and was the University’s first Asian American dean. Chun’s term will officially end on June 30, after which he will return to full-time

Searching for a Rap Star or Gaming a Friendship?

Cont. from page B1 key difference lay in expectations — i.e., him having none. At first, things were cordial; he was subdued, and so the conversation was too, and to be honest, a little boring. But as soon as I mentioned I had listened to the show, making homage to a few bits, some bravado, and creativity emerged. Suddenly, their radio show was actually very popular, owing to the charm of the hosts. And in fact, the reason Mike Bennet, the U.S. senator from Colorado, was mentioned so frequently on the show was because “he’s got this pull with girls 16-24,” a key demographic of their audience they were missing. Now we were talking, and we were playing. Every so often I’d sneak in a reference to his ex or the failure of the Yale Students for Pete Buttigieg, and I’d win a barely suppressed chortle, plus the surprise in his eyes. Reporter: 1. Nader: 0.

Nader is, as depicted earlier, the most “outwardly-facing normal.” Though he is Persian, when asked if Nader was white, Logan replied, “I would without a doubt characterize him as a typical white man, and I think it’s my place to do that.” Perhaps glasses say more than they should for me, but I could also see a little Steve Kornacki in him. Slightly reserved, he’s the most rational of the trio but also the truest gym bro: works out religiously, obsessed with the Philadelphia Eagles, reports on Yale football games, etc. But he’s also the Donkey to Joe’s Shrek — the “wonderfully cherubic angel of a kid,” cool with sometimes being laughed at rather than with, who can also occasionally deliver the best one-liner punchlines. Though comedy isn’t his 9-5, being around the other two allows this side hustle of his to thrive; they form an environment outside a campaign or the gym in which to truly embrace his favorite alias, “Lord of the Idiots.”

Logan was my most memorable interview. Considering he was after Nader, I assumed there would be some collusion behind the scenes, so I was expecting a more brash personality. But I was still caught unawares: storming into Blue State with a dark hoodie and greeting me with a firm handshake, I was not expecting the distinctive mannerisms of Logan Ledman, which seemed as surreal as they did somewhat familiar. Wolverine, Zach Galifianakis, Bobby Berk, Ron Swanson, Phoebe Buffet, Hagrid, the Lorax. Here was a bona fide character. Logan speaks with a characteristic lull, or a measured rhythm, in which the time it takes for him to build a sentence indicates climactic suspense and some impending sagacious insight, only to lead nowhere, or land south of Dakota. He also has a predilection for adverbs and prepositions, like “wherein,” “for whom,” and “therein,” that help him tease out his prolonged statements. A few highlights:

On what music means to him: “It’s the soul of humanity for whom there is not a soul without the universal language of music.”

On a thesis of their radio show: “I think it’s understanding where the unseen hours are in this moment here right now in America, in this America, in our America, wherein someone like Doja cat, for whom there is such — among all of us, serious acclaim — wherein there for her, the unseen hours are, and are not, and what those results of that would be right here, right now, and for the posterity of our audience.”

On the helpfulness of their show during the pandemic: “Does it make us heroes? Probably. But that’s more, like, for you to say.”

Other comments included comparing the three of them to the 1789 Constitutional Convention — Doja Cat being the Declaration of Independence — aspiring to be the Federal Reserve Bank, and considering his peers to be “empty blank slates.” Honestly, Logan is a master at saying so much without saying anything, a trait I can’t help but think would make him a skilled politician. But it was hard for me to take him seriously without laughing, and therefore I did lose some ground. Luckily, I still had a few tricks up my sleeve, which garnered a few rewarding wins in the form of escaped guffaws, and rolling, frantic stutters: in response to an inquiry about questionable twitter behavior, “I would say” was repeated 8 times in a row when, evidently, nothing could be thought of to say. I will concede he had a good counterattack— “why am I being asked this question”— and questioning my credibility as part of the YDN. But overall, it was a very fair match. Reporter: 1. Logan: 1.

A history major who once co-wrote a whole play about a historical figure in his hometown, and who knows the ins and outs of said hometown in Minnesota, “Logan is like [a] gem… one of the smartest people I’ve met, but also the dumbest.” He can present as dazed and confused, but it’s exactly this sort of self-proclaimed “dumb humor”

// NADER GRANMAYEH

that discloses the keenest intellect. Gruffy but lovable; awkward but at ease — these are just a few contradictions that compose the caricature that is Logan Ledman.

“Does it make us heroes? Probably. But that’s more, like, for you to say.”

