Why did I feel ashamed?

My middle school and high school summers were always chaotic and never, ever spent at home. I went to various sleepaway camps, spent time in upstate New York, and ventured on some unforgettable family trips.

When I began to think about my first summer as a college student, I assumed it would be no different. Whether that be study abroad, backpacking or an internship, I knew I wouldn’t be spending college summers at home.

If anything, the Yale environment only strengthened my assumption that summers should be spent away from home, as that seemed to be the norm. “What are you doing for the summer?” started to subconsciously

To be at Yale is to be consumed by a neverending need for productivity and accomplishment. Just as sleep is written off as something that can be sacrificed to the climbing of the ladder of success, I’d written off a summer at home as a lazy and unproductive waste of an opportunity.

But my summer at home was nothing short of productive. And more importantly, when I look back on it, I have no regrets. I wish I could go back to spring of my first year and say “I’m going to spend the summer at home” with more oomph, more pride.

Home for me is Brooklyn, N.Y. I will talk about my love for Brooklyn until the day I die, but the location of “home” isn’t the relevant part of this reflection. Spending a solid chunk of time in the place I grew up after the most tumultuous year of my life was something I needed more than I’d realized.

Your first year at college everything is new: friends, classes, responsibilities, even your sense of self. In building up everything in your life from scratch, you practically recreate yourself.

Being back home for the summer was grounding; a much needed source of serenity after a year worth of some serious calmness-deficiency. It wasn’t until this summer that I was able to fully process all that had shifted.

Experiencing the mundane things in life you’re most familiar with — the way the sun enters your bedroom, the scent of the coffee shop across the street from you, or the voice of your dad announcing dinner — as this “recreated” person lets you reflect and truly understand who you’ve become and who you’re becoming amid the inevitable self-transformation of college.

Only by returning to what hasn’t changed could I take time to recognize what had; it’s in this contrast that who I’ve become and who I am still becoming came into sharper focus.

That’s not to say that I have it all figured out now, that being at home for a summer was the solution to all the unknowns and the hectic go-go-go mindsets. But I do think I am better prepared to attack the next three years at Yale than if I hadn’t spent summer at home.

Spending a summer at home was a privilege and a joy. Yes, now I am eager to be as adventurous as possible next summer, but that’s besides the point.

Contact NINA BODOW at nina.bodow@yale.edu.

ILLUSTRATION BY RANA ROOSEVELT

// BY NINA BODOW