Joe “DJ Joe Wickline” Wickline, as he asked to be referred, is the editor-in-chief of the prestigious Yale Record, a satirical publication that partially fills in the void of humor on campus. I’ll admit to having attended one of the first club meetings for the publication myself this year, before realizing I wasn’t actually funny or willing to subject myself to be judged as such. By contrast, Joe Wickline is exactly the sort of person you might expect to head such an organization. He has the understated confidence of someone who knows they’re awkward and proud of it, the gait of someone self-aware of their own idiosyncrasies and fine with it. He also looks exactly how you might imagine someone with such an assertive, if not slightly generic, name to look. Towering at 6 foot 7, there’s a slight hunch in his shoulders as he walks, the trademark one tall people weather as compensation for standing out. But sitting down, “DJ” Joe Wickline’s posture relaxes, as if more comfortable in this less measured realm of engagement.

Of the three, Joe is by far the hardest to read. Unlike his peers, whose boundaries between character and self were clearer to identify, I couldn’t always tell whether his answers were genuine or genuine to be funny. He seemed too normal and too professional, to the point where it was a bit unsettling. Was his passion for the show “as an audiovisual community space for dialogue, discourse and radical compassion” unfeigned? At one point, I brought up his past bouts with narcolepsy to see if I could extract anything, but then I couldn’t tell if he got truly offended, or was just skilled at ruffling my own confidence. Looking back, Joe’s style is just more subtle, perhaps; “I bet the compass of Doja’s heart points straight toward justice, and that ain’t got no party affiliation,” dropped in between conversations. It could also be that he expected me to expect him to be funny, and so purposefully maintained an air of ordinary nonchalance. Either way, the jury is still out on “DJ” Joe Wickline. Joe: 1. Reporter: 0.

I was warned beforehand that the suite-meet would be a lot. A giant tapestry of Jeff Goldblum, a flag of Eswatini, a lingering musk of boys and weed. But besides a jar of mayo, a book by Dr. Seuss and a CD player with “Say So” on repeat for an hour, I didn’t find the room to be that much more eccentric than any other Yale room — we do all generally pride ourselves on our unique paraphernalia. I would characterize the overall vibes as chaotic neutral, however. It’s easy to see how their suite could be a home, a safe place for them to freely release their inner oddity. “A delightfully symbiotic relationship,” as described by Phil, one of the rotating characters in the supporting cast. Following a question about whether humor could be inherited, their conversation followed a tangent from eugenics to white supremacy to the evangelical base of the American right to the resurgence of the Labor movement—basically, it became a highly lucid discussion about the state of American politics today. They became pundits as quickly as they fell back into debating just how Cowardly Logan would be as the Lion in Wizard of Oz, and whether Nader would be the Wizard or Dorothy — I personally would consider Dorothy Doja Cat, and Nader Toto. At another point, Joe admitted to using “comedy as a shield, because if [he’s] making a joke [he doesn’t] have to do anything else”; but again, this seemed too on the nose. Was he saying that because it was true, or because he knows that’s what I “wanted” to hear? Was it a moment of gravity or masked levity? Or perhaps both could be true, and that’s the punchline.

***

Tucked away in a corner of Trumbull College is a very peculiar group of friends. Highly intelligent, to be sure, verified excelsior by their political jargon alone. But also a breath of fresh air from the rest of Yale, where everyone is always taking themselves so seriously — myself included. I’d like to thank the numerous friends surrounding the trio for inviting me in on their jokes, indulging my inner comedian, and generally letting me be a part of the group. It was fun. And of course, to the three boys who are constantly getting stood up, unseen by both pop star Doja Cat and the masses, I’m sure you’ll continue to find solace in each other Tuesdays at 1pm on WYBC. If you ever need a shoulder to literally or comically cry on, just Say So.

Contact LAURA ZENG at laura.zeng@yale.edu.

// NADER GRANMAYEH

POETRY IN THE DARK: the Story of Wazhma Sadat

// BY BRIAN ZHANG

Wazhma Sadat is the first Afghan woman to have graduated from both Yale College and Yale Law School. But when her journey of finding a home and an education began, she was reading smuggled books and eating watermelon skins to survive.

Blanketed windows. Smuggled books. Huddled with parents and six older siblings around a lamp, listening to Persian poetry. For five-year-old Wazhma Sadat, this was what education looked like when the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 1996. The city had barely recovered from the Soviet-Afghan War and Afghan civil wars, but the streets were already finding themselves vulnerable again to torture, poverty and kidnappings. Neighbors disappeared overnight. Residents were left “dismembered” and slaughtered.

In Kabul, Sadat and her family lived in constant fear of repercussions for their “secret education” system: the Taliban had made it illegal for girls and women to receive an education of any form, let alone go to school. There was also incredible “outside pressure” on her father to join their movement, as he was from the same Pashtun tribe as the Taliban. Combined with food scarcity, these reasons eventually prompted the family to flee their homeland and move to Pakistan. Making their new home in the city of Peshawar, Sadat and her siblings attended school in the mornings and helped earn some income sewing carpets at night. The situation had not improved by much.

“There were so many days that I didn’t have anything to eat,” she said. “We would eat … the shells of watermelons, scraping [them] o until there was very little to it.” Even today, Sadat feels hunger as a “visceral pain” that comes to mind whenever she hears about a country su ering from poverty. It is a particularly haunting feeling of “home,” she explained.

Little did she know that the relocation to Peshawar would be the first of many more to come. Always following her around is this feeling of “starting from scratch.” After two years of living in Peshawar, her family moved to Mansehra, Pakistan, where her mother started the first-ever school for Afghan refugees. It was also around this time that 9/11 happened — the collapsing Twin Towers an image that Sadat “vividly remember[s]” watching on television as a nine-yearold. Thousands of miles away, the attack nonetheless had a tremendous emotional impact on her parents, who led a family prayer for the lives lost to violence — the violence that looked and felt too similar to what they had seen back home.

Shortly following the attack, the United States invaded Afghanistan. Sadat’s family, along with many other Afghan refugees, started relocating back to their hometown of Kabul, albeit cautiously in waves. Her return home did not grant her what she dreamed of when she was five, however. Going to a “conventional” classroom and wearing a “little backpack” would have to wait until the ninth or tenth grade. Instead, for the first two years following her family’s return, Sadat attended school in a UNICEF tent while her school building — which had been the former headquarters of the Taliban — was renovated to remove the marks of war and atrocity. Sadat remembers walking through classrooms covered in bloodstains. “Ropes tied to faucets,” she recalled, among other torture devices, were left scattered on the floor.

***

Everything changed in 2006. A few years into high school, she received news that she was among the 37 of 4000 student applicants selected to study abroad through an exchange program for Central Asian students. Sadat came alone to the United States, living with a host family while studying in Florida. A year later, she moved back to Kabul, where she finished high school and started working for various non-profit organizations that specialized in economic and educational development.

“The last project I worked with in Kabul was funded by USAID. My job was to represent Afghan woman-led small businesses in global wholesale markets,” she said. “I would travel internationally to represent Afghan-made products and enter into contracts with wholesale buyers on behalf of Afghan businesses.” Sadat was eighteen years old.

During one of those trips, which brought her to the New York International Gift Fair for an exhibition, a mentor recommended that she consider researching and applying to U.S. colleges. At that point in time, Sadat knew little about Ivy League universities, except that their need-based admissions policies made them the most financially feasible. That same trip, a colleague drove her to New Haven to tour Yale, where she happened to learn that the admissions o ce was in the process of conducting interviews for international students.

“This was my only opportunity to interview with colleges because it was very di cult to get a visa to come to the U.S. just for an interview,” Sadat explained, remembering waiting outside 38 Hillhouse in jeans as she watched other students “suited up.” “I was very, very underdressed and nervous and did not know what was going on.”

Flash forward several months. A hand-mailed application with “I cannot pay the application fee” written on the top and a TOEFL test later, Sadat described what was the “most emotional” moments of her life. She had been accepted early action to Yale University, where she would then pursue a study in global a airs.

Sadat attributes a big part of her Yale career to her friends and the many mentors and professors who helped her navigate challenging courses. But it was also her incredible determination behind the scenes and the learned habit of “fetching for herself” that helped get her through what she described as a “steep learning curve” and a “socially, culturally, [and] emotionally” demanding environment. She never took an “o ce hour for granted” and put in e ort to build connections with her professors. And every night, she studied five new vocabulary terms, self-learning concepts that she mentioned her peers had already covered in “elementary school.”

In May of 2014, Sadat graduated Yale College, being the first Afghan woman to have done so. Having secured a job at home, she was excited to return to Afghanistan to “do something meaningful for [her] country,” to make “organic” change for her people. “I wanted to go back –that was the only goal I worked toward while in college” she said.

***

But her plans were suddenly interrupted by “some level of real threat and attack on [her] family [that remained] in Afghanistan.” She described the Taliban’s targeting of her family as “deeply traumatizing and unsettling.”

//WAZHMA SADAT

The Taliban had noticed not only that she worked closely with Ashraf Ghani, the most recent former president of Afghanistan, but also that she went to school in the United States and was part of the USAID. The shocking news prompted Sadat’s entire family to disperse, with her parents and several siblings ultimately emigrating to Canada. Unfortunately, one of her brothers — whom she considers to be her “best friend” — could not leave Kabul.

“For a long time, I felt a tremendous amount of guilt for the price my family had to pay for my education,” Sadat said. Having family still remaining in Kabul — and thinking about the challenges confronting them — dramatically shifted how she carried herself even thousands of miles away from the Taliban’s threats. Past conversations with peers about her private and family life were no longer ones that she felt comfortable with. “As someone who had always been vocal about my journey and the ongoing political and legal issues both in Afghanistan and globally, I felt that the only way to ensure my family’s safety was to stay silent and remain invisible,” she said.

Unable to return to Afghanistan, Sadat applied to and enrolled in Yale Law School — a decision that she had intended to make much later on. Her first week of legal education began with the sad news of losing a close friend, a fellow prospective Afghan lawyer, in a Taliban-led attack on the American University of Afghanistan in Kabul. The threats to her family, along with the friends and extended family members who were murdered by the Taliban, never escaped her mind for one moment during the grueling years of her years in the Law School. She explained that law school was among the most intellectually and emotionally challenging years in her life, as she balanced rigorous coursework and exams with the constant feeling that the safety of her family was in jeopardy.

Trump’s election to office in 2016 only exacerbated the situation, highlighting the existing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments, according to Sadat. “[My] optimism shifted significantly,” she said, presented with new visa and green card applications on top of her existing hurdles.

In law school, Sadat devoted a significant amount of her time to fighting against the Trump administration’s travel ban on several Muslim majority countries as part of a legal clinic that filed an amicus brief to the U.S. Supreme Court challenging the president’s executive order. “My initial years of legal education coincided with my immigration to the United States,” she said. “Although I had lost my own homeland, a place I still don’t know if I will ever be able to return to, it was not hard to see that this country, my new home, was aching too.” In the face of such uncertainty and emotional grapples, Sadat nonetheless became the first Afghan woman to graduate from the Law School. The year was 2019.

***

Two years later on Aug. 15, 2021, the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan yet again. Her brother, sister-in-law and their two children were still there.

Thousands of miles away in America, Sadat could not “sleep or eat or do anything besides help them evacuate.” Sadat knew that with stampede after stampede breaking out, it was not only impractical for her brother to wait for departure at the United States.-controlled Kabul airport. His life was on the line.

She described what she did next as “literally out of the movies.” Following at least four separate missions to evacuate them — which consisted of advocating, coordinating and code-communicating with evacuation ambassadors, human rights organizations and strangers — her brother was escorted into the Kabul airport, successfully boarding a United States-bound flight.

“Several individuals did not sleep those nights and worked with me as I evacuated my brother’s family,” Sadat said. “I can never thank them for their heroic selflessness.”

He and his family are now reunited with the rest of Sadat’s family in Canada.

***

Today, Sadat lives in Silver Spring, Maryland with her husband Usama Qadri — a fellow Yale College graduate and former resident at the Yale Emergency Medicine department — and their two year old son, Idris.

As she reflects on her journey, she cannot help but feel “emotional.” She was forced to travel continents and oceans for an education. The word “home” was complicated to “this idea that [she] was never actually going to return home, whatever that was.” She has had sleepless nights thinking about her family, the same family that huddled with her in the dark reading poetry and the same family that wove carpets with her to make ends meet.

But through it all, she has — and continues to — remain optimistic. “I’m one of the luckiest immigrants in the U.S.,” she said, emphasizing her incredible education, the new family she has built here and the prospects of helping even more people as an attorney. Sadat just joined a law firm in D.C. following her clerkship at the Connecticut State Supreme Court, working to represent new Afghan arrivals who came to the United States following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan.

“It [took] a lot of hard work … inspiration and encouragement from others,” Sadat said. “That got me through from the beginning until the very end.”

Contact BRIAN ZHANG at brian.zhang@yale.edu.

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Waving to the people in McClellan Hall

What The Sex Lives of College Girls Gets Right — And Wrong

// BY AUDREY KOLKER AND ANABEL MOORE

// SOPHIE HENRY

Just when you were reflecting on your fi rst ever semester at college — the classes, the people and the terrible decisions that keep you up at night — here comes a television show about the exact same thing to distract you from all that exhausting introspection. “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” a new comedy from Mindy Kaling and Justin Noble, aired November 2021 on HBOMax. It attempts to tell the stories of four young women starting school at the fi ctional Essex College, an elite private institution in Vermont. The show follows Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet) — yes, that kind of Chalamet — a first-generation student from Arizona; Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), a varsity soccer player dodging her politician mother’s shadow and carrying on an a air with her married, older assistant coach; Leighton (Reneé Rapp), a callous Manhattan princess and happily closeted lesbian; and Bela (Amrit Kaur), an Indian-American aspiring comedy writer — not unlike Kaling herself. “The Sex Lives of College Girls” covers a lot of ground in its ambitious fi rst season, with mixed success — not unlike our own fi rst semesters. As fi rst-years ourselves, we’ve broken down what works, what doesn’t and what we want to see more of.

Right (Audrey): Specifi c detail. Kaling and Noble went on “research expeditions” to Yale and Dartmouth to re-familiarize themselves with the college experience and that work has led to some of the series’ best jokes. Bela attends an interest meeting for the college humor club, along with about eighty thousand other people. Somebody’s sucky long distance boyfriend shows up out of nowhere. There are the requisite digs at a capella groups and disgusting frat basements. And then there is my favorite line, delivered with perfect disdain by Reneé Rapp: “Kimberly, I’m from New York.”

Wrong (Anabel): Contrary to popular belief, mature and kind young men do exist in college, and platonic male friendships are part of what make the college experience rich and exciting. Men are more than symbols of sex, power and manipulation, but beyond the affable, and caricatured, “FAF” — “faculty member and friend,” AKA Froco — I came away from each male scene with the overwhelming sense that men are entirely immature pigs. Write more characters like Canaan, Whitney’s later and kinder love interest but perhaps who don’t have a romantic interest in one of the girls!

Right (Anabel): Kimberly’s FGLI experience juxtaposed against Whitney’s senatorial family and Leighton’s New York oldmoney roots did much to illuminate a more modern experience at a school modeled after one that only introduced its generous fi nancial aid program in the early 2000s.

Wrong (Audrey): Some of the show’s plotlines and characters make it abundantly clear how long ago the writer’s room graduated. This is most egregious in the episodes where Leighton is forced to volunteer at the Women’s Center, meeting walking queer tropes who bake “gluten-free spice free bread.” Another example is Whitney’s a air with her assistant coach, which was so dated that Whitney quickly became my least favorite of the four suitemates to watch. The supportive Black friend in the wheelchair — TikTok famous, though — the sassy gay guy…. Surely the show is capable of writing semi-dimensional side characters. It just seems to think it’s funnier not to.

Right (Anabel): Some semblance of grounding. When Kimberly gets caught cheating on her economics exam and calls her dad, she is met with love and the imperative to fi x what she has done. Moments of genuinity and sincerity like this give characters the latitude to fi nd their ways, balancing the pressure on their personal values with their desire to become someone.

Wrong (Audrey): This is sort of a spoiler: in order to gain admission to the competitive Catullan comedy club, Bela gives six of their writers handjobs. This is regarded as a #girlpower move and then basically dropped for the rest of the series — a writing choice with dumbfounding sexual politics, and one that does not inspire confi dence in the #MeToo storyline introduced a few episodes later.

Right (Anabel): The portrayal of social media and dating apps. The writers were aware of how social media can be just as important to career growth as academics; Bela’s excitement at having a piece posted on the Catullan social media feed stood out, as well as Whitney’s acute awareness of her mother’s professional reputation and Leighton’s desire to not “be known as gay.” Today, being marketable seems to be just as important as being knowledgeable; each of the main characters is hyperaware of their personas and how others perceive them.

Wrong (Audrey): Sorry, why are we supposed to believe Nico the frat boy brother genuinely cares about Kimberly again? Their illicit, UTI-causing hookups are just that good?

Anabel: Or is he really just grinding (sorry, pun intended) for those French tutoring hours?

One more thought (but not about sex life): Turns out Leighton is great at math, so much so that she places out of a fi rstyear lecture – but then that plotline ends. So much attention is given to Kimberly’s academic woes that it would be refreshing to see the other girls succeed amidst the notoriously di cult academic landscape of the Ivy League. Part of the experience at a place like Essex is learning to balance competing components of the college landscape: sex social life, academics, athletics and extracurriculars. Each needs to be given its due diligence.

Concluding: Ultimately, “The Sex Lives of College Girls” attempts to show the reality of today’s college experience. Overdone elements of the show detract from its moments of genuineness; there are too many moments of “we want more!” or “ugh, this is old” that corrupts the idealism of the show and research of the writers. It’s not something we’d recommend to the 800 early-accepted ’26ers, but it is entertainment; a more thoughtful portrayal of the sex lives of the modern-day college girl, yes, but one that still has a long way to go.

Contact AUDREY KOLKER at audrey.kolker@yale.edu

and ANABEL MOORE at anabel.moore@yale.edu.

